07.06.2006

Professor Chris Kim has received an IBM Faculty Partnership Award to support his work on "Analysis, Measurement, and Design Techniques for NBTI Tolerance." Negative Bias Temperature Instability, or NBTI in short, is one of the major aging mechanisms of nanoscale transistors that can eventually lead to chip failure. The IBM Faculty Awards program is a competitive worldwide program that enhances collaboration between faculty at leading universities and IBM researchers. Professor Kim was nominated for this award by Ching-Te Kent Chuang in the VLSI Design Department at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center.

06.25.2006

Professor Peter Herczfeld, from Drexel University, was awarded the Pioneer Award at the 2006 International Microwave Symposium by the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society. Dr. Herczfeld received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1967.

05.31.2006

The University of Minnesota ranks second among U.S. universities in industrial outreach in nanotechnology and microtechnology, according to the results of a survey published recently in the May/June 2006 issue of the nanotechnology trade publication Small Times. The University was also rated ninth in nanotech research, making it the highest-ranking Big 10 university in these categories.

The University of Minnesota was specifically recognized for work in the University's Nanofabrication Center, Characterization Facility and Particle Technology Laboratory. "The University of Minnesota is pleased to be recognized as a leading institution for nanotechnology," said Steve Campbell, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Nanofabrication Center.

For more information, see:

http://www.ur.umn.edu/unsreleases/find.php?ID=3022&from=umnnews

or listen to the "Minnesota Moment" radio spot at:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/urelate/radio/nanotechnology.mp3
Raw audio: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/urelate/radio/nanotechnology_raw.mp3

05.25.2006

Electrical and Computer Engineering junior Jaymes Grossman will receive the Congressional Award Gold Medal for volunteer work at a presentation at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 21. For more information, see

http://www.ur.umn.edu/unsreleases/find.php?ID=3015&from=umnnews

05.23.2006

Professor Phil Cohen, along with his postdoctoral associate, Zhiheng Liu, and colleagues at Vanderbilt University and Oak Ridge National Lab have recently demonstrated using laser light instead of heat to remove hydrogen atoms from the surface of a silicon wafer. It should now be possible to dramatically lower the temperature at which Si and SiGe are grown. This unprecedented achievment was reported in the May 19, 2006, issue of Science. For more details, see

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/exploration/stories/hsidesorption.html

05.01.2006

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is hosting the Tech Tuneup: Nano VLSI Design course sequence at the University of Minnesota on June 26-28, 2006. Tech Tuneup will focus on applications and problem areas associated with the very near future nano VLSI generation.

Topics that will be covered during the 3-day course include:

Advanced digital CMOS circuit design
Advanced CAD for analog, RF and mixed-signal systems
Digital design, verification and applications
Architectural design issues for reliable computing
Current FPGA architectures and computer-aided design (CAD)
Tolerating process variations through design and CAD in sub-100nm circuits
Nanoscale CMOS (<100nm) analog interface design
Process issues for nanoscale CMOS


Instructors from both academia and industry will lead this three day course sequence. For further details please see course website.

Dates: June 26, 27 & 28
Location: 402 Walter Library, 117 Pleasant St. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Registration: $900 ($800 if registering before June 1, 2006)
Website: http://www.umn.edu/~harjani/techtuneup/

05.01.2006

Professor Ned Mohan taught an internet-based short course "Teaching Power Systems with an Integrated Software Laboratory" on April 28, 2006 to 800 participants from all over the world. This short course was sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the local Twin Cities Chapter of the IEEE-PES. The on-demand videos are now on the website www.ece.umn.edu/groups/power and they can be viewed anytime up to three months by using the password ps2006.

04.26.06

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering alumnus Dr. Yunqian Ma (Ph.D.E.E., 2003) has received the International Neural Network Society (INNS) Young Investigator Award for 2006. This award is chosen by the INNS Board of Governors to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions in the field of neural networks. Dr. Ma, who was advised during his Ph.D. research by Professor Vladimir Cherkassky, is currently with Honeywell Labs where he works on video surveillance and security applications.

04.03.06

Professor Steve Campbell has been awarded an IT Distinguished Professorship. This award is given to a select group of IT faculty to recongnize their contributions to research, teaching, and service in both their professions and to the University's Institute of Technology. Professor Campbell's research is in the area of fabrication of micro and nano systems. Some of his most significant research contributions over the years include:

• His work on nanoparticle fabrication (e.g., single crystal silicon nanoparticles);
• His pioneering research in the development of the low-leakage high-K dielectric materials that are essential for next-generation low-power circuit designs;
• His work on the modeling of flow dynamics during the rapid thermal processing stage of wafer fabrication.

Some of his major educational contributions include authorship of a widely used textbook on microelectronic fabrication, and his work on developing a novel NSF-sponsored program for technical education in collaboration with local technical colleges. In addition to his role as a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, he serves as the Director of the NanoFabrication Center (NFC), and has run the Nanocoordination Office for the past three years.

03.30.06

Professor Doug Ernie received the Taylor Service Award for his pioneering service to the continued development of the UNITE distributed learning program, growing it from a live 4-channel analog broadcast TV system to today's wider network, employing delivery techniques that use streaming video. In addition, he has made major contributions to the use of technology-enhanced learning throughout the university, served as interim director of the Center for Development of Technological Leadership, and been active in the UROP and REU undergraduate research programs. Professor Guillermo Sapiro received the Taylor Research Award for his contributions to the area of image processing and computer vision. For example, his research has gone beyond Planet Earth (his lossless image compression technique is used by the Mars rover to tranmit images from the surface of the red planet), and his image inpainting work has been incorporated into Adobe Photoshop. Other research contributions include the application of mathematical analysis to imaging the HIV virus, and compression and analysis of digital elevation maps.

03.05.06

Dr. Paul Imbertson has been working with a group of ECE students to to bring solar-powered lights to a remote village in Nicaragua. Click here to read the complete story: http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/Feature_Stories/Village_lights.html

03.05.06

Professor Jim Leger has been chosen to receive one of this year's Horace T. Morse - University of Minnesota Alumni Association Awards for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. This award is given annually by the University Senate Committee on Educational Policy to a select group of faculty members to recongnize their contributions to undergraduate education. As part of the award, Professor Leger will be inducted into the University's Academy of Distinguished Teachers.

03.01.06

Professor Massoud Amin, H.W. Sweatt Chair in Technological Leadership, Professor of ECE, and Director of CDTL, has been appointed as a Member of the scientific advisory committee for the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division (CSED) of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for January,2006-May, 2010. Professor Amin also serves on several panels and boards,including the National Academy of Engineering's Board on Infrastructure and Constructed Environment (BICE), the Critical Infrastructure Protection Roundtable at the National Academy of Science/Engineering, the NAE/NAS Committee on Enhancing the Robustness and Resilience of Future Electric Transmission and Distribution in the United States to Terrorist Attack, and several advisory and review panels at NSF, DHS, OSTP, EPRI and the National Academies. He has given numerous presentations on S&T policy, such as the vulnerability of the energy network and power grid to a pandemic flu outbreak (see http://www.cidrap.umn.edu for more information).

02.16.06

Dr. Gary H. Glover, Professor of Radiology and Director of the Radiological Sciences Laboratory at Stanford University, was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering "for research and engineering in the development of computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging." Election to the NAE is one of the highest professional honors awarded to engineers. Dr. Glover received his B.S. (1964), M.S. (1965), and Ph.D. (1969) degrees, all in Electrical Engineering, from the University of Minnesota. Additional information is available at:

http://www4.nationalacademies.org/news.nsf/isbn/02102006?OpenDocument

02.16.06

Professor Rhonda Drayton is featured in the newly-released book, "Changing our World: True Stories of Women Engineers." The book is being released during National Engineers Week through the Extraordinary Women Engineers Project Coalition. It is intended to "provide inspiration and encouragement for young women to pursue careers in engineering." For additional information, see

http://www.engineeringwomen.org/

http://www.conveyinc.com/ewep/pdf/08_telecomm.pdf

01.27.06

Graduate student Chad Barry received a student travel award and a research gold award from the Materials Research Society (MRS) for his work with Professor Heiko Jacobs on, "Directed Assembly of Nanomaterials on Topographically Patterned Substrates." The travel award was one of 24 selected from more than 400 applicants to present their research at the conference. Subsequently, 6 were selected for the gold award after their presentations. The award consists of recognition and presentation of a plaque at the MRS awards ceremony, a year's free MRS membership, and travel cost reimbursement.

01.24.06

The paper, 'Distributed Trellis Coded Modulation for Multi-Source Cooperative Networks', co-authored by R. Wang, W. Zhao, and G. B. Giannakis, won the best student paper award at the IEEE Radio Wireless Symposium in San Diego, CA, Jan. 17-19, 2006.

01.03.06

A Workshop on Renewable Energy to discuss renewable energy prospects in Minnesota was organized by Profesoor Ned Mohan at the University of Minnesota on Dec 9, 2005. It was highly successful with a broad range of speakers and nearly 300 participants. The workshop details and many of the presentations can be found at http://www.ece.umn.edu/groups/wind/

12.19.05

The University of Minnesota's Tech Talk television program will feature Professor Ramesh Harjani talking about wireless communication. You can watch the program in the Twin Cities on TPT Minnesota Channel 17 at 9:00 p.m. December 25, 2005. See http://www.techtalk.umn.edu/ for more information.

11.23.05

Thomas Misa, associate professor of history at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), has been selected as the new director of the Charles Babbage Institute, effective July 1, 2006. Misa will hold concurrent appointments as Engineering Research Associates (ERA) Chair in the History of Technology, as a faculty member in the Program in the History of Science and Technology, and as professor of history of science and technology within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. For more information, see http://it.umn.edu/news/misa.html

11.14.05

Professor Ramesh Harjani has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for contributions to the design and computer aided design (CAD) of analog and radio frequency circuits." Professor David Lilja also was elected a Fellow "for contributions to statistical methodologies for performance assessment of computing systems."

The grade of Fellow is awarded by the IEEE Board of Directors to recognize extraordinary accomplishment in one of the fields of interest of IEEE. The total number of Fellows selected in any one year is limited to no more than one-tenth of one percent of the total IEEE membership.

10.10.05

Professor Bruce Wollenberg (center) is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering by W. A. Wulf, President of the NAE (left) and NAE Board Chair Craig R. Barrett, Chairman of the Board, Intel Corporation (right)."

10.07.05

Professor Rhonda Franklin Drayton has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the Ceramic Interconnect and Ceramic Micro Systems Technology Conference (CICMT). This group is co-sponsored by the Acers/IMAPS (Amercican Ceramics Society and the International Microelectronics and Packaging Society) organizations. These groups are dedicated to improving the industry's knowledge of ceramic technology for electronics and microsystems.

10.05.05

Professor Ahmed Tewfik has been elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. His term will run from January 1, 2006, through December 31, 2008.

8.19.05

Professor Chris Kim's paper, "A Low-Power Embedded SRAM Cache with PVT-Aware Leakage Reduction and Improved Read Stability," by Chris H. Kim, Jae-Joon Kim and Kaushik Roy was a winner in the low power design contest at the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design. The award will be presented at the symposium in San Diego on August 8-10, 2005."

8.17.05

The paper, "On the Duality of Gaussian Multiple-Access and Broadcast Channels," published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, May 2004, co-authored by Professor Nihar Jindal, Professor Siram Vishwanath (University of Texas, Austin), and Professor Andrea Goldsmith (Stanford University), has been selected to receive the IEEE Joint Information Theory/Communications Society Best Paper Award for 2005. The award recognizes an outstanding paper that addresses both communications and information theory and that has appeared in either a Communications Society or Information Theory Society publication. The award will be presented at the 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT '05) in Adelaide, Australia.

8.04.05

The faculty of the Electrical Engineering Graduate Program have made changes to the MS and MEE degree programs.

The Electrical Engineering MSEE Plan A (Thesis) Degree will remain as is without any changes.

The Plan B (Project) option for completing the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) Degree will be discontinued.

The Master of Electrical Engineering (MEE) (Professional) Degree will be discontinued.

Students who are presently doing an MSEE Plan B or MEE and are in good standing can complete their degree as planned.

A new MSEE Plan C coursework only option for completing the MSEE Degree with project, written report, and oral presentation course experience requirement will be created.

The changes will take effect Fall semester 2005

For more information see

http://www.ece.umn.edu/academics/grad-studies/ee/

7.29.05

Borealis III, the University's entry in the 2005 North American Solar Challenge (NASC), finished second by about 11 minutes to the University of Michigan's car in the 2,500-mile "rayce" for solar-powered vehicles. The 11-day event began in Austin, Texas, on July 17 and concluded in Calgary, Alberta, on July 27.

Although several schools held the lead at various times, Minnesota and Michigan were the primary leaders. The drama heightened during the last two days, when Michigan successfully appealed a penalty for speeding and regained the advantage, running neck-and-neck with Minnesota for most of the final morning.

A team of 46 University undergraduates members of the Solar Vehicle Project created Borealis III using a wide array of interdisciplinary technologies, including digital electronics, high-efficiency solar cells, composite materials, and efficient suspension systems unique to solar cars.


More information

6.24.05

Dr. Michael Hofer has received the best Ph.D. dissertation award from the Austrian Mathematical Society (OeMG). The award will be presented at the Joint Mathematics Meeting of the Austrian and German Mathematical Societies in September in Klagenfurt, Austria. Dr. Hofer currently is a postdoctoral research associate working with Professor Guillermo Sapiro in the ECE department. More information about the award is available (in German) from http://www.oemg.ac.at/

6.24.05

Professor Ned Mohan recently offered two internet-based short courses to over 1200 registrants, ``Electric Drives: From Basic Understanding to Advanced Vector Control and Encoder-less Direct-Torque-Control (DTC) Operation'' and ``Teaching Power Electronics to Undergraduates: Double the Breadth AND the Understanding.'' On-demand videos and additional information are available at: http://www.ece.umn.edu/groups/power/. DVDs of these courses are available at cost from http://www.bookstores.umn.edu/viewCategory.cgi?categoryID=110;curr_page=2 This work was sponsored by NSF grant no. DUE-0231119.

6.02.05

Professors Wang, Stadler, and Ruden have had articles chosen for publication in the Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science and Technology (http://www.vjnano.org). Originally published in the Journal of Applied Physics, their articles were subsequently selected for the Virtual Journal, which is published by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society in cooperation with numerous other societies and publishers. The Virtual Journal is an edited compilation of links to articles from participating publishers covering a focused area of frontier research. Participating journals include Nature, the Physical Reviews of APS, Applied Physics Letters of AIP, and the journals of the Optical Society of America.

6.01.05

The area of self-healing infrastructure pioneered by Professor Massoud Amin over the past eight years has been recommended by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as one of three thrust areas for the National Plan for research and development in support of Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). The recently released 2004 National CIP R&D Plan is available at: http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/ST_2004_NCIP_RD_PlanFINALApr05.pdf

5.19.05

Professor Georgios Giannakis recently received the Technical Achievement Award for 2005 from The European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing (EURASIP). This is the highest award given to an individual by EURASIP. It is awarded in recognition of a person's fundamental contributions to the advancement of science.

More information about EURASIP and this award is available from: http://www.eurasip.org/content/default.asp?page=s11

5.03.05

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering alumnus Dr. Liuqing Yang was named the winner of the University of Minnesota Graduate School's Best Dissertation Award in the Physical Sciences and Engineering in 2005. This is a considerable honor for Dr. Yang, her dissertation adviser, Professor Georgios Giannakis, and for the Graduate Program in Electrical Engineering. Dr. Yang's thesis, which she defended in June, 2004, is entitled, "Ultra-Wideband Wireless Communications: From Concept to Reality." Dr. Yang is now an assistant professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

4.30.05

Professor David Lilja will succeed Professor Mos Kaveh as head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, effective May 1, 2005. Kaveh, who served as department held since 1990, became college's Associate Dean for research and planning in March.

4.30.05

Professor Mostafa Kaveh, head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has accepted a three-year appointment as IT's Associate Dean for research and planning, effective March 1. Kaveh will continue to serve as department head until his successor has been identified, most likely sometime in April.

As Associate Dean Kaveh will be responsible for managing the college financial resources, including decisions on requests for matching funds. He will also work to identify and promote major research opportunities for IT faculty as well as to enhance collaborations between faculty and industry.

4.19.05

Professor E. Bruce Lee, 1932-2005

E. Bruce Lee, the Vincentine Hermes-Luh Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and an I.T. Distinguished Professor, passed away on April 15, 2005 at age 73.

Professor Lee studied mechanical engineering, earning the B.S. degree in 1955 and the M.S. degree in 1956 from the University of North Dakota, and the Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1960. He was with Honeywell, Inc. as a senior research engineer from 1956 till 1963, at which time he joined the University of Minnesota as an associate professor of electrical engineering. He was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1966, served as the Acting Head of the Department of Computer Science 1969-1970, as the Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, 1976-1982, and again as the Acting Head of the EE Department in 1983-1984. He was a founder of the Center for Control Science and Dynamical Systems, and was its Co-Director for many years. His other academic appointments included Visiting Professor, Caltech, 1968, Sr. Visiting Fellow, Science Research Council (England), 1968-1972, Visiting Professor, Technical University of Warsaw, 1976-1979, Universite de Montreal, Candada, 1978, and the University of Florida, 1983.

Professor Lee was long the leader of the Systems and Controls Group in Electrical Engineering, and the strength of his reputation in this area helped attract some of the most outstanding control scientists and engineers in the world to Minnesota, as well as help forge collaborations with faculty and students in several of the departments in the Institute of Technology. These departments include Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science.

As a leading educator and scholar in systems and controls, Professor Lee has supervised over fifty Ph.D. and numerous masters theses. His book, Foundations of Optimal Control Theory, Wiley, 1967, co-authored with L. Markus, is a classic in systems and control and is considered one of the most influential textbook in this area. The book has been translated into Russian and Japanese. Professor Lee^Òs additional professional recognitions include election as a Fellow of the IEEE in 1986 and election as a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2000. He has received the Warsaw University of Technology Medal for the development of control theory and establishment of cooperative research with Polish scientists.

According to Prof. Lee's wishes, the Lee Family has asked that in lieu of flowers donations be made to the Hartig Fund, Department of ECE, University of Minnesota Foundation.

In memoriam - Professor Ernest Bruce Lee, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Volume 25, Issue 4, Aug. 2005, p. 97.

4.6.05

On April 18, the Digital Technology Center, Computer Science and Engineering Department, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, The Institute of Technology, and The Carlson School of Management will sponsor the University of Minnesota IBM Day in the Great Hall of Coffman Memorial Union.

For further information see http://www.dtc.umn.edu/seminars/ibmday.html

4.5.05

Professor Heiko Jacobs has received a third 3M Nontenured Faculty Award in support of his research. The Award is designed to support new faculty members funded by the 3M Contributions Program. This award (in the amount of $15,000) is to be used for the performance of basic research in the physical and/or biological sciences.

2.13.05

Professor Bruce Wollenberg has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "Contributions to control centers for electric power grids and to power engineering education". NAE membership is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer. 74 new members and 10 foreign associates were elected this year.

1.25.05

The paper, "Robust Adaptive Beamforming Using Worst-Case Performance Optimization: A Solution to the Signal Mismatch Problem," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, February 2003, co-authored by Drs. S. Vorobyov and A. Gershman of McMaster University, and Professor Tom Luo has been selected to receive a Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The award will be presented next March at the 2005 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP'05) in Philadelphia.

1.18.05

Allen Nussbaum, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, passed away January 5 at age 85.

Prof. Nussbaum earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry (1939) and a master's degree in physics (1940) from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1941 to 1950 served in the U.S. Air Force as a radar officer and then earned a Ph.D. in solid-state physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. Nussbaum was a research physicist and manager at Honeywell Research Center in Hopkins, Minnesota, from 1953 to 1961, and the Head of the Solid State Division of American Electronics Labs, 1961-1962.

In 1962 Dr. Nussbaum joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department, where he specialized in the physics of heterojunctions and PN junctions, and advanced geometrical optics. His work in optics involved the behavior of lenses, mirrors, prisms, and their use in optical instruments such as microscopes, photographic lenses, bar code readers, and medical applications. He served the Department as the Director of Graduate Studies for over two decades until his retirement in 1988.

In addition to scientific and educational papers, Professor Nussbaum was the author of eight books, and served on the editorial boards of Solid State Electronics and IEEE Transactions on Education and was a Life Fellow of the IEEE. He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem (197172).

No memorial service has been scheduled for Prof. Nussbaum, however a memorial recital is being planned. Memorials are preferred to the Allen Nussbaum Scholarship Fund, University of Minnesota Foundation.

1.18.05

The paper "Fast PLL Simulation Using Nonlinear VCO Macromodels for Accurate Prediction of Jitter and Cycle-Slipping due to Loop Non-idealities and Supply Noise," by graduate students Xiaolue Lai, Yayun Wan, and Prof. Jaijeet Roychowdhury has received the Best Paper Award of the 2005 Asian South Pacific Design Automation Conference, (ASP-DAC), held January 18-21 2005 in Shanghai.

12.22.04

Professor Kiehl's research on DNA scaffolding for nanoelectronics was reported in the Science Daily on December 20, 2004. The article can be found in

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219133547.htm

12.20.04

Professor Jae Moon has been elected a Fellow of the IEEE, effective January 1, 2005, for "contributions to signal processing and coding for magnetic recording".

12.17.04

Prof. Guillermo Sapiro will serve on the editorial board of the SIAM interdisciplinary journal called "Multiscale Modeling and Simulation" (MMS), which was launched in 2003. The new journal focuses on the fundamental modeling and computational principles underlying various multiscale methods arising from different applications, including imaging.

11.16.04

Professor Keshab Parhi has been elected to serve on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS) for the period January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2007.

11.15.04

Xinmiao Zhang has won the First Prize in the Student Paper Contest at the 2004 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers held at Pacific Grove, CA, Nov. 7-10, 2004, for the paper "An efficient 21.56 Gbps AES Implementation on FPGA", co-authored with Prof. Parhi.

11.03.04

Professor Randall Victora has been elected the President of the IEEE Magnetics Society for the years 2009 and 2010. Professor Victora will serve the Magnetics Society as Secretary Treasurer in 2005 and 2006, and Vice President in 2007 and 2008.

10.28.04

Professor Beth Stadler was elected for a 3 year term to the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society (MRS). MRS has over 12,000 members worldwide.

10.11.04

Further Results on Selective Multiuser Diversity by L. Yang, M. -S. Alouini , and D. Gesbert received the Best Paper Award at the 7th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM 2004), Venice, Italy, October 7, 2004.

Lin Yang is a graduate student working with Prof. Alouini, and Prof. Gesbert is with Eurecom, France.

09.30.04

An article published in the August 2004 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) has received national attention by the press.

The PNAS article and reports in the Science News and the Dallas Morning News can be found at

http://www.ece.umn.edu/users/hjacobs/publications/PNAS2004.pdf
http://www.ece.umn.edu/users/hjacobs/publications/science_news2004.pdf
http://www.ece.umn.edu/users/hjacobs/publications/Dallas_selfassembly.htm

09.27.04

Register to attend:
Wind Workshop 2004: Utility Integration of Wind Power
The University of Minnesota
September 30 - October 1, 2004

Optional Tutorial:
Principles of Electric Drives for Harnessing Wind Energy
Wednesday Sept 29, 2004 - 4:00-6:30 p.m.

Sponsored by:
Xcel Energy
The National Science Foundation
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Center for Electric Energy
The University of Minnesota

For complete program information and convenient on-line registration visit http://www.cce.umn.edu/windworkshop

09.13.04

A one day symposium celebrating the discovery of the semiconductor laser in 1962, and exploring the future of semiconductor devices and photonics will be held on September 17, 2004. The Symposium commemorates Prof. Marshall Nathan's retirement from the ECE faculty, and is co-sponsored by IBM.

04.27.04

The paper, Space-Time Diversity Systems based on Linear Constellation Precoding, co-authored by former graduate students Dr. Y. Xin (now at the National University of Singapore), Dr. Z. Wang (now at Iowa State University) and Prof. G. Giannakis, published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 294-309, March 2003, has received the IEEE Marconi Best Paper Award.

The IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award is an annual award, sponsored by Qualcomm Inc., for an original paper in the field of Wireless Communications published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in the previous calendar year. Criteria of the award are: originality, utility, timeliness, and clarity of presentation. It is annually presented by the IEEE Communications Society Awards Committee Chair, in the name of the IEEE Communications Society, the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and the external sponsor of the award, at the International Conference on Communications (this year in Paris, France). The award comes with a Prize Plaque, honorarium of up to US $1000, and travel reimbursement of up to US $3000.

04.07.04

The Electrical and Computer Engineering Division of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) has selected Professor Keshab Parhi as the recipient of the 2004 Frederick Emmons Terman Award.

The Terman Award is bestowed annually upon an outstanding young electrical engineering educator in recognition of the educator's contributions to the profession.

The Award: The award is sponsored by the Hewlett-Packard Company and consists of a $4,000 honorarium, a gold-plated medal, a bronze replica, a presentation scroll and reimbursement of travel expenses for the awardee to attend the ASEE Frontiers in Education Conference, where the award is presented.

Qualifications: In light of the successes of Dr. Terman and those of his students (Dr. Terman served Stanford University in many capacities, including head of the electrical engineering department, dean of the school of engineering, provost, vice president, and acting president), the recipients of this award must meet the following requirements:

Be the principal author of an electrical engineering textbook published prior to June 1 of the year in which the author becomes 40 years of age and judged by peers to be outstanding by virtue of its original contribution to the field. Prof. Parhi's book is VLSI Digital Signal Processing Systems.

Have outstanding achievements in teaching, research, guidance of students and related activities.

Be an electrical engineering educator in the US or Canada under 45 years of age on June 1 of the year in which the award selection is made.

03.30.04

The Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota has selected Professor Georgios Giannakis as the recipient of its 2004 George Taylor Distinguished Research Award. The Award, which recognizes Professor Giannakis's wide-ranging contributions to research on signal processing for wireless communication systems and networking, will be presented at the Institute of Technology Pre-Commencement celebrations on May 7, 2004.

03.17.04

Professor Guillermo Sapiro is recipient of a University of Minnesota 2004 Distinguished McKnight University Professorship. Professor Sapiro is being recognized for his work in the areas of mathematical image processing and computer vision and applications to a wide range of areas including biomedical imaging and artistic image restoration.

The purpose of the Professorship is to recognize and reward the University's most outstanding mid-career faculty. Recipients are honored with the title Distinguished McKnight University Professor, which they will hold for as long as they remain at the University of Minnesota. The grant associated with the Professorship consists of $100,000 to be expended over five years.

03.01.04

The paper "High-speed Architecture for Parallel Long BCH Encoders," co-authored by graduate student Xinmiao Zhang and Prof. Parhi has been selected for the Best Paper Award of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2004). The award will be presented at the Symposium in Boston in April 2004.

02.09.04

Professor Bruce Wollenberg was part of a team from the IEEE Power Engineering Society that presented a tutorial on power system blackouts to staff personnel of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC on February 6, 2004. Titled "Blackouts 101", the tutorial dealt with electric power system fundamentals, the technology of the computer systems needed to protect power systems and engineering analysis of the August 14, 2003 blackout. About 40 people attended.

01.28.04

The paper Wireless Multicarrier Communications: Where Fourier Meets Shannon , by former PhD student Dr. Z. Wang (now a faculty member at Iowa State University) and Professor Giannakis, published in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 29-48, May 2000, has been selected to receive the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award for 2003. The Award, which will be presented at the annual signal processing conference, ICASSP'04, recognizes an outstanding tutorial paper published in the Signal Processing Society's monthly magazine, which is received by around 24,000 members of the Society.

01.20.04

Professor Heiko Jacobs was honored by the University as one of nine McKnight Land-Grant University Professors for the period 2004-06. Professor Jacobs was recognized for his ground-breaking program of research on "Non-traditional micro-and nano-technologies to enable the manufacture of novel devices". The Professorship provides the recipient with two years of research support and the possibility of a fully-supported sabbatical research leave.

01.08.04

Professor Tryphon Georgiou has received the 2003 George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society for the paper: "A generalized entropy criterion for Nevanlinna-Pick interpolation with degree constraint," co-authored with Prof. Christopher I. Byrnes (Washington University) and Prof. Anders Lindquist (KTH, Sweden), which appeared in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control in June 2001. The George S. Axelby Award is given annually to recognize up to three outstanding papers published in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control during the two preceding years. The paper by Prof. Georgiou and his co-authors was the sole winner in 2003. The award which consists of a plaque for each co-author was presented at the 42nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, held in December, 2003, in Maui, Hawaii.

Prof. Georgiou has received the Axelby Award twice before, in 1992 and in 1999, for papers co-authored with Malcolm Smith (University of Cambridge), and both times their paper was the sole recipient of the Award for the year as well. Professor Georgiou now holds the record of having received the Axelby Award three times.

01.06.04

Well over half the bits transmitted from the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) that has landed on Mars will consist of compressed image data gathered from the unprecedented nine cameras on-board each of two rovers. This compression is based on the ICER and the LOCO [1] image compression technologies. LOCO was developed by Dr. Marcelo Weinberger and Dr. Gadiel Seroussi from Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and Prof. Sapiro from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota (while he was at the HP Labs). The JPL/NASA hardware implementation of LOCO on-board the rovers is used when maximum geometric and radiometric fidelity is required. The LOCO technology, patented by Sapiro, Seroussi, and Weinberger at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, is also the core of the international standard JPEG-LS for the lossless and near-lossless compression of still images. More on the story can be found at http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2004/jan-mar/hp_mars.html.

[1] M. J. Weinberger, G, Seroussi, and G. Sapiro, The LOCO-I lossless image compression algorithm: Principles and standardization into JPEG-LS, IEEE Trans. Image Processing 9, pp. 1309-1324, 2000.

12.01.03

Professor Sachin Sapatnekar has been appointed as the first holder of the Robert and Marjorie Henle Chair in Electrical Engineering. A Fellow of the IEEE, Professor Sapatnekar received the 2003 Technical Excellence Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation. He and his co-authors also received the Best Paper Award from the 2003 Design Automation Conference (DAC).

The Chair was established by Robert and Marjorie's son David and his wife Joan. Robert Henle received his B.S. in 1949 and M.S. in 1951 in EE from the University of Minnesota. He was a pioneer in the development of all-transistor computers and the monolithic memory technology. He was an IBM Fellow, and the director of the Advanced Silicon Technology Laboratory at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the IEEE Edison Medal, Robert received the University of Minnesota Outstanding Achievement Award in 1989.

12.01.03

On December 1st the University of Minnesota was informed that its multi-university team was successful in attracting the National Nano Infrastructure Network (NNIN). NSF will provide $70 M over the next five years to support the network which ../../../includes Cornell (lead), Stanford, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Penn State, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Minnesota, Harvard, University of Texas at Austin, University of New Mexico, Howard, and in an affiliate role, North Carolina State University. NNIN's goal is to provide researchers across the country low cost access to nano capabilities. NNIN funding will be used to support the operation of multi-user facilities and to open up those facilities to subsidized usage by academics from outside the node institutions. In addition to concentrating on attracting usage by nano researchers in the upper Midwest, the Minnesota node will specialize in nano characterization and on nanoparticle and aerosol capabilities. The NNIN funding will be used to strengthen the operation of Minnesota's Nanofabrication Center (www.nfc.umn.edu) and Characterization Facility (www.charfac.umn.edu), and to support staff affiliated with the Particle Technology Lab (www.me.umn.edu/divisions/environmental/ptl/) who will open up the lab to a broader spectrum of users. Professor Steve Campbell (ECE), who directs the Nanofabrication Center, will act as the lead for the Minnesota node.

11.21.03

Professor Randy Victora has been elected a Fellow of the IEEE, effective January 1, 2004, for contributions to the exploration of magnetic and optical properties of materials and devices. Prof. Victora is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

11.07.03

Professor Kia Bazargan joins all the other assistant professors in the ECE Department (Rhonda Drayton, Heiko Jacobs, Bethanie Stadler, and Babak Ziaie) as a recipient of a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. Professor Bazargan's five-year award will support research on "Computer-Aided Design of Mixed ASIC / Reconfigurable Fabrics of the Nanometer Era".

10.21.03

Professor Keshab Parhi has been appointed the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-1 (CAS-1), effective January 1, 2004.

10.17.03

Professor Jacobs' work on nanoxerography, reported in the October 2003 issue of Nanotechnology has received considerable attention.

Professor Jacobs is the subject of the "In the spotlight" column of Nanobusiness News (Oct. 17, 2003) http://www.nanobusiness.org/whatsnew060303.htm.

This research was also reported in the October MIT Technology Review

10.16.03

Professor Massoud Amin has been in much demand by the press, technical and government organizations to speak on the security of large scale infrastructures and power delivery systems, particularly in light of the August Blackout. Prof. Amin's media interviews since August 14 include the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, SIAM News, the Scientific American and the Congressional Quarterly. His recent plenary and keynote talks on these subjects include the US Department of Energy 2003 Conference, The Santa Fe Institute, the IEEE and International Council on Large Scale Energy Systems, and a Congressional Staff Briefing hosted by the IEEE, ASME and the U.S. Energy Association. He is one of two speakers at the inaugural meeting of the House Research and Development Caucus on October 29, 2003, and will speak on Self Healing Power Delivery Systems.

10.15.03

The first of a series of annual workshops on wind energy was held at the University on Oct 8-10, 2003. The Workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Xcel Energy, NASA and the ECE Department, and chaired by ECE Professor Ned Mohan. A tutorial on Oct 8 had approximately 65 participants, and the workshop had approximately 150 participants. The mission of this workshop series is to bring together the developers, vendors, researchers and interested parties with the objective of discussing progress and technical challenges in harnessing wind energy at a large scale. Further information on the Workshop can be found at http://www.ece.umn.edu/groups/windworkshop2003.

09.04.03

The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) sponsored the SiGe Design Challenge that started in July 2002. Fifty nine university teams from across the world participated in this contest. The top 15 winning designs of Phase 1 were fabricated by IBM (IBM6HP 47GHz FT) and then tested by the students in each team. The Minnesota team, which had placed 2nd during the first phase of the design competition, placed 1st overall. The title of the design was "20 GHz Wide Tuning Range Low Noise VCO and Monolithic CDR Circuit". Team members were: graduate students Byunghoo Jung and Jaewon Kim, consultant Philip Cheung, and Professor Ramesh Harjani.

08.22.03

Professor Bruce Wollenberg, an authority on power systems, and Professor Massoud Amin, an expert on infrastructure security, were in demand by national and Canadian news services and other organizations following the Great Blackout of August 14. In addition to the local radio, TV and newspapers, Prof. Wollenberg was interviewed by the Washington Times, Philadelphia Daily News, Sripps Howard News Services and Bloomberg News Service. Prof. Amin's opinions on security issues related to the power grid were requested by the National Academy of Engineering, among others.

07.15.03

Professor Rhonda Drayton has been selected as a recipient of a 3M Nontenured Faculty Award. The $15,000 unrestricted award supports excellence in research by new faculty members in physical and/or biological sciences.

07.14.03

Prof. Sachin Sapatnekar is the recipient of the 2003 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Technical Excellence Award. According to the SRC, Dr. Sapatnekar's work in the area of the Analysis and Optimization of Signal and Supply Networks has significantly enhanced the productivity of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

The SRC Technical Excellence Award is given annually to researchers who, over a period of years, have demonstrated creative, consistent contributions to the field of semiconductor research, who are groundbreakers and leaders in their fields, and who are regarded as model collaborators with their colleagues in the SRC member community.

07.01.03

The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department will host an NSF sponsored workshop on teaching of power electronics and electronic drives.

Through NSF and NASA funding, the Professors Mohan, Robbins, Wollenberg, Riaz and Imbertson have been actively working on novel ways to reinvigorate the fields of power electronics and electric drives as enabling technologies. This development effort has resulted in new approaches and laboratories to teach these subjects, and student enrollments in relevant courses have tripled over their low points of a few years back. NSF has recently funded the group for a three-year period to disseminate this development nationally. The first faculty workshop will be held at the University of Minnesota during July 10-13, 2003.

06.09.03

The paper entitled " Random Walks in a Supply Network ," co-authored by Haifeng Qian, Sani R. Nassif and Sachin S. Sapatnekar has received the Best Paper Award from the 2003 Design Automation Conference (DAC). Haifeng is Prof. Sapatnekar's graduate student and Sani Nassif is with the IBM Austin Research Lab.

06.05.03

Professor Mohamed-Slim Alouini was the recipient of the George Taylor Career Development Award from the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota. This award recognizes exceptional contributions to teaching by a candidate for tenure during the candidate's probationary period.

05.07.03

Professor Bruce Wollenberg is the recipient of the 2002-03 HKN Outstanding Teaching Professor Award. This award is presented annually by the University of Minnesota Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, and is based on nominations submitted by undergraduate students to HKN.

04.29.03

ECE Professor and Executive VP and Provost Christine Maziar received a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus Award from Purdue University.

04.28.03

ECE Senior Honors Student John McKeen has been selected as the 2003 recipient of the Paul Cartwright and IT Alumni Society Award for Outstanding Service in student activities and community projects.

04.25.03

Professor Guillermo Sapiro and his group's research on Image Inpainting has received wide international news coverage. Links to the stories can be found at: http://mountains.ece.umn.edu/~guille/inpainting.htm

04.15.03

Professor Keshab Parhi has been selected by the IEEE Board of Governors to receive the 2003 Kiyo Tomiyasu Award for pioneering contributions to high-speed and low-power digital signal processing architectures for broadband communications systems.

04.11.03

Prof. Joey Talghader has received the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award.

04.10.03

Dr. Paul Imbertson has been selected by the IT Student Board as the Best Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2003.

04.01.03

Professor Massoud Amin received the 2002 Chauncey Award in March 2003. This award is the highest annual EPRI award and was given in recognition of leadership in creation and execution of the Infrastructure Security Initiative to secure the Nation's energy infrastructure

03.29.03

Professor Emad Ebbini's research on time-reversed ultrasound for medical applications was reported on in an article entitled "On the Rebound" discussing time reversal techniques, in Science News, March 15, 2003.

03.24.03

Prof. Heiko Jacobs' research has been in the news in the past few months. You can visit his web site at http://www.ece.umn.edu/users/hjacobs/HOJ_Pub.html for a complete list. An interesting recent one on nano-xerography, entitled nanoscale photocopies can be found in the Materials Update of the Nature Publishing Group at http://www.ece.umn.edu/users/hjacobs/publications/ naturenewnanoxerography/ naturenewsnanoxerography.html

03.15.03

Professor Kiehl and his collaborators' research on DNA for nano-device scaffolding has received coverage in the news. For example, see the EE Times article at http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030218S0065

03.03.03

Professor Emeritus Ray Warner has received the Paul Rappaport Award for his paper entitled: "Microelectronics: Its unusual origin and personality" published in the November 2001 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. The Award was presented at the December 2002 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco.

02.19.03

Prof. Heiko Jacobs has received an NSF CAREER Award for research on Directed Assembly of Nanoparticles; A Tool to Enable the Fabrication of Nanoparticle Based Devices.

02.18.03

Professor Heiko Jacobs received a 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award.

01.22.03

Ramesh Harjani's team of graduate students Byunghoo Jung and Jaewon Kim, and consultant Philip Cheung have placed second in the Phase 1 of the SRC SiGe Design Challenge for their paper "SiGe Low Noise Wide Tuning Range VCO/PLL for High-Speed Communication Circuits". The team will receive a check for the second place prize of $5K for the ECE Department at the upcoming International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). 59 contestants including teams from MIT, CMU, Caltech, UC Berkeley, Univ of Washington, UC Sang Diego, NCSU, U of Michigan, Delft U of Tech had submitted designs.

11.18.02

The IEEE Board of Directors, at its meeting on 17 November 2002, elected Professor Sachin Sapatnekar an IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2003, for contributions to the optimization of timing and layout in VLSI circuits.

11.15.02

Prof. Sapatnekar has received the IBM Faculty Award for 2002-03.