DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of March 11 - 15, 2002

This page contains news related to the ECE department for the current week. Specifically, it includes information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, and personal news.

This newsletter is also emailed by Friday afternoon of the previous week to all faculty, staff, and students in ECE.

If you are not receiving this email, please contact <nancy@ece.northwestern.edu> and we will get you on that email list.

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

We continue with visits from faculty candidates, and this week we have two visits again: Jose Martinez is visiting us on Tuesday, March 12, from the University of Illinois, and Tara Javidi is visiting us from the University of Michigan on Thursday, March 14.

Last week we had our first joint CS/ECE Distinguished Lecture in Systems and Computer Architecture when James Smith visited us from the University of Wisconsin.

This is the last week of classes for Winter Quarter, so it is time to finish the course material and get ready for final exams.

Carol Henes, Associate Director of MITP, was featured in last week's Northwestern Observer.

-Abe Haddad
Interim Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Faculty Candidate Seminars

DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 2002
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "Speculative Shared-Memory Architectures"
SPEAKER: Jose Martinez, UIUC

DATE: Thursday, March 14, 2002
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "Resource Allocation Issues in Communication Networks"
SPEAKER: Tara Javidi, University of Michigan

EXAMINATIONS

Monday, March 11, 2002: M.S. Final Examination - 1:00 p.m.
Room L324
Ayodeji Coker
"Group Velocity Dispersion Measurement in Microstructure Fiber"
Committee Members: P. Kumar (chairman), V. Taylor, and G. Barbosa

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES/AWARDS/HONORS

Professor Yehea Ismail will be giving two invited talks in Intel's Distinguished Faculty Series on March 27-28, in Portland, Oregon. The talks will be conducted at Intel's Strategic CAD Research Group and Circuits Research Group (CRL), respectively."

Jay Sharping of Northwestern's student chapter of the Optical Society of America will travel to the Pacific University College of Optometry in Forest Grove, OR, to conduct an educational outreach workshop for the Columbia local section of OSA. The workshop will be attended by science teachers from the region as well as local section members interested in visiting schools to try to generate an interest in science and engineering. The workshop will be held on Saturday, March 16.

OTHER NEWS

Xavier Jonsson is a new Post-Doc in our department. He will be working with Jorge Nocedal from March 6, 2002 to March 5, 2003.

CFS NEWS

SUPPORT STAFF START DATE DELAYED

As was announced in a previous newsletter, Pauline Wairimu was hired to fill the department's vacant Windows support position. She was scheduled to start on March 13th, but due to red tape, her first day has now been deferred until March 26th. We hope to see her then.

GCC PROBLEMS

After installing GCC 3.0.5 in /meas/beta, some kind testers have reported problems with using it. In addition, we had problems building it on the Solaris for Intel platform. These problems tell us that the 3.x release is not mature enough at this point for production use. So the CFS has decided to somewhat amend its goals with respect to GCC. Version 2.95.3, an extremely stable release and the last of the 2.x releases, has been installed in /meas/beta for both the SPARC and Intel versions of Solaris.

When three months of final testing have passed, this release will be put into production and the then-current 3.x release of GCC will be installed in /meas/beta, assuming current bugs are fixed.

WILKINSON LAB CLEANLINESS

This past week was very busy for students using the Wilkinson lab. I would like to remind you to please be sure to clean up after yourselves by throwing any paper junk into the recycle bin and by putting chairs back under their desks. Please do not bring any food or drinks into the lab.

Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

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