7/3/2009 — Grayson invited to review quasiparticles

Matthew Grayson was invited by the American Physical Society magazine "Physics" to write a Viewpoint review article on quantum Hall edges and fractionally charged quasiparticles, entitled "Quasiparticle Doppelgangers," published this Monday, June 29. The article: http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/56

6/22/2009 — Fortnow elected SIGACT Chair

Lance Fortnow has been elected Chair of SIGACT for a term beginning July 1, 1009 and ending in three years, June 30, 2012.

6/17/2009 — Kuzmanovic invited to speak at Microsoft Research

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic gave an invited talk entitled "ISP-Enabled Behavioral Ad Targeting without User Consent Made Legal," at Microsoft Research in Redmond recently.

6/16/2009 — Razeghi and CQD team publish results in Applied Physics Letters

Recent results from the Center for Quantum Devices have been published, "Demonstration of midinfrared type-II InAs/GaSb superlattice photodiodes grown on GaAs substrate," Applied Physics Letters 94, 223506 (2009), and are available on the web site: http://cqd.eecs.northwestern.edu/. Abstract: http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=APPLAB000094000022223506000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

6/10/2009 — Findler is awarded CAREER award

We are very pleased to announce that one of our assistant professors have won the National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, one of the NSF's most prestigious award for junior faculty members in science and engineering. Robby Findler's project "Lightweight, Blame-aware Contract Checking" is the recipient.

6/10/2009 — Brian Leung among ten students chosen to take part in Initiative for Sustainability and Energy

EECS student Brian Leung from Prof. Seda Ogrenci Memik's lab was among the 10 students chosen as the first class of the Initiative for Sustainability and Energy at Northwestern’s cluster fellows program.

The mission of the program is to create, advance and communicate new science, technology and policy for sustainability and energy. The cluster’s task is to promote energy and sustainability research, development, education, outreach and communication at Northwestern.

6/8/2009 — EECS Annual Awards Presentation, June 5, 2009

Best Teacher: Ian Horswill; Best TA: Oliviu Ghica (advisor Peter Scheuermann); Best Dissertation: Yao Zhao (advisor Yan Chen) "Internet Networking and Application Troubleshooting"; Best Graduating EE Major: Michael DeBoer; Best graduating CS Major; Rui Jiang; Best Graduating CO Major: Timothy Zwiebel.

William L. Everitt Awards: Electrical Engineering: Ilya Mikhelson; Computer Engineering: Alexander Romine. This award is given each year at universities affiliated with the International Engineering Consortium. It honors outstanding seniors who have demonstrated an interest in the communications field.

6/8/2009 — Haddad's textbook translated into Chinese

Abraham Haddad's textbook on "Probabilistic Systems and Random Signals" has been translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan by Prentice Hall-Pearson Education Taiwan Ltd.

5/27/2009 — Alum Ankit Mohan

A paper by Graphics Group alumnus Ankit Mohan (now at MIT-Media Lab) is highlighted by promotional materials for ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 conference. The paper describes a new kind of small optical tag that digitally encodes viewing angles for any out-of-focus camera.

Bokode:Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for Camera-Based Interaction From a Distance Ankit Mohan, Grace Woo, MIT; Shinsaku Hiura, Osaka University; Quinn Smithwick, Ramesh Raskar, Media Lab MIT Detailed analysis of how to enable a commodity camera to photograph and capture a 3mm barcode from two meters away. The key is to exploit camera bokeh, which maps binary data encoded in directionally varying rays into a large disk. The next step is to decode ID as well as camera pose for augmented reality applications.
Ankit Mohan, Grace Woo, MIT; Shinsaku Hiura, Osaka University; Quinn Smithwick, Ramesh Raskar, Media Lab MIT

5/27/2009 — Taflove named to ASG Faculty and Administrator Honor Roll

Allen Taflove was named to the ASG Faculty & Administrator Honor Roll.

5/27/2009 — Center for Quantum Devices news

Manijeh Razeghi and Ryan McClintock of the Center for Quantum Devices published a paper in the Journal of Crystal Growth. Razeghi, D. Hoffman, B.-M. Nguyen, P.-Y. Delaunay, E Huang, M. Z. Tidrow, and V. Nathan published an invited paper in IEEE Proceedings for June 2009. Recently published papers are available on the CQD web page.

5/26/2009 — Forbus invited to DARPA's IPT office

Ken Forbus gave an invited colloquium at DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office last week.

5/14/2009 — Honig visiting professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong

Michael Honig was recently the visiting Wei Lun professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

5/11/2009 — Horswill speaks at several recent conferences

Ian Horswill gave talks at the following meetings and universities: AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies; the A*STAR symposium Social Interaction in Virtual Worlds; the National University of Singapore EECE Colloquium; the Interactive and Digital Media Institute at the University of Singapore; UC Santa Cruz.

5/11/2009 — Kumar guest panelist at Federal Funding Seminar

Prem Kumar will be a guest panelist at this Wednesday's federal funding seminar organized by the IL Technology Development Alliance.

The very words “government grants” may be daunting to most entrepreneurs, yet Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs create the largest source of early stage research and development funding for small businesses in the United States. The ITDA hosts the Annual Federal Funding Seminar to provide in depth information about NASA and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs. To register for the seminar, click here.

5/11/2009 — Norman appointed Honorary Fellow of Design Research Society

Don Norman is appointed Honorary Fellow of the Design Research Society “an acknowledgement from the Society of the internationally leading role Donald Norman has played in design research for so many years”.

Also this month, Prof. Norman was appointed to the advisory board of the International Conference on Emotion and Design to be held in Chicago, October 2010, and has been invited to give the Keynote Address at the International Association of Design Research Societies, meeting in Seoul, October 2009.

5/7/2009 — Kuzmanovic appointed a visiting professor at UESTC, Chengdu, China.

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic has been appointed a visiting professor at UESTC, Chengdu, China.

4/27/2009 — Pappas EIC of IEEE Journal

Thrasos Pappas has been selected to be Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, the premier journal in the field of image processing. His term as EIC will be from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2012. In the remainder of 2009, he will serve as the EiC-Elect of the journal.

4/24/2009 — Kumar Distinguished Lecturer in Massachussets and Washington

Prem Kumar recently was the Distinguished Lecturer at two IEEE/LEOS (Lasers & Electro-Optics Society) chapters: the Quantum Entanglement Workshop at the Boston LEOS Chapter, and also at the DC/NOVA Chapter in College Park, MD. His talk was entitled "Fiber-Optic Quantum Communications and Information Processing"

4/22/2009 — Binh Minh Nguyen wins SPIE scholarship

Center for Quantum Devices Ph.D. candidate Binh Minh Nguyen has been awarded the 2009a SPIE scholarship in Optical Science and Engineering. The award includes a gift of $4,000 for education related expenses in optics and photonics.

4/22/2009 — Can Bayram wins SPIE scholarship

Center for Quantum Devices Ph.D. candidate Can Bayram has been awarded the 2009 Laser Technology, Engineering, and Applications Scholarship. This Scholarship is awarded in recognition of a student's scholarly achievement in laser technology, engineering, or applications. The award includes a gift of $6,000, provided in part by a gift from the former Forum for Military Applications of Directed Energy, and in part by SPIE.

4/16/2009 — Norman appointed to National Academies of Science committee

Don Norman was appointed to the National Academies of Science Committee for a workshop on Usability, Security, and Privacy of Information Systems. Project web page.

4/16/2009 — NSF Design Workshop — Spanning Design Boundaries

Wei Chen (Mechanical Engineering), Ed Colgate (Mechanical Engineering), Liz Gerber (Mechanical Engineering), Ann McKenna (Segal Design Institute), and Don Norman (EECS) co-hosted the Second NSF Interdisciplinary Graduate Design Workshop, with over 60 design educators from the United States, Europe and Asia to discuss the nature of graduate education in design (April 15-17). Design Workshop.

4/13/2009 — Haddad to visit Chinasoft

Abraham Haddad is traveling to Chengdu, China to present a paper and participate in a panel discussion (as the only US participant) at Chinasoft: 2009 EU-China Information Society Summit Forum

4/10/2009 — Forbus speaker at RPI

Prof. Ken Forbus gave a talk at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute this week.

4/8/2009 — EECS PhD Candidate Can Bayram receives $10,000 prize from Dow Sustainability Innovation Challenge

EECS PhD Candidate Can Bayram (25) is selected as a winner by The Northwestern Institute for Sustainable Practices on the 2009 Dow Sustainability Innovation Challenge in recognition of his research contributing to global sustainability. The challenge is a new initiative of The Dow Chemical Company Foundation to recognize exceptional work by students who are engaged in ongoing scientific, technical or social research to develop innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to meet human needs while also protecting the environment, promoting economic growth and achieving social welfare. Can receives this award for his creative work to develop high quality, energy efficient green light emitting diodes, under the supervision of his advisor Prof. Manijeh Razeghi of Northwestern University. Can graduated from the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department of Bilkent University in 2005, and he is a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering at the Center for Quantum Devices of Northwestern University since then. “Based on the strong foundation of my scientific education in Izmir Science High School and Bilkent University, and thanks to the unique facilities at Center for Quantum Devices and unique collaboration opportunities with Nanovation, I am delighted for my dedicated research efforts to be recognized with this prestigious award. I will allocate the $10,000 award as the seed money in my early research career on solid state lighting and solar cell research." Can says. His current research interests include the growth, characterization, fabrication and measurement of (Al, Ga, In)N and ZnO based opto-electronic devices with a special focus on ultraviolet-visible range detectors and light emitters. He has precision engineered high quality materials that leads to world' highest performance nitride optoelectronic devices. He has published 14 articles in high impact SCI journals, and 14 international conference papers & presentations.

The official award ceremony will be held on May 1 in Northwestern University, where his achievements will be recognized. An event to recognize prize winners from Northwestern, Cambridge, Peking, Tufts, Michigan and Sao Paolo is scheduled for October to take place in Michigan.

1) Northwestern University McCormick Engineering News Article
McCormick news article
2) Northwestern Institute for Sustainable Practices Web Site Announcing the Award
www.sustainability.northwestern.edu
3) Northwestern Institute for Sustainable Practices Press Release
Dow Press Release
4) Web page of Can Bayram where his research and accomplishments are available.

4/7/2009 — Cassell profiled in new book

Justine Cassell is profiled in the book "The Princess at the Keyboard: Why girls should become computer scientists" by Amanda Stent and Philip Lewis.

4/7/2009 — Cassell visits China on an ACM Distinguished Speaker's Panel

Justine Cassell will be traveling to China for 10 days (April 16-26) on an ACM-sponsored Distinguished Speaker's Panel on the topic of "Emerging Technologies in Computing". The panel will be giving talks at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhon, and South China University of Tech in Guangzhou.

4/2/2009 — Norman invited to address IDSA and TED

Don Norman gave an invited address at Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Designer Spotlight Presentation “Sociable Design” on December 17, 2008. Don's 2003 TED talk video has just been posted: www.ted.com

4/2/2009 — Norman Featured Scientist of the Month at FABBS

Don Norman was honored as the “Featured Scientist of the Month” forFebruary/March 2009 by the Federation for the Advancement of the Behavioral and Brain sciences (FABBS): fabbs.org/norman_honor.html.

4/2/2009 — Norman honored at KAIST

Don Norman was appointed Visiting Distinguished Professor at KAIST, the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Ttechnology. Don will spend two months each year there for three years. He spent the month of March, 2009 at KAIST.

4/1/2009 — Iacobelli and Nichols win 50 For The Future award

We congratulate EECS graduate students Francisco Iacobelli and Nate Nichols who were named as "50 For the Future" 2009 award winners by the Illinois Technology Foundation. Read more and see a full list of winners here.

The Illinois Technology Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of this year's 50 For The Future technology talent competition. Students from across the state of Illinois will be honored in a ceremony this week in Chicago on April 2.

The program, now in its third year, is designed to recognize top technology talent in the region and provide students with connections to business leaders early in their academic careers. The program was open to candidates enrolled in institutions of higher learning throughout Illinois, and, for the first time this year, extended to Chicago public high school students.

"It has been exciting to see the potential and ambition that these local students possess," said Don Sharp, VP, CIO, Navistar and judge for 50 For The Future. "The future of technology begins with these students and I'm proud to be a part of it."

4/1/2009 — Scheuermann appointed as ACM SIGSPATIAL Program Co-Chair

Peter Scheuermann has been appointed Program Co-Chair of the 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL Intern. Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems that will take place in Seattle, Nov. 4-6, 2009

3/16/2009 — Kumar's IEEE Distinguished Lecturer Award extended

Prem Kumar's Distinguished Lecturer Award from the IEEE Photonics Society (formerly the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS)) has been extended for a 2nd term -- Jul 2009 to Jun 2010.

"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."

Prof. Kumar says, "Traveling to various locations across the globe to give these lectures at events sponsored by the local chapters of the IEEE Photonics Society has so far been a great experience for me. It has given me a great opportunity to promote the great advances taking place not only in my own research field, but also on a broader scale at Northwestern, particularly in EECS and McCormick. I am looking forward to my second term."

3/6/2009 — Kumar in the middle of six-city lecture tour to IEEE Photonics Society chapters

Prem Kumar traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico, on 4th March 2009 to deliver an IEEE Photonics Society (formerly the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society of the IEEE) sponsored Distinguished Lecture at the Center for High Technology Materials at the University of New Mexico on the topic of “Fiber-Optic Quantum Communications and Information Processing.” This was third of the six lectures he will deliver this year to the various IEEE Photonics Society Chapters around the world on this timely topic.

3/4/2009 — Kuzmanovic invited to lecture

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic gave invited talks at University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Boston University.

2/17/2009 — Center for Quantum Devices news

Manijeh Razeghi and members of the Center for Quantum Devices publish papers in Applied Physics Letters and Applied Physics B. Recently published papers are available on the CQD web page.

2/11/2009 — Forbus on Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society

The Cognitive Science Society congratulates the newest members of its Governing Board: Jeffrey Elman, Ken Forbus, Michael Spivey and Hedderik van Rijn.

2/3/2009 — EECS Alum launches a company for Game-based Learning products

On January 27th, DreamBox Learning, an online eLearning start-up co-founded by an EECS alum and NU Trustee, launched DreamBox Learning K-2 Math (www.dreambox.com), an innovative online learning product that is built on a standards-based mathematics curriculum and wrapped in a fun, adventure-style interactive game. Developed for children in kindergarten through second grade, DreamBox Learning K-2 Math is an adaptive product that complements what young students learn in the classroom by developing and reinforcing foundational math concepts through effective, individualized instruction while simultaneously being fun and engaging for kids at home.

DreamBox Learning was co-founded by NU trustee Ben Slivka, who earned BS and MS degrees from McCormick in computer science in 1982 and 1985. The Northwestern connection continues with DreamBoxer Neil Smith, also BS CS '82, and two current NU CS majors who worked as summer interns at DreamBox Learning: Anda Bereczky '10 and Nikola Borisov '10. Brad Chase Kellogg '87 is on the DreamBox Learning board of directors.

2/2/2009 — Kuzmanovic on M-Lab’s steering committee

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic has been appointed a member of the steering committee of the Measurement Lab (http://www.measurementlab.net/), an open platform founded by Google Inc., the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, and the Planet Lab Consortium. The platform enables researchers to deploy their Internet measurement tools and help users test their broadband connections and evaluate net neutrality.

More information is available here: http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/01/introducing-measurement-lab.html.

1/29/2009 — Katsaggelos elected Fellow of SPIE

Aggelos K. Katsaggelos has been elected a Fellow of the SPIE (http://spie.org/) foe achievements in Image and Video Processing. He is among the 59 new SPIE Fellows elected in the class of 2009. Each year, SPIE promotes members as new Fellows of the Society. Fellows are Members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement, for their service to the general optics community, and to SPIE in particular. More than 550 SPIE members have become Fellows since the Society's inception in 1955.

1/29/2009 — Katsaggelos gives Distiguished Lecturer talks in London and Madrid

A. K. Katsaggelos gave invited talks as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK and King's College, London, UK in Dec. 2008. Katsaggelos also was an invited speaker by the European Commission at the Future Internet Assembly in Madrid, Spain (Dec. 2008). The title of his talk was "Future Content Networks in the US".

1/20/2009 — Kumar elected Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science

Prem Kumar, Director of CPCC and Professor of EECS and Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

He is among the 486 new AAAS Fellows elected in November 2008 and among the 32 new AAAS Fellows affiliated with the Section on Physics. AAAS defines a Fellow as "a Member whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished."

Prem is being recognized "for distinguished contributions to the science and technology of quantum communications, particularly for utilizing quantum optical effects in fibers to realize applications of entangled photons."

1/20/2009 — Shahriar elected Fellow of SPIE

Selim Shahriar, Chair of the Solid-State & Photonics Division in EECS, Professor of EECS and Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has been elected a Fellow of the SPIE (http://spie.org/). He is among the 59 new SPIE Fellows elected in the class of 2009.

Each year, SPIE promotes members as new Fellows of the Society. Fellows are Members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement, for their service to the general optics community, and to SPIE in particular. More than 550 SPIE members have become Fellows since the Society's inception in 1955.

The SPIE is bestowing this honor on Selim "for his pioneering contributions to the development of static and dynamic volume holography, with applications to phase conjugation, automatic target recognition via image correlation, coherent and incoherent beam combination, and polarimetric imaging."

1/5/2009 — Hartline awarded NSF CAREER grant

We are pleased to announce that one of our assistant professors, Jason D. Hartline, has won the National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project entitled "CAREER: Mechanism Design". This is one of the NSF's most prestigious award for junior faculty members in science and engineering.

12/22/2008 — Forbus gives keynote address in Australia

Ken Forbus gave a keynote address on “AI: Some final frontiers for interactive entertainment” at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Brisbane, Australia in December.

12/11/2008 — Scheuermann elected fellow of AAAS

Peter Scheuermann has been elected to the rank of fellow of AAAS for distinguished contributions to the fields of database and file systems and web-related technologies.

12/8/2008 — Norman appointed to Editorial Board

Don Norman was appointed to the Editorial Board of MIT Press series on "Deep Design"

12/8/2008 — Norman Gives Keynotes

Don Norman presented invited keynote addresses at the following meetings: User Experience Week conference. San Francisco; Institute for Design, Design Research Conference, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; Design and Emotion conference, Hong Kong Polytechnic University; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Design Academy, Eindhoven (The Netherlands) User Experience week conference. Chicago, IL User Experience week conference. Amsterdam

12/5/2008 — Distinguished Speaker Series online: Manijeh Razeghi

If you missed Professor Manijeh Razeghi's Distinguished Speaker Series lecture on December 3, 2008, click here to watch the video.

12/3/2008 — Center for Quantum Devices news

Manijeh Razeghi and members of the Center for Quantum Devices publish papers in Applied Physics Letters and Applied Physics B. Recently published papers are available on the CQD web page

11/20/2008 — Chen to be TPC Co-Chair at SecureCom 2009

Yan Chen is invited as the TPC Co-Chair for the 5th International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks (SecureCom) 2009 to be held on September 14-18 at Athens, Greece. See more details at http://www.securecomm.org/.

11/12/2008 — Alumna Susan Hagness named IEEE Fellow at 37

Susan Hagness, a former undergraduate and graduate student in EECS, has just been named an IEEE Fellow for 2009 for contributions to time-domain computational electromagnetics and microwave medical imaging.
Susan was mentored by Allen Taflove starting with her arrival in fall 1989 as a freshman (a member of the first cohort of students in the Honors Program in Undergraduate Research), and culminating in the award of her Ph.D. from Taflove's computational electromagnetics group in June 1998. At that time, she had 9 tenure-track offers, and ultimately chose the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She rose rapidly in the academic ranks there, attaining a full professorship in the UW-Madison ECE Department two years ago. She has become internationally known for her pioneering research in early-stage breast cancer detection using ultrawideband microwave technology, research that she initiated during her Ph.D. program here.

11/6/2008 — Haddad lecturing in Taiwan

Abe Haddad will be traveling to Taiwan this month to present a series of lectures at the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan. He is being hosted by Professor Ching-Chih Tsai.

11/3/2008 — Kumar plenary speaker at Photonics 2008

Prem Kumar will be a plenary speaker at Photonics 2008 to be held at the Habitat World Convention Center, New Delhi, India, during December 14-17. He will speak on "Quantum Information Processing in Optical Fibers." While at the conference, he will also present a short course entitled: Quantum Information -- Photonic Technologies and Applications. See the attached announcement that appeared in this month's IEEE/LEOS Newsletter.

10/30/2008 — Bustamante Senior Member of the ACM

Fabian E. Bustamante has been made Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest computing society.

10/23/2008 — Bustamante on panel at IEEE ICNP

Prof. Fabian E. Bustamante has been invited to be part of a panel on the "Tension between P2P communication and service providers", to take place during the 16th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP) in Orlando, FL.

10/23/2008 — Kuzmanovic at MIT and Purdue.

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic gave invited talks at MIT and Purdue.

10/21/2008 — Razeghi CQD team: Powerful QCLs eye remote sensing.

Steven Slivken is the QCL group team leader responsible for epitaxial growth of QCLs, research conducted with Yanbo Bai, Shaban Ramezani Darvish, and Manijeh Razeghi. Article available here for download. Published in Compound Semiconductor Magazine, Vol 14, No. 9, October 2008 (compoundsemiconductor.net)

10/3/2008 — Kumar IEEE-LEOS Distinguished Lecturer in New Delhi

Prem Kumar traveled to the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India, on 19 September 2008 to deliver an IEEE-LEOS (Lasers and Electro-Optics Society of the IEEE) sponsored Distinguished Lecture to the IEEE-LEOS India Chapter on the topic of “Fiber-Optic Quantum Communications and Information Processing.” This was second of six lectures he will deliver to the various IEEE-LEOS Chapters around the world on this timely topic.

8/20/2008 — Chen invited to speak at Juniper Networks, Inc.

Yan Chen gave an invited talk at Juniper Networks Inc.entitled "NetShield: Matching with a Large Vulnerability Signature Ruleset for High Performance Network Defense" on July 29. Juniper is one of the major network infrastructure companies. For the same project, Chen won a NSF Cyber Trust award recently.

8/13/2008 — Nocedal is Awarded a US Patent.

Jorge Nocedal and co-inventors Michael Elliott, Patrick O'Neill and Robert Fourer (of IE/MS) received a patent from the US Patent Trademark Office for optimization of debt collection systems.

8/13/2008 — QRG demonstrates CogSketch to enthusiastic crowd at AAAI in July

At AAAI two weeks ago in Chicago, the Qualitative Reasoning Group demonstrated CogSketch to an enthusiastic crowd. The demo session was supposed to end at 9pm, but attendees kept the demo team (Kate Lockwood, Andrew Lovett, and Jon Wetzel) there until 9:30pm. Morteza Dehghani presented a computational model of moral decision-making, as a talk in the Integrated Intelligent Systems track.

At the Cognitive Science Society conference in Washington last week, the Qualitative Reasoning Group gave a number of talks and posters. Andrew Lovett presented a computational simulation of a visual oddity task, and how the simulation could account for differences between American and Munduruku participants in the original experiment. Emmett Tomai presented a computational model of blame assignment, which uses qualitative reasoning to better explain human data than prior models. Scott Friedman described how analogical generalization could be used to construct causal models, as the first step in conceptual change. Morteza Dehghani described how MoralDM explains data from several psychological experiments. Ken Forbus gave a talk how AI and Cognitive Science have interacted over the last 30 years and should interact over the next 30, as part of an invited symposium.

8/13/2008 — FREECS wins ACM Chapter Excellence Award and TGS Advocacy Group of the Year

The Female Researchers in EECS (FREECS) won the ACM Chapter Excellence Award for Outstanding Community Service for 2008. (FREECS is affiliated with ACM-W). The award comes with a $500 check for the group to use on programming for next year.

In addition, FREECS won the Advocacy Group of the Year award at the Graduate Student Leaders and Associations Awards, sponsored by TGS in May.

8/13/2008 — Bustamante invited as speaker/panelist to P2P MEDIA SUMMIT SV

Fabian Bustamante has been invited as a speaker/panelist to the Distributed Computing Industry Association’s (DCIA) first Conference in Silicon Valley – the P2P MEDIA SUMMIT SV.

7/24/2008 — Center for Quantum Devices

Darin Hoffman, Binh-Minh Nguyen, Edward Kwei-wei Huang, Pierre-Yves Delaunay, Manijeh Razeghi, Meimei Z. Tidrow, and Joe Pellegrino published "The effect of doping the M-barrier in very long-wave type-II InAs/GaSb heterodiodes" in Applied Physics Letters 93 (2008). Read the article here.

7/18/2008 — Tumblin invited to speak at Sharp Laboratories of America

Assoc. Professor Jack Tumblin gave an invited talk at Sharp Laboratories of America just outside Portland, OR, entitled "Shaped Visual Noise and Gigapixel Hallucinations" along with talks by colleagues Ben Watson (NCSU) and Dave Luebke (NVidia). The visit was hosted by Scott Daly of Sharp Labs.

7/17/2008 — Yan Bai wins Best Student Paper Award

Congratulations to Yanbo Bai, graduate student in Prof. Manijeh Razeghi's group, who was selected for a Best Student Paper Award for the SPIE Photonics West Symposium/Conference 2008. View the award announcement.

7/17/2008 — Choudhary receives U.S. Patent

Alok Choudhary and co-inventors Anshuman Nayak, Malay Haldar, Vikram Saxena, and Prithviraj Banerjee were awarded a United States Patent through Xilinx, Inc., for "System for architecture and resource specification and methods to compile the specification onto hardware". Details can be found at the US Patent and Trademark Office, Patent Full Text and Image Database

7/7/2008 — Razeghi group publishes research results on quantum-cascade lasers

Yu, Slivken, Evans, and Razeghi's research articles on high-performance, continuous-wave quantum-cascade lasers have been published in Applied Physics A, Materials Science and Processing, and Applied Physics Letters. The articles: Applied Physics A, IEEE JQE, and Applied Physics Letters.

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 Intelligent 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.