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ECE Department Weekly Newsletter
June 7-11, 2004
 

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

This is to inform everyone that I have decided to step down as Chairman of the ECE Department at Northwestern effective August 15, 2004, after five wonderful years. I have accepted a position as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a position that will become effective Aug. 16, 2004. See the official news release at:

http://tigger.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/newsbureau/cgi-bin/index.cgi?from =Releases&to=Release&id=813&start=1079111686&end=1086887686&topic=0&dept=0

I am proud to have served the ECE department at Northwestern over the past five years as Chairman, and eight years as a faculty member. During this period, the ECE department rankings have gone up to 17th in computer engineering, and 20th in electrical engineering at the undergraduate level, and 21st in computer engineering and 26th in electrical engineering respectively at the graduate level. The research funding of the department has doubled from less than $4 million per year to $8 million per year. During this period, we hired 10 new faculty, five of whom received the NSF Career Awards (100% of all eligible faculty received the Career awards!). This past year, we had the best recruiting year in our department where all three of our first choice candidates accepted our offers. In terms of curriculum changes, we have made significant changes in our undergraduate electrical engineering and computer engineering curricula with strong instructional labs. Our industrial relations have never been stronger thanks to support from companies such as Motorola, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard. Our department is definitely headed in an upward trajectory, and I give the credit to my outstanding colleagues for this. I was honored to be a part of such a strong and exciting department.

I am ready for the next challenge in my life. The Deanship of the UIC College of Engineering will be a very exciting opportunity for me. I am deeply indebted to all of you for your support over the past eight years. I plan to remain in close contact with many of you in the future since I will continue to be an Adjunct Faculty of the ECE department for the next three years. I will keep visiting Northwestern regularly to continue to co-supervise some of my graduate students who will remain, and to continue research interactions with some of the ECE faculty.

Dean John Birge is in the process of appointing the next Chairman of the ECE department. We will provide updates of our search for a new Chairman in the weeks and months ahead.

Regards,

Prith Banerjee
Chairman

EXAMINATIONS

Monday, June 7, 2004: Ph.D. Final Examination - 1:00 p.m.
Room L324
Clyde V. Moseberry
"Dynamic Computer Performance Optimization Based on a Collaborative CMAC Design"
Committee Members: C.-H. Wu (chairman), L. Henschen, and G. Krulee

Friday, June 11, 2004: Ph.D. Final Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room L324
Xiaoyong Tang
"High-Level Synthesis Algorithms for Low Power ASIC Design"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), H. Zhou, R. Dick, and S. Memik

Friday, June 11, 2004: Ph.D. Final Examination - 10:00 a.m.
Room A230
Yakun Sun
"Transmitter and Receiver Techniques for Wireless Fading Channels"
Committee Members: M. Honig (chairman), R. Berry, and A. Haddad

Friday, June 11, 2004: Ph.D. Final Examination - 2:00 p.m.
Room L324
Tianyi Jiang
"Power Aware High-Level Synthesis Techniques for FPGAs"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), R. Dick, and H. Zhou

TRAVEL

Prith Banerjee is traveling to San Diego, CA, June 8-9, to attend the 41st IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference.

Robert Dick is traveling to the Design Automation Conference in San Diego from 7-10 June, where his paper on synthesizing fault-tolerant embedded systems will be presented.

Randy Freeman is traveling to Arlington, VA, June 6-8, to participate in an NSF Small Team Sensor Action Panel (Control, Networks, and Computational Intelligence program).

Hai Zhou traveled to San Diego, CA, June 2-6 to attend IWLS '04--International Workshop on Logic Synthesis-- and present his work on "A new efficient retiming algorithm derived by formal manipulation." He also attended the Technical Program Committee meeting for ICCAD 04 there.

 

 

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