-COE News
-New Research Grants and Gifts
-Awards and Honors
-Industry Activities
-Seminars and Events
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-COE News
-New Research Grants and Gifts
-Awards and Honors
-Industry Activities
-Seminars and Events
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Dear alumni and friends:
We are off to a great start for the 2007-08 academic year!
Our undergraduate enrollment has continued to increase, reaching a five-year high of over 1700 undergraduates. The quality of our incoming students continues to be outstanding, given the very competitive nature of admission into our undergraduate programs. Although it is always very impressive to review statistics and charts summarizing our students, it is even more exciting to have a chance to meet and interact with our students in person. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to eat dinner with some of our undergraduate students in our newest dormitory, Stukel Towers.
Our students are an amazing group of individuals: diverse, creative, smart, and ambitious. Having a chance to hear some of their plans and dreams in a casual atmosphere was very energizing. Also, it is impossible not to see that these engineering students are just decent and nice young adults, who really want to make a positive impact on the world. By the way, Stukel Towers is the most beautiful dormitory I have ever seen. This year at UIC, over 50% of our freshmen now live in the dorms.
Our graduate and research programs are also off to a strong start. We currently have over 450 M.S. students and over 420 Ph.D. students. Over the last year we have graduated 64 Ph.D. students, up from 47 graduates the year before. Since July 1, we have received approximately 40 new research grants and contracts, including three multi-million dollar awards soon to be announced. Our research expenditures have increased 3.4% to over $20.8 million over the last year. While the increase is somewhat modest, the funding climate has been very difficult, particularly at the federal level.
On September 7, we also held one of our two biannual College of Engineering Advisory Board meetings. The Advisory Board plays a critical role in advising our College on matters related to industrial trends and engineering practice. The Advisory Board also plays a key role in strengthening our ties with industry and helping with our fundraising. The September meeting focused on the topic of “Materials and Nanotechnologies.” We had an excellent day of discussions and presentations, and began to discuss future actions for the Advisory Board to take. My sincere thanks to all of our Advisory Board members for the significant time they devote to serving our College!
Wishing you a pleasant autumn,
Peter C. Nelson
Interim Dean, College of Engineering
Computer Science
New Distributed High-Performance Pixel Streaming Feature Announced at GLIF Conference in Prague
An international team of computer and application scientists announced the results of a distributed pixel streaming experiment using the new Visualcasting feature of the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE).
SAGE is the Global Lambda Visualization Facility (GLVF)-adopted middleware developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL).
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College Of Engineering Research Report 2006-2007
Available Now http://www.engr.uic.edu/research/research.htm
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Engineering News Magazine Fall 2007 Edition
Available Now http://www.engr.uic.edu/en-magazine/index.htm
Andreas Linninger received a new NSF award for our brain research activities:
"Mathematical optimization for targeted macro-molecules delivery to the brain",
NSF, PI A Linninger, 2007-2010
Thanks to OVCR for their seed support in developing this new research field. This award completes a successful grant cycle with more than $1.8 Million of new awards last year for Linninger’s laboratory including:
"Modeling, Monitoring and Control of Hydrocephalus", NIH R21,
"Development of a volume sensor for the treatment of hydrocephalus", STARS,
"New Design Methods and Algorithms for Highly Energy-efficient and Low-cost Multi-component Distillation Processes", Department of Energy, and
"Integrated Design and Control Under Uncertainty", NSF.
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Barbara Di Eugenio has obtained new funding from the /Motorola University Partnership in Research/ program for:
“Intelligent Aggregation for Mobile Search.”
The project focuses
on developing resources and algorithms to perform aggregation, i.e., summarization of long lists of concepts. The problem is important for effective mobile search, since long lists can overwhelm small displays, are difficult to remember when spoken, and are difficult to navigate on a small device. The problem is challenging, since it touches on unsolved research issues. First, we will need to develop new algorithms to generate meaningful groupings of the items that appear on long lists; in many cases, such as aggregating email messages, the possible dimensions are too numerous to define a priori and must be dynamically determined. Second, mobile search cannot be conceived of as a sequence of isolated queries: a user will follow up to an answer from the mobile search engine with further requests. Hence, the system must be able to address new requests from the user that will refer to the entities dynamically created by the system.
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Sohail Murad, “GOALI:Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Membrane Assisted
Phase Equilibrium in Dilute Solutions,” NSF, $10,000, RET Supplement, 5/07-4/08.
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Kenneth Brezinsky (MIE), “Science-Based Design of Fuel-Flexible Chemical Propulsion/Energy Conversion Systems,” Air Force Office of Scientific Research (via Princeton University) 7/1/07-6/30/12, $881,000.
Kenneth Brezinsky (MIE), “Aromatic Radicals-Acetylene Particulate Matter,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 7/17/07-7/16/10, $410,911.
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Piotr Gmytrasiewicz - NSF IIS0713541 Decision Theoretic Planning $150,933 total.
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Venkat Venkatakrishnan received a grant of $125,000 to investigate CTER Runtime Techniques.
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Jon Solworth received a $100,000 grant from NSF to investigate “Factoring High Level Authorizations into Kernel.”
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David Yang (ECE), “Metamaterial-Based Antennas for Minitiarized Multi-Band Wireless Systems,” Bridge Wave Electronics, 07/01/07 - 06/30/09, $70,000.
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Danilo Erricolo, “Near Field Scanner for High Field for Electromagnetic Field Measurements,” AFOSR-DURIP, (Not sure of the exact dates) 07-08, $138, 000.
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Mitra Dutta, “Broadband LWIR C-IHET FPA,” Intelligent Epitaxy Incorporated, 10/01/07 - 04/30/08, $30,031.
Junlan Yang, a doctoral student in the ECE department at UIC, has been selected to receive the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) for her paper on "Robust Focused Image Estimation from Multiple Images in Video Sequences." The paper has been co-authored by Dan Schonfeld from UIC Electrical and Computer Engineering department and Magdi Mohamed from Motorola Research Labs. ICIP is the premier conference in image processing with over 1700 submissions received this year, of which about 765 were accepted.
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Sara Lee Corporation 
Senior executives from Sara Lee Corporation, a global manufacturer and marketer of high-quality, brand-name products for consumers throughout the world will be visiting UIC College of Engineering to review the capabilities and advances in the area of manufacturing, packaging and Engineering processes and explore joint research activities
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Department of Computer Science Seminar
DATE: Friday, October 5, 2007
TIME: 10:30 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.
PLACE: 412 S Peoria St, Chicago, IL 60607 (College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs Hall, Room 341)
TITLE: STaR: Smart Transport and Roads
SPEAKER: Dr. Glenn Geers Systems Engineering Manager, ITS Senior Visiting Fellow, School of Computer Science and Engineering National Information Communications Technology of Australia & School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia
Department of Bioengineering Seminar
DATE: Friday, October 5, 2007
TIME: 12:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room 236, SEO Building
TITLE: Two biomedical applications of numerical electromagnetics:
microwave breast tumor detection and interaction of light with retinal photoreceptors
SPEAKER: Milica Popovic, Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering- McGill U
Learn the Story Behind This Picture
Engineers Without Borders Gala Celebration
DATE: Saturday, October 6, 2007
College of Engineering Open House
DATE: Monday, October 8, 2007
TIME: 11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room 302, Student Center East, 750 S. Halsted Street
All interested students and parents must RSVP by Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, October 9, 2007
TIME: 11:00 a.m.
PLACE: 1043 ERF
TITLE: Bioenergy Initiatives at UIUC
SPEAKER: Professor Hans Blaschek
Director, Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research University of Illinois, Urbanaiversity of Maryland
Department of Bioengineering Seminar
DATE: Friday, October 12, 2007
TIME: 12:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room 236, SEO Building
TITLE: Geometric and Topological Methods in Molecular Shape Analysis
SPEAKER: Yusu Wang, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University
Department of Computer Science Seminar
DATE: Monday, October 15, 2007
TIME: 11:00 a.m.
PLACE: 1000 SEO
TITLE: Spatial Databases and Geographic Information Systems
SPEAKER: Professor Hanan Samet from University of Maryland
Department of Computer Science Distinguished Lecturer Series
DATE: Tuesday, October 16, 2007
TIME: 11:00 a.m.
PLACE: 1000 SEO
TITLE: The Challenge and Promise of Automated Reasoning
SPEAKER: Bart Selman, Cornell University
Department of Bioengineering Seminar
DATE: Friday, October 19, 2007
TIME: 12:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room 236, SEO Building
TITLE: Surface Plasma Resonance in the Analysis of Biomolecular Interactions
SPEAKER: Greg Jursich, Bioengineering Department Visiting Research Scientist
International Institute for Nanotechnology Symposium
DATE: October 24, 2007
TIME: 8:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Orrington Hotel Grand Ballroom
1710 Orrington Avenue Evanston, IL
Newsletter Editors, Carolyn Griffith and Nancy Singer
Please submit news items to cgriffi@uic.edu