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Greetings: Here is what has been happening in EE this last week: 1. Earlier this week, the National Security Agency designated the University of Washington a "National Center of Excellence in Information Assurance Education." The center involves faculty from the Institute of Technology at UW Tacoma, the UW Seattle's Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering departments, the UW Information School, UW Tacoma's Milgard School of Business, Pacific Lutheran University, Seattle University, Idaho State University, Highline Community College, Bellevue Community College, Olympic College and Shoreline Community College. Professor Radha Poovendra in our Department of Electrical Engineering has been one of the leaders in getting this center established, and he currently serves as the Associate Director for Research. Quoting the press release: "The center will become an axis for researchers, educators and practitioners from industry and government to work together in protecting networked infrastructures from all kinds of threats, including mobile program code attacks, worms, viruses and denial-of-service attacks," says Radha Poovendran, Associate Director for Research. "It will also focus on age-old protections like encryption, back-up and recovery, systems access control and disaster recovery. Further, it will be involved with incident forensics, providing another focus for those interested in fields dramatized in several popular television shows." Congratulations, Radha! This will be a critical resource for our Department and the UW as we forge the path ahead for network and wireless security. 2. Professor Karl Bohringer has been awarded the prestigious IEEE Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Karl's award citation reads: "for contributions to physical geometric algorithms and MEMS, with application to problems in parts manipulation and self-assembly." This award was presented to Karl on 2004/4/29 at the annual IEEE ICRA Conference. Only two of these awards were given out this year; the second went to Katsu Yamane. Congratulations, Karl! This is a great achievement! 3. Friday and Saturday (4/30 and 5/1) of this week were Engineering Open House. We had over 5000 high school students visit the College on Friday, and a large number of parents, guests, and other visitors on Saturday. It was a great success! Special acknowledgement and thanks goes to Helene Obradovich, for doing the initial planning and organization, and to Prof. Denise Wilson for organizing the EE theme of Past, Present, and Future, for preparing the EE Research Group posters, and for supervising the EE activities on both days. In addition to Denise, several faculty helped out significantly: Profs. Rich Christie, Mohamed El-Sharkawi, and Maya Gupta. Of our staff, Stephen Keating, Tom Jones, Rachel O'Brien, Lara Haas, Sekar Thiagarajan, and Peter Kim deserve a special thanks for their extra work. This event could also not have come off as well without the gracious and spirited help from our student volunteers. In particular, Lisa Hansen, Matt Johnston, Carina Leung, Radha Sampigethaya, Brian Antonich, Adam Mills, David Burnett, Andrew Moe, Melisa Meyer, and Scott Philips deserve special recognition for really going that extra mile and engaging our visitors. Numerous other student volunteers did a great job with making our visitors feel welcome. THANK YOU ALL - for helping to make EE look good, and to showcase our department to the next generation of future engineers. Well done, all. Enjoy! --Bruce Robert Bruce Darling, Ph.D., P.E. |