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Volume 13, Issue 10
December 15, 2010


In this issue:


Season's Greetings

Dear Friends,

As the year of 2010 comes to a close, I would like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the role you play in the College of Engineering and for all the accomplishments you achieved this past year. Your commitment to excellence is one of the defining characteristics of our college, both on campus and worldwide. One of the joys I have as dean is meeting alumni, which gives me an opportunity to see how our institution has transformed their lives in such a positive way. We should all feel proud of our students and the impact we have on them.

I also would like to thank our staff for their efforts in making the restructuring and new "centers" come to life as smoothly as could be expected. I know there still are challenges ahead, but I am grateful for your commitment to making this work.

May you each have a joyous holiday filled with love and laughter, family and friends, and many precious moments and memories.

Sincerely,
Lance Collins
Dean of Engineering


Faculty meeting scheduled for December 20

The next College of Engineering faculty meeting will be held on Monday, December 20, 3:30–5:00 p.m., in the Memorial Room in Willard Straight Hall. The agenda will include an update on the state of the college. A reception will follow the formal meeting. All Engineering faculty members are encouraged to attend.


AV upgrades to be installed over winter break

Classroom AV upgrades will be installed over winter break in 101 Phillips, B17 Upson, and B11 Kimball. All three rooms will have clicker receivers, dual wireless mics, new projectors, and new switching and control systems. B11 Kimball will have a second projector on a side screen. 101 Phillips will have the option for a split screen image, a SMART tablet, and a new document camera. A SMART tablet is available for B17 Upson or B11 Kimball on request.

An “AV open house” to demonstrate the equipment will be held in these classrooms on January 20 on the following schedule:

  • 11:00–1:00, 101 Phillips
  • 1:30–2:30, B17 Upson
  • 3:00–4:00, B11 Kimball

Faculty may also schedule an appointment for an equipment demonstration. Contact Teaching Excellence Institute Director Kathryn Dimiduk for more information.


TEI teaching workshop features Michael Prince

Learn to re-engage students throughout your lecture, even 75 minute lectures. Cornell Engineering’s Teaching Excellence Institute 2011 January Teaching Workshop will include presentations by Prof. Michael Prince, co-director of the National Effective Teaching Institute with Richard Felder and Rebecca Brent and professor of chemical engineering at Bucknell University. The January 17 workshop will include the following presentations:

  • Forum: Uncovering and Repairing Student Misconceptions
    9:00–10:00, 245 Olin

  • Seminar: Does Student Engagement Really Work?
    11:00–12:00, 255 Olin

  • Lunch discussion with Michael Prince
    12:15–1:15,128 Olin

  • Workshop: Making the Transition to Active Learning
    1:30–4:00, 245 Olin

More information is available online. Please RSVP for to Kathryn Dimiduk for the sessions you would like to attend.

Prince's visit and presentations are co-sponsored by the Cornell Center for Teaching Excellence.


Study suggests how to improve engineering education

America's higher education system is widely regarded to be one of the largest and most flexible systems in the world. Despite this advantage, the U.S. is in danger of being outpaced by other countries in producing innovative scientists and engineers.  Enabling Engineering Student Success, a new report released by the Center for the Advancement of Engineering Education and available for download on their Web site, addresses this challenge by identifying key opportunities for improving how engineering students are currently being prepared for professional practice.


Expand your network: Join DPE on LinkedIn.com

Diversity Programs in Engineering is now on LinkedIn! If you are not already a member of LinkedIn, we encourage you to create a profile at www.linkedin.com and then join the DPE group (Cornell Engineering Diversity Programs to professionally network and stay connected with Cornell peers, alumni, industry partners, and other friends of DPE. Be sure to also check out the subgroups on the DPE page for Cornell AISES, NSBE, SASE, SHPE, and SWE.


Awards and honors in the Engineering community

ECE Professors Dave Albonesi and Steve Wicker were elected Fellows of IEEE. The grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE board of directors "upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest." Albonesi was recognized for contributions to power-efficient and adaptive computer architectures; Wicker was recognized for contributions to wireless information systems.

Assoc. Prof. Huseyin Topaloglu, ORIE, won the 2010 INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize, for his paper, Using Lagrangian relaxation to compute capacity-dependent bid prices in network revenue management.

Prof. David Williamson, ORIE, received a Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which promotes academic cooperation between excellent scientists and scholars from Germany and internationally, grants up to 100 awards annually to.  academics who have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.

Williamson, along with Prof. Eva Tardos, CS, and co-auuhors, won the Glover-Klingman Prize for the best 2009 paper published in the journal Networks, honoring their paper Approximating the Smallest k-edge Connected Spanning Subgraph by LP-Rounding.


Recent engineering news releases


Submitting announcements to Information Update

Please send your news notes to engr_info_update@cornell.edu. Announcements will be published no more than twice and should be limited to about a hundred words or less. The next issue of Information Update, published biweekly during the academic year and monthly in the summer, will be May 29, 2013. The deadline for submissions to this next issue is Friday, May 24, 2013 at 5 p.m. Information received after the deadline will be published in a future issue if appropriate.