DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of November 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.

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CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

As many of you know, the Motorola Foundation has provided funds to pursue some new initiatives to improve the ECE department at Northwestern. One of these initiatives is to sponsor undergraduate research in order to encourage more of our undergrads to pursue graduate school in the future.

I am pleased to announce the Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program for the year 2002-03. During this year, we will fund several research projects. As a part of this program, we will be able to provide stipends for about 10 undergrad students in ECE. Each selected student will get a stipend of $1250 for each quarter they do undergraduate research as part of an ECE 399 project (not counting design competition) with any ECE faculty member. The faculty advisor supervising the project will get a $500 unrestricted grant per quarter. It is expected that the project will take two quarters (Winter and Spring), hence each student will get a total stipend of $2500 over two quarters and each faculty member will get $1000 over two quarters.

I am pleased to announce the Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Awards. Although we received more high quality research proposals than we were able to fund, we are able to support the research projects of 13 undergraduate students.

A committee consisting of Professor Aggelos Katsaggelos, Professor Allen Taflove, and Professor Prith Banerjee reviewed all the submitted proposals and selected the following research projects.

  1. "Downlink Scheduling for Wireless Cellular Systems"
    Prashanth Ravi-Shankar and Jung Ryu
    Advisors: Professors Michael Honig and Randy Berry
    Quarters of research: W03 and S03

  2. "Design and Implementation of Automatic Instrumentation and Data Entry Systems"
    Mark Dredze
    Advisors: Professor Valerie Taylor
    Quarter of research: W03

  3. "Power Scaling Trends in VLSI"
    Yoni Torchman
    Advisor: Professor Yehea Ismail
    Quarters of research: W03 and S03

  4. "Design and Formal Verification of Asynchronous Interface Circuits"
    Gregory Lou
    Advisor: Professor Hai Zhou
    Quarter of research: W03 and S03

  5. "Embedded Design and Implementation of a Wirelessly Updateable Message Delivery CD Player"
    Adam Russell and Ryan Stoner
    Advisor: Professor Allen Taflove
    Quarters of research: Adam - W03; Ryan - W03 and S03

  6. "Turning the Bare Hand into a Real-Time Input Device"
    Carey Tischler
    Advisor: Professor Ying Wu
    Quarters of research: W03 and S03

  7. "Evaluating Human Interface Design Through Digital Image Analysis"
    Owen Piette
    Advisor: Professor Ying Wu
    Quarter of research: W03 or S03

  8. "Development of Room Temperature Continuous Wave Quantum Cascade Lasers"
    John E. David
    Advisor: Professor Manijeh Razeghi
    Quarters of research: W03 and S03

  9. "Efficient Control of Solar Car Power Management"
    Alexander Hu
    Advisor: Professor Chi-haur Wu
    Quarters of research: W03 and S03

  10. "Efficient Feature Selection for Multidimensional Clustering"
    Elliot Parsons
    Advisor: Professor Peter Scheuermann
    Quarter of research: S03

  11. "Stochastic Channel Simulations for Subjective Evaluation of Wireless Video Communication Systems"
    Eren Soyak
    Advisor: Professor Thrasos Pappas
    Quarters of research: W03 and S03

The undergraduate researchers and their faculty supervisors will be invited to go to Motorola headquarters in Schaumburg in the first week of June to present the results of their research to all the Motorola engineers.

Congratulations to all the award recipients and best wishes for some exciting and engaging research.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Computer Science Department
DATE: Monday, November 11, 2002
TIME: 3:00 p.m.
PLACE: CS Main Classroom (Room 381), 1890 Maple Avenue
TITLE: "Research in Video Gaming"
SPEAKER: Dr. John Buchanan, Electronic Arts, Inc.

CQD Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, November 12, 2002
TIME: 2:00 p.m.
PLACE: 4051 Cook
TITLE: Simulation of Nanotube Devices: Continuum vs. Quantum Terms
SPEAKER: Dr. Slava V. Rotkin, Beckman Institute, Univ. of IL at Urbana-Champaign

Computer Science Department
DATE: Friday, November 15, 2002
TIME: 3:00 - 4:00 p.m.
PLACE: CS Main Classroom (Room 381), 1890 Maple Avenue
TITLE: "Fault-Tolerant Runtime Environments"
SPEAKER: Michael Spertus, Geodesic Systems

EXAMINATIONS

Thursday, November 14, 2002: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 4:00 p.m.
Room M416
Hao Bi
"Power and Signature Optimization for Downlink CDMA"
Committee Members: M. Honig (chairman), A. Haddad, and R. Berry

TRAVEL

Professor Yehea Ismail is traveling to San Jose, California, from November 10-15, to attend, present a paper, and give a full day tutorial at ICCAD.

11/5/02 - Professor Prem Kumar visited the Lab for Physical Sciences, at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, for potential funding and research collaboration.
11/6/02 - Dr. Kumar attended the Program Committee meeting of the Optical Fibers Communications Conference '2003.

Professor Manijeh Razeghi traveled to Brugge, Belgium, October 28-29 to give a Hot Topic Tutorial, "Quantum Sensing Using Artificial Atoms: Inspiration from Nature," at the SPIE International Symposium on Photonics Fabrication Europe.

Professor Peter Scheuermann traveled to Baltimore, MD, November 1-3, to present a paper entitled "Efficient Data Reduction Methods for On-line Association Rule Discovery" at the NSF Workshop on Next Generation Data Mining.

OTHER NEWS

Luis David Alverez-Corral will be in Prof. Katsaggelos's group as a visiting pre-doc fellow beginning November 1, 2002.

CFS NEWS

SHORT FILE SERVER DOWNTIME

On Tuesday, November 19th at 9am, two important ECE UNIX file servers (core and fs3) will be shut down for maintenance for a period of about 15 minutes. Only users with home directories on one of these systems will be affected. This includes Dr. Banerjee's and Dr. Choudhary's graduate students and visitors (fs3), and all undergrads and staff (core). You may verify that you will be affected by typing "pwd" at your UNIX prompt and looking for one of these two hostnames.

ANTI-SPAM SOFTWARE AVAILABLE

The Computing Facilities Staff (CFS) has installed and evaluated for a period of time an anti-SPAM package called SpamAssassin. The CFS and a few faculty and staff testers have found this package to be remarkably effective. See

http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/CFS/FAQ/SpamAssassin.html
for details and setup instructions.

S/KEY DEPRECATED

The S/Key one-time password system in use at ECE for many years is now deprecated. In 6 months, S/Key-based logins will no longer be allowed. Instead, the CFS urges those still using S/Key to migrate to SSH, which has many feature advantages over S/Key, including encryption of the entire session, not simply the login password. Those still using S/Key are asked to contact the CFS via the alias if they need help or advice in transitioning to SSH-based logins. SSH software for MacOS and Windows may be obtained from NU IT's software page at

http://aquavite.northwestern.edu/it-services/download.cgi

NETSCAPE 7 INSTALLED

Netscape version 7.0 has been installed. It may be accessed by issuing the "netscape7" command. Netscape 4.78 is still available as "netscape". Version 4.78 appears to be more stable than version 7.0, however the latter supports many more modern web sites and has a number of very nice features. Finally, Netscape 7.0 is based in part on the Mozilla codebase, so many of the features of it and Mozilla are the same, although the CFS has found Netscape much more stable and refined than Mozilla, at least on Solaris.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

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