The ECE Department is pleased to announce that ST Microelectronics has made a donation of 60 units of advanced 16-bit and 32-bit MCUs and development tools,along with all of the necessary training and technical support.  The hardware and software will be used to train students with skills for developing embedded applications and technologies.

The total value of the donation is estimated at $33,000.

The WOLF team in the Intelligent Systems Club lead by Professor N. Natarajan brought back three awards from the IGVC competition:

• WOLF was placed second on the navigation challenge (ties for first place but lost on time)
• WOLF was placed second in the coveted Grand Award.
• WOLF was placed third in the autonomous challenge. This is the flagship event of the competition.

Professor natarajan pointed out that WOLF may be unique in winning more in prize money than what  it cost to built it! Most robots in the competition cost upwards of $15,000 and WOLF costs less than $2000.

For information about the Intelligent Systems Club, go to http://www.umd.umich.edu/intelligent_systems

The faculty and students at the ECE would like to thank Mr. and Mrs. Jack M. Dickert for their generous donation towards the purchasing of lab equipment.  Modern lab equipment is vital to EE education and many students in ECE will benefit from this gift.  Mr. Jack Dickert graduated from the ECE department in 1964.  He and his wife Jan currently reside in Redondo Beach, CA.

ECE will offer the following new graduate course in Fall 2008:

ECE 5251: Multimedia Design Tools 1

This course will introduce students to basic concepts of multimedia. The fundamentals of digital images will be reviewed, such as color models, compression, and filtering. Various methods of image editing and enhancement will be covered including masks, gradients, filters, and image compositing. Vector graphics will be introduced, including SVG, Bezier curves, groups, and transforms. Character codes, and web-related technologies will be reviewed. Students will gain experience using software tools both for the analysis of multimedia data, as well as creating multimedia content. Matlab will be used for analysis and the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver will be used for content creation.

Advising: This course can be used as an elective for EE and CE students.

Course Instructor: Professor Paul Watta,  watta@umich.edu.

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Lecture time/day: 6:10pm - 9pm, Monday.