Department News

Newsletter of the Department of Electrical Engineering

Clark School Fastest Climbing Engineering Program in National Rankings

The University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering is the fastest rising engineering program in the country, according to U.S. News & World Report’s annual graduate program rankings. Although ranked just 37th in 1994, the Clark School’s graduate programs rose to 25th in 1995, 18th in 1997, and 13th in 1998 among all institutions, both public and private. The Clark School was ranked 8th among graduate programs in public institutions.

The graduate school survey included 219 accredited programs, which were ranked based on several measures of academic quality. The ranking criteria are as follows, with the weights of each measure appearing in parenthesis: reputation (40%), faculty resources (25%), research activity (25%), and student selectivity (10%).

Department Hosts Third Annual Research Review Day

The department hosted the third annual review of its research and education programs, called the Research Review Day, on May 7, 1998.

The day-long event, presented to industry, government laboratories, media, and local universities, attracted more than 160 people from around the country. This year’s event featured a morning session of talks, held at the University of Maryland University College Inn and Conference Center, and an afternoon of laboratory tours and technical poster presentations within the department’s facilities.

The morning session started with an introduction to the department and college of engineering by Prof. William Destler, Dean of the Clark School of Engineering. Prof. David Barbe, Executive Director of the Engineering Research Center, spoke next, providing attendees with a brief introduction to the Maryland Industrial Partnerships Program, which offers matching grants to industry for research collaboration with the Clark School. Ms. Heidi Sauber, Director of the Engineering Coop and Career Service Center, spoke next, about how the Clark School can help industry and the government to recruit students for internships, coops, and full-time employment.
Three electrical engineering faculty members presented their research during the morning sessions. Prof. Christopher Davis gave a talk entitled “It's a Small, Small World: New Research in Scanning Microscopy.” Nariman Farvardin, Professor and Chair, delivered a talk titled “Multimedia Compression: Applications on Wireless Channels and the Internet.” Prof. P. S. Krishnaprasad presented a talk titled “Control and Sensing: From Smart Machines to Smart Systems.”

A buffet-style lunch was accompanied by speaker and Maryland Alumnus Dr. Jeong Kim, Chairman and CEO of Yurie Systems. Kim spoke about how he founded Yurie, and about the advantages of Yurie’s proximity to Maryland.

The afternoon session featured tours of the department’s laboratories, as well as more than 160 technical poster presentations, displayed by both faculty and students.

Spring Distinguished Lecturer Series

Erich P. Ippen, Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visited the department on April 10 as a speaker for the department’s distinguished lecturer series.

His lecture, titled “Femtosecond Optics,” encompassed advances and applications of femtosecond-duration optical pulses over a wider range of wavelengths, and with compact, all-solid-state systems.
Ippen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the IEEE, and the Optical Society of America.

Random Graphs, Random Walks, Differential Equations and the Probabilistic Analysis of Algorithms
Richard M. Karp, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and an Adjunct Professor of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington, visited the department on March 20, in a lecture that was jointly sponsored by EE and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, as part of that group’s “Theory Day.”

His lecture, titled “Random Graphs, Random Walks, Differential Equations and the Probabilistic Analysis of Algorithms,” covered the probabilistic analysis of algorithms, the threshold for k-orientability, proofs of unsatisfiability for random 3-CNF formulas, and a number of techniques, including the use of differential equations, for analyzing random walks and other stochastic processes.

Karp is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.