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Professor Mikko Lipasti was selected as one of three honorable mention recipients for the 1999 Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Young Electrical Engineer award. A single award and honorable mentions are presented annually. Selection is based on an application and up to five letters of recommendation. IBM-Rochester management nominated Lipasti prior to his joining the ECE faculty in computer architecture in fall 1999.
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Professor James E. Smith was the 1999 recipient of the Eckert-Mauchly Award consisting of a certificate and $5,000. The honor is awarded jointly by the Association for Computer Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding contributions to the field of computer and digital systems architecture. The award recognized Smith "for fundamental contributions to high-performance micro-architecture, including saturating counters for branch prediction, reorderbuffers for precise exceptions, decoupled access/execute architectures, and vector supercomputer organization memory and interconnects."
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Professor Charles Kime recently completed the second edition of Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals, (M. Morris Mano and Charles R. Kime, Prentice Hall, Inc., 2000) The new edition features introductory coverage of both VHDL and Verilog hardware description languages.
Professor John Booske was selected Outstanding ECE Instructor by Polygon Engineering Council for the 1999-2000 academic year.
ECE professor Franco Cerrina (left) describes his research to Governor Tommy Thompson during a tour of the college's Biotechnology Center. |
Professor Franco Cerrina and a team of UW-Madison researchers developed a new process for making gene chips, which allows scientists to analyze thousands of genes at once, quickly and inexpensively. The team consists of professors Fred Blattner (genetics and director of the Genome Center), and Michael Sussman (horticulture, genetics and director of UW Biotechnology Center); and researchers Yongjian Yue (ECE), Roland Green (Environmental Toxicology Program), and Sangeet Singh-Gasson (now at Motorola). The process reduces the time needed to make one chip from several weeks to a few hours. NimbleGen Systems, a company founded by Blattner, Cerrina and Sussman, will commercialize the technology.
ECE faculty that have expertise in signal processing and communications, computer and communication networks, computational electromagnetics, and radio frequency (RF) devices are working on a multidisciplinary effort in wireless communications.
The breadth of the effort is a unique feature of the college's wireless communications program. The goal is to fully integrate wireless channel modeling, antenna and RF device/circuit design, signaling and reception techniques, dynamic resource allocation for quality of service management, and fast simulation techniques for overall performance assessment and optimization.
A group of five ECE department faculty members (Rajeev Agrawal, Susan Hagness, Parameswaran Ramanathan, Akbar Sayeed and Barry Van Veen) received initial funding for multi-disciplinary wireless communications research through a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Integrating Antennas, Receivers, and Networks in Mobile, Wireless Communications." NSF's 1999 Wireless Information Technology and Networks Program provides the funding.
Professor Robert Lorenz was named Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE, Industry Applications Society for 2000/2001. He currently serves as vice president and president-elect of the IEEE Industry Applications Society for 2000 and will serve as society president starting in January, 2001. Lorenz is the technical program chair for the IEEE, IAS 2000-World Conference on Industrial Applications of Electrical Energy to be held in Rome, Italy, October 8-12, 2000.
A paper by Professor Fernando Alvarado is included on a list of the 39 "highest impact papers of the century" (1900 to 1999) in the area of power systems. "Penalty Factors from Newton's Method," IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. PAS-97, No. 6, November-December 1978, pp. 2031-2040 was selected by a panel of electrical engineering professors. The intent is to select from among this list the four highest impact papers of the century and to have them presented at the 2000 North American Power Symposium in Waterloo, Canada this fall.
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The Journal of IEE(Japan) recently invited Grainger Professor of Power Electronics and Electrical Machines Thomas Lipo to write the contributing essay for its lead page. Lipo wrote the essay for the May, 2000 issue. The Journal of IEE (Japan) is a monthly magazine subscribed to by more than 30,000 members of IEE (Japan) and is similar to the IEEE Spectrum. Key leaders in industry, including the presidents of Toshiba Corp, Tokyo Electric Power Corp, Fujitsu Corp and Mitsubishi Electric Corp, typically write the essay. The last American to contribute an essay was IEEE President Charles Alexander.