Press Coverage

• Communications Center Renamed Motorola Center for Seamless Communications, Observer, December 1, 2005
  
  

• Motorola Grant Funds NU Research Center, Daily Northwestern, September 23, 1998
  
  

• Motorola Awards $600,000 Grant, Money Will Be Used to Research Wireless Multimedia Devices, Northwestern University Observer, September 24, 1998.
  
  

• World Wide Wrist, Galvinized Innovation?, Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1998.
  
  

• Motorola Helps Pave Way for Student Research
  
  

Motorola Grant Funds NU Research Center

By Chris Argyris (The Daily Northwestern, September 23, 1998)

Northwestern professors and Motorola Inc. engineers are set to work in the university's new telecommunications research center in an effort to extend the capabilities of wireless communications.

The Northwestern-Motorola Center for Telecommunications, which was introduced earlier this month, was financed by a $600,000 grant from the Schaumburg-based corporation.

The grant is intended to strengthen Motorola's relationship with NU through the development of technology important to the university, said David Rudd, Motorola's corporate communications manager.

It's a win-win deal for Northwestern and for Motorola," Rudd said. "People are very mobile these days and want devices to go along with them -- scheduling, sending faxes, accessing e-mail, Technology is changing rapidly with people's needs and this partnership is a move to keep pace.

Aggelos Katsaggelos, NU professor of electrical and computer engineering, will serve as the director of the center in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. He said researchers hope to improve current telecommunications equipment.

NU professors Majid Sarrafzadeh, Chung-Chieh Lee, Abraham H. Haddad, Horace Yuen and Michael Honig will join Katsaggelos in his research efforts.

NU's close proximity to the Motorola headquarters makes for an ideal partnership, said Ira Uslander, McCormick's director of industry relations.

"They are practically in our backyard, so it's a great opportunity for our professors and their engineers to get together and share a great deal of information," Uslander said.

The wireless data effort is one of five projects funded by the Motorola grant. Other projects include improving data security programs and the speed and efficiency of telecommunications devices.

Motorola awards $600,000 grant

Money will be used to research wireless multimedia devices

By William Burton (Northwestern University Observer, September 24, 1998, Volume 14, Number 2)

A $600,000 grant from Motorola will fund research the design of wireless multimedia devices and protocols in a new Northwestern-Motorola Center for Telecommunications in the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The grant, according to Motorola's relationship with Northwestern and to develop technologies that are important to the university and that Motorola can draw on.

"The projects will be collaborative and will also involve Motorola researchers," said Mikulski, who is senior director of Motorola's corporate research laboratories.

The goal of several of the projects is to develop the technology needed to extend hand-held wireless communication beyond just speech and alphanumeric data as is now used for cellular phone calls and paging, according to Aggelos K. Katsaggelos, Ameritech Professor of Information Technology and professor of electrical and computer engineering at McCormick.

"We would like to be able to transmit over wireless channels multimedia data that could include audio, images, graphics and video," said Katsaggelos, who will be director of the new center. "To do so, we need to devise ways to efficiently compress and encode the data and present it to the wireless channels with error protection or fault tolerance."

Some projects will also have applications for wired networks. Katsaggelos's own project is to develop efficient coding algorithms to compress video signals for transmission over a wireless channel but also over the Internet, so that users will receive video at quality level appropriate to their connection speed and the resolution of their TV or computer screen.

The other Northwestern investigators, all in electrical and computer engineering, and their projects are:

Professor Majid Sarrafzadeh will design application-specific processors for image and multimedia signals that combine high quality with small size, low power consumption, fast design time and speed of manufacture.

Professor Chung-Chieh Lee, with Abraham H. Haddad, the Henry and Isabelle Dever Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering, will investigate efficient means of allocating wireless channel resources to multimedia network traffic including voice (phone calls), packet data (e-mail and Internet access) and video (video conferencing).

Professor Horace Yuen, with Srikanta P.R. Kumar, associate professor, will investigate the use of physical rather than mathematical-based systems for encryption of data for security and privacy.

Professor Michael Honig, with Katsaggelos, Lee and Scott Jordan, associate professor, will investigate methods for supporting wireless multimedia communications.

Their work is aimed at enhancing the capabilities of current wireless technologies, such as Code-Division Multiple Access, which is now used for mobile cellular voice services.

World Wide Wrist

Galvinized innovation?

(Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1998)

With CEO Chris Galvin vowing to restore Motorola Inc.'s plummeting stock process, the Schaumburg-based electronics Goliath that brought Dick Tracy his two-way wrist radio back in the 1930s is now at work on the Northwestern University campus with a research product to add cellular video calls to Dick's watch.

NU's Aggelos K. Katsaggelos said $600,000 in new Motorola grant money will go to finding ways to compress video clips and then send them over the air to play out on tiny screens on cell phones and other portable electronic gizmos.

Motorola Helps Pave Way for Student Research

By Megan Fellman

Thanks to a recent $50,000 cash gift from the Motorola Foundation, electrical and computer engineering students are taking advantage of undergraduate research opportunities like never before.

"The Motorola gift has allowed us to whet the appetites of bright students with the challenges and rewards of research," said Prith Banerjee, chair of the electrical and computer engineering department. "It is my hope that the research experience will encourage more undergraduates to attend graduate school."

The gift will be distributed over five years to the department, with approximately half of the money each year, or $50,000, going to support students and faculty in an undergraduate research program. Juniors and seniors team up individually with a faculty mentor to work on a research project of their choice. If their proposal is funded, both student and faculty member earch receive a $2,500 stipend over two quarters.

The program is competitive. This year 13 of 20 student proposals were funded. The program was designed to fund 10 each year, but, in this round, Banerjee found that impossible. "We decided to fund 13 proposals instead of the intended 10 because they were all excellent and deserved to be chosen," he said.

During the course of the winder and spring quarters, the students will work closely with their faculty mentors in conducting research ranging from wireless communication to sensor devices for robot control. On June 2, the students will travel to Motorola to present their results to some of Motorola's top corporate executives.

"Motorola love the program because they can tap the bright minds of our students," said Banerjee. "The students are attracted to the program because of the connection with Motorola. And the faculty are already actively recruiting students for next year."

The other development Banerjee is excited about is the launching of the department's first distinguished lecture series, also made possible by the Motorola gift. The series will bring six top researchers to Northwestern each year, one from each of the six areas within the department. Banerjee also plans to create a mentoring program, where junior faculty can spend time with the distinguished speakers one-on-one during their campus visits.

The $500,000 gift also will support a graduate recruiting initiative, allowing the department to offer an extra stipend to the very best first-year graduate students; an annual design competition; and an annual department open house to be held each May.