7/3/2008 — Rankin to be Research Scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center

Yolanda Rankin, Ph.D. has accepted a Research Scientist position at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. Yolanda will be working in the Services Research division to design and develop 3D virtual worlds to support globally distributed customers.

7/3/2008 — Razeghi publishes research results on Nanostructured Sensors

Nanostructured Sensors - Type-II superlattices could be the next solution for fast and uniform infrared imaging.
By Manijeh Razeghi

Infrared photon imaging between 3 and 14 μm has important applications in security, defense, astronomy, and a number of other areas. Soldiers need infrared imaging to conduct surveillance in the dark. Astronomers and climatologists want imaging systems to learn more about our universe and world. Researchers at the Center for Quantum Devices at Northwestern University have overcome several challenges in integrating Type II superlattice materials into IR imaging systems. Their innovative work using nanotechnology to create these structures has resulted in fabrication of the first high-quality IR camera with a 10 μm cutoff wavelength.
Read the full article. [pdf]

7/2/2008 — Chen Distinguished Lecturer at Intelligen Automation, Inc

Yan Chen was invited to give a distinguished lecture at Intelligent Automation, Inc. in June 2008. The title of his speech is "Anomaly/Intrusion Detection and Prevention in Challenging Network Environments". Intelligent Automation, Inc. (IAI) is one of the top IT incubator companies that provide technical R&D services and innovative applications and toolkits to federal agencies, first tier systems integrators and commercial clients. IAI has more than 10 million dollar annual grants from various federal agencies such as DARPA. It won the prestigious Tibbetts Award twice (in 2000 and 2007) from the Small Business Administration and the Small Business Technology Council for excellence in technology research and commercialization.

7/1/2008 — Haddad in South Korea to attend IFAC 17th World Congress

Abraham Haddad, Henry and Isabelle Dever Professor of EECS, is traveling to Seoul South Korea to attend the IFAC 17th World Congress (www.ifac2008.org) and attend meetings of the IFAC Council as the US representative and other related meetings. He will also receive the IFAC Fellow award during the Congress.

6/26/2008 — Zhou receives ACM Award

Hai Zhou has received a Technical Leadership Award from ACM SIGDA (Special Interest Group on Design Automation) on the Design Automation Conference held in Anaheim, June 8-13.

6/9/2008 — Kumar speaks at Workshop on Quantum Cryptography

Prem Kumar was an invited speaker at the Workshop on Quantum Cryptography: The Commercialization Future of Quantum Key Distribution and Physics Based Security held as part of the 5th Annual Meeting of the MIT Center for Integrated Photonic Systems, MIT, Cambridge, MA, May 14-15, 2008. Kumar represented Northwestern University and his company, NuCrypt LLC, with a talk entitled, "Physics-Based Cryptography Compatible with Fiber-Network Infrastructure." For details on the Workshop and other invited participants, see: http://www.rle.mit.edu/cips/annual08/QuantumCryptograph.html.

6/5/2008 — Zhou AE of ACM Journal

Hai Zhou has been appointed an associate editor of ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems, the leading journal in Design Automation.

5/29/2008 — PhD student Ankit Mohan appointed as Post-Doc at MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Arts and Sciences Division (Media Lab) has appointed EECS PhD student Ankit Mohan as a new Post-Doctoral Associate beginning July, 2008 for an extendable 15-month term. Mohan, now completing his dissertation "Light-Field Modulation for Improved Image Capture and Projection" funded by NSF and supervised by EECS Assoc. Professor Jack Tumblin, will continue his research with Ramesh Raskar at MIT in the new 'Camera Culture' research group. In the past two years, Mohan's collaborations with Raskar MERL and Tumblin at Northwestern have yielded several notable papers on newly devised techniques for computational photography.

5/29/2008 — Senior Nate Matsuda wins McCormick award

EECS Senior Nathan 'Nate' Matsuda has won McCormick's 2008 Harold B. Gotaas Undergraduate Research Award, for his EECS 399 project entitled "A Low-Cost High-Dynamic Range Video Camera", guided by EECS Assoc. Professor Jack Tumblin. Nate will receive the Award at 2008 Commencement Exercises June 20, 2008. The Harold B. Gotaas Undergraduate Research Award, named in honor of the third dean of the Technological Institute, is made to the senior who presents the best research paper in the competition. Congratulation to Nate!

5/29/2008 — Tumblin's courses to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2008

Two half-day course proposals co-organized by EECS Professor Jack Tumblin will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2008 (Los Angeles, August 11-15), selected by peer review.   Course "Advanced Topics in Computational Photography" surveys new directions from 2006 and later, led by  Ramesh Raskar (MIT-Media Lab), Paul Debevec (Univ. Southern Calif.-Institute for Creative Technologies), and Tumblin.  The second course "A Gentle Introduction to the Bilateral Filter and its Applications" links together a broad class of nonlinear edge-preserving smoothing filters and their uses, including PDEs, diffusion variants, and recent fast-bilateral methods, to be led by Sylvain Paris (Adobe Systems, Inc.) Fredo Durand(MIT-CSAIL), Pierre Kornprobst (INRIA-France) and Tumblin.

5/28/2008 — Taflove wins teaching award

Allen Taflove has received the Northwestern Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award.

5/22/2008 — Kuzmanovic gave an invited talk at on Internet Tomography at Rutgers University

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic gave an invited talk at the DIMCS/DyDAn Workshop on Internet Tomography (http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Tomography/), an NSF workshop which took place at Rutgers University and gathered the leading researchers in the Internet measurement community. Kuzmanovic presented an Internet-wide monitoring system that his group recently developed, which is capable of detecting and locating congestion "hot spots" in the Internet core (Tier-1 and -2 networks). Karl Deng, Kuzmanovic's Ph.D. student, also gave an invited talk on a related topic.

5/22/2008 — Katsaggelos speaks at HP Labs

Aggelos Katsaggelos gave a talk entitled "Content-Adaptive Efficient Resource Allocation for Packet-Based Video Transmission" at HP Labs, Palo Alto, California, on May 12, 2008

5/6/2008 — Katsaggelos is Distinguished Lecturer in Chicago, Istanbul, Santa Clara

Prof. A.K.Katsaggelos, as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, gave talks at the University of Illinois Chicago on March 21, 2008, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, on March 25, 2008, and National Semiconductor, Santa Clara California, on May 12, 2008 (upcoming). The topics of his talks are "Image and Video Recovery" and "Video Communications".

5/2/2008 — Bustamante honored by Science Foundation of Ireland

Fabian E. Bustamante, assistant professor in the EECS department, was awarded the E.T.S. Walton Award by the Science Foundation of Ireland. The E.T.S. Walton Visitor Awards program enables highly qualified researchers from around the world to carry out research projects of their own choice in Ireland. This award, established to honor and perpetuate the legacy of Ireland's 1951 Nobel laureate in physics, is decided taking into consideration the investigator's recent research record, the proposed research plan and the relevance of the research to the economic, scientific and educational development of Ireland. Some previous awardees include Prof. Anthony J. Windebank (Mayo Clinic), Prof. John Leonard (MIT), Prof. Kumpati Narandra (Yale) and Prof. Oliver O'Reilly (UC Berkeley). The E.T.S. Walton Award will allow Bustamante to spend a few months at Trinity College, Dublin, working in collaboration with their Distributed Systems Group on the challenges and opportunities with emergent (mis)behavior in vehicular-based distributed systems.

4/18/2008 — Valtchanov, Borisov, Bereczky in top 100, ACM ICPC

The Northwestern Wildcats -- Nikolay Valtchanov, Nikola Borisov, and Anda Bereczky -- coached by Peter Dinda, competed in the 32nd annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The team was one of 100 top teams from over 6700 worldwide at the start of the competition, and was awarded an honorable mention in the World Finals. More information can be found at https://cm2prod.baylor.edu/login.jsf

4/16/2008 — Hadded elected IFAC Fellow

Abraham Haddad has been elected IFAC Fellow to be presented in Seoul, South Korea on July 10, 2008 during the IFAC World Congress. The IFAC Fellow Award is given to persons who have made outstanding and extraordinary contributions in the field of interest of IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control), in the role as an Engineer/Scientist, Technical Leader, or Educator. Prof. Haddad's citation reads: "For contributions to analysis, optimization and control of stochastic systems with applications to vehicle guidance and communications networks." The list of 2008 IFAC Fellows is found here.

4/8/2008 — Kumar receives Distinguished Lecturer Award

Prof. Prem Kumar of the EECS Department and the Physics and Astronomy Department at Northwestern will receive a Distinguished Lecturer Award from the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) of the IEEE for 2008-09.

The Distinguished Lecturer Awards program is designed to honor excellent speakers who have made technical, industrial or entrepreneurial contributions of high quality to the field of lasers and electro-optics, and to enhance the technical programs of LEOS chapters. Consideration is given to having a balance of speakers who can address a wide range of topics of current interest in the fields covered by LEOS. Eight Lecturers are selected each term (July 1 – June 30) with some Lecturers extending for a second term. Each Lecturer agrees to give a minimum of six lectures at LEOS chapters. Travel reimbursement of up to $5000 per term per Lecturer is provided. Candidates need not be members of the IEEE or LEOS. The Award consists of a plaque, presented at the LEOS Annual Meeting to those completing their term(s).

4/8/2008 — Wetzel wins NSF GRFP

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) provides students with three years of funding -- up to $121,500 -- for research-focused Master’s and PhD degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

The National Science Foundation aims to ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the United States and to reinforce its diversity by offering approximately 1,100 graduate fellowships in this competition. The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master’s or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate study. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) invests in graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the National Science Foundation.

4/8/2008 — SPIE Awards $1000 Scholarship to Wei Wu

Wei Wu is a second-year PhD graduate student at the Bio-inspired Sensors and Optoelectronics Laboratory (BISOL), directed by Professor Hooman Mohseni at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Northwestern University. His current research focuses on highly efficient electrically tunable quantum dot infrared sensors sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and National Science Foundation (NSF). More information about his research interests, including novel nanolithography and Nanofabrication techniques, can be found at www.bisol.northwestern.edu.

SPIE is the world’s largest international not-for-profit society in the fields of optics, photonics, and imaging with 17,000 individual members including 3,800 students. To date, SPIE has distributed over $3 million U.S. dollars in scholarships and grants to those working and learning in 84 countries. SPIE strongly believes in the opportunities and personal enrichment that education provides and in the need for increased scientific and technical literacy. The Society is committed to the upcoming generations of scientists and engineers who will develop the potential of optics and photonics.

For more information on SPIE’s scholarship program, visit spie.org/scholarships.

4/7/2008 — Yuen receives 2008 Quantum Electronics Award

Horace Yuen of the EECS Department at Northwestern and Jeffrey Shapiro of the EECS Department at MIT, and Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, will jointly receive the 2008 Quantum Electronics Award from the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) of the IEEE. Their citation for the Award will read: "For pioneering and seminal contributions to the theory of the generation, detection, and applications of novel states of light." The Award will be presented at the 2008 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics to be held in San Jose, CA, May 4-9.
The Quantum Electronics Award is given to honor an individual (or group of individuals) for outstanding technical contributions to quantum electronics, either in fundamentals or applications, or both. The Award may be for a single contribution or for a distinguished series of contributions over a long period of time. No candidate shall have previously received a major IEEE award for the same work. Candidates need not be members of the IEEE or LEOS. The Award consists of an honorarium of $4,000 and a medal. The presentation is made at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO).
Over the 30-year history of the QE Award, the recipients have included 18 members of the NAE, 13 members of the NAS, and 7 members of the AAAS.
Related Links:
LEOS Award Winners
http://www.ieee.org/portal/site/leos/menuitem.c068a7b8deb7e828fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=leos_level1&path=leos/info&file=previous_award_winners.xml&xsl=generic.xsl
Prof. Jeffrey Shapiro: http://www.rle.mit.edu/rleonline/People/JeffreyH.Shapiro.html

4/3/2008 — Gokhan Memik wins NSF CAREER award

Gokhan Memik wins the NSF CAREER award, NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members, for his research entitled "Holistic Computer Architectures for Nanoscale Processors."

Technology scaling (i.e., the continuous decrease in device dimensions) has been the most important contributor to the increase in the computational power in microprocessor over the last four decades and indirectly affects many aspects of modern life. However, as the silicon industry moves into smaller technologies, the growing standby power dissipation and the increasing variability in device characteristics are becoming the most important hurdles to further scaling. The main goal of this research is to target the problem of variability in device characteristics, i.e., process variations, which manifest themselves as fluctuations in performance, power, and reliability of manufactured processors. To address these problems, this research develops variation-tolerant architectures that a) will be tolerant to failures/variations and b) have improved lifetime reliability. We also incorporate novel holistic optimization goals for such architectures.

3/26/2008 — Kuzmanovic awarded Narus Research Fellows grant

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic is among this year's awardees of the Narus Research Fellows Program for his "Googling the Internet" project. This grant will fund a collaborative research that also includes Ionut Trestian, Ph.D. student, and Dr. Supranamaya Ranjan and Dr. Antonio Nucci from Narus. The team will focus its research efforts on designing the first-of-its-kind real-time endpoint-driven traffic classifier suitable for deployment in high-speed IP networks.

3/20/2008 — Haddad invited to speak at the Technion in Haifa

Professor Abraham Haddad will travel to Israel to present an invited lecture at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa.

3/19/2008 — Tsaftaris, Katsaggelos - Digital Signal Processing

Sotirios A. Tsaftaris and co-author Aggelos Katsaggelos, Fellow of IEEE, published a short opinion paper in IEEE proceedings entitled "The Not So Digital Future of Digital Signal Processing". The paper is mentioned on the cover. Read the article in PDF, or log into the IEEE Explore publication.

3/11/2008 — NU Student Chapter of the OSA Career Day for Girls

Northwestern University student chapter of Optical Society of America volunteers have taken part in this year’s Career Day for Girls on February 23rd. Thirty students in grades 8th-10th spent 30 minutes in a combination of lab tours and optical demonstrations in small groups. Since the Kumar group research laboratories focus on fiber-optic telecommunications, at the start the students witnessed how total internal reflection contains laser light in a stripe of Jell-O. This is similar to the process that contains light in optical fibers, making it possible for light to stay in fiber as it curves, and to get transmitted great distances under oceans and across continents. Two Jell-O stripes put in contact shaped as x illustrated how light from multiple fibers can get redirected or combined, in a so-called fiber coupler. Sending red and green laser light zig-zagging along the Jell-O patch together showed how light of different colours can travel together down the same optical fiber, expertly called wavelength-division-multiplexing. This brought home another important point – that a lot of fancy sounding expressions in engineering can hide a very simple meaning. Having seen the basic principle of optical fibers in the Jell-O demonstration, students marveled at the same phenomenon in a real fiber with Helium-Neon laser light flowing through it in Monika Patel’s experiment on microstructured fibers. Then Milja Medic showed them quantum communications laboratory. If the students in the group were interested in aerospace engineering, they saw powerful new technology light detectors designed for catching light signals from probes on Mars. For those interested in telecommunications, the students were shown where we make entangled pairs of smallest portions of light. Students were excited to hear how these pairs can be used to transmit information in ways that are impossible with laser light-in-Jell-O-type of communication, which is basis for current technology. After the lab tour, Matt Hall and Neal Oza showed the students fascinating transformation of CD music into light and back. Volunteers were happy to see many faces light up and to answer the students’ numerous questions.

3/11/2008 — NU Student Chapter of the OSA

NU Student Chapter of the OSA Foundation has been awarded a 2008 Educational Outreach Grant for $1000, which will fund one winter, three spring, one fall event; two at Northwestern University, two at Dawes Primary School and one at Whitter Primary School.

3/3/2008 — Cassell received 2008 Women of Vision award

Justine Cassell has just received the 2008 Women of Vision award for Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, which "recognizes a woman who has led an important technology development or innovation, made a significant contribution to the technology industry, and inspired others.

3/3/2008 — Norman files patent application

Professor Don Norman files a patent application: Vemuri, S., Miller, D. B., Norman, D. A., & Ghosh, R. (2008). U.S. Patent Application No.: PCT/US08/52501. Free Form Voice Command Model Interface for IVR Navigation. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

3/3/2008 — Norman delivers keynote address

Professor Don Norman was invited to give the Keynote address to SolidWorks User Conference, San Diego on January 22, 2008. He gave a talk on Design of Future Things to the Commonwealth Club, Silicon Valley chapter, in Palo Alto, California on March 11, 2008.

3/3/2008 — Norman appointed to several boards

Professor Don Norman has been appointed to the Advisory Committee for NSF’s Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) for the term May 2008 – 2010, as well as the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Design (published at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology), and has been reappointed to the Motorola Visionary Board for 2008.

2/27/2008 — Grayson invited to speak at area institutions

During the month of January and February, Matthew Grayson has given invited seminars at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington University, and at the Department of Physics of Northwestern University on the topic of "Luttinger Liquids and the Exotic World of One-Dimensional Conductors".

2/22/2008 — Kuzmanovic wins NSF CAREER award

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic wins the NSF CAREER award, NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members, for his research entitled "Internet Audit: A Theory, Toolset, and Applications for a World without Net Neutrality."

The main goal of this research is to build a system capable of monitoring Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Content Distribution Network services and elements, revealing their behavior and policies, and accurately detecting and exposing biased or discriminatory network practices. The focus will be on devising novel distributed end-host-based auditing methodologies and tools to systematically study a number of threat models, that range from open DoS attacks to more sophisticated methods in which ISPs are adding jitter or using differentiated services in destructive ways.

2/20/2008 — Grayson wins NSF CAREER award

Matthew Grayson wins the prestigious NSF CAREER award for his research entitled "Bose-Einstein condensation using different flavors of electrons"
Most electronic devices operate by sending negatively charged electrons, positively charged holes, or both, around a device for the purposes of signal amplification and logic switching. However certain semiconductors host different kinds of electrons, designated by their so-called “valley-index”, and new quantum device ideas and physical phenomena could be realized if it were possible to control and distinguish these different kinds of electrons. This research will study possible ways of distinguishing these different flavors of electrons, and investigate simple electronic devices which function as a result of this distinguishability. Evidence for a rare quantum state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate will be sought, under conditions where electrons from different valleys might be coerced to pair with each other.

2/18/2008 — Razeghi now Fellow of Materials Research Society

Professor Manijeh Razeghi has been selected for recognition with the new and distinguished title of MRS Fellow. The inaugural class of Fellows will be recognized at the 2008 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco. The title of MRS Fellow honors The Materials Research Society members who are notable for their distinguished research accomplishments and their outstanding contributions to the advancement of materials research, world-wide. The maximum number of new Fellow appointments each year is limited to 0.2% of the current MRS membership. The distinction is thus highly selective.

2/18/2008 — Chen speaks at UIUC and U of Toronto

Yan Chen gave invited talks on the Network-based Intrusion Detection, Prevention and Forensics research at UIUC in December 2007 and at University of Toronto in January 2008. In particular, he presented the P2P Doctor System for Measurement and Diagnosis of Misconfigured P2P Traffic, a joint work with Prof. Aleksnder Kuzmanovic.

2/18/2008 — Sahakian speaks at IIT

Alan Sahakian traveled to Illinois Institute of Technology on February 8 to give an invited talk titled: "The Incoherent Heart -- Searching for Structure in Atrial Arrhythmias."

2/13/2008 — Ho Keynote Speaker at IEEE INEC 2008

Prof. Seng-Tiong Ho will be a prominent Keynote Speaker at IEEE International Nanoelectronics Conference (INEC) 2008 (http://ieeenec.org/speakers/), which is among the largest IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies –Nanoelectronics and Nanophotonics ,with participants from over 27 countries attending. The international conference will be held in Shanghai, China, from 24-27 March 2008. Professor Ho will give a plenary talk on “Nano-Optoelectronics for Ultrafast Photonics and Electronics” to the conference attendees, featuring his latest works on nanophotonics and large-scale photonic-electronic integration.

2/11/2008 — Guo's paper receives special mention

2007 Information Theory Society Paper Award
The 2007 Information Theory Society Paper Award recognizes an exceptional publication in information theory, appearing in the period January 1, 2005 through December 31, 2006. At ISIT 2007 in Nice, it was announced that the award goes to: “The Capacity Region of the Gaussian Multiple-Input Multiple- Output Broadcast Channel,” by H. Weingarten, Y. Steinberg and S. Shamai (Shitz), which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 52, No. 9, pp. 3936-3964, September 2006. This paper establishes the capacity region of one of the most important class of broadcast channels. In the process, new concepts and analytical tools are introduced. These results already impacted many other works in information theory.
A special mention should be given to the runner-up paper which was recognized by the award subcommittee to be an extremely strong contender: “Mutual Information and Minimal Mean-Squared Error in Gaussian Channels'', by D. Guo, S. Shamai (Shitz) and S. Verdu, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory , vol. 51, pp. 1261-1282, April 2005.

2/4/2008 — Kuzmanovic on advisory board of Narus Inc.

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic has been appointed a member of the advisory board of Narus Inc. (www.narus.com). Narus is one of the leading companies in the area of Internet security focusing on carrier-class security solutions for the world's largest IP networks.

1/24/2008 — Zhou, Das, and Intel researchers shine at ACM/IEEE

The joint work by Hai Zhou and his student Debasish Das with Intel researchers Kip Killpack, Chandramouli Kashyap, Abhijit Jas was presented by Debasish at the ACM/IEEE ASP Design Automation Conference in Seoul, Korea this week. The publication, "Pessimism Reduction in Coupling Aware Static Timing Analysis Using Timing and Logic Filtering," was selected as one of the 10 Best Paper Award Finalists among 350 submitted papers to the conference.

11/14/2007 — ICCAD Best Paper Award Finalist

The joint work by Seda Ogrenci Memik and Yehea Ismail along with graduate students Jieyi Long and Ja Chun Ku was presented by Jieyi Long at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD) in San Jose last week. The publication was selected as one of the 6 Best Paper Award Finalists out of 139 presented papers at the conference.

11/13/2007 — Kumar is co-organizer of the IEEE/LEOS

Prem Kumar is co-organizer of the IEEE/LEOS (Lasers and Electro-optics Society of the IEEE) Winter Topical Meeting on "Fiber Optical Parametric Amplifiers and Related Devices," to be held in Sorrento, Italy, January 14-16, 2008. This IEEE/LEOS sponsored meeting is one of four collocated 2008 Winter Topicals on the general theme of Nonlinear Photonics. The other collocated topical meetings are: "Nonlinear Optics in Liquid Crystals," "Chip-Scale Nonlinear Optical Devices," and "Photonic Crystal Fibers: Technology and Applications." Complete conference information, including the Advance Program, can be found online

11/8/2007 — SC - Best Student Paper Winner

Serkan Ozdemir wins the SC Best Student Paper Award - An article by EECS graduate student S. Ozdemir co-authored with J. Ku, A. Mallik, G. Memik, and Y. Ismail titled "Variable Latency Caches for Nanoscale Processors" has been awarded the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing (SC) 2007. SC, which was held between November 10th and 16th, is one of the premier conferences in high-performance computing and attracts approximately 10,000 attendees every year.

11/7/2007 — Haddad appointed visiting Chair Professor, Taiwan

Abraham Haddad has been presented with a plaque of appointment by the President of National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan, to a three-year term as visiting Chair Professor at the university. The position involves cooperation with faculty at the university and occasional visits to present seminars and short courses.

11/5/2007 — Haddad visits Taiwan

Abe Haddad is traveling to Taiwan to attend and present a plenary paper at the CACS 2007 in Taichung (International Automatic Control Conference)

11/1/2007 — Bustamante taking part in MMCN in January '08

Fabián Bustamante has been invited to be part of a research panel on the topic of “How content distribution models are changing and how mobility may impact this.” The panel is to be hosted in the 2008 Multimedia Computing and Network conference (MMCN), next January.

11/1/2007 — Bustamante invited to speak at UIC

Fabián Bustamante gave an invited talk at the University of Illinois, Chicago, as part of the University of Illinois IGERT program on Computational and Transportation Science. This week, Bustamante also gave the inaugural presentation at Faculty Research Seminar organized by the Northwestern University Transportation Center.

10/29/2007 — Dick paper one of 30 most influential in 10 years

Robert Dick's publication, "MOCSYN: Multiobjective Core-Based Single-Chip System Synthesis," was selected by Design, Automation, and Test in Europe Conference as one of the 30 most influential papers in the last ten years. Niraj K. Jha co-authored this paper.

10/18/2007 — Katsaggelos presents Distinguished Lectures

Aggelos K. Katsaggelos gave Distinguished Lectures in Madrid Spain, Hong Kong, Bogota, Colombia, and Rochester, NY over the summer. He was the plenary speaker at the "Symposium on Signal and Image Processing and Computer Vision," in Barranquilla, Colombia on 9/27/07. He attended an one-day meeting at Motorola, as a member of their Research Visionary Board, on 10/4/07.

10/17/2007 — Kuzmanovic promotes NU ties with UESTC in China

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic gave an invited talk at the University for Electronic Science & Technology of China (UESTC) in Chengdu, China. He gave an interview for the local newspapers promoting ties between Northwestern and UESTC, and held informative sessions with students interested in studying at Northwestern. Prof. Kuzmanovic also attended the ICNP 2007 conference which took place in Beijing, China, where his student Amit Mondal presented a paper. Another paper from Prof. Yan Chen's group was presented at the conference by his student Zhichun Li.

10/15/2007 — Chen invited to speak in Asia

Yan Chen gave invited talks at Microsoft Research Asia, Tsinghua University and Peking University in September.

10/15/2007 — Dinda invited to talk in Chicago, Iowa

Peter Dinda is giving invited talks on the subject of "The End-user in Experimental Computer Systems Research" at TTI-C/U.Chicago and Iowa State in the upcoming weeks.

10/15/2007 — Dinda invited to Intel Virtualization Summmit

Peter Dinda has been invited to attend the Second Intel Virtualization Summit in early November. He will be presenting the work of the Virtuoso project (virtuoso.cs.northwestern.edu ) and explaining a new funded project on virtual machine monitors.

10/15/2007 — Dinda, Memik, Dick win NSF grant

Faculty members Peter Dinda, Gokhan Memik, and Robert Dick have been awarded a three year grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue research on how to optimize client-server computing subject to end-user satisfaction. The intent is to examine systems and computer engineering problems that arise in this context with the idea of having limited end-user input available.

10/15/2007 — Dick, Dinda, Henschen et al win NSF grant

Faculty members Robert Dick, Peter Dinda, Larry Henschen, CEE faculty member Charles Dowding, and their colleague Pai Chou of the University of California-Irvine, have been awarded a three year grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue research on programming and synthesis languages and toolchains for wireless sensor networks. The goal is to make complex sensor networks straightforwardly programmable by application domain experts, as opposed to wireless sensor network experts.

10/15/2007 — Dinda, Bustamante, Joseph awarded NSF grant

Faculty members Peter Dinda, Fabian Bustamante, Russ Joseph, and their collaborator Barney Maccabe at the University of New Mexico have been awarded a four year grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue research and development of an extensible open source virtual machine monitor framework for modern computer architectures. A virtual machine monitor is an operating system that runs other operating systems.

10/10/2007 — Haddad to visit Tel-Aviv University

Professor Abraham Haddad is traveling from October 11 to November 1, 2007 for a visit to Tel-Aviv University in Israel.

10/9/2007 — Ken Forbus speaking at University of Colorado

Ken Forbus will be giving an invited talk this week at University of Colorado, Boulder.

9/26/2007 — Derin Babacan wins IBM Student Paper Award

Derin Babacan received the IBM Student Paper Award for the International Conference on Image Processing 2007, for the paper "Total Variation Image Restoration and Parameter Estimation Using Variational Posterior Distribution Approximation", co-authored with R. Molina and A. K. Katsaggelos. The Award consists of a plaque as well as a check for $1000 which was awarded on Tuesday 9/18/07 in San Antonio Texas.

9/24/2007 — Kuzmanovic speaks at HP Labs and Washington U

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic gave invited talks at HP labs in Palo Alto, California on August 24, 2007, and at Washington University in St. Louis.

9/19/2007 — Bustamante co-chairing workshop at HotAC

Fabian E. Bustamante and Emre Kiciman (Microsoft Research) are co-chairing this years workshop on Hot Topics in Autonomics (HotAC) to be held in Jacksonville, Florida on June 15th. This is the second iteration of the successful HotAC workshop series founded by Bustamante in 2006.

9/18/2007 — NU's OSA student chapter awarded outreach grant

Northwestern University OSA Student Chapter Awarded Educational Outreach Grant

The Optical Society of America Foundation (OSAF) is pleased to announce that the Northwestern University OSA Student Chapter has been awarded an Educational Outreach Grant in support of their efforts at three different educational programs: Career Day for Girls, Physics Open Day and at Dawes Primary School. At each event chapter members use highly visual experiments to highlight optical phenomena. The complexity of the experiments ranges from simple and colorful, suitable for children beginning primary school, to laser light experiments, to more involved, such as turning sound into light and back into sound again. To learn more about the Northwestern University outreach program and the volunteer activities of its members please contact Matt Hall at m-hall1@northwestern.edu or 847 467 2261. For more information contact KiKi L'Italien, Student chapter and Local Section Manager, klital@osa.org

9/18/2007 — Prem Kumar is the general co-chair for QELS '08

Prof. Kumar will be the general co-chair for QELS '08. This conference will be held in San Jose, CA next year, May 4-9, 2008

The Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO) and the Quantum Electronics and Laser Science Conference (QELS) are two of the most highly regarded programs in the lasers, electro-optics and nanophotonics fields. With more than 1,500 talks on the latest cutting-edge optics and photonics research, CLEO/QELS is the source of the most innovative new developments for the industry. With the introduction of PhAST, CLEO/QELS attendees now have the opportunity to experience three conferences in one!

9/18/2007 — Katsaggelos to give Distinguished Lecture, Toronto

Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos will be giving a Distinguished Lecture at the University of Toronto on 5/14/07, with topic "Image and Video Recovery".

9/18/2007 — Yan Chen hosting TPC for 13th ACM MobiCom

Yan Chen is hosting the Technical Program Committee (TPC) meeting at Northwestern University for the 13th ACM MobiCom conference. The MobiCom conference is the premier and highly-seleective international forum addressing networks, systems, algorithms, and applications that support the symbiosis of mobile computers and wireless networks. The TPC meeting will be held at Pancoe Auditorium from 6/2 to 6/3. More than 30 TPC members will come and join the meeting. Chen is also a member of the TPC.

9/18/2007 — G. Memik co-chairing 40th Int'l Symposium on Micro

Gokhan Memik and Mikko Lipasti (University of Wisconsin) will co-chair the technical program of 40th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (Micro). Micro is the oldest venue in computer architecture and is the premier conference in Microarchitecture. Profs. Alok Choudhary and Russ Joseph are also members of the TPC.

9/18/2007 — Taflove, Doufexi elected to ASG Faculty Honor Roll

Allen Taflove and Vana Doufexi have been selected by the Northwestern student body as two of the outstanding Faculty of the Year for 2006-2007. The honorees were selected based on their quality of instruction and contribution to the academic lives of undergraduate students.

9/18/2007 — Kuzmanovic's TCP-LP protocol algorithm released

TCP Low Priority (TCP-LP), a protocol designed by Prof. Aleksandar Kuzmanovic and his former advisor Ed Knightly, has entered the Linux kernel as one of their congestion control algorithms. TCP-LP is a distributed protocol designed for non-intrusive bulk data transfers. More information is available at the following links: http://tcp-lp-mod.sourceforge.net/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcp-lp-mod/

9/18/2007 — Lana Kiperman receives service excellence award

Lana Kiperman, Program Assistant for CPCC, has received a 17th Annual Service Excellence Award from NU.

9/18/2007 — Robert Dick, Lei Yang win Horizon Award

Robert Dick and Lei Yang have won Computerworld’s 2007 Horizon Award. Computerworld will publish the list and stories in the August 20th, 2007, issue.

9/18/2007 — Katsaggelos gives Distinguished Lectures in China

Aggelos K. Katsaggelos, Professor of EECS, will give distinguished lectures at the Hong Kong Baptist University and Hong Kong Polytechnic University on "Recent Advances on Image and Video Recovery" on June 18, 2007

9/18/2007 — Tumblin multitasks at SIGGRAPH 2007

This year, EECS department student Ankit Mohan and Prof. Jack Tumblin and their many collaborators (at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories [MERL-Boston], University of Maryland, MIT-CSAIL, INRIA, Rochester Institute of Technology, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Stanford University, Columbia University) have very strong representation at ACM SIGGRAPH 2007. Look for them in two courses: "1. Computational Photography" (full day) and "13. A Gentle Introduction to Bilateral Filtering and Its Applications" (half-day) and a full paper that introduces two new classes of computational cameras: "Dappled Photography: Mask Enhanced Cameras for Heterodyned Light Fields and Coded Aperture Refocusing".

In addition, Jack Tumblin and Ramesh Raskar from MERL-Boston will host a tutorial session on computational photography at EG 2007 in Prague, September 3-7.