During 1997-98, ECE continued to operate under the administrative structure adopted a year earlier. Major decisions were considered by the Chairman with the consultation and approval of the Executive Committee. By the end of the academic year, Prof. Banerjee had worked extensively with the ECE faculty to develop a comprehensive new structure and plan for the Department to be implemented beginning with his appointment in Sept. 1998.

A major effort in forming the Motorola Research Center in Telecommunication Systems at Northwestern culminated in success. The Center officially started in early Aug. 1998 with $600,000 funding for its first year. It is managed by a Director, Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos, and a faculty Board. While this is a McCormick Center, the faculty currently involved are all affiliated with ECE. The other Centers affiliated with ECE continued to be very successful. In fact, externally funded Department and Center research activities grew to an aggregate level of about $9 million. While our total faculty count remained at 33, we recruited two new faculty members in computer engineering and solid-state engineering to start in 1998-99. A new public relations committee developed an updated and enhanced Research Brochure and produced two issues of the new Department newsletter, ECE News, that were sent to alumni and colleagues at other universities, including EE and ECE department chairs.

     Prof. James E. Van Ness, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. His election brings to 12 the number of faculty of the McCormick School of Engineering who are currently members of the prestigious academy.

     Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos was nominated by a faculty search committee and subsequently appointed by the Dean as the Ameritech Professor of Information Technology for a three-year term beginning Sept. 1, 1997. This past year, he was also elected a Fellow of IEEE "for contributions to the theory and application of iterative image restoration methods."

     Aggelos was Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, Editor of the book, Digital Image Restoration (Springer-Verlag, 1991), and is currently Editor-in-Chief of
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He was General Chairman of the 1994 Visual Communications and Image Processing Conference. His current research interests include image recovery, processing of moving images (including motion estimation, enhancement, and very-low bit-rate compression), and computational vision.

     Prof. Bruce Wessels was named a Walter P. Murphy Professor by the Dean. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

     Prof. Michael Honig was tenured. Mike is a Ph.D. graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, and an IEEE Fellow.

     Mike was recently elected to a three-year term on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and was appointed Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. Information Theory. His current research interests include communications, signal processing, networks, spread-spectrum wireless communications systems, interference suppression and multiuser detection, multiple-access techniques, and resource allocation to support integrated services.

                                                                                                            Associate Prof. Alok Choudhary was tenured. Alok received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He joined Northwestern in Sept. 1996 after seven years on the faculty at Syracuse University. His main research interests are in high-performance computing and communications systems and their applications in multimedia, information processing, and scientific computing. Specific areas include the design and evaluation of architectures, software systems, servers, and databases.

     Alok received the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993, the IEEE Engineering Foundation Award, the IBM Faculty Development Award, and the Intel Research Council Award.

In other faculty honors, Prof. Jorge Nocedal was selected as the Bette and Niesen Harris Chair of Teaching Excellence by the McCormick School of Engineering. Prof. Randy Freeman received an NSF Career Award titled: "Career: Nonlinearity and Uncertainty in Control System Design" effective June 1, 1997 through May 31, 2001. Prof. Freeman was also selected for our Department’s Best Teacher Award.

Prof. Alvin Bayliss was named to the editorial board of J. Computational Physics. Prof. Abe Haddad served as Chairman of the IEEE Edison Medal Committee. He was also Associate Editor at Large of IEEE Trans. Automatic Control and Secretary of the American Automatic Control Council. Prof. Larry Henschen was Program Chairman of the 14th Int. Conf. on Advanced Science and Technology. Prof. Prem Kumar was appointed Co-Editor of Optics Express, the Optical Society of America’s new all-electronic journal devoted to rapid dissemination of new research results.
Prem was also the General Chairman of the Fourth Int. Conf. on Quantum Communication, Measurement, and Computing sponsored by the U. S. Office of Naval Research and the U. S. National Security Agency. Prof. Manijeh Razeghi and her colleagues received the SPIE Best Paper Award for 1998. Prof. Alan Sahakian was elected Vice President for Publications and Technical Activities of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) for 1997-1999. Alan was also appointed a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE/EMBS, and was honored at the Provost Reception celebrating 25 years of the residential college program at the Lindgren Residential College of Science and Engineering. Prof. Majid Sarrafzadeh was the General Chairman of the 1998 IEEE/ACM Int. Symp. on Physical Design. Majid was also appointed Assoc. Editor of IEEE Trans. Computer-Aided Design for 1997–99.

We hired two new faculty during 1997–98. In computer engineering, we hired Dr. Andreas Moshovos, who recently received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Moshovos is starting as a tenure-track assistant professor in Oct. 1998. In solid-state engineering, we hired Dr. Christopher Jelen, who recently received his Ph.D. from our Department. Dr. Jelen will start as a tenure-track assistant professor in 1999–2000.

Dr. Eric Schwabe ended his faculty appointment on Aug. 31, 1998. Prof. Gordon Murphy retired and was granted emeritus status effective Sept. 1, 1997.

As a result of the University’s continuing $110-million reconstruction of our building, we moved a large number of ECE faculty offices and research labs to newly reconstructed space. This affected about one-half of the CompE faculty. In addition, our EE teaching labs were moved to their final locations. We hired Norm Flasch to be the electronic technician in charge of these labs.
Norm replaced Mike Greenley, who assisted us on a part-time basis during 1997–98 despite his retirement.

Finally, our two new committees, the public relations and awards committees, continued the excellent job started last year. The public relations committee prepared a new Research Brochure which was mailed to all interested graduate students as well as to faculty at our peer institutions.
The external ECE News was published in Dec. 1997 and July 1998 and was mailed to alumni, faculty colleagues, and chairpersons of other ECE departments. The awards committee selected our best teacher, best teaching assistant, and best Ph.D. dissertation.

The significant external research funding attracted by the Center for Quantum Devices (CQD) headed by Prof. Manijeh Razeghi has been a key element in the large increase of our research expenditures over the past four years. We are now seeing a similar impact from the research funding attracted by the two-year-old Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing (CPDC). For example, during 1997-98, several CPDC faculty headed by Prof. Prith Banerjee submitted a successful proposal to DARPA in the amount of $1.85 million for 3 years.

An additional encouraging note about our research support is that support from industry continues to increase as well, especially from Motorola where a proposal for a Center for Telecommunications Research was approved with initial funding of $600,000 for the first year.
The contract was signed in early August 1998. The Motorola Center, which supports research in telecommunication systems, includes ECE faculty projects in the areas of video coding,
VLSI, wireless communications, and shared-network protocols.

The expanded ECE Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) met twice during the year. The first meeting was on Sept. 11, 1997 just prior to the meeting of the McCormick Advisory Council. The second meeting was on May 11, 1998 just after our annual faculty reception and tribute to Prof. James Van Ness on his induction into the National Academy of Engineering. IAB agenda items included plans to revise our curricula and to establish improved administrative processes for the Department.
It is important to note that the Board has been very supportive of the Department. We hope that this will result in stronger relations with industry relative to student support and research involvement.

The Department continues to be involved with the National Communications Forum which serves the information industry.

It is exciting to see an increased number of incoming freshman students declare CompE majors. Consider the entering McCormick freshman class of approximately 370 students in both 1996-97 and 1997-98. While the number of declared freshman EE majors was 19 in both of these years, the number of declared freshman CompE majors increased from 19 to 29. We wrote letters to all admitted freshmen describing the EE and CompE curricula offered by our Department. In order to attract more undecided students to ECE, we held an open house for all freshmen during New Student Week. Assisted by the IEEE and Eta Kappa Nu student organizations, we also held an open house for all McCormick students during Winter quarter. We plan to continue these activities, and are working on specific action items to increase our share of the declared majors by better acquainting freshmen with the exciting career possibilities in the ECE field. As a first step, we designed a new flyer promoting ECE to interested high school students and incoming freshmen.

An important factor in our undergraduate program is the number of our co-op students, which decreased slightly from 41 to 38. We expect this decline to be temporary.

An additional initiative undertaken by ECE was the start of a professional masters degree offered by the McCormick School in the area of information technology. The program held its first graduation ceremony for the 29 students enrolled in the class of 1998. The class of 1999 (28 students) started the first year in 1997-98, and 28 new students are expected to enroll in 1998-99.

An important milestone occurring during 1997-98 was the graduation with the Ph.D. of students in the first entering class (1989-90) of McCormick’s Honors Program in Undergraduate Research.
This McCormick program was originated by Profs. Allen Taflove of ECE and John Torkelson of ChemE. It aims to attract a small number of the brightest high school students in the U.S. each year; provide them with strong mentorship by research-active faculty from their freshman year on; encourage them to engage in meaningful research at an early age; and point them toward Ph.D. studies. Because it counts the undergraduate research as the equivalent of an M.S. thesis,
it eliminates the formal need for this degree and thus has become known as the B.S. / Ph.D. program.

Of the eight students entering McCormick under this program in Sept. 1989, two selected the ECE Department: Susan Hagness and Chris Jelen. In June 1998, Susan and Chris received their Ph.D.’s as advisees of Prof. Taflove and Prof. Manijeh Razeghi, respectively. During their studies, Susan and Chris accumulated impressive publication records: a combined total of over 65 refereed journal and conference papers.

Susan’s wide-ranging Ph.D. research involved computational electromagnetics (CEM) modeling of optical microcavity resonators / lasers and a new ultra-wideband microwave radar technology for detection of early-stage breast cancer. In June, she received the ECE Department’s 1998 Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award for this work. Her current research interests are in CEM algorithm development and analysis for biomedical and optical applications. She joined the ECE Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a tenure-track assistant professor in Aug. 1998.

Chris’ Ph.D. thesis reported the growth, characterization, and fabrication of GaInAsP-based
n-type long-wavelength quantum well infrared photodetectors. His current research interests include semiconductor detector arrays for multi-spectral infrared imaging. Chris was recently engaged as a lecturer in the ECE Department at Northwestern. He will begin his appointment as a tenure-track assistant professor in our Department in Sept. 1999.

The second component of the Engineering-First program is a two-course Engineering Design and Communication sequence, which is team-taught with English Department faculty from Northwestern’s Writing Program. This sequence teaches freshmen the methods involved in engineering design. Simultaneously, the students are instructed in ways to effectively communicate to their colleagues, supervisors, and sponsors through oral, written, and multimedia reports.

In our curriculum revision, there is a strong emphasis on laboratory-based learning. For example, all CompE courses have migrated to the use of commercial computer-aided design (CAD) tools from Mentor Graphics. These tools are used in courses dealing with logic design, computer architecture, very-large-scale integrated-circuit (VLSI) design, and various project-based courses. In addition, many of the courses in the networking, communications, and signal-processing areas in the EE curriculum have started using MATLAB software packages in their design and analysis problems.

As part of this revision, ECE is reworking and updating all of its undergraduate instructional laboratories to make them exciting and relevant to the students. In the past year, two-dozen new Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Sun workstations and twenty new personal computers (PC’s) were acquired for this purpose. This year, ECE is acquiring several lab benches, each consisting of a sophisticated digital oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and function generator integrated with a PC for programmable control, data acquisition, and display. This equipment is comparable to the latest used by professional engineers in industrial settings.

Our teaching should continue to improve as more new and young faculty teach all of our courses, improve their contents, and generate new courses reflecting recent trends in ECE. Our best faculty were assigned to teach EA1.

Our Department continued to participate in the AAHE project on peer review of teaching.
Profs. Alan Sahakian and Martin Plonus continued to offer innovative approaches to improve teaching and involve all ECE faculty in the process. In addition, Prof. Nocedal was selected as the Bette and Niesen Harris Chair of Teaching Excellence, indicating the major effort at improving teaching in ECE. Finally, ECE was made responsible for the McCormick computing staff who have key roles in setting up the Engineering-First labs as well as in maintaining the McCormick administrative network and server and all computer teaching labs.

The Conference was devoted to exploring the physical, mathematical, and technical problems related to quantum noise and quantum information in open systems, particularly those in information processing, optical-communication networks, and quantum computing. These topics have tremendous potential impact on the practice of communication, computing, and cryptology.
The Conference allowed key researchers in experimental and engineering aspects of quantum optics and communication systems to interact with physicists and applied mathematicians working in the areas of quantum probability and measurement theory. The Conference program was in the form of invited, regular, and poster papers, with proceedings to be published by Plenum Press.
Conference sponsors included Tamagawa University, Tokyo, Japan; Northwestern University;
the U.S. National Security Agency; and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

A highlight of the Conference was the presentation of the 1998 International Quantum Communication Awards to Prof. H. J. Kimble of Caltech for "outstanding experimental advances in the areas of quantum measurements, cavity QED, and quantum logic," and Dr. P. Shor of AT&T Research for "ground-breaking contributions to the field of quantum computing." This award was established by the Research Institute of Tamagawa University to acknowledge an individual or a group of individuals for their pioneering contributions to the development of quantum communications. The award carries a plaque and a cash prize.

     We expect to build upon these successes to achieve our goal of being a top-ranked ECE department. With a focus on:

     •  excellence, visibility, and international impact in research;

     •  fine undergraduate teaching by motivated faculty using
        modern curricula and high-quality facilities; and

     •  recruitment of high-quality faculty at all levels

I conclude with my thanks to the University’s upper administration for their support, including, but not limited to, Dean Jerome Cohen, Provost Lawrence Dumas, and President Henry Bienen. I wish the best to Prof. Banerjee, who has set the stage for continued improvement to an even higher level.

The mission of the ECE Department at Northwestern University is to be a leading department in the country in undergraduate and graduate education and research. Over the next five years, our specific goals are:

• To be ranked among the top 15 ECE departments in the U.S.;

• To provide a relevant, exciting, and high-quality education to our students;

• To perform internationally recognized research.

1. Increase the excellence of our faculty;

10. Improve the Department’s infrastructure and administration.

State-of-the-Art

We also plan to improve the teaching assistance in the Department by complementing the existing use of graduate TA’s with undergraduate TA’s. Senior-year undergraduates will be involved in the curricular-improvement process and in advising younger students.

We are adopting a pro-active stance in undergraduate and graduate student recruiting by:

• expanding and intensifying publicity regarding the Department;

• pursuing better professional-placement options for our seniors and graduate students
(see item immediately below);

Over the next several years, our goal is to increase both EE and CompE undergraduate enrollment by at least 20%, and to increase our enrollment of high-quality M.S. and Ph.D. students.
We recognize that achieving this goal would buck the current national trend. However, we believe that this goal is feasible with the above action plan.

We also want to encourage more of our undergraduate students to continue on into graduate school and ultimately join leading universities as tenure-track professors. This would certainly lead to better visibility and reputation for our Department within the ECE community. One means to this end is to identify candidate seniors, involve them in undergraduate research, provide them with opportunities to attend technical conferences and to author and / or present papers, and hold regular meetings to alert them to opportunities for graduate admission and fellowship support at universities around the country (especially ours!).

• establish regular industrial seminars in the areas of strength of our Department;

• provide more and better information to industry using improved printed brochures and
Web-based media describing our undergraduate and graduate programs, our courses,
our students, and our research;

• nurture industrial collaborations and consulting by faculty;

• perform research that is relevant to industry’s needs by having thesis projects
selected in consultation with members of industry;

• grow our Masters in Information Technology program (aimed at people working full time
in industry).

• publish the external Department newsletter, ECE News, in February and September of
each year for distribution to alumni and faculty colleagues outside of Northwestern;

• establish regular seminars in the areas of strength of our Department.

These steps will improve the outside visibility of the Department by enhancing relations with university and industry leaders. In addition, these steps will attract new students and faculty,
and publicize various activities within the Department.

• ECE Graduate Program — Prof. Lawrence Henschen, Director

Profs. Alok Choudhary, Scott Hauck, Scott Jordan, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Prem Kumar,
and Manijeh Razeghi; graduate students Amy Csizmar, Jonathan Geisler, and Michael
Vasilyev

• Undergraduate EE Program — Prof. Michael Honig, Director

Profs. Prith Banerjee, Scott Jordan, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Prem Kumar, Manijeh
Razeghi, and Alan Sahakian; undergraduate student Andrew Dukatz

• Undergraduate CompE Program — Prof. Majid Sarrafzadeh, Director

Profs. Prith Banerjee, Alok Choudhary, Scott Hauck, Jorge Nocedal, and Valerie Taylor;
undergraduate student James Cooley

• Computing Facilities — Prof. Alok Choudhary, Director

Profs. Randy Freeman, Andreas Moshovos, Jorge Nocedal, Majid Sarrafzadeh, and
Allen Taflove; Department staff Chris Walsh

• Instructional Labs — Prof. Alan Sahakian, Director

Profs. Randy Freeman, Lawrence Henschen, Seng-Tiong Ho, Carl Kannewurf, Nathan
Newman, Valerie Taylor, and Chi-Haur Wu; Department staff Norm Flasch;
undergraduate student Jason Perlewitz

• Publicity and Publications — Prof. Allen Taflove, Director

• Alumni and Industrial Relations — Prof. Prem Kumar, Director

• Administration — Ms. Deneen Bryce, Director

• Faculty Promotions, Tenure, Recruitment, and Improvement — Prof. Prith
Banerjee, Chairman

Profs. Lawrence Henschen, Michael Honig, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Prem Kumar, Manijeh
Razeghi, and Majid Sarrafzadeh

     I wish to thank the outgoing Chairman, Abraham Haddad, for providing strong leadership in the ECE Department for the last 10 years. We shall build upon the solid foundation that he established. We shall endeavor to further strengthen the Department so that it becomes a consensus national leader in education, research, industrial relations, and alumni relations. In the latter vein, I welcome your perspectives on leading ECE into the 21st Century. Please send me your comments via email at banerjee@ece.nwu.edu.