The Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Ollie Cossairt has been invited to give talks at two upcoming meetings.  At COSI 2013 in June, Prof. Cossairt will present a talk entitled  "Performance Bounds for Computational Imaging". The Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging meeting is held in Arlington Virginia.  Read more about it at this link.

As officially announced during the business lunch of ICDE 2013 in Brisbane, Australia, the 30th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) will be held in Chicago, March 31 - April 4, 2014. General co-Chairs of the Organizing Committee of ICDE 2014 are Elisa Bertino of Purdue University and Goce Trajcevski.

The annual ICDE conference addresses research issues in designing, building, managing, and evaluating advanced data-intensive systems and applications. It is a leading forum for researchers, practitioners, developers and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences.

Andrew Lovett has received a Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prize. This prize is intended to recognize and honor young researchers conducting ground-breaking research in cognitive science. Up to five such prizes, which include $10,000 and three years complementary membership in the Cognitive Science Society, are awarded internationally each year.  Andrew won this prize for his Ph.D. thesis, "Spatial Routines for Sketches: A Framework for Modeling Spatial Problem Solving."

More information concerning the prize can be found at http://www.cognitivesciencesociety.org/about_awards_glushko.html

Congratulations, Andrew! 

Ken Forbus gave a keynote address at the Workshop on Interactive Pen and Touch Technology for Education, in Los Angeles last weekend.  His talk described CogSketch, a sketch understanding system being developed in the NSF-sponsored Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center, which involves Northwestern, University of Chicago, Temple University, UCLA, and several other universities. 

A prototype of JiveHealth’s first game impressed judges in Partnership for a Healthier America’s End Childhood Obesity Innovation Challenge, presented at the Building a Healthier Future Summit, held March 6 to 8 in Washington, D.C.

JiveHealth’s game, Jungo, is “a hybrid of Angry Birds and Temple Run” for 7- to 12-year-olds in which the player uses a slingshot to ward off enemies, said creator Dennis Ai, a senior studying computer science. In order to power up a character, the player must feed him simple, but healthy, recipes.

Prof. Bryan Pardo and PhD Candidate Mark Cartwright of the Interactive Audio Lab have just launched a web demo/data collection/fun device they'd like you to try called SocialEQ.  SocialEQ is a project to learn the meaning of sound adjectives that relate to equalization.

Jing Wang, a graduate student working on image processing under the supervision of Prof. Thrasos Pappas, has been selected as one of the ten Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholars.

UPDATE: Dongning Guo's Team Wildcats competed with 89 other teams world-wide in the DARPA Spectrum Challenge qualifying phase and finished top-15 to enter the Tournament.  Team Wildcats consists of students in EECS 395/495 Software Radio Laboratory class and several members of the Communications and Networking Laboratory. 

Goce Trajcevski has been invited to join the Editorial Board of GeoInformatica: an International Journal on Advances of Computer Science for Geographic Information Systems (Springer) (http://link.springer.com/journal/10707#)

Led by Zachary Bischof

Recent studies on broadband services (such as those published by SamKnows in collaboration with the FCC in the US and Ofcom in the UK) focus primarily on comparing the performance of ISPs in traditional networking terms, such as throughput, latency and packet loss.

Prof. Koray Aydin presented two invited talks at the SPIE Photonics West 2013 conference in San Francisco last week. He highlighted two research areas that currently being studied in the Metamaterials and Nanophotonic

Prem Kumar has been invited to deliver the 2013 Herman Anton Haus Lecture at MIT.  The title of his presentation will be: “Fields and Photons in Optical Fibers: In the Footsteps of a Visionary.”

EECS alum Jinyu Han, a former PhD student of Prof. Bryan Pardo, will co-chair the IEEE international workshop on Broadcast and User-generated Content Recognition and Analysis (BRUREC) held in conjunction with ICME 2013 (http://www.icme2013.org), in San Jose, California, USA.

Prof. Allen Taflove reports the publication of his new book "Advances in FDTD Computational Electrodynamics: Photonics and Nanotechnology" by the end of January.  This follows up his previous book, "Computational Electrodynamics: The Finite Difference Time-Domain Method" which is the 7th all-time most-cited book in physics, according to the Institute of Optics of the University of Rochester (go to link).  Read more about Allen and his research at his web page [link].

Prem Kumar will be one of two plenary speakers at the 47th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS 2013), to be held on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, 20—22 March 2013. The title of his talk will be “Ultrafast Processing of Photonic Entanglement: Technologies and Potential Applications.”