Dear Colleagues, Message from the Editors-in-Chief.pdf

1 looking.forward The IEEE Computer Society’s Student Magazine Spring 2004 Vol. 11, No. 1 Message from the Editors-in-Chief Antoine AZAR Alain Patrick MEDENOU école Polytechnique de Montréal (Québec, CANADA) IEEE Poly Computer Society antoine.azar@polymtl.ca medenou@ Dear Colleagues, Welcome to the spring 2004 edition of the electronic magazine Looking.Forward. The student branch of the IEEE Computer Society of the école Polytechnique de Montréal (Quebec, Canada) is very excited to be hosting this edition, and has chosen to publish it under a theme of diversity. This diversity is expressed both through the range of topics of the articles and through the two publication languages. As a first in the history of Looking.Forward, this edition contains articles both in French and in English. This aims to express the spirit of the école Polytechnique de Montréal, the largest French-speaking engineering university in North America, and to also offer an opportunity to our francophone audience to read scientific articles written in the language. This magazine includes two articles in French, both about communications networks. The first article presents the MPLS routing protocol, which is of great use to designers of next- generation networks. The second article presents an empirical performance study of IEEE 802.11 wireless networks, and proposes improvements by the introduction of quality of service concepts. The three other articles of the magazine are in English. The first one of these introduces a method for complete graphics-card based processing of a scientific numerical simulation. The second article, in artificial intelligence, presents the AdaBoost algorithm, which allows the boosting of hypotheses of a weak learning 2 looking.forward algorithm. Finally, the third article dives in the multidisciplinary world of robotics, by studying path-tracking