11/17/2009 — Pierre-Yves Delaunay wins second place in The 2009 Engineering Student of the Year competition

[News release excerpt]
The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] today announced the winners of the company-sponsored 2009 Engineering Student of the Year Award, presented by aerospace publication Flight International. This year's competition had two first-place winners: Can Bayram of Northwestern University and Michael Grant of Georgia Institute of Technology. The awards ceremony was held in Dubai on the eve of the international Dubai Airshow.

The second-place winner is Pierre-Yves Delaunay, a French Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, and the third-place winner is Alexandros Thomopoulus, a Greek master's candidate at Delft University in the Netherlands.

"Our 2009 competition reflected a great diversity of nations, and a great diversity of talents, interests and abilities. We had entries from many outstanding students whose accomplishments were most impressive and made for our best competition ever," said Charles Toups, vice president of Engineering and Mission Assurance for Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. "Their work is destined to take the art and science of engineering to new levels -- the future of aerospace is in very good hands."

11/16/2009 — Can Bayram wins 2009 Boeing Engineering Student of the Year Award

Can Bayram, a PhD candidate under the supervision of Professor Manijeh Razeghi, Walter P. Murphy Professor and Director of Center for Quantum Devices, has recently been selected by The Boeing Company as the 2009 Engineering Student of the Year due to his impact, and potential for impact, of his work on current and future aeronautical and space technology.

The general Boeing award definition can be found at www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/06/15/327734/boeing-engineering-student-of-the-year-2009.html.

The official announcement has been released at http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/11/14/334891/flightglobal-achievement-awards-phd-students-scoop-boeing-engineering-awards.html.

11/3/2009 — McCormick CS Student Joins Anita Borg Institute Board of Trustees

Link to the full article online.

10/19/2009 — The New York Times - The Robots Are Coming! Oh. They're Here.

Sportswriting has long played host to some of the most glorious, along with the most cliché-ridden, exercises in journalism. As anybody on a sports beat can tell you, making game stories interesting day in and day out can be a brutal challenge, but for those with lesser ambitions, it can be something that you do in your sleep. Now some kids at the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University are suggesting that an average game day story can be bolted together without human intervention. Read the full article

10/7/2009 — The New York Times - Prizes Aside, the P-NP Puzzler Has Consequences

The September cover article in the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery touched off a distinct buzz last month when more than 10 times the usual number of readers downloaded the article in the first two days it went online.

The subject? A survey of progress being made (not much, apparently) in solving the grand challenge for the fields of theoretical computer science and complexity theory. The problem is described rather opaquely as P vs. NP, and it has to do with real world tasks like optimizing the layout of transistors on a computer chip or cracking computer codes.

Like earlier grand math challenges like Fermat’s last theorem, there is a lot at stake, not the least of which is a $1 million cash prize that was offered for the solution as one of seven Mount Everest-style “Millennium Problems” the Clay Mathematics Institute offered almost a decade ago.

So far no one appears to be close to picking up a check. The challenge, in its simplest, but not most understandable phrasing, is to determine whether or not P equals NP. P stands for the class of problems that can be solved in polynomial time, or reasonably quickly. NP stands for the class of problems that can be verified in polynomial time — quickly. If it can be shown that P=NP, then it is possible that the world will be a very different place.

The issues center around a group of classic computer science problems, like the traveling salesman problem — how to figure out the most efficient route through a number of cities given certain constraints. Factoring a large number is also a good example of what is referred to as an NP problem. At present, there is no understood method for doing it in polynomial time, but given an answer it is easy to check to see if it is correct.

The most efficient layout of transistors on a computer chip is another example of problems that are said to be NP.

The allure of the challenge, in addition to the fame and the money, is that if it is possible to prove that P does in fact equal NP some of the hardest computing challenges may collapse, leading to a burst of new economic and technological productivity.

All of the tasks above, like the traveling salesman problem, are similar in that that as the problems grow in size — one more city for the salesman, one more transistor for the chip — the computing time required to solve them increases exponentially. In other words, one more city makes the problem 10 times harder.

Checking to see if any particular solution is correct is simple, but finding the best solution in the case of very large problems is infinitely difficult.

“There are a lot of smart people who have tried to solve this problem and failed,” said Patrick Lincoln, the director of the computer science laboratory at SRI International, a research group based in Menlo Park, Calif. “But they also failed to prove the problem can’t be solved.”

The editors of the journal said they were tickled to have a hit article on their hands.

”I don’t think we’ve ever had an article that started off with this kind of a bang,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, a Rice University computer scientist who is editor in chief of the journal. ”Our e-mail blast went out and thousands of people felt they had to click.”

The author of the article, Lance Fortnow, a computer scientist at Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering, initially told Dr. Vardi that the article would be a short one. ”Still open,” he writes, was in first reaction to writing about the state of the work on solving the problem.

There remains a glimmer of hope, he noted. An esoteric branch of mathematics known as algebraic geometry may offer an avenue to prove or disprove the problem, which was first outlined by Stephen A. Cook, a University of Toronto computer scientist, in 1971.

That prospect feels a bit intimidating. As Dr. Vardi said, “It’s a bit scary because we have to start learning a very difficult mathematical field.”

Link to the article in nytimes.com by John Markoff.

10/2/2009 — Daily Northwestern -- iLab to bring virtual labs to high schools

Read the full article.

10/2/2009 — Live Science: Technology -- Online Labs Aim to Revolutionize High School Science

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Read the full article.

9/29/2009 — Razeghi featured in Society of Women Engineers Magazine

Professor Manijeh Razeghi, Director of the Center for Quantum Devices, appears in the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) Magazine Fall 2009 issue which just came out in print. The article title is, "University Labs: Where Women Excel," which appears on p. 48-53 of the SWE Magazine. Read the article: www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/swe/fall09/#/50

9/28/2009 — Career Development Seminar Series Offered for McCormick Graduate Students and Alumni

This six-week, non-credit course (which offers three classes in the fall and three in spring) is designed to provide graduate students and alumni with tools to manage their careers in engineering, technology, and the sciences. Read the full McCormick News Article.

9/2/2009 — ACM Bulletin Service -- Fortnow's Communications of the ACM Cover Story Sets Record Downloads

The cover story in the September issue of Communications of the ACM on "The Status of the P versus NP Problem" set a record number of downloads in its first week of availability in ACM's Digital Library. In fact, the download statistics for this article started accumulating well before the print edition became available.

In the article, author Lance Fortnow of Northwestern University explores one of the fundamental mathematical problems of our time, finding its challenge no closer to unraveling. He chronicles past attempts and approaches to solving the problem and describes a ray of hope in a new long-term project to separate P from NP using algebraic-geometric techniques.

The Fortnow article is open and available to the public in its entirety via the Communications Web site. We encourage you to view the article that has generated such interest and share it with your colleagues.

"The P vs NP problem is the most outstanding problem in theoretical computer science; the interest in its status is enormous," says Moshe Y. Vardi, editor-in-chief of Communications, about the overwhelming response to the cover story.

The article is available at this link. Please note that it is necessary to click on the "pdf icon" to get the full text.

8/27/2009 — Communications of the ACM

"The Status of the P Versus NP Problem," by Lance Fortnow.

It's one of the fundamental mathematical problems of our time, and its importance grows with the rise of powerful computers.

When editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi asked me to write this piece for Communications, my first reaction was the article could be written in two words:
Still open.
When I started graduate school in the mid-1980s, many believed that the quickly developing area of circuit complexity would soon settle the P versus NP problem, whether every algorithmic problem with efficiently verifiable solutions have efficiently computable solutions. But circuit complexity and other approaches to the problem have stalled and we have little reason to believe we will see a proof separating P from NP in the near future.
Nevertheless, the computer science landscape has dramatically changed in the nearly four decades since Steve Cook presented his seminal NP-completeness paper "The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures"10 in Shaker Heights, OH in early May, 1971. Computational power has dramatically increased, the cost of computing has dramatically decreased, not to mention the power of the Internet. Computation has become a standard tool in just about every academic field. Whole subfields of biology, chemistry, physics, economics and others are devoted to large-scale computational modeling, simulations, and problem solving.
Full text of the article can be read here.

7/27/2009 — BBC News: Barcode replacement shown off

A replacement for the black and white stripes of the traditional barcode has been outlined by US researchers.

Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.

The 3mm-diameter (0.1 inches), powered tags could be used to encode nutrition information on food packaging or create new devices for playing video games.
v The work will be shown off at Siggraph, a conference in New Orleans next week.

"We think that our technology will create a new way of tagging," Dr Ankit Mohan, one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers behind the work, told BBC News.

Link to story.

Mohan, now a post doctoral researcher at MIT, was a student of Prof. Jack Tumblin when he graduated in 2008.

7/23/2009 — Communications of the ACM, Lance Fortnow, "Time for Computer Science to Grow Up"

Unlike every other academic field, computer science uses conferences rather than journals as the main publication venue. While this made sense for a young discipline, our field has matured and the conference model has fractured the discipline and skewered it toward short-term, deadline-driven research. Computer science should refocus the conference system on its primary purpose of bringing researchers together. We should use archive sites as the main method of quick paper dissemination and the journal system as the vehicle for advancing researchers' reputations. Read the full article.

7/20/2009 — Immorlica Appointed Microsoft Research Fellow for 2009

Nicole Immorlica is among the New Faculty Fellows for 2009. Nicole Immorlica studies the design and deployment of modern platforms and technologies. Using techniques from economics, social science, and theoretical computer science, Nicole develops theories predicting how people behave. These predictions in turn allow Nicole to propose platforms that, by their very design, guide individuals' self-motivated actions toward a globally optimal outcome. Her work has applications to social networks like Facebook, auction design—including sponsored search auctions, and two-sided markets like the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP).

6/8/2009 — NU Solar-car Team placed 3rd in 2009 FormulaSun Rayce

Northwestern's solar car, SC5, placed third in the FORMULA SUN GRAND PRIX 2009.

6/4/2009 — Editor and Publisher -- Medill, McCormick Student Innovations Support Future of News

Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism is developing technology applications that it hopes will help shore up the news industry. As traditional mass media business models decline, the project aims to apply technology in ways that generate new revenues or reduce journalism's production and distribution costs while maintaining its standards.

"We've got the resources, time and energy to do research and development that the news industry doesn't," Assistant Professor of Multimedia Jeremy Gilbert said in an announcement, citing Web applications in the works by journalism and computer science students.

One program generates sports stories from box scores and play-by-play. A plug-in enables reporters to quickly research or fact-check stories as they write in Microsoft Word without switching to an Internet search engine. A Web application for the iPhone offers five- to 20-minute segments of news for those with limited time. Twitter News Service sends pertinent news links to users based on their posts, all while keeping user screens clutter-free by running in the background of Twitter or from a designated Twitter account that users choose to follow. Tweedia will combine news stories with relevant personal opinion and information on a topic via Twitter (news outlets can place a Tweedia link at the end of stories that will open a gadget on the page or direct readers to a Tweedia Web page).

Earlier this year, another student team created the NewsMixer interactive tool that provides new ways to discuss news online (E&P Online, Feb. 1, 12).

The New Media Publishing Project class is taught by Rich Gordon, Medill's director of digital technology in education, and Kristian Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, professor and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering.

"Interactive services that deliver news to consumers increasingly are technology-driven, and will be developed by journalists and technologists in collaboration with one another," said Gordon, adding that "technology can be used to help journalists do their jobs better."

Read the article online

5/27/2009 — Chicago Sun-Times, May 25, 2009 - Northwestern looks for future of news

TECH MATTERS | Course brings student journalists, computer programmers together
BRAD SPIRRISON chicagotechmatters@gmail.com

All aspiring journalists also must be entrepreneurs. As fewer jobs are found at traditional media outlets, the next generation of enterprise reporters are learning not only how to find stories, but where to publish them. The Internet, while justly being blamed for its demise, is also fueling the reawakening of the newsgathering business.

At the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, a new course is bringing together graduate journalism students with undergrad computer programmers. Workgroups of students formerly immersed in separate disciplines have formed to create new Internet-based applications for assembling and displaying newsworthy content.

Among the ideas in various stages of development are ways to aggregate time-sensitive news reports on Twitter, verify facts online by highlighting a passage on a Word document and generate written reports of a baseball game based on data found exclusively in its box score. There's no telling what is on deck.

"The goal is to give these projects a chance to play out and survive in the world," said Kristian Hammond, the computer science professor behind the Innovation in Technology, Media and Journalism class. Hammond, who is 52 and a founder of a few media startups that incorporate artificial intelligence technology, hopes students with worthy ideas eventually will obtain grant money or some sort of startup capital to bring their inventions to market.

At the very least, the projects serve as a virtual extension to their resumes.

"When they are looking for jobs, it is better to have their sites running and displayable," Hammond said.

More significant than any finished product is the relationships that are developed between future journalists and their engineering counterparts.

Hammond said programmers have a tendency to build cool but impractical features if not given proper direction of what might actually work journalistically. There is also an unprecedented opportunity for programmers to refine their own communication abilities and tell stories from their vantage point.

"We want to end the year off with where we are going next," Hammond said.

5/8/2009 — April 15 - Crowdsourcing
Hammond on WTTW's Chicago Tonight

Prof. Kris Hammond will be seen regularly on WTTW's Chicago Tonight. Watch his most recent appearance: View clip.

There is a brand new way of doing business thanks to the World Wide Web. Kris Hammond of Northwestern University introduces us to the popular phenomenon known as "crowdsourcing," and tells us how it works.

5/8/2009 — Jona's iLab Network project featured in current issue of Centerpiece

Kemi Jona, research associate professor and director of the Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships (OSEP) is featured in the Office of Research Centerpiece magazine. The article, "iLabs: Bringing High School Science Back to the Future" explores the growing gap between the practice of science that's happening by researchers at Northwestern and other institutions, and what science looks like in high school.

Read the article at this link.

5/5/2009 — Palacios 1.1 and Kitten 1.1.0 Released

The V3VEE Project at Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, and the Scalable System Software Department at Sandia National Laboratories are pleased to announce the joint release of Palacios 1.1 and Kitten 1.1.0, two new open source operating systems. Palacios is a virtual machine monitor (VMM) for modern architectures, while Kitten is a lightweight kernel for high performance computing. The combination of Palacios and Kitten enables applications, whether virtualized or not, to achieve scalable high performance on large machines. On Sandia's Red Storm machine (the 9th fastest supercomputer in the world), Palacios and Kitten can provide a virtualized environment that enables near-native performance and scaling for communication-intensive applications. More broadly, the two operating systems provide an open substrate for virtualization research, development, use, and teaching in computer systems, computer architecture, and high performance computing.

Palacios is a "type I", non-paravirtualized VMM that makes extensive use of the virtualization extensions in modern x86 processors, such as AMD's SVM. Palacios can be embedded into existing kernels, including very small kernels. Thus far, Palacios has been embedded into Kitten and the University of Maryland's GeekOS teaching kernel. The Palacios 1.1 codebase is about 20% larger than that of 1.0, which was released in November, 2008. Significant new functionality has been added, including 64 bit support, nested paging support, profiling, and numerous virtual devices. Enhancements are present throughout the codebase. Currently, Palacios can run on emulated PC hardware, commodity PC hardware, and Red Storm.

Kitten is a lightweight kernel operating system designed to be used on the compute nodes of distributed memory supercomputers. The primary goal of Kitten is to enable supercomputer applications to scale to significantly higher node counts and perform substantially better than is possible with general-purpose compute node operating systems, such as Linux. The design choices in Kitten target scalability (low noise, deterministic behavior) and performance (physically contiguous memory layout, transparent large pages, and novel techniques for taking better advantage of multi-core processors). Currently, Kitten can run on emulated PC hardware, commodity PC hardware, and Red Storm.

The V3VEE Project is a collaboration between Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, and is supported by the United States National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. It is a community resource development project that is creating an open source virtual machine monitor framework for modern architectures. The Scalable System Software Department at Sandia National Laboratories is responsible for developing effective systems software for some of the most performance-critical large scale supercomputers in the world.

Palacios is BSD-licensed and available from http://v3vee.org. Kitten is GPL-licensed and available from https://software.sandia.gov/trac/kitten. Detailed instructions on how to download, install, build, and use both operating systems are available at http://v3vee.org. The site also includes links to the relevant discussion groups. Community enhancements to both Palacios and Kitten are very much welcomed.

--The V3VEE Team
--The Kitten Team

4/22/2009 — Kuzmanovic discusses Internet congestion and net neutrality

Aleksandar Kuzmanovic discusses the Internet congestion and net neutrality issues in an article entitled "Cox Cable Congestion Management Plan Challenged, Defended" Read the article.

4/16/2009 — Norman featured in Dwell Magazine

Don Norman was featured in Dwell Magazine’s May issue: “If you've long loathed your leaky faucet, this is your chance to gracefully drop the drip. Professor Donald Norman offers his expert opinion on what makes a spectacular tap.” Go to the article

4/15/2009 — McCormick Students Win $10,000 for Sustainability Research

Two individuals and one team, all Northwestern students, have each received $10,000 for their research contributing to global sustainability through the Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge sponsored by the Dow Chemical Company.

The honor recognizes the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science students for their exceptional work in ongoing scientific, technical or social research to develop innovative approaches to meet human needs. Their projects, part of the “green chemistry movement,” must also protect the environment while promoting economic growth and social welfare now and into the future.

The individual award recipients were Can Bayram, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and computer science, and Cynthia Pierre, a graduate student in materials science and engineering. The winning team was comprised of undergraduates Yann Manibog, Eric West, Suelyn Yu, and Zachary Lindemann.

The Dow Chemical Company invited six universities to participate in the challenge. In addition to Northwestern, the participating universities included Cambridge University, Peking University, Tufts University, the University of Michigan and the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil.

The Dow Chemical Company Foundation initiated the Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge this year. Eligible areas of research included sustainable chemistry, energy efficiency and conservation, reducing climate change impact, life-cycle product safety, and sustainable freshwater supply and distribution.

-- Adapted from a NewsCenter article

4/9/2009 — Slashdot: Software Improves P2P Privacy By Hiding In The Crowd

pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new "guilt-by-association" threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification." Link: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/09/1310223

3/16/2009 — Immorlica's Meet the Faculty Lecture now on video

Nicole Immorlica's lecture is available for viewing online. Click here to watch the video.

12/11/2008 — Light Shines for Potential Early Cancer DiagnosisTechnique

The team's findings may have major implications for improvements in screening large populations for early-stage colon cancer. In addition, although unstated in the article, their technique also appears to be applicable to screen large populations for early-stage pancreatic cancer and early-stage lung cancer. As is known, these are very deadly diseases which claim tens of thousands of lives each year, and have proven to be very difficult to detect early on.
Link to Abstract;
Link to article at PNAS;
Megan Fellman's full story: December 10, 2008 -- Light Shines for Potential Early Cancer Diagnosis Technique

12/8/2008 — Palacios Virtual Machine Monitor Released By V3VEE Project

The V3VEE Project is pleased to announce the release of Palacios, a new virtual machine monitor (VMM) that we hope will prove useful insystems, architecture, and high performance computing research andteaching. Palacios is BSD-licensed and available from v3vee.org.

Palacios is a "type I", non-paravirtualized VMM that makes extensiveuse of the virtualization extensions in modern x86 processors, such asAMD SVM and Intel VT. Palacios can be embedded into existing kernels, including very small kernels. Thus far, Palacios has been embeddedinto Sandia National Labs' Kitten high performance computing kerneland the University of Maryland's GeekOS teaching kernel.The V3VEE Project is a collaboration between Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico, and is supported by NSF and DOE. Itis a community resource development project that is creating an opensource virtual machine monitor framework for modern architectures.

At Northwestern, the V3VEE project involves Peter Dinda (principle investigator), Jack Lange (lead Ph.D. student and lead developer), faculty members Fabian Bustamante and Russ Joseph, Ph.D. students Lei Xia and Chang Bae, undergraduates Mat Wojick and Pete Kamm, and visiting scholar Yuan Tang.

For more information, please consult our web site, v3vee.org.

12/2/2008 — Slashdot.org - Researchers Latch Onto BitTorrent To Spot Connection Problems

"Northwestern University researchers have developed a system that gives a heads up about traffic problems on the Internet, where there is no central management system. Their Network Early Warning System (NEWS), which latches on to a popular BitTorrent client, is designed to spot problems by encouraging feedback from end users who are experiencing problems. 'You can think of it as crowd sourcing network monitoring,' said associate professor Fabián Bustamante. He has a track record with BitTorrent users, having developed the popular Ono plug-in for speeding up P2P interactions." Link

11/24/2008 — Developing A Neighborhood Watch For The Internet

Fabián Bustamante and doctoral student David Choffnes are building a participatory approach to detecting, isolating and reporting network anomalies: the Network Early Warning System, or NEWS for short. Read the entire article here

9/8/2008 — Crain's Chicago Business - Info Junkie: Kristian Hammond

Info Junkie: Kristian Hammond Link to Crain's Chicago Business article

Computer scientist Kristian Hammond, 51, founded Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory and consults with companies such as Boeing Co. and Motorola Inc. on artificial-intelligence technology. His picks:

Watches CNN's "Headline News" and E!'s "The Soup" ("to track pop-culture stuff without having to watch it"). User-submitted story sites such as Digg and Reddit offer "the extreme ends of the news." Social-networking site Twitter is "a way to monetize ADD — the size of the sound bite has got to be unbelievably tiny."

A former improv performer with Second City — where his wife is a producer — he uses stand-up CDs to show his two school-age sons "what it means to be smart and funny at the same time." Favorites: Eddie Izzard, Bob Newhart.

Studies TV news to feed into lab projects such as "News at Seven," which automatically gathers and edits news from the Web, then passes it to a virtual anchor. "On 'The Daily Show,' Lewis Black does rants. They're not that funny, but he's yelling and then he'll pause and interject something that is funny, so we'll map that on to the machine."

"Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage," Alfred Lansing's account of the savage 1914-15 Antarctic crossing, is "astoundingly inspirational." Lighter but still weighty: comic books. "They're about picking yourself up and finding clarity." His family subscribes to about 30 titles. "I've been reading 'Batman' chronologically since I was 8."

Uses Bravo reality shows "Project Runway" and "Top Chef" as teaching tools. "You learn what it means to work against constraints and just solve the damn problem."

9/4/2008 — New Scientist Magazine - "Virtual Hand Gets Under the Skin"

Andrew Kaufman, one of our EECS / Graphics Group undergrad alumni, is in the news. Andrew is currently at UBC working with Dinesh Pai, who in turn is collaborating with Ed Colgate here in McCormick). --He is co-author of a well-received paper at SIGGRAPH 2008: Read the paper.

The article was excerpted in New Scientist Magazine (8/14/2008)

Visit Andrew's web page.

7/24/2008 — ComputerWeekly.com, July 4, 2008 -

Don Norman discusses the significance of the user-friendly design of Apple's iPod in an article entitled "The Secret to Designing User-Friendly Interfaces for Desktop Software" Read the article.

7/14/2008 — EECS Team Finishes among Top 10 in Int'l Competition, Early Detection of Cancer Using Data Mining

A team from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Northwestern University, led by Professor Alok Choudhary and consisting of graduate students Ramanathan Narayanan, Sanchit Misra, Prem Swaroop finished among the top 10 out of 200 teams world-wide competing in the KDD Cup Challenge 2008. The KDD Cup is one of the oldest and most competitive Data mining competitions. This year's challenge focused on the problem of early detection of breast cancer from X-ray images of the breast. Specifically, it was related to the development of algorithms for Computer Aided Detection (CAD) of early stage breast cancer from X-ray images. The EECS team developed and applied their data mining techniques for this application. This work involving data mining is very exciting because it can automate the process of looking at large number of patients' data for the propensity of a patient having early stage breast cancer. Future work will involve further improving these techniques in terms of accuracy and speed.

About KDD Cup Challenge 2008 Breast cancer is a disease in which malignant (cancer) cells form in the tissues of the breast. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women today (after lung cancer) and is the most common cancer among women, except for skin cancers. About 1.3 million women are expected to be diagnosed annually with breast cancer worldwide, and about 465,000 will die from the disease. In the United States alone, in 2007 an estimated 240,510 women were expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer, and 40,460 women are expected to have died from breast cancer. The KDD Cup 2008 challenge focuses on the problem of early detection of breast cancer from X-ray images of the breast. Details about the challenge, dataset description and performance metrics can be obtained at http://www.kddcup2008.com/index.html.

7/3/2008 — NU NewsCenter --NCI Grant Launches Clinical Trials For Colon Cancer

EVANSTON, Ill. --- A Northwestern University biomedical engineer who has developed optical technology shown to be effective for the early detection of colon cancer has received a $7.5 million grant over five years from the National Cancer Institute to further study an instrument that potentially could become a routine colon cancer screening test and to launch large-scale clinical trials.

Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States; more than 50,000 Americans die each year of the disease. Colon cancer, however, can be easily treated if detected early. But no existing population-wide screening test can accurately predict the presence of the disease with adequate sensitivity. Vadim Backman, principal investigator for the grant and professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, believes the technology he has developed could lead to the first such test. A major part of the NCI grant is to validate the technology and have it ready for commercialization.

Backman is leading a diverse group of researchers from Northwestern and the four hospitals conducting the clinical trials.

Read the full article [pdf]

7/2/2008 — CBS2 Chicago (June 30, 2008) Northwestern University Students Build Solar Car

Northwestern University Students Build Solar Car (Video)
What's Under the Hood of Northwestern's Solar Car? (Video)

7/2/2008 — The Daily Northwestern - NuSolar Looks To Build 'Most Advanced Car Yet'

With an army of 600 silicon cells to trap sunlight and a backup pack of lead acid batteries for extra "oomph," a gas-free car built by Northwestern students boasts a seven-horsepower engine that carries its driver at highway speeds of more than 65 miles per hour. Now these students say they are ready for an upgrade. NuSolar, the Northwestern solar car team, has built four gas-free cars since its inception in 1998. The team's mission is to design, build and race solar electric vehicles with "perfection, craftsmanship and aesthetics," said McCormick junior Vytas Bradunas, head of operations for NuSolar. He said the team is ready to reach this perfection with plans for construction on a new car this month. NuSolar finished its last creation in 2005, using an old frame from a car it had built in 2003. Called nu'Nergy, it took fifth place at the 2005 Formula Sun Grand Prix, a national solar car race. The team qualified for the 2,500-mile North American Solar Challenge, but an "electrical failure" prevented it from continuing. Team members said they are now manufacturing a new vehicle from scratch, thanks to a new design and a $200,000 budget. They estimate the next gas-free vehicle will be completely race-ready in October, and they hope to race it in the North American Solar Challenge in the summer of 2008. "I look at the computer screen and I think someday this is going to be real," Bradunas said. Hopefully we can get it done." The new car will weigh between 500 and 600 pounds - the current car weighs 800. The team's first vehicle, made in 1998 and called SolarCat, weighed about 2,000 pounds. The frame will be built from lightweight, high-strength aluminum instead of steel, and its shell will be made of carbon fiber. It will use lithium ion batteries, which offer significantly more power than lead acid, Bradunas said. "We intend it to be the most advanced car yet," said McCormick sophomore Michael Awadalla, the team's business manager. The only problem, Bradunas said, is "it just needs a name." Bradunas, who joined the NuSolar team "pretty much as soon as (he) got (on campus)," said works on the project for 70 to 80 hours per week. "School pales in comparison with the amount of time I put in here," Bradunas said. "I'm not a school person. I don't like sitting in a classroom." He said between 80 and 100 students have contributed to the project over the course of two years, and a core of about 30 students are currently involved. The design began in January. "It's hand-constructed, so it gets a lot of man hours," said McCormick senior Andrew McDermott, the team's electrical specialist. "We actually built our shell. A lot of people who say they work on cars just buy a fender." Team members said they hope to place even higher at the 2008 North American Solar Challenge. "When it runs, those are the great moments," said McDermott. Reach Day Greenberg at d-greenberg@northwestern.edu. Article

7/2/2008 — NU Solar Car Team departs July 3 for Texas to compete in the 2008 North American Solar Challenge

The Solar Car Team (website) is readying the car for the North American Solar Challenge during July 2008. The car will race 2400 miles from Plano, Texas on July 13th to Calgary, Alberta on July 22nd. Check out the blog to find out what they are doing on the road.

Meet the team members.

The 2008 North American Solar Challenge (NASC2008) is a competition to design, build, and drive solar-powered cars in a cross-country time/distance rally event.

6/27/2008 — Optics and Photonics News - The Quantum Cascade Laser: A Versatile and Powerful Tool

Article appearing in OPN's July/August 2008 issue: Manijeh Razeghi, Steven Slivken, Yanbo Bai and Shaban Ramezani Darvish, "The Quantum Cascade Laser: A Versatile and Powerful Tool"

Many important applications in the infrared are awaiting the right laser source. Advances in quantum cascade lasers will enable powerful new technologies to become commercial realities.

The diode laser has been around for more than 40 years. In the beginning, it was a scientific novelty. Later, it became a strategic technology, due to its small size, low power consumption and long lifetime. Now, thanks to mass production, millions of laser diodes are manufactured each month and appear in products ranging from telecommunications transmitters to DVD players to laser pointers. In fact, diode lasers made up roughly 55 percent of a $6.9 billion worldwide laser market in 2007.

Download a PDF of the full article.

6/27/2008 — NewScientistTech - Ad men to target social networking trendsetters

Think you exert an influence on your Facebook or MySpace friends? Then you could find yourself being used by advertisers to get people to pay more for products, according to US researchers. Using economic models they predict new tactics to exploit the personal information that online social-networking sites provide. One effective strategy could see free or cut-price products offered to the most influential online individuals to kickstart new fads, says Jason Hartline, at Northwestern University, Illinois, US.

Read the full article

6/3/2008 — North Carolina CBS-affiliate WRAL-TV interview Kemi Jona about future of STEM

In an interview for North Carolina CBS-affiliate WRAL-TV (5/30), Noah Garrett, former executive director of communications for the North Carolina Technology Association, discussed the future of STEM education with Dr. Kemi Jona of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Jona, when asked what the "biggest challenges" for STEM are, said that there "are two interrelated problems: STEM workforce and STEM education. The need for a workforce that is skilled in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics areas is closely linked to the idea of American competitiveness in the global economy." Jona explained that the media must better promote STEM. "There is a big misconception, left over from the bursting of the Internet bubble, that high-tech jobs are too risky or all being outsourced," he said. Furthermore, "right now...we don't have a single momentous event like Sputnik to galvanize the country's attention around STEM education." Jona pointed out that "[p]arents, employers, [and] teachers all need to do their part in helping make students aware of the breadth of STEM careers."

5/29/2008 — Applied Physics Letters cover article by Kong, Sahakian, Heifetz, Taflove, and Backman

Soon-Cheol Kong (post-doctoral associate), Alan Sahakian, Alex Heifetz (post-doctoral associate), Allen Taflove, and Vadim Backman report that their research article, "Robust detection of deeply subwavelength pits in simulated optical data-storage disks using photonic jets" has just appeared in the May 26 issue of Applied Physics Letters as its cover article. Link to article; Link to cover image.

5/28/2008 — Newsday: LI KIDS: Not too young to network

Newsday, May 25, 2008 - Justine Cassell, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and AT&T Research Professor in communications studies, comments on parenting. (Full article)

5/28/2008 — Virtual pal a real help

Chicago Sun-Times, May 20, 2008 -- Virtual pal a real help
Justine Cassell, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and AT&T Research Professor in communications studies, and her research team developed software for computer-generated playmates designed to help autistic children improve their conversation skills through interactive storytelling.

5/28/2008 — Laser Focus World - Type II semiconductor superlattice photodetectors new alternative to HgCdTe

LFW News Break -Type II semiconductor superlattice photodetectors new alternative to HgCdTe
While mercury cadmium telluride photodiodes and quantum-well infrared photodetectors are well established in military and other applications, the performance of these detectors at long-wave infrared (LWIR) and very-long-wave infrared (VLWIR) wavelengths is limited due to difficulties in producing uniform material. In an invited talk at SPIE's Defense + Security Symposium March 17 (Orlando FL), Manijeh Razeghi, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern Univesity (Evanston IL) announced that Type II indium arsenide-gallium antimonide (InAs/GaSb) photodetectors may now be an important alternative to existing detectos at these wavelengths. Razeghi and her team fabricated Type-II InAs/GaSb superlattice photodiodes by growing multiple layers of Type II materials via molecular-beam epitaxy, enabling precise control of the cut-off wavelength from 3.7 to 32 mm.

The group created photodiode arrays up to 400 mm^2 in size with external quantum efficiency (QE) greater than 50% at a 9 mm wavelength. With optimized antireflective coatings, the single-pass QE could exceed 75%, says the group. The single-element detectors and arrays featured decreased dark current and increased sensitivity, and functioned as two-color detectors in LWIR with the differential resistance and QE of single-band devices.

5/28/2008 — New Superlattice Structure Enables High Performance Infrared Imaging

Scientists at the Center for Quantum Devices (CQD) in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University have demonstrated for the first time a high-performance infrared imager, based on a Type II superlattice, which looks at wavelengths 20 times longer than visible light. Read the full article

5/28/2008 — New Mid-Infrared Lasers Show Doubled Efficiency

New Mid-Infrared Lasers Show Doubled Efficiency -- May 19, 2008
Researchers at the Center for Quantum Devices at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University have recently doubled the efficiency of infrared lasers under the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Efficient Mid-wave Infrared Lasers (EMIL) program. Read the full article

5/6/2008 — Researchers use Akamai to find local BitTorrent peers

Researchers use Akamai to find local BitTorrent peers By John Timmer | Published: May 06, 2008 - 11:31AM CT

The rise of P2P traffic as a percentage of total network use has left ISPs looking for ways to limit its impact on their capacity. Comcast, notably, has chosen to throttle some P2P traffic, but that solution is generally viewed as a temporary fix. Testing of the hardware used for throttling P2P traffic reveals that it performs poorly when challenged with obfuscated or encrypted P2P traffic. Other ISPs, such as Verizon, are considering working with P2P software makers to help keep P2P traffic on local networks, and thus less burdensome. But computer science researchers from Northwestern University have been experimenting with ways of keeping the traffic local that don't require the cooperation of ISPs; the researchers provided Ars with a publication detailing some of the results. Read the full article here.

5/6/2008 — Bustamante and Choffnes' Ono discussed at Slashdot

Read the blog

2/21/2008 — Cassell: Virtual peers help children with autism

ScienceNOW Daily News, 2/15/08 -- Artificial Playmates for Autistic Children by Elsa Youngsteadt
MSNBC Technology & Science, 2/21/08 -- Digital tutors help children and adults develop advanced skills by Robin Lloyd

2/11/2008 — Media Summary: Manijeh Razeghi

ScienceDaily.com, February 1, 2008 Tiny Avalanche Photodiode Detects Single UV Photons
Science Centric, January 29, 2008 Tiny Avalanche Photodiode Detects Single UV Photons
SPIE Newsroom, January 29, 2008 Tiny Avalanche Photodiode Detects Single UV Photons

2/11/2008 — Tumblin's work noted in American Scientist.org

Computational Photography -- New cameras don't just capture photons; they compute pictures. By Brian Hayes. The article in the journal 'American Scientist' Volume 96, March-April 2008, Page 94-99, describes work by EECS Assoc. Professor Jack Tumblin and his collaborators at MERL (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs: Ramesh Raskar, Amit Agarwal, Ashok Veeraraghavan, others) along with work at Stanford, MIT, Technion, Northwestern, and elsewhere.

2/7/2008 — Physics Today - Taflove, fellow optics researchers

"IBM Reports Milestone in Silicon Nanophotonics; Achievements from Japan's Kyoto University, Northwestern and the University of New Mexico Noted in Optics Express Focus Issue"

In 2004, Allen Taflove, Prof. Vadim Backman of BME, and students and postdocs discovered a new way that light can be concentrated into a beam that can be so narrow that its width is less than a limit thought to be absolute. The research group's most recent paper on this beam, which was dubbed the "photonic nanojet," appeared in the on-line journal, Optics Express, in December 2007. The nanojet could have applications ranging from detecting early-stage cancer in individual biological cells to enabling an entirely new generation of optical data storage devices which have much greater capacity than state-of-the-art BluRay (TM) disks.

Taflove's group's December Optics Express paper on the photonic nanojet has just been favorably mentioned in the Physics Today website. Please visit the URL: http://blogs.physicstoday.org/wht/2007/12/ibm_reports_milestone_in_silic.html

The website blurb is titled: "IBM Reports Milestone in Silicon Nanophotonics; Achievements from Japan's Kyoto University, Northwestern and the University of New Mexico Noted in Optics Express Focus Issue"

Scroll down and you'll see the following text:

"A new paper from Northwestern and the University of New Mexico explores new ideas about achieving super resolution using photonic nanojets, potentially for the detection of bio and nanoparticles in applications including cancer detection. 'Subdiffraction optical resolution of a gold nanosphere located within the nanojet of a Mie-resonant dielectric microsphere.' A. Heifetz, J. J. Simpson, S.-C. Kong, A. Taflove and V. Backman, Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico. pp. 17334-17342."

The University of New Mexico is mentioned because that is where Prof. Taflove's June, 2007 Ph.D. graduate, Jamesina Simpson, is now on staff as a tenure-track assistant professor.

12/5/2007 — Time, November 8, 2007

Don Norman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, comments on technology and bad design in his book titled The Design of Everyday Things.

12/5/2007 — New Scientist, November 9, 2007

Don Norman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is a design guru helping to trace a route into science.

12/5/2007 — AScribe, November 12, 2007

Thrasos Pappas, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is one of the primary researchers developing a tactile surface that can facilitate communication between visually impaired and blind persons and computers.

11/26/2007 — Kumar's Quantum Group Highlighted in Science

Science, 23 November 2007: Better Computing with Photons
Excerpt: The experimental ability to generate, distribute, and use optical entanglement has steadily been improving over recent years. At the meeting, we heard of various advances in this field from P. Kwiat (Univ. of Illinois), A. Furusawa (Univ. of Tokyo), and H.-A. Bachor (Australian National Univ.). In particular, P. Kumar (Northwestern Univ.) described his group’s optical fiber–based entanglement source, promising the possibility of integration of quantum communication applications into standard telecom infrastructure. He presented results on a telecom-wavelength quantum controlled-NOT gate, which is perhaps the essential logic device necessary to build a quantum computer.

11/19/2007 — NU Programmers Take Midwest

A Northwestern undergraduate team has, for the second year in row, won the 5-state Mid-Central USA regional competition for the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). ACM ICPC is the oldest and most prestigious Computer Science problem solving competition in the world. The Northwestern team, the Wildcats (Nikolay Valtchanov (junior), Nikola Borisov (sophomore), and Anda Bereczky (sophomore)) beat 114 other teams in the region. The Wildcats will compete with 80 other teams, chosen from over 6000 world-wide, in the ACM ICPC World Finals, which will be held in April in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Northwestern also fielded a second excellent team, Northwestern Purple (Anish Godha, Julia Merryman, Henry Petrash). The teams are co-coached by Peter Dinda and Hai Zhou. More information about the competition can be found at this link.

11/1/2007 — Kumar featured in Chicago Tribune

By Jon Van, Chicago Tribune -- October 31, 2007 University researchers often study the spooky quantum world, but their discoveries rarely launch a business.

Prem Kumar, an electrical engineering professor at Northwestern University, not only launched a quantum-based business, but his company, NuCrypt, has raised millions of dollars and is showing prospective customers some products.

That is quite a feat for a field that asserts that the subatomic world is utterly uncertain, random and unpredictable, a notion that Albert Einstein found so repugnant that he famously declared that "God does not play dice." Kumar and his business colleagues might well respond that "dice is nice." Read the full story

10/16/2007 — CNNU Looks at News at Seven, October Launch

Read the full story at www.CNN.com/TECH

10/15/2007 — Alok Choudhary new Chair of EECS

It is my pleasure to announce that Professor Alok Choudhary will be the new chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at McCormick. Choudhary brings considerable distinction to this position. He received his PhD degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1989, an MS degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1986, and his BE with honors from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India in 1982.

From 1989 to 1996, Choudhary was on the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Syracuse University, where he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award form the National Science Foundation. He has also received an IEEE Engineering Foundation Award, and was among the first recipients of the Excellence in Research, Teaching and Service Award from McCormick. He is a fellow of the IEEE.

His research interests are in high-performance computing, data intensive computing, scalable data mining, computer architecture, high-performance I/O systems and software and their applications, and scientific computing. Furthermore, he has interest in the design and evaluation of architectures and software systems. In these areas Choudhary has published more than 300 papers, as well as a book and several book chapters.

Choudhary serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Systems, and the International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking. He is a member of the National Academy of Science's committee on Impact of High-End Computing on Science.

The chair of the Computer Engineering and Systems division of the EECS department, Choudhary was the founding director of the Center for Ultra-scale Computing and Information Security (CUCIS), and a member of the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern. He was co-founder and VP of Technology of Accelchip Inc. which was eventually acquired by Xilinx. He has served on the boards of several companies.

Choudhary teaches marketing and technology industry management at the Kellogg School of Management, and is the academic director of the Executive Program on Managing Customer Relationships for Profit in Kellogg's Executive Education Program.

I do believe that McCormick and Northwestern are well positioned to climb to a higher level of excellence. We are extremely well positioned in emerging areas and we had unprecedented success in hiring top faculty across all levels in the last two years. Connectivity and collaboration are competitive advantages and our metrics indicate that progress is being made across a vast range of critical areas, spanning graduate and undergraduate levels. EECS is a critical component in reaching our goals.

I would like to use this opportunity to thank Professor Bruce Wessels for his valuable service to McCormick as interim chair of the EECS department. His leadership of the department at this transitional time has been very important for both the department and the school.

Sincerely,
Julio M. Ottino
Dean
R. R. McCormick Institute Professor
Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering

10/9/2007 — Optoelectronic Sensor-Based Fashion Show

Professor Alan Sahakian of EECS, and Professor Anke Loh of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, have their first exhibition of optoelectronic sensor-based fabrics and garments on Wednesday October 10 in the Chicago Arts District in Pilsen. For details read the announcement.

9/24/2007 — AquaLab discussed on Torrentfreak

TorrentFreak - September 21st, 2007 Speed Up Your Torrents With Ono

"A plug-in developed by a university is promising improved BitTorrent transfers by selectively connecting to peers offering faster response times. Currently in use on over 25,000 Azureus installations, it identifies and connects to nearby peers in an attempt to accelerate downloads." This is part of David Choffnes' graduate research work. Dave works under the supervision of Fabián E. Bustamante, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Read more about AquaLab at the website.

9/18/2007 — Former ECE head Banerjee named director of HP Labs

HP named Prith Banerjee, Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), as senior vice president of research, and director of HP Labs, effective Aug. 1. Prof. Banerjee was the Walter P. Murphy Professor and chairman of this electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University until 2004. Read the story here.

9/18/2007 — Razeghi and CQD featured in Semiconductor Int'l

The Brighter Side of Semiconductors
Ruth DeJule, Contributing Editor -- Semiconductor International, 6/1/2007
Prof. Manijeh Razeghi discusses the Center for Quantum Devices (CQD). Read the full article.

9/18/2007 — Center for Quantum Devices laser design

Laser sets records in power and energy efficiency - July 18, 2007
EVANSTON, Ill. --- The rise in global terrorism in recent years has brought significant attention to the needs for more advanced sensors and defense technologies to protect civilians and soldiers. Next-generation laser-based defense systems are now being designed for this need, including the use of infrared countermeasures to protect aircraft from heat-seeking missiles and highly sensitive chemical detectors for reliable early detection of trace explosives and other toxins at a safe distance for personnel. Since practical systems must be easily portable by a soldier, aircraft or unmanned vehicle, they must be lightweight, compact and power efficient. In addition, such systems also would need to be widely deployable and available to all soldiers, airplanes and public facilities, which requires a low production and operating cost. While several types of lasers exist today that can emit at the desired infrared wavelengths, none of these lasers meet the above requirements because they are either too expensive, not mass-producible, too fragile or require power-hungry and inefficient cryogenic refrigeration. A new type of semiconductor-based laser, called the Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL), may soon change this situation. Like their computer chip cousins, semiconductors lasers are inherently compact and suitable for mass production, which has led to their widespread and low-cost use in everyday products, including CD and DVD players. The Center for Quantum Devices (CQD) at Northwestern University, led by Manijeh Razeghi, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, has recently made great strides in laser design, material growth and laser fabrication that have greatly increased the output power and wall-plug efficiency (the ability to change electrical power into light) of QCLs.

The CQD now has demonstrated individual lasers, 300 of which can easily fit on a penny, emitting at wavelengths of 4.5 microns, capable of producing over 700 milli-Watts of continuous output power at room temperature and more than one Watt of output power at lower temperatures. Furthermore, these lasers are extremely efficient in converting electricity to light, having a 10 percent wall-plug efficiency at room temperature and more than 18 percent wall-plug efficiency at lower temperatures. This represents a factor of two increase in laser performance, which is far superior to any competing laser technology at this wavelength.

These results have been submitted for publication, and Razeghi presented similar results at the Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials, which took place in Japan this past May.

Razeghi's research work received funding in March from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through the Efficient Mid-Wave Infrared Lasers (EMIL) program, which is overseen by Henryk Temkin and Mark Rosker from DARPA and Mihal Gross of the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The work is also partially funded by the Navy and Army Research Office (ARO) through separate contracts, which are overseen by Jerry Meyer from the Naval Research Laboratory and Michael Gerhold from ARO, respectively.

Allison H. Berger Associate Director, McCormick Office of Corporate Relations Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering 2145 Sheridan Road Tel: (847) 491-3365 Fax: (847) 467-3033 Email: a-berger@northwestern.edu www.industry.northwestern.edu/

9/18/2007 — Flying Bike Game demo'd by Gooch, Rankin

Microsoft Research inventions are wacky and useful - 07/17/07
Dr. Bruce Gooch and graduate student Yolanda Rankin demo the Flying Bike Game, featuring Read the full story.

5/1/2007 — Student Lei Yang's invention ships in June 2007

EECS Ph.D. student Lei Yang's invention, CRAMES, will first ship in NEC FOMA 904i phones in Europe and Japan in June 2007.

3/20/2007 — Don Norman Co-Director of Segal Design Institute

Crate and Barrel Co-Founders Endow Design Institute at Northwestern

Gordon and Carole Segal, co-founders of Crate and Barrel, have made a significant donation to establish a new institute for design at Northwestern University, Northwestern President Henry S. Bienen announced March 20.

The generous gift will create The Segal Design Institute, which will significantly expand the University's existing undergraduate design curriculum in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, support the development of new master's degree programs and fund research on design. Read the full story.

On May 22 the institute will host a conference on design at Northwestern that will showcase the talents of the design community in Chicago.