DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of March 18 - 22, 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

This is final exam week for the Winter Quarter. Best wishes to our students for successful outcomes in the exams.

There is a McCormick faculty meeting on Monday the 18th at 1:30. You should have received the notice from the Dean's office.

Even this week we continue with faculty recruiting and we are visited by two candidates on March 19 and 21: Mr. Ekici from Georgia Tech in the networks area and Ms. Zhang from Penn State in the computer architecture area. Please be sure to attend their seminars at 4:00 p.m.

Prem Kumar has been granted a courtesy appointment by the Physics Department.

Next week is Spring Break. Please have a wonderful break and best wishes for happy holidays as well, including but not limited to Good Friday, Easter, and Passover, among others.

-Abe Haddad
Interim Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

DATE: Tuesday, March 19, 2002
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "Routing in Next Generation Terrestrial/Satellite IP Networks"
SPEAKER: Eylem Ekici, Georgia Tech

DATE: Thursday, March 21, 2002
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "Scheduling and Resource Management for Next-Generation Clusters"
SPEAKER: Yanyong Zhang, Penn State

EXAMINATIONS

Monday, March 18, 2002: M.S. Final Examination
Madhvi Verma
"Option C"
Committee Members: C.-C. Lee (chairman), P. Scheuermann, and A. Haddad

Wednesday, March 20, 2002: Ph.D. Final Examination - 1:00 p.m.
Room B211
Hui-Hua Wen
"Knowledge Based Image Restoration"
Committee Members: W.-C. Lin (chairman), A. Sahakian, P. Scheuermann, and C.-T. Chen

TRAVEL

Professor Abraham Haddad is traveling to Stuart, Florida, March 15-17, to attend the ECE Department Heads Annual Meeting.

Professor Mary Phillips will be traveling to Anaheim, CA, March 18-23, to attend the Optical Fiber Communication Conference.

CFS NEWS

NEW VIRUS SOFTWARE

The University has changed anti-virus software vendors from McAfee to Symantec. The Symantec software (Norton Anti-Virus) is a superior product and it costs less.

The task of replacing McAfee with Norton on all faculty and staff PCs will be one of the first tasks to be performed by Pauline when she joins the department.

WINDOWS SECURITY

There are currently a lot of Windows security vulnerabilities, especially with Windows 2000 and XP. Microsoft has created a "personal security advisor" application

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/mpsa/start.asp

which will do a nice job of scanning your Windows 2000, NT 4, and XP hosts for security problems and make recommendations. Note that it does not work for Server versions.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

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

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

Please send email to <ecenews@ece.northwestern.edu> before Thursday 5PM of the previous week to be included in the current week's news. Include information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, and personal news.