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October ]990 Volume- S. Number I

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BEnERTHANEVER

BEFORE!

EE News Welcomes Dr. Eye Riskin to UW

New Professor Joins EE Faculty

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The' UndergraduateScholarship Watch

The EE News would like to give awarm welcome to the EE Faculty'snewest member, Dr. Eve Riskin. Pro­fessor Riskin came to the UW lastmonth after receiving her Ph.D. fromStanford where she specialized inimage compression. She did herundergraduate work at MIT, finishingup there in 1984.

ProfessorRiskin chose the UW overseveral otheruniversities because ofits)eputation in medical imaging, its ex­.cellent medical school, and its locationwithin a large city. An obvious new­comer to the Puget Sound region whohas yet to experience the joys of thearea's famous late fall, winter, andspring months, she has not been toothrilled with the comparatively mildweather here for her first month.

Beginning winter quarter, Dr.Riskin will be teaching EE 595, acourse in data compression. In addi­tion, she has received funding for re­search in the compression of medical

In this issue:

New Professor Joins EE Department 1

Scholarship Watch 1

Fall 1990 Undergrad Admissions 2

Advising Office news 2

IEEEStudent Branch activities 3~, 1990-91 Scholarship Recipients .4

Northconl9O Report 5

Faculty and Department Activ ities 6

and binary images, and would like toencourage any students interested inthese fields to stop by and see her inRoom 310. She enjoys teaching, hav­ing been a T.A. for several courseswhile at Stanford, and thinks some ofthe qualities which make for a good in­structor include knowledge of thematerial, responsiveness to the class,the ability to see things from the stu­dent's perspective, and a good sense ofhumor.

Looking toward the future, she seesradiological workstations and auto­mated radiological pre-screening astwo of the big advances coming in herfield in the years to come. She islooking forward to getting settled inhere at the U, establishing herself inher teaching and research, and becom­ing involved as a mentor for otherwomen in engineering.

Again, welcome to the UW and theEE Department Professor Riskin!-DaleWi~on

Have you eaten breakfast lately?

Have you ever wondered what kindof scholarship aid the Department hasfor undergrads? How do you apply?How are the winners selected? Well,read on and I hope to answer thosequestions and more.

This current year a total of 22 stu­dents have received undergraduatescholarships through the Department,The total amount awarded is about$35,000 with awards ranging from$500 to $3600. Some of the awardscome from the College ofEngineering.A few companies (National Semicon­ductor, Chevron Information Technol­ogy, and Art Anderson) donate moneyspecifically for EE undergrads. Evensome EE alums have written checks tosupport scholarships. Another largesource is the Electric Energy IndustrialConsortium (EEIC) representingmany energy companies in the region.

In order to be eligible, you mustsubmit a COMPLElE ScholarshipApplication. In the past these havebeen due by March 1. I stress COM­PLElE because of the 55 applicationsreceived this year, a large number werenot. Typical problems were missingtranscripts, no signature, and incom­plete information on such things ascredits, citizenship status, and ex­pected graduation date . Incompleteapplications are not considered forawards.

You should also know that many ofthe awards carry restrictions. Ex­amples are GPA minimums, fields of

(seepage 4)

"Grounded in the Northwest"

Report from Northconl90The Northwest's largest exhibition and conference for

design, test and production engineers, also known as North­con/90, took place at the Seattle Center Coliseum on Octo­ber 9-11. As a joint venture of the Seattle and Portland sec­tions of IEEE, the Cascade chapter of ERA, and the Elec­tronics Manufacturers Association, the three-day eventaddressed the interdependence of engineering functionswith a unique blend of vertical exhibits, correspondingvertical technical sessions and professional seminars, ex­ploiting the latest engineering issues and technologies.

Over 300 companies and organizations, ranging fromwiring manufacturers to CAE developers, exhibited theirlatest and best in automated design tools, design, develop­ment, test and production software, and analysis instrumen­tation. The twenty technical sessions were divided into fourdifferent disciplines: Design, Leading-Edge Technologies,Manufacturing, and General Interest Some of the topicsdiscussed during these sessions included Fault Tolerance,Visual Systems, Neural Network Theory and Application,and Education and Training on the 1990's. A number ofprofessors from our department even participated in someof the sessions. (See article at right.) The 21 professionalseminars, on the other hand, incorporated lessons andhands-on experience on such issues as basic Ohm's Lawelectronics for purchasing, sales, and production and sup­port personnel, chemicals of the future, and "just-in-time"manufacturing. The special software demonstration ses­sions provided participants with even more opportunities toget their hands on the latest application programs.

Fonner EE News editor Ming Koh and I attended theconference on October 11tho On that day, we had theopportunity to see a Microsoft demonstration on a 386SXbased ffiM using Windows 3.0 with other Microsoft appli­cation programs. We learned about anew, powerful featurecalled Dynamic Data Exchange (DOE), which allows usersto update imported data by editing the original. Say, for ex­ample, you have imported a pie-chart from Excel into Word,and you decide to change the value of one of the pieces ofthe pie. IfExcel and Word are run simultaneously (multi­tasking), you can simply go to Excel, change the data, andthe pie-chart exported to Word will automatically be up­dated. According to Steven R. Smith, associate verticalmarketing manager, at least 1-2 megabytes RAM is recom­mended in order to have DOE perform without delays.

It was unfortunate that we were not able to see ourprofessors in action, but as an overall impression, both Mingand I agreed that it was "neat."

-KenSadahiro

Professors Participate in Northconl90Professors Arun K. Somani and Linda Shapiro put in

their time and effort to organize two of the twenty technicalsessions offered at the recent Northcon/90 engineeringconference. Professor Somani organized the technicalsession titled, "Fault Tolerance and High PerformanceSystems," (October 9) which mainly focused on the rele­vant issues and solutions in design and implementation ofsuch systems that require integrity. Professor Somanipresented the overview paper, in which he separated thefocus ofthe session into two parts: the processing problemsof a single-computer system, and the necessity and cost ofredundancy implemented in a multi-computer system. Healso discussed how redundancy can be reduced by usingparallelism available in multi-computer systems. The threefollowing papers, presented by professional engineers in the

"...it is averygoodindustrialshow,so I encouragemore people to attend."

Seattle area, were titled "Fault Tolerance in Multi-stageInterconnectionnetworks,""Reconfigurable FaultTolerantComputer System," and "Testability Analysis Tools."

Professor Shapiro organized a technical session titled"Visual Systems." (October 10) The session described therecent advances invisual systems research and applications.Professor Shapiro presented two papers during this session.She presented the third paperofthe session, "UsingTernaryRelationships Among Image Line Segments to RepresentTwo Dimensional Patterns," with Professor J. Henikoff,and the fourth paper, "Representing Morphological VisionProcedures in Predicate Logic," with ProfessorRobert Har­alick and graduate student Hyonam Joo.

When asked about the attendance to the technical ses­sions, Professor Somani replied, "they were not that wellattended." He even mentioned that Professor Shapiro wasdisappointed at the low turnout. He did, however, stress thepoint that, "it is a very good industrial show, so I encouragemore people to attend."

Also, Professor Robert Marks, together with AssociateProfessors Jeng-Neng Hwang and Les Atlas, presented apaper titled "Neural Network Research at the UW-RecentResults and Applications" for the Neural Network technicalsession (October 9). ....

~-KenSadahiro ~

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