Home > News > Weekly News Archive > Weekly News from 2002-03 > May 26-30, 2003

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

We had an excellent meeting of the ECE Advisory Board on Friday, May 16. At the meeting, the Board was informed about the progress of the department this past year in terms of faculty recruiting and awards, research activities and funding, graduate student recruitment and enrollment, undergraduate and graduate curricular issues, interactions with industry, career placement of our undergraduate and graduate students, and other issues. During the meeting, the Board met with our faculty, undergraduate students, and graduate students, and gave constructive feedback about the strategic directions of the department. I want to thank all the Board members for taking the time off their busy schedules to attend this yearly meeting. The meeting was attended by about 15 members and was chaired by David Carney.

I want to acknowledge the efforts of all the ECE Directors (Chairs of various committees) and Center Directors for meeting with the Advisory Board members and participating in discussions throughout the day to improve the department. I also want to thank the graduate and undergraduate students for providing their input about the graduate and undergraduate curricula, and suggesting areas of further enhancement.

We truly appreciate the efforts of the graduate students who presented about 30 exciting posters during the Graduate Student Poster Session. I had appointed three judges to make the recommendations for the three best posters:

(1) Solid state and photonics (Judge David Carney)
(2) Systems (Judge Tom Anderson)
(3) Computer Engineering (Judge Adarsh Arora)
I am pleased to inform you that the winning posters are:

SOLID STATE AND PHOTONICS
Poster 1-8: Preetpaul Devgan, Renyong Tang, "Technologies for Packet Switched Optical Networks." Advisor: Prem Kumar

SYSTEMS
Poster 2-5: Peter Aleksic and Zhilin Wu, "Audio Visual Speech Recognition and Speech-to-Video Synthesis Using Facial Animation Parameters."
Advisors: Aggelos Katsaggelos, Thrasos Pappas, and Ying Wu

COMPUTER ENGINEERING
Poster 3-6: Steve Chiu, Jianwei Li, Ying Liu, "High Performance Data Storage, Management, and Mining for Parallel Data Intensive Computing."
Advisors: Alok Choudhary and Wei-keng Liao

Each of the student groups will receive a $100 cash award (enough to buy pizza for their group!) which will be presented on Friday May, 30 at 3:30 PM in an Awards Ceremony along with other awards in the department.

Please note that the process of selecting these awards was very subjective, and not done scientifically. So students should not be disappointed if they did not win the award. The important thing was to have some fun while presenting the posters. I want to thank all the students for participating in the Poster Session.

Finally, I want to thank Nancy Singer and Deneen Marie Bryce for making all the arrangements for hosting this very important event including making travel and hotel arrangements for the visitors, organizing the poster session, making arrangements for the various meals and coffee breaks, arranging for the photographer to take pictures of the event, and in general making sure that the entire day's events went smoothly.

Thanks to all of you for making the ECE Advisory Meeting such a success.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

DATE: Tuesday, May 27, 2003
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
PLACE: Tech L324
TITLE: "The Pensieve Project: Compiling for Multiple Memory Models"
SPEAKER: Sam Midkiff, Purdue University

EXAMINATIONS

Friday, May 30, 2003: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 9:30 a.m.
Room L324
Masud Hasan Chowdhury
"Noise Analysis and Design Methodologies in Deep Submicron VLSI Circuits"
Committee Members: Y. Ismail (chairman), P. Banerjee, A. Sahakian, and R. Dick

TRAVEL

Professor Yehea Ismail traveled to Thailand from May 23 - May 27 to chair three sessions, present three papers, and give a full-day tutorial at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

Professor Aggelos Katsaggelos traveled to IEEE headquarters in Piscataway NJ, May 22, 2003, to attend the editorial board meeting of the Proceedings of the IEEE. He is chairing the "IT, Signal Processing and Communications" committee responsible for identifying key topics to focus on in the Proceedings of the IEEE over the next three to four years. Please contact him if you have any suggestions.

Professor Hai Zhou will travel to Anaheim, CA, for the ICCAD (IEEE International Conference on Computer Aided Design) technical program committee meeting and attend the Design Automation Conference May 30-June 2.

AWARDS

My ECE Ph.D. student Jason Ng has just won the Young Investigator Competition at the 2003 North American Society for Pacing and Electrophysiology (NASPE) Conference. The work which he presented is in collaboration with Dr. Steven Swiryn and Dr. Westby G. Fisher, both of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare and also on the faculty in our medical school.

This is a huge honor for Jason, and something we can be very proud of.

-Alan Sahakian

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Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science,
Northwestern University. All rights reserved.

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