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Greetings: Here is what has been happening since the last installment: 1. I hope everyone had a nice holidays over Christmas and New Years, as well as the bonus holiday that we had on Tuesday afternoon with the snow closure. Such snowfall doesn't happen all that often in Seattle, but it is beautiful when it does! 2. It is a pleasure to announce that the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity has been formally established at the University of Washington with the Department of Electrical Engineering taking one of the leadership roles under the coordination of Prof. Radha Poovendran. The center is set up as a collaborative effort between the different UW campuses (Seattle and Tacoma), the different Colleges of the campus (Engineering, Information School, and Arts & Sciences) and the different departments including EE, C&SE, and Urban planning. The Center will be a Pacific Northwest resource for the research, education, industry and government community that provides innovation and leadership in the protection of critical public and private information infrastructure, and provides well educated information assurance and cybersecurity at all professional levels. The Center plans to produce and be a catalyst for research, invention, innovation, education, public awareness, entrepreneurship, and economic growth in the state of Washington. The center was founded by several faculty on the various campuses across the Pacific Northwest, including Profs. Mari Ostendorf, Sumit Roy, Jim Ritcey, Hui Liu, Jeng-Neng Hwang, Ming-Ting Sun, Howard Chizeck and Radha Poovendran from Electrical Engineering, and Profs. John Zahorjan, David Weatherall, and Tom Anderson from Computer Science and Engineering. Prof. Radha Poovendran, who led the efforts from Electrical Engineering, will be serving as the Associate Director for Research for the Center. Click here for more information. Congratulations all!!! This is an exciting and timely new venture that is one of the first such centers in the nation. 3. There is a lot of buzz recently about Mars with the recent successful NASA probe landing. For those who would like to learn more about Mars space missions, I recommend visiting the Boeing Museum of Flight this Saturday, Jan. 10, for their MARS FEST. One of the keynote speakers for the MARS FEST, Robert Zubrin, a UW graduate, will also be giving a talk in A&A on Monday, Jan. 12, at 3:30 - 4:30pm in Guggenheim room 224, titled "Mars Direct: Humans to the Red Planet within a Decade." If you can't make it to either of these, you can, of course, check out the Viking Mars Lander that is located in our Electrical Engineering building on the second floor, just above the rotunda. 4. Welcome back, and I wish the best of success to everyone for the new year and the new quarter ahead! Enjoy! --Bruce Robert Bruce Darling, Ph.D., P.E. |