The Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Manijeh Razeghi will give an invited talk on Monday, May 6^th, in Charlotte, North Carolina at “Superlattice Workshop Development of Man Made Electronic Materials and Devices: Past and Future,” in honor of Dr. Raphael Tsu’s 80^th birthday and 25 years of service at UNC-Charlotte.  http://opticscenter.uncc.edu/superlatticeworkshop .

Northwestern University hosts the 2nd Greater Chicago Area Systems Research Workshop (GCASR), which will be held on Friday May 3rd at Louis Room, Norris University Center. Nikos Hardavellas from EECS is this year's Program and General co-Chair. 

The workshop is tasked with increasing communication and synergy amongst the computer systems research community in the greater Chicago area. The program features a keynote from Pete Beckman, Director of the Exascale Technology and Computing Institute at Argonne National Labs, and co-Director of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering.

Ken Forbus gave a talk at Google last week summarizing his group’s work on the Companion cognitive architecture and how it may be a step towards human-level AI.  The Companion architecture is exploring the idea that analogy and qualitative reasoning are central in human cognition.  Companions have been used in many learning tasks, including solving physics problems and playing a variety of games.  Companions have also been used to model conceptual change, as found in prior studies of human students.  For more information on Companions and the research of the Qualitative Reasoning Group, please see http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/.

Nikos Hardavellas gave an invited talk at Google on building virtual macrochips using photonic interconnects. This technology allows several smaller chips to be combined and form a larger virtual chip capable of housing thousands of cores. The virtual chip can break past conventional power and bandwidth limitations and reach scales impossible to realize with conventional technology, while at the same time retaining simpler packaging, power, and heat requirements.

This is joint work with Prof. Gokhan Memik and Prof. John Kim at KAIST. Read more about Prof. Hardavellas' research at his website: eecs.northwestern.edu/~hardav/

The Baltimore Chapter of IEEE Electron Devices & Solid-State Circuits is hosting a special meeting at UMBC featuring Dr. Manijeh Razeghi from the Center for Quantum Devices at Northwestern University.  Dr. Razeghi will discuss quantum engineering of semiconductor atomic structures for biosensing. Her talk is entitled “Quantum Engineering of Semiconductor Atomic Structures for Biosensing”. 

 

Manijeh Razeghi will travel to Baltimore to give two invited talks at SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing (DSS) Conference (http://spie.org/x6770.xml). They are titled: "High-performance bias-selectable dual-band mid-/long-wavelength infrared photodetectors and focal plane arrays based on InAs/GaSb Type-II superlattices" and "High-performance bias-selectable dual-band short-/mid-wavelength infrared photodetectors and focal plane arrays based on InAs/GaSb/AlSb Type-II superlattices".  Co-authors on both papers are lab members Abbas Haddadi, Anh Minh Hoang, and Guanxi A. Chen.  

EECS professor Manijeh Razeghi (pictured at right) gave a tour of her Center for Quantum Devices lab to Bernard S. Myerson, IBM's Chief Innovation Officer, when he was at Northwestern University to present a Dean's Series Seminar. 

EECS professors Brenna Argall (pictured, at right) and Seda Ogrenci Memik delighted a group of kids this morning with their robots and patient explanations of how they work. The occasion was part of Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day, an annual event organized by the NU Women's Center.

Aggelos Katsaggelos will be a speaker and a panelist of the panel "Video Analytics in the Wild: Practical Considerations in Large-Scale Deployment" on Friday April 26, 2013. The event is organized by Motorola Solutions as part of the BIG DATA WEEK. Details can be found at bigdataweek.com/videoanalyticsinthewild. The event will be streamed live. Registration is required at the above URL.

Michael Honig and Dongning Guo, co-PIs, received a $90,000  gift from Cisco to pursue research on their project "Graph-Based Modeling and Algorithms for Interference Mitigation." They will be working on advanced receiver technologies for future generation WiFi systems.

Goce Trajcevski gave two invited talks in Australia last week, presenting On the Links Between "D" and "A" in Mobile Data Analytics in Brisbane and Sydney.  The first was at the inaugural MoDA (Mobile Data Analytics) workshop, associated with the International Conference on Data Engineering - ICDE 2013 - and the second one was with the University of New South Wales.

Aggelos K. Katsaggelos will give an invited talk called "Image Reconstruction" at the June meeting of COSI 2013 in Arlington, Virginia. Read more about the Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging conference at this link: COSI 2013.

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.

In September Prof. Cossairt will head to Nürtingen Germany for the 7th International Workshop on Advanced Optical Imaging and Metrology, or Fringe 2013 and present his talk entitled

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. 

BY: SARAH OSTMAN | March 29, 2013

JiveHealth, a video game startup founded by a McCormick student to promote healthy eating habits in kids, took first place this month in an anti-obesity competition hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama.

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.

Paul Voss (PhD '03) was awarded tenure in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Georgia Tech. Paul's full title is the Demetrius T. Paris Professor and Assistant Professor of Optics and Photonics.

While at Northwestern Paul studied under the supervision of Prof. Prem Kumar, director of the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing.  His current research at Georgia Tech involves the development of novel and improved devices and systems for optical communications and for quantum communications.

Congratulations, Paul!

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. 

Jack Tumblin, associate professor, and PhD candidate Dev Ghosh will visit the Art Institute of Chicago's Conservation Department on March 22 where Dev will present his dissertation research work, tentatively titled "Semi-Automated Assembly of Metric Mosaics with Guaranteed Error Bounds" (from digital photo sets taken by uncalibrated, lens-distorted cameras from many different unknown camera poses).

Manijeh Razeghi gave a seminar titled "The Future of Type-II Superlattices for Multi-Color Imaging, and Other Advanced Research at the Center for Quantum Devices" at the Army Research Lab on Friday, March 15th.  The program is funded by DARPA.

Jorge Nocedal, Professor in the Industrial Engineering Department with a courtesy appointment in EECS will speak at UIUC on March 27 as part of The Illinois Distinguished Lecture Series in Operations Research.  Prof. Nocedal's talk is entitled "Optimization U t he Science of Big Data".

LaserFocusWorld | February 2013
Manijeh Razeghi and her group at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) have created a new, high-performance infrared (IR) imager that combines detection in both the shortwave and midwave IR (SWIR and MWIR) in one device—a quality particularly valuable for tracking and reconnaissance.¹ The device is based on a III-V semiconductor-based type-II indium arsenide/gallium antimonide (InAs/GaSb) superlattice (T2SL) structure, which previously had only been implemented for MWIR and longwave IR (LWIR).

Hooman Mohseni has been elected as a Fellow Member of the Optics Society. He is among the regular OSA Members who have significantly contributed to the advancement of optics and photonics are eligible for election to the rank of Fellow.  

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#)

 

AquaLab researchers find that paying for high download speeds may not always improve your web performance and investigate how to effectively compare ISPs' offerings.

Paying for higher download speeds may not improve your web performance; it also depends on the pages you visit.

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.

Alumna and game designer Robin Hunicke (www.linkedin.com/) has been nominated for 8 BAFTA awards for the groundbreaking game Journey, for which she was producer. Robin Hunicke's advisor while at NU was Professor Ian Horswill.  Her website is http://www.funomena.com/

EECS professor Kristian Hammond, co-director of the Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern University, appeared on WTTW 11 Chicago Tonight in a segment on cyber privacy, "Google Email Under Fire in Microsoft's "Scroogled" Campaign.

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

SPIE Photonics West Show Daily | Wednesday February 6, 2013
The ongoing challenges of developing short-wavelength QCLs were described by Neelanjan Bandyopadhyay of Northwestern University in an OPTO session on the topic.  "Wavelengths of 3 to 3.5 microns are important for several different spectroscopy applications, because it coincides with many hydrocarbon absorption bands," he said.

Yan Chen was invited to serve as the TPC Co-Chair for the first International Workshop on the Security of Embedded Systems and Smartphones (http://doe.cs.northwestern.edu/SESP/), co-located with the 8th ACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2013.