2013 Annual Magazine
INSPIRE CONNECT INVENT
infinite possibilities Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
2013 Annual Magazine The University of Arizona Electrical & Computer Engineering Department P.O. Box 210104 Tucson, AZ 85721-0104 520-621-6193 head@ece.arizona.edu
ece.arizona.edu The annual ECE magazine is published for alumni and friends of the University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering. All contents Š 2013 Arizona Board of Regents. All rights reserved. The University of Arizona is an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution. The University prohibits discrimination in its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and is committed to maintaining an environment free from sexual harassment and retaliation.
Edited by Karina Barrentine Designed by David Hostetler Photography by Pete Brown, Karina Barrentine and Jonathan Santos
Table of Contents 2 11 16 18 22 24 28 30 31 32
Featured Research Faculty Awards Wireless Technology Faculty Accomplishments Faculty List Student Awards Department News Featured Supporter Supporters Industrial Advisory Board
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Moving Forward to Inspire, Connect and Invent Dear Friends, It has been my pleasure and a great honor to serve the UA’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department this last year. As my first ECE Annual Magazine — a new format for the Annual Report — goes to press, I am inspired by all of our achievements and by all who have contributed to these successes. ECE faculty, students and staff are all grateful to our alumni, corporate partners and other friends. Your support makes possible student scholarships, faculty endowments, and research equipment and facilities. Likewise, the members of our Industrial Advisory Board provide valuable insight and advocacy and help us stay connected to industry needs. Thank you all for your continued support. You are critical to the department’s success and the success of our students.
Researchers Tackling Grand Challenges
Research expenditures for 2012-2013 are at $7.8 million. Despite a difficult federal environment, we have secured several large grants and contracts, with $11 million awarded in summer 2013 alone. From cybersecurity, bomb detection and autonomic vehicles to cancer imaging, portable diagnostics and solar power, we are inventing technology to tackle society’s grand challenges. You can read about some of the projects starting on Page 2. Additionally, the UA-led NSF Broadband Wireless Access and Applications Center, covered on Pages 16 and 17, launched in summer 2013 and is poised to help pave the way for 5G technology and beyond. We owe a debt of gratitude to our initial BWAC industry sponsors: Agilent, Avirtek, Raytheon, Rincon, Hydronalix and Space Micro.
Rankings Up as Department Grows
The department has moved up a few notches in the national rankings: 31st in computer engineering and 35th in electrical engineering. Enrollment is on the rise with a 100-percent jump in graduate students. Top companies worldwide continue to recruit heavily from among our undergraduate and graduate students. And, in our increasing efforts to meet the educational needs of working professionals, ECE launched an online master’s program in fall 2013. We also hired three excellent faculty members in fall 2013: Jinghong Chen, associate professor; Kay Thamvichai, professor of practice, and Onur Ozan Koyluoglu, assistant professor. Four more faculty hires are expected in fall 2014.
Award-Winning Faculty and Students
Our faculty, students and staff are the best and the brightest. This magazine, beginning on Page 11, features just a few examples of the strides they have made. Jonathan Sprinkle received a 2013 National Science Foundation Career Award for his work in cyberphysical systems. Three faculty members have been named fellows by their professional organizations: Kathie Melde and Bane Vasić with IEEE and Wolfgang Fink with AIMBE. Congratulations to Hal Tharp and Hao Xin for being named 2013 Arizona Engineering Fellows and to all of our undergraduate and graduate students alike who are winning top University honors, co-authoring internationally recognized professional papers, and playing key roles in entrepreneurial endeavors.
Looking Forward to Seeing You
Finally, stop by and visit with us during Homecoming festivities November 8 and 9. If you can’t make it this year, consider scheduling a department tour next time you are in the area. We look forward to seeing you and to a stellar future. With your help, we will continue to inspire students, connect with industry and invent new technology to meet society’s greatest challenges. Warm regards
Tamal Bose
Department Head UA Electrical and Computer Engineering
Jonathan Sprinkle Works to Streamline Cyberphysical Modeling In highly interconnected and complex ways, cyberphysical systems integrate computers with the real world. They enable us to control things in our home while we are away, invent new kinds of medical monitors and treatments, and expand our air transportation capabilities. They have to be able to communicate in real time and predict how long computations will take. Unfortunately, that’s much easier said than done. So ECE’s Jonathan Sprinkle is working on streamlining the process. “We know how to build cyberphysical systems; we just do not know how to build them in an efficient, costeffective way,” said Sprinkle, a 2013 National Science Foundation Career Award winner. “Almost all large cyberphysical systems projects go over time and over budget.”
the drawing board well into the process. The goal of Sprinkle’s research is to make it easier to build cyberphysical systems by using new kinds of programming languages that are based on graphical models. The tools Sprinkle and his team are developing will automatically change the graphical models to fix problems well before the testing phase. The UA’s Cognitive and Autonomous Test vehicle will serve as a test bed for the new modeling techniques. By the time a group of high-school students, many of whom are not even old enough to drive, get the keys to the robotic car later in the project, the new modeling techniques are expected to ensure safety.
Professor Jonathan Sprinkle speaks with a local television reporter about his work with the UA’s Cognitive and Autonomous Test vehicle.
Because of the complexity of cyberphysical systems, traditional modeling and analysis tools are unable to effectively predict system behavior. Each cyberphysical system, with its complicated mix of controls, communications and computations, must be built from scratch, and problems most often are not identified until the testing phase, which can send developers back to
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“We want to build models so that we know by the time the models verify themselves that they are going to be safe,” Sprinkle said. “I know the students are going to use the car safely because we are only going to allow them to generate safe code.” Here’s how it will work: A few dozen 10th-graders from Tucson’s Flowing Wells and Sabino high schools will write computer code that controls certain aspects of the car’s performance, such as how it maneuvers around a slalom-like course marked by cones. Sprinkle’s
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This optical sensing mechanism sits atop the robotic vehicle.
code-verification software will ensure safety constraints, such as velocity, steering angle and distance from cones before the car can even start its engine.
“We know how to build cyberphysical systems; we just do not know how to build them in an efficient, cost-effective way.” Professor Jonathan Sprinkle
Satisfying these sorts of task-specific design requirements in cyberphysical systems is critical for tomorrow’s smart buildings, smart power grids, home health care, and water management, Sprinkle explained.
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Research
Robotic Car Gives Undergraduates Chance of a Lifetime
TECH UPDATE:
Google’s experimental driverless cars are zipping around California’s Silicon Valley. Toyota, BMW and other automakers are debuting prototypes of self-driving cars. And students participating in a UA research program headed home after a 2013 summer program having done their part to help make robotic vehicles safer and more reliable.
Team Heads to Market with Cost-Limiting Thermostat Jonathan Sprinkle, Susan Lysecky and their research team have developed a heating and cooling thermostat that enables homeowners to decide temperatures based on their budgets. The cost-limiting thermostat means no surprises when the electric bill lands in the mailbox, at least not for energy used to cool and heat a home, which typically accounts for more than half of a homeowner’s utility bill.
The National Science Foundation program, Research Experiences for Undergraduates, provides opportunities for undergraduates to work with faculty mentors and graduate students at universities throughout the United States. Ten students from across the United States and Puerto Rico participated in the 10-week University of Arizona REU program focused on advancing the CAT, or Cognitive and Autonomous Test, vehicle.
“The goal of the REU program is to broaden the participation and research much further than it traditionally has been,” said Jonathan Sprinkle, who led the program. “When the students left here, they knew what research was and how interested they were in doing research.” While students were weighing whether research was right for them, they were also gaining experience in wireless networks, cognitive radio technologies, embedded control systems and algorithms, sensory data processes and sensor fusion.
When the temperature schedule or monthly budget is changed, the cost-limiting thermostat displays how one affects the other.
“Most people just set their thermostat temperature in the desired range then get a bill at the end of the month with no understanding of how they correlate,” said Sprinkle.
The new costlimiting thermostat provides real-time feedback on temperature-cost correlation and puts consumers in control of balancing their comfort and budget. “They can trade off the costs of keeping a home cool or warm depending on how comfortable they want to be,” said Lysecky.
Learning all the new programming and software for the CAT vehicle in just a few short weeks was challenging even for those who love computers and programming.
The thermostat technology involves establishing customized home model and prediction algorithms based on continually updated environmental data inside and outside the home. Programmed into the thermostat is information on what temperatures residents prefer during different times of the day, week and month. The technology monitors the weather outside and learns temperature-related characteristics of the home itself, and over time it determines how long the heating or air-conditioning unit would need to run to keep the house at a particular temperature.
“But it’s something that I like,” said Miguel Angel De Jesus, a student at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, “I could be in all day working on it, and I would not mind.”
“Then it advises the user: To get the best temperature for your dollar, this would be the daily schedule,” said Sprinkle.
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Mark Neifeld, Ivan Djordjevic on Team for Navy’s Quantum Key Encryption System $1.86 Million Award to Help Overcome Low Data Rates, Atmospheric Interference With the help of a U.S. Department of Defense award and the laws of quantum physics, Mark Neifeld and Ivan Djordjevic are working to give secret-keepers the upper hand against code-breakers. Six researchers at four universities have won a multimilliondollar Department of Defense award to explore quantum key encryption methods far more advanced than cryptography technology in use today. The UA portion of the award is $1.86 million. The five-year project is a combined effort between the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the project lead; Duke University; Boston University; and the UA.
Quantum key distribution, or QKD, uses quantum mechanics to guarantee secure communication. It enables two parties to automatically produce a shared random secret key known only to them, which can then be used to encrypt and decrypt messages sent over a standard communication channel. “One of the simplest approaches to QKD,” Neifeld explained, “involves two parties sharing entangled photon pairs via optical fiber.” Traditional key distribution security methods leave communications networks vulnerable to cyberattack because those doing the attacking can figure out how to crack the complex mathematics underpinning these methods. Quantum key distribution, however, uses light particles. According to the laws of quantum physics, such encryption keys are inherently secure. “QKD relies on the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics to ensure that the encryption is impossible to break,” said Neifeld, who along with Djordjevic holds joint appointments in ECE and Optical Sciences.
In the realm of quantum physics, the mere act of observing an ultrasmall particle influences the physical processes taking place. So an eavesdropper trying to intercept a quantum communication inevitably would leave detectable traces. Any attempt to steal the key would reveal the hacker’s presence and prompt the QKD to abort generation of the key. QKD has been proven in laboratory and controlled environments, and there are a few efforts under way to commercialize QKD technology. However, it is not without its challenges in the real world, especially when it comes to sharing the key. Some of the issues are associated with photon detection, transmission distance, and rate of key generation. This project will take a number of approaches to overcoming the challenges. “When we succeed at this project, we will have a secure method of communication through the air between ships and air vehicles at data rates sufficient to support realtime exchange of secret information,” said Neifeld.
DHS Awards Mark Neifeld and His UA Team $3.7 Million to Advance Detection of Bombs in Aircraft Baggage Most travelers checking their bags for a trip are thinking about getting where they are going. Not Mark Neifeld. He is thinking about how to develop better mathematical tools to improve baggage scanner bomb detection. Neifeld and his multidisciplinary team have been awarded $3.7 million, in two separate proposals, from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to advance X-ray detection of explosives, especially emerging homemade bombs, in checked baggage aboard commercial aircraft. Building on their U.S. Department of Defense work in KECoM, or Knowledge Enhanced Compressive Management, Neifeld’s research team will develop an information-theoretic system design, based on the mathematics of compressive measurements, to more efficiently detect explosives. Airport X-ray systems are not optimized for the detection of
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improvised explosive devices, explained Neifeld. They collect far more visual information than is needed because they do not effectively differentiate between the clutter and the threat. “In such a highly resource-constrained environment, it is critical that all measurement resources be directed toward the optimal extraction of task-relevant information,” he said. The system under development will enable the collection of less data but much more relevant information, and the process will be quicker. It is expected to increase detection rates of explosives, while reducing the cost of X-ray scanning. Neifeld’s co-investigators on the project include Amit Ashok, who holds a joint appointment in the College of Optical Sciences, Ali Bilgin, who holds a joint appointment in biomedical engineering, and Michael Gehm, who recently joined the faculty at Duke University.
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Research
Hao Xin’s Research Team Advancing Bomb Detection and Breast Cancer Screening Averting destruction caused by homemade explosives will likely involve high-tech systems that can identify concealed bombs from a distance. With a $1.5 million U.S. Department of Defense award, UA researchers are adapting their breast cancer imaging research for detection of embedded explosives.
Hao Xin, principal investigator on the 2013 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, award, says the same advanced technology he and his colleagues have been creating for early breast cancer detection is now being developed to rapidly detect explosives in opaque, or nontransparent, materials. The types of materials often used to conceal explosive devices – mud and meat, for example – share a trait with breast tissue: high water content, which makes it difficult
to identify objects or abnormalities using existing ultrasound or microwave imaging techniques. Ultrasound images show a clear shape, but the properties cannot be delineated. Microwave images have contrast, but shapes are not clear. The new hybrid technology will combine the advantages of highcontrast microwave imaging with highresolution ultrasound imaging to detect improvised explosive devices. The technology also mitigates the harmful radiation effects of traditional X-ray imaging and works without making contact with the material in which the explosive is concealed. “We take advantage of both technologies and avoid the disadvantages to increase detection specificity,” said Xin, director of the UA Millimeter Wave Circuits and Antennas Laboratory. The 18-month renewable project, titled Thermoacoustic Imaging and Spectroscopy Method for Explosive Detection at Standoff, sends microwaves into a target, which locally heats up distinct objects or tissues differently, then the quick thermal expansion generates an ultrasound image that is identified using a novel spectroscopic process.
“The new imaging technique will help us better identify abnormalities in tissue and could significantly reduce the need for diagnostic biopsies, increase the rates of early breast cancer detection, and improve treatment outcome.” Professor Hao Xin Like bomb detection, breast cancer detection has seen myriad advancements in recent years, with a number of competing technologies emerging. But none has overcome the challenges associated with identifying the specific properties of abnormal tissue. Mammography, today’s gold standard for breast cancer imaging, fails to detect breast cancer in as many as a quarter of the cases where it is later confirmed, according to various scholarly and medical sources. Thus, Xin and his team expect this
research will also advance their work in breast cancer imaging. “The new research and imaging technique will help us better identify abnormalities in tissue and could significantly reduce the need for diagnostic biopsies, increase the rates of early breast cancer detection, and improve treatment outcome,” said Xin. Joining forces with Xin are his co-investigator, Russell Witte, assistant professor of radiology, biomedical engineering and optical sciences; Raytheon; the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and a handful of exemplary graduate students and graduate research assistants. “A large research university like the UA allows people across disciplines to collaborate with industry on projects like this that have the potential to save lives on many fronts,” said Xin.
A UA research team led by ECE Professor Hao Xin (third from right) and co-investigator Russell Witte (second from right), assistant professor of radiology, biomedical engineering and optical sciences, will apply new breast cancer imaging technology to bomb detection.
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Linda Powers Developing Disposable Tests for Blood-Borne Disease Building on research that sent her biking across Tanzania a couple of summers ago to test remote water sources for bacteria, Linda Powers is moving into the diagnostic realm. The Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Bioengineering is developing fast, disposable blood tests for pathogens that cause diseases such as HIV and hepatitis.
“This will save time, work and expense when detection of blood-borne disease organisms is needed and other facilities are not available. It quickly tells you the information you must know.” Professor Linda Powers
The novel technology for rapid pathogen detection in blood relies on the capture of the pathogens with specially designed binding mechanisms and the intrinsic fluorescent signatures of the live captured pathogens. “This will save time, work and expense when detection of bloodborne disease organisms is needed and other facilities are not available,” said Powers, who holds appointments in biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering. “It quickly tells you the information you must know.” Powers’ company, MicroBioSystems of Arizona, was awarded two Department of Defense contracts in 2013. One contract is for developing
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a disposable blood test to detect any pathogens present. The other will distinguish the specific pathogens, including viruses that cause HIV, some forms of hepatitis, prions that can lead to mad cow disease, and malaria-inducing parasites. The military has plans to use the technology in the field, for example in remote locations to test for infectious agents in blood to be used for transfusions. However, disposable blood tests for diseases such as HIV and hepatitis could also save countless lives in developing nations and even in remote areas of the United States. Now blood samples must be sent off to labs, where microbe specimens are grown and analyzed, before they can be used in medical procedures. This is a time-consuming process, especially in life-or-death scenarios. With this new technology – which combines molecular, electrical and optical engineering – blood drawn or acquired with a finger stick will go directly into a small, disposable unit for analysis in real time. Among Powers’ UA collaborators are “Janet” Meiling Wang, principal investigator and ECE professor; Walter Ellis Jr., a research professor in biomedical engineering; and a number of dedicated and talented graduate students.
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As curious local children look on, Professor Linda Powers (right) and a UA graduate student use a portable instrument designed by Powers to test water taken from the Kilombero River in Tanzania. (Photo by Kurt Paterson, Michigan Technological University)
Globetrotting Professor Whether she is using a hand-held sensor to find microbial communities six feet under arctic ice; backpack-size instrumentation to identify cholera- and diarrheacausing bacteria in Tanzanian well water; tiny equipment atop drones to discover what microbes are kept aloft in Atacama Desert volcanic plumes; or a new disposable instrument to detect bloodborne pathogens; there is no doubt that somewhere in the world Professor Linda Powers will be making a difference.
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Research
TECH UPDATE:
Offering a Hand of UA Friendship to Small Business Linda Powers’ company, MicroBioSystems of Arizona, was awarded two Department of Defense subcontracts. She had the technology to build on, but she credits UA College of Engineering Dean Jeff Goldberg with making the arrangement a reality and enabling her team to expand on their work. “He really made this happen,” said Powers. “What an incredible extension of a hand of friendship to small businesses in the Valley. He is very supportive of entrepreneurships and farsighted enough to realize the opportunity with a new, small company in Southern Arizona.”
Professor Linda Powers, shown here in the Arctic with one of her instruments, is taking her portable technology to a new level: diagnostics, checking blood for disease. The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Professor Raymond Kostuk and one of his grad students, Isela Howlett, test the new bench-top imaging instrument for ovarian cancer.
Raymond Kostuk, Former Coast Guard Lieutenant, Is Doing the Best Work of His Life Holographic Imaging System for Early Detection of Ovarian Cancer Reaches Milestone Raymond Kostuk, who holds a joint appointment in ECE and Optical Sciences, and his research team have developed a bench-top version of an instrument capable of detecting ovarian cancer, a disease often referred to as the “silent killer” because it presents no symptoms until it is highly advanced. The bench-top version of the volume holographic imaging system, which shows promise for detecting ovarian cancer in situ, uses specialized holographic components in a microscope to generate images capable of detecting subtle tissue microstructure changes as well as fluorescent biochemical signatures.
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Working with Dr. Kenneth Hatch, of the UA’s College of Medicine, and his consenting patients, as well as researchers in the UA’s BIO5 Institute, Kostuk and his co-investigator Jennifer Barton, who now holds the position of associate vice president for research at the UA, have completed a study of cancerous and noncancerous ovarian tissue in which the imaging system successfully identified abnormal spatial and spectral markers of cancerous ovarian tissue removed during surgery. Now the research team is working on a miniature endoscopic version that further enhances imagery, achieves even greater contrast, and is capable
of reliably diagnosing ovarian cancer in real time during noninvasive laparoscopic procedures and screenings. “The instrument is cost effective, easy to use, and holds the promise of saving lives,” said Kostuk. Only 45 percent of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer live more than five years after diagnosis, according to the National Institutes of Health. Surviving ovarian cancer, which spreads quickly and is known to attack generations of women in genetically predisposed families, depends on early diagnosis. To date, there is no single effective screening test for ovarian cancer. Noninvasive imaging methods lack
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sufficient resolution to detect ovarian cancer, so surgically removing affected tissue is the only way to diagnose the rapidly progressive disease. The result is that more than 50 percent of women with ovarian cancer are diagnosed in late stages of the disease. The National Institutes of Health has provided significant funding for the research, and Kostuk is in the process of seeking renewed funding. Patents and invention disclosures have attracted the attention of several investment groups. “Commercialization of the instrumentation may not be far off,” said Kostuk.
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Research
New Approach to Developing More Efficient Solar Energy Systems Is Paying Off Looking for energy? Raymond Kostuk’s Photonics Systems Lab is the place to find it.
susceptible to power fluctuations in cloudy weather and do not work at night. Solar thermal converters, which heat liquid with solar He and his research team are busy illumination then later convert the doing everything in their power to stored heat to electricity, are less make solar energy more efficient reactive to changes in sunlight, but they are most efficient on a large scale “Being able to make a contribution to and take up something that is going to help people considerable space. motivates me to be successful.” Professor Raymond Kostuk
and affordable so it will be adopted, sooner rather than later, for widespread use.
“We believe that both types of converters will be needed to make a reliable, cost-competitive solar energy conversion system,” said Kostuk.
Solar energy costs about five times as much as fossil fuel energy, and a typical solar energy system only converts about 15 percent of available sunlight into electricity, Kostuk explained.
Kostuk, working with a local solar energy company, has already designed an optical concentrator, a thin holographic film, to replace half of the expensive photovoltaic cells on a rooftop system at about one
percent the cost of the photovoltaic cells. Kostuk’s team also has been successful using a holographic element to trap light in a solar cell so that more light is absorbed and converted to electricity. Now Kostuk is working on ways to capture more of the solar spectrum and putting holographic elements to work for a combined photovoltaic and thermal solar energy converter. The thermal converter acts as energy storage to offset fluctuations in photovoltaic cell output and provide electricity in the evening hours. Work in the Photonics Systems Lab is funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Science Foundation Arizona, TRIF Renewable Energy Network, and the Research Corporation.
“What we want to do is dramatically increase the conversion efficiency and at the same time apply techniques that will drive down the cost,” he said. Using holographic optical components to manage the sunlight in two types of solar converters — photovoltaic systems and solar thermal converters — Kostuk and his team are seeing success. Photovoltaic systems, which directly convert sunlight into electricity, work well on a small scale, but they are
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Research Researchers Going Undercover to Identify Cybercriminals Cloaked in the anonymity of the online world and motivated by profit and retribution, more and more cybercriminals all over the world are joining forces to launch sophisticated, coordinated attacks on government and industry. In fact, cybercrime, one of the fastest growing areas of criminal activity, is costing the world between $300 billion and $1 trillion every year, according to 2013 government and industry reports.
“If cybercriminals do not have the capability to accomplish what they want, they just purchase it on the cyber black market.” Professor Salim Hariri
Bolstering the burgeoning cybercriminal activity is an online shadow community with the sole purpose of buying, selling, and trading the strategies and tools, such as code and applications, for cybercrime.
software — to track cybercriminal communications in social media and online as well as profile and identify influential cybercriminals and hackers. Hariri will lead the development of honeypots — traps set to detect unauthorized use of information systems — and autonomic monitoring and analysis tools to track hacker activity and assess their command-and-control infrastructures. “Understanding the underground cybercrime community and how it operates,” said Hariri, “will help put businesses and governments on the offensive.”
“If cybercriminals do not have the capability to accomplish what they want, they just purchase it on the cyber black market,” said Salim Hariri, an expert in autonomic computing and cybersecurity and co-investigator on two 2013 National Science Foundation grants for cybersecurity advancements, totaling $5.4 million.
Hariri joins principal investigator Hsinchun Chen, UA Regents Professor in Management Information Systems and a world leader in security informatics research, and co-investigator Tom Holt, criminal justice professor at Michigan State University.
One of the keys to staying in front of cybercrime, researchers say, is improving behavioral analytics to identity and respond to emerging cyber threats. As part of a $1.2 million NSF grant, a multi-university research team will develop an integrated computational framework — and associated algorithms and
Hariri also joins principal investigator Chen and coinvestigators Mark Patton and Paulo Goes, of UA Management
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Information Systems, on a $4.2 million grant to create a new cybersecurity scholarship-for-service program at the UA. The goal of the program is to graduate more students, particularly students from Arizona with minority backgrounds, who are highly proficient in cybersecurity and risk management. As part of the project, Hariri will lead the development of an online AskCypert portal for teaching educators and students about cybersecurity.
Professor Salim Hariri will use autonomic agents and anomaly behavior analysis to detect cybersocial activities of hackers by continuously monitoring their activities using forums and IRC, or Internet Relay Channels, messages.
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Faculty Awards
UA Technology Innovation Award Honors Salim Hariri’s Advancement of CyberSecurity As a young boy in Syria, Salim Hariri spent his time building tiny radios and dreamed of one day becoming an electrical engineer. Today he is a cybersecurity expert known in academic and government circles for his ability to think outside the box and far beyond the constraint of today’s computer systems. For his work in cybersecurity autonomic computing technology, the University of Arizona recognized Hariri, director of the National Science Foundation Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing, with a 2013 Technology Innovation Award. “He and his research team are advancing technology that has the potential to revolutionize how the world manages, secures and protects its cyberresources,” said Tamal Bose, ECE department head.
From the transistor radios of his boyhood to complex cybersecurity systems, Hariri’s entrepreneurial
“The litmus test is whether the research will result in something somebody can pick up and use.” Professor Salim Hariri
contributions stem from a desire to make something useful and make a difference. “The litmus test,” Hariri said, “is whether the research will result in something somebody can pick up and use.”
Richard Ziolkowski Joins Elite Group with Denmark’s Honorary Doctorate Degree from Technical University Richard Ziolkowski has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Technical University of Denmark. In a letter to Ziolkowski, the president of the Technical University of Denmark, Anders Bjarklev, wrote: “The Academic Council of our University has decided to confer upon you the degree doctor technices honoris causa, which is the highest honour our University can confer.” Ziolkowski has several connections with the Technical University of Denmark, many of them formed through the IEEE Propagation
Society, of which he is a past president, and through graduate students and visiting doctoral students. “The list of previous recipients is rather daunting,” said Ziolkowski, who is the Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Professor. “It includes some famous engineers and scientists.” Ziolkowski’s research team is creating a variety of first-of-theirkind electrically small antennas based on metamaterial concepts that are impacting a number of wireless/mobile platforms. The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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From Key Chains to Cyberphysical Systems Jonathan Sprinkle Wins 2013 Career Award Ask Jonathan Sprinkle about winning a 2013 National Science Foundation Career Award, and he’s likely to tell the story about an AutoCAD program and milling machine that came to his high school. The machine had nothing to do with the cyberphysical systems work for which Sprinkle is being recognized but everything to do with where he is today. Sprinkle and a friend hacked the software and reset the machine to cut a 3-D figure of a sports car, instead of the Plexiglas key chain it was set up to produce, then output dozens of copies. The experience propelled Sprinkle into the world of engineering. “I never would have been an engineer if that key-chain maker had not come to my high school, said Sprinkle, an ECE assistant professor. That’s why as part of his research, Sprinkle will give the keys of a fullsize autonomous ground vehicle to high school students so they can test new cyberphysical systems modeling techniques intended to
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guarantee safe operation of the vehicle. “By involving students in the design of behaviors of the vehicle, the project exposes scientists and engineers of tomorrow to societal-scale problems and tools to address them,” he said. The National Science Foundation Career, or Early Faculty Development, Award is the NSF’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty members who demonstrate outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Sprinkle’s award includes a $460,000 grant over five years to support his educational activities and research. “His work is at the forefront of thinking about systems that run themselves,” said UA College of Engineering Dean Jeff Goldberg. “This project will help bring to fruition futuristic ideas such as cars that drive themselves and mobile patient monitoring and treatment devices.”
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Professor Jonathan Sprinkle is building new cyberphysical systems to control cars that drive themselves, and he is giving high-school students the keys to the car.
See Page 2 for more on Professor Sprinkle’s research.
“By involving students in the design of behaviors of the vehicle, the project exposes scientists and engineers of tomorrow to societal-scale problems and tools to address them,” Professor Jonathan Sprinkle
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Faculty Awards
Kelly Simmons-Potter Named Chair of ACerS Division Kelly Simmons-Potter, professor of electrical and computer engineering and optical sciences, has been named 2013 chair of the international, 400-member Glass and Optical Materials Division of the American Ceramic Society. As chair, she is responsible for all division business, including scientific programming, professional and student awards, editorial publications, annual reports, and oversight of the division’s two annual meetings. Simmons-Potter’s research interests lie in the area of linear and nonlinear response of optical materials and devices to ionizing and nonionizing radiation. See Page 24 for more on Professor Simmons-Potter’s research.
Wolfgang Fink Class of 2012 AIMBE Fellow For his outstanding contributions in the field of ophthalmology and vision sciences with particular focus on diagnostics and artificial vision systems, Wolfgang Fink was elected to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering College of Fellows. AIMBE fellows are nominated each year by their peers and represent the top two percent of the medical and biological engineering community. Since October 2009, Fink has been an associate professor and the inaugural Edward & Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair in Microelectronics at the UA in the departments of electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering, systems and industrial engineering, and ophthalmology and vision science.
Ahmed Louri Completes NSF Program Directorship Ahmed Louri, an IEEE Fellow, has completed a three-year appointment as computer architecture program director for NSF’s Computing and Communication Foundations in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. During his detail at the National Science Foundation, Louri managed projects in the areas of cyberphysical systems, trustworthy computing, expeditions in computing, failure-resistant systems, and computing research infrastructure as part of an $800 million annual CISE portfolio. “In Washington he applied his expertise to help determine the direction of computing research for years to come,” said Tamal Bose, ECE department head. “Now we are capitalizing on the knowledge he brought back from Washington.” The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Mark Neifeld Gaining International Recognition Recent Honors Include Secretary of Defense Medal, Top 50 Spot in Applied Optics Mark Neifeld’s work in optical processing systems and highspeed communications is gaining international attention. This year, Neifeld completed a 3-year service with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he was responsible for a $125 million research portfolio in physics and mathematics. During his time at DARPA, Neifeld initiated programs on compressive sensing, soldier-borne surveillance, and quantum optical information theory for communications and imaging. Neifeld received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service, recognizing that his programs “have the potential to create an asymmetric advantage for the nation’s warfighters.” Neifeld was also named one of the most prolific contributing authors for Applied Optics, a publication focused on applications-centered research in optics. On its 2013 commemorative 50th anniversary website, Neifeld
is ranked at 37, with 45 articles published in the highly regarded journal. “Professor Neifeld is doing important work in the areas of optical processing systems and high-speed communications, with potential applications in aerospace and defense,” said Tamal Bose, head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
“Professor Neifeld is doing important work in the areas of optical processing systems and high-speed communications, with potential applications in aerospace and defense.” Tamal Bose, head of the UA Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Neifeld directs the ECE Optical Computing and Processing Lab. Optical computing uses light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) to process information.
See Page 4 for more on Professor Neifeld’s research.
College Names Two ECE Professors Arizona Engineering Fellows Two ECE professors were among six UA College of Engineering faculty members named 2013 Arizona Engineering Fellows, an honor that recognizes exemplary teaching and research records.
Professor Hal Tharp
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Hal Tharp, associate professor and associate ECE department head, was named Education Fellow, recognizing his contributions to undergraduate education. And Hao Xin, ECE
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
professor, was named Faculty Fellow, recognizing his long-term success in research and graduate education. Their fellowships carry three-year terms.
See Page 5 for more on Professor Xin’s research.
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Faculty Awards
IEEE Names Marwan Krunz Distinguished Lecturer Marwan Krunz continues to amass awards and lead research in communications technology and networking. Most recently, the Communications Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, named Krunz a distinguished lecturer. “I am humbled by the company I am in — some of the world’s most accomplished researchers in communications technology,” said Krunz of the prestigious and highly competitive honor.
funds worldwide travel for speaking engagements. Among Krunz’s planned speaking topics is dynamic spectrum access, or DSA, models to help remedy the lack of available wireless spectrum. “This is an opportunity to share with more schools what we are doing here at the UA in a more formalized way,” said Krunz.
Krunz joined the UA in 1997 and received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 1998. He was named an IEEE fellow, the highest grade of membership possible in the institute, in 2010 for his The two-year appointment recognizes renowned authorities in their fields and contributions to resource management policies in wireless networks. In 2012, he earned the IEEE’s “This is an opportunity to share with Technical Committee on more schools what we are doing here Computer Communications Outstanding Service Award. at the UA in a more formalized way.”
Professor Marwan Krunz will lecture at universities throughout the world on DSA models that increase available wireless spectrum.
See Page 17 for more on Professor Krunz’s research.
Professor Marwan Krunz
For They Are Jolly Good (IEEE) Fellows Continuing a legacy of excellence for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kathie Melde and Bane Vasić have been made fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Professor Melde’s research focus includes high-density circuit packaging and interconnects as well as antennas for wireless communications systems. Professor Vasić, a da Vinci Fellow, is affiliated with the Department of Mathematics and the BIO5 Institute. Among Vasić’s research interests are coding theory, information theory, digital communications, memory and storage systems.
Professor Kathie Melde
Professor Bane Vasić
IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association, with more than 400,000 members in 160 countries, only confers fellowships upon engineers with extraordinary records of accomplishment. The total number of fellows selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total voting membership. The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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UA-Led Team Forging the Future of Wireless
TECH UPDATE:
ECE’s Tamal Bose Directs New Center’s Pursuit of 5G Technologies
BWAC Project Areas
Imagine a future beyond 4G; beyond smart phones, exciting new apps, and high-speed wireless internet connectivity at home, work, school and in transit. Imagine a world in which the heating and cooling of our homes is controlled from cell phones, where medical devices are wirelessly networked and surgeries performed remotely, where rural communities communicate just as quickly and reliably as urban centers, and where computing efficiently and securely in the cloud is second nature. Realizing that vision of effortless and secure connectivity anytime, anywhere is dependent on the creative collaboration of many highly skilled and
“The problems with clogging of the electromagnetic spectrum can be compared to a traffic jam. The roads are built up, and we have nowhere else to build. So we have two solutions: One is to make the lanes narrower and the cars smaller so we can fit more cars; the other is to increase the speed limit.” Tamal Bose, ECE department head
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knowledgeable people, all focused on developing the next generation of reliable and sustainable broadband wireless technologies. Backed by National Science Foundation funding of nearly $1.6 million over the next five years and industry support of about $4 million, such is the mission and work of BWAC, the new multi-university Broadband Wireless Access & Applications Center led by the University of Arizona.
“The NSF support is a great boost and gives us a green light to many 5G-level projects under consideration within this multi-university, multiindustry consortium,” said Tamal Bose, head of ECE and the project’s principal investigator. As an NSF Industry & University Cooperative Research Center, BWAC is dedicated to partnering with industry and government in development of long-term solutions to far-reaching technological problems. In addition to the UA, BWAC’s founding members include Auburn University, Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, Notre Dame, and about 20 industry partners.
“With several billion mobile users around the world expected to tap into unprecedented broadband speeds and increasingly massive bandwidth by the end of 2013, managing the ensuing data onslaught and securing the airwaves will be chief among the challenges BWAC tackles,” said Bose, who headed BWAC’s predecessor, the Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology, or WICAT, at Virginia Tech. The search is also on for new broadband spectra at millimeterwave frequencies, spectrum access and exchange mechanisms, machine-to-machine communication, fully integrated wireless hospitals, rapidly reconfigurable networks, refined management strategies for massive networks, radar that thinks, and the design of circuitry that operates on minimal power. Bose is joined at the UA by Marwan Krunz, worldrenowned researcher in computer networking, and Haris Volos, whose expertise includes artificial intelligence applications for cognitive radios, wireless distributed computing, and the co-existence of communications and radar systems. “As the hub of BWAC, the
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Opportunistic spectrum access and allocation • Spectrum trading and auctions • Wireless cybersecurity • Cognitive sensor networks of heterogenous devices • Image and video compression technologies • Integrated-circuit and low-power design for broadband
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is well positioned to guide
collaborative research and the development of new wireless technologies emerging from member universities,” said Bose. “ECE affords BWAC an extensive computing infrastructure, essential to the investigation of proposed research. And the department has the capability of performing all electromagnetic design and simulation as well as fulfilling the fabrication and integration requirements of projects in development.”
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Two Professors Aim to Stop Eavesdroppers in Their Tracks By Advancing Signature-free Secure Wireless Communications Wireless communications networks present significant security challenges. For the military, where tactical communications among troops rely heavily on wireless networks, the stakes are particularly high. Even with sophisticated encryption and authentication systems for confidential information, eavesdroppers could use radio frequency and traffic analysis to capture transmission attributes and create a fingerprint of the communications. For example, adversaries could gain access
to contextual information such as the location of communications, applications used, websites visited, and languages spoken. “The core threat to security in the open wireless environment is exposure of transmission signatures,” said Marwan Krunz, BWAC codirector and primary investigator on a U.S. Department of Defense research project focused on diminishing that threat. With the support of a 2013 $460,000 U.S. Army Research Office grant, Krunz and his co-
investigator, Loukas Lazos, aim to get at the root of the problem. They are developing new techniques, which center around randomization and integrated transmitter/receiverfriendly jamming, to effectively cloak the telling transmission attributes. In addition to the ARO award, Krunz has received a $320,000 U.S. Department of Defense award through the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program to develop a test bed for a cognitive heterogenous wireless network.
BWAC held its first industrial advisory board meeting in the spring of 2013 at the UA’s Biosphere 2. In addition to the University of Arizona, BWAC’s founding members include Auburn University, Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, Notre Dame, and about 20 industry partners.
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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January 2012 – September 2013 Scholarly Books and Monographs
Djordjevic, Ivan
• I.B. Djordjevic, Quantum Information Processing and Quantum Error Correction: An Engineering Approach, Elsevier/Academic Press, April 2012 • M. Cvijetic, I.B. Djordjevic, Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks, Artech House, January 2013
Lysecky, Roman
• R. Lysecky, A. Lizarraga, Programming in Java, Zyante. http://java.zyante.com, 2013 • R. Lysecky, F. Vahid, Programming in C, Zyante. http://progc.zyante.com, 2012
Editorships & Associate Editorships of Journals
Bilgin, Ali
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing • Associate Editor, IEEE Signal Processing Letters
Bose, Tamal
• Associate Editor, Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering • Editorial Board Member, IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences, Japan.
Djordjevic, Ivan
• • • •
Associate Editor, IEEE Communications Letters Associate Editor, Frequenz Associate Editor, International Journal of Optics Lead Guest Editor, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on Advanced DSP and Coding for Multi-Tb/s- per-Channel Optical Transport
Dvorak, Steve
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging
Hariri, Salim
• Editor-In-Chief, Cluster Computing Journal: The Journal of Networks, Software Tools, and Applications
Krunz, Marwan
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
Louri, Ahmed
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Computer Society • Special Issue Editor, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, Academic Press, issue on Network-on-chips
Lysecky, Roman
• Editorial Board, IET Computers & Digital Techniques
Potter, Kelly
• Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids
Ramasubramanian, Srini
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• Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Faculty Accomplishments
Editorships & Associate Editorships of Journals (cont.)
Rozenblit, Jerzy
• Associate Editor, Journal of Computing and Information Technology
Xin, Hao
• Associate Editor, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
Wang, Janet
• Associate Editor, IEEE Circuits and Systems
Patents
Akoglu, Ali
• Aravind Dasu, Ali Akoglu, Aravind Sudarsanam, and Sethuraman Panchanathan, “Reconfigurable processing,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,281,297 B2
Bilgin, Ali
• A. Bilgin, Y. Kim, M.S. Nadar, R. Sundaresan, “System and method for motion-compensated compressed sensing for dynamic imaging,” 2013 U.S. Patent No. 8520928
Bose, Tamal
• “Cognitive radio device,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,295,341 B2 • “Efficient outphasing transmitter,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,290,086
Djordjevic, Ivan
• “Superimposed training and digital filtering coherent optical receivers,” 2013 U.S. Patent No. 8,538,278 • “GLDPC encoding with Reed-Muller component codes for optical communications,” 2013 U.S. Patent No. 8,386,879 • “Polarization mode dispersion compensation in multilevel coded-modulation schemes using BLAST algorithm and iterative polarization cancellation,” 2013 U.S. Patent No. 8,385,439 • “Modified progressive edge-growth LDPC codes for ultra-high-speed serial optical transport,” 2013 U.S. Patent No. 8,381,065 • “Simultaneous PMD compensation and chromatic dispersion compensation using LDPC coded OFDM,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,234,549 • “Ultra high-speed optical transmission based on LDPC-coded modulation and coherent detection for all-optical network,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,234,538 • “Multi-dimensional LDPC coded modulation for high-speed optical transmission systems,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,219,874 • “Mitigation of fiber nonlinearities in multilevel coded-modulation schemes,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,185,796 • “Polarization mode dispersion (PMD) compensation in polarization multiplexed coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,184,993 • “High speed LDPC decoding,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,181,091 • “Multidimensional turbo product codes and generalized low-density parity-check codes with component Reed- Solomon codes for optical transmission,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,176,381 • “Methods and systems for polarization multiplexed multilevel modulation for optical communication,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,175,466 • “LDPC-coded multilevel modulation scheme,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,140,934 • “LDPC codes and stochastic decoding for optical transmission,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,099,645
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Patents (cont.)
Dvorak, Steve
• B.K. Sternberg, S.L. Dvorak , “Method For Measuring Absolute Magnitudes And Absolute Phase Relationships Over A Wide Bandwidth,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,296,086 B2 • S.L. Dvorak and B.K. Sternberg, “Vector Signal Measuring System, Featuring Wide Bandwidth, Large Dynamic Range, and High Accuracy,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,155,904 B2
Fink, Wolfgang
• Wolfgang Fink and Mark Tarbell, “Method and System for Training a Visual Prosthesis,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,260,428
Marcellin, Michael
• M.W. Marcellin, A. Bilgin, H.G. Lalgudi, and M.S. Nadar, “Lifting-based view compensated compression and remote visualization of volume rendered images,” 2012 U.S. Patent No. 8,126,279
Keynote Presentations
Bilgin, Ali
• Afternoon Keynote Speaker, 2012 Data Compression Conference, Snowbird, Utah, April 2012
Krunz, Marwan
• IEEE Computer Communications Workshop, Sedona, Ariz., November 2012
Neifeld, Mark
• Plenary Presentation, 2013 Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging Conference, Arlington, Va., June 2013
Rozenblit, Jerzy
• • • •
“Simulation-based Surgical Training: Concepts, Foundations, and Modeling Issues,” Autumn Simulation Conference, San Diego, Calif., October 2012 “Computer-Assisted Surgical Training: Enhancing Patients’ Safety Through High Technology and Human Skill,” TEDx, Tucson, Ariz., February 2013 ”Critical Infrastructure and Life-Critical Computing Systems, Keynote, Disruptive Innovative e-Health Ecosystem for Regenerative Medicine in Poland,” 2ndPolish-American Conference VAIL Europe, July 2013 “Computer-Assisted Surgical Training: Enhancing Patients’ Safety Through High Technology and Human Skill,” Keynote Presentation, 6th Intl. Conference on Human Centered Computing, Taiwan, August 2013
Xin, Hao
• “GHz to THz Components and Microsystems Utilizing 3D Additive Manufacturing Technology,” Raytheon Fellows Seminar Series, Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, El Segundo, Calif., August 2013
Ziolkowski, Richard
• “Metamaterial-inspired Engineering Electrically Small Antenna Systems,” Raytheon Multifunction RF Systems Technology Network, Tucson, Ariz., April 2013
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The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Faculty
Three New Faculty Members Join Department in Fall 2013 Jinghong Chen, Associate Professor Jinghong Chen joins the University of Arizona’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department as an associate professor. He comes to the UA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he was an associate professor in electrical engineering. Chen’s research focuses on the design of high-performance and highly integrated mixed-signal and RF, or radio frequency, integrated circuits and systems for computing, communication, energy, biomedical, and sensor applications. Chen received his PhD in electrical engineering in 2000 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his MS in 1997 from the University of Virginia. He also holds an MS and BS in engineering physics from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Kay Thamvichai, Professor of Practice Ratchaneekorn (Kay) Thamvichai joins ECE as a professor of practice from Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota, where she was a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Her research interests include digital signal processing, communications, digital design and embedded system design. Thamvichai earned her PhD in electrical engineering in 2002 from the University of Colorado, Boulder; her MS in 1998 from Stanford University; and her BEng in 1996 from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
“We have a responsibility to share what we learn. The greatest discoveries can be made from understanding fundamentals and using sound design principles, which allow us to be cautious in our creativity yet open to endless innovation.” Jinghong Chen
“My love for teaching and for seeing my students become competent electrical and computer engineers encourages me to keep learning new technical skills and teaching methods.” Kay Thamvichai
Onur Ozan Koyluoglu, Assistant Professor Onur Ozan Koyluoglu joins ECE as an assistant professor. He comes from the University of Texas, Austin, where he served as postdoctoral fellow. Koyluoglu’s research interests lie in the areas of information theory, communications, statistics, and neuroscience, with special emphasis on networks, security, and neural coding problems. Koyluoglu received his PhD in 2010 and MS in 2007, both in electrical and computer engineering, from Ohio State University. He also received a BS in electrical and electronics engineering in 2005 from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey.
“Wireless networks have revolutionized almost all aspects of human interaction. It is imperative that we design secure systems to ensure their continued growth and protect users.” Onur Ozan Koyluoglu
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Tenure and Tenure Track Faculty Ali Akoglu Associate Professor Ali Bilgin Assistant Professor Tamal Bose Professor and Department Head Jinghong Chen Associate Professor Ivan B. Djordjevic Associate Professor Steven L. Dvorak Professor Wolfgang Fink Associate Professor Edward & Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair Elmer Grubbs Associate Professor Salim Hariri Professor Raymond Kostuk Professor
Michael W. Marcellin Regents’ Professor International Foundation for Telemetering Chaired Professor Michael M. Marefat Associate Professor Kathleen Melde Professor
Richard W. Ziolkowski Professor John M. Leonis Distinguished Professor
Harold “Skip” Parks Associate Professor Kelly Potter Professor Linda S. Powers Professor Thomas R. Brown Chair in Bioengineering Srini Ramasubramanian Associate Professor Jeffrey J. Rodriguez Associate Professor
Onur Ozan Koyluoglu Assistant Professor Marwan Krunz Professor
Jonathan Sprinkle Assistant Professor
Loukas Lazos Associate Professor
Miklos N. Szilagyi Professor
Ahmed Louri Professor
Ratchaneekorn “Kay” Thamvichai Professor of Practice
Roman Lysecky Associate Professor
Hal S. Tharp Associate Professor Associate Department Head
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Hao Xin Professor
Mark A. Neifeld Professor
Jerzy W. Rozenblit Distinguished Professor Raymond J. Oglethorpe Endowed Chair
Susan Lysecky Assistant Professor
“Janet” Meiling Wang Associate Professor
Bane Vasic Professor Kenneth Von Behren Chaired Professor
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Research Faculty Youssif Al Nashif Research Assistant Professor Kamel Didan Research Associate Professor Thienne Johnson Postdoctoral Research Associate James Spinhirne Research Professor Haris Volos Research Assistant Professor
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Faculty
Joint Faculty Amit Ashok Assistant Professor Optical Sciences
Ben Sternberg Professor Mining and Geological Engineering
Jacobus Barnard Associate Professor Science, Technology, and Arts
J. Scott Tyo Professor Optical Sciences
Jennifer Barton UA Associate Vice President for Research Professor Biomedical Engineering; Optical Sciences; Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering
Urs Utzinger Associate Professor Biomedical Engineering
William Dallas Professor Radiology Eustace Dereniak Professor Optical Sciences; Radiology
Christopher Walker Professor Astronomy James Wyant Professor Professor, Optical Sciences
Allan Hamilton Professor Surgery Charles Higgins Associate Professor Neuroscience Hong Hua Associate Professor Optical Sciences Thomas Koch Dean, College of Optical Sciences Thomas Milster Professor Optical Sciences Elizabeth Ritchie Professor Atmospheric Sciences Ricardo Sanfelice Assistant Professor Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering
Professor Emeritus John Brews Robert Carlile Francois Cellier William Gensler Glen C. Gerhard Doug Hamilton Stuart Hoenig Bobby R. Hunt William J. Kerwin John F. O’Hanlon John A. Reagan Larry C. Schooley Robert Schowengerdt Robin Strickland Malur K. Sundareshan
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Team Earns Professional Kudos with Endeavour’s Return of Optical Fibers Not many students can say they had to wait for their research to come back from space before they could collect their doctorate degrees. And not many can say that along the way they earned the top award in their professional community. Meet Brian Fox. Fox saw his optical fibers launched into space aboard space shuttle Atlantis in 2010. Then he waited in the wings 18 long months – launch delay after launch delay – to see how the rare-earth-doped fibers had fared in the harsh space environment on the Materials International Space Station Experiment-7, or MISSE-7. Finally in May 2011 the test fibers arrived back aboard space shuttle Endeavour on its final mission.
“MISSE is one of those rare opportunities that only come around once or twice in a lifetime,” said Fox. “How many people get to send their research into space?” Fiber-optic lines carry voices over cell phones, information via the Internet, and highdefinition video to televisions. Because of its low energy usage, light weight and high data integrity, optical fiber is ideal for space-based telecommunications. Fox and his mentor, ECE and Optical Sciences Professor Kelly SimmonsPotter, set out to see how optical fibers doped with the rare-earth metals erbium and ytterbium would hold up several
hundred miles above the earth’s protective atmosphere. Finding out which hardening elements work best among all the sources of space radiation, such as X-rays or gamma rays, presents unique challenges, said SimmonsPotter, explaining that special testing facilities on earth can duplicate some of the sources of radiation, but only one at a time. Simmons-Potter – whose research group is one of only a few in the world working on radiationhardened optics for space – used her connections at Sandia National Labs and the Naval Research Lab to secure a spot on MISSE-7 for the fibers. The arrival of the fibers back on Earth meant more weeks of waiting before the last of the payload was unloaded from the shuttle. By the time the fibers were returned, still in their metal open-suitcaselike tray with tracking sensors attached, Fox and Simmons-Potter were primed to get a look. Then hearts sank. The sheath containing the fibers had become rigid and brittle. The researchers did not think they would get good data.
Brian Fox and Professor Kelly Simmons-Potter work in the Arizona Materials Lab after their research on radiation-hardened optical fibers returned from the International Space Station aboard the space shuttle Endeavour’s final mission.
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“We gently cut the tubes off the fibers, and realized the optics fiber had
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
maintained mechanical fidelity,” said Fox. A collective sigh of relief, and the researchers were back in business. “By testing the optical fibers in a combined space environment,” said Simmons-Potter, “we were able to identify fibers that exhibit better radiationhardness and wavelength regions where the worst damage occurs.” Fox, who recently graduated, moves on as one of only a few graduate students ever to win the highly competitive Outstanding Paper Award from the Hardened Electronics and Radiation Technologies, or HEART, Conference. The award is based on an oral presentation and a peerreviewed journal paper – authored by Fox, SimmonsPotter and their colleagues at Sandia National Laboratories in California – that is being published in multiple scientific journals this year. “I am extremely fortunate Dr. Potter let me present our paper,” said Fox. As for the future of optical fibers in space, the results of their research may one day, in the not-so-distant future, result in improved fiber-optic lasers and amplifiers aboard spacebased systems, even commercial spacecraft, to transmit information.
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Student Awards
NSF Innovation Award and Startup Tucson Win Give Grad Student Entrepreneurial Workout One thing engineering students discover when the entrepreneurial spirit moves them is that they need to get out of the lab and into the world to find out what people really want. So says ECE doctoral candidate Xiao Qin.
“I feel really lucky to be working with Drs. Sprinkle and Lysecky and with Manny,” Xiao said. “You never know when opportunity is going to come knocking, but when it does, you better be ready.”
“I’ve learned to ask questions like, ‘How am I going to make a product people will use in their daily lives?’ ” said Xiao, whose National Science Foundation and Startup Weekend Tucson teams both won first-place awards in 2012. Xiao’s experiences with an NSF Innovation Corps training program and Startup Tucson’s entrepreneurial marathon not only helped him learn the business skills needed to introduce a product to market, they also helped him overcome his uneasiness. The NSF Innovation Corps, or I-Corps, is a series of activities that help foster the commercialization of select, NSF-funded, basic-research projects. As part of an eight-week I-Corps entrepreneurial training program in summer 2012, Xiao was required to interview potential customers for a market survey, a daunting assignment for the expert in embedded hardware and sensor networked systems. “The first week of the program, three of us went out to survey people, and I was almost silent, just smiling and nodding,” he said. “By the end of the process, I played a much more active role. It was a big change for me. I never thought I could accomplish something like this.” The NSF-supported research team has created a cost set-point thermostat that indicates how temperature correlates to heating and cooling costs, putting consumers in control of their home energy costs. The group was named Best Team out of 27 teams at the culmination of the six-month I-Corps program. The cost set-point thermostat project, which also spawned the startup company Acomni, originated with ECE professors Jonathan Sprinkle, an expert in industrial control technology and embedded and autonomous systems, and Susan Lysecky, an expert in design automation and interface design. Manny Teran, a UA aerospace and mechanical engineering alumnus and successful Tucson entrepreneur, also is a partner in the company.
Involved in the NSF I-Corps project were (from left) Professor Jonathan Sprinkle, doctoral candidate Xiao Qin, Professor Susan Lysecky, and UA Engineering alumnus Manny Teran.
For Xiao, it wasn’t long. From I-Corps he moved on to Startup Weekend Tucson in September 2012. Twelve teams were formed on the spot with one goal: Create a startup in 54 hours. Shark Tank, the penultimate event of the weekend, is when teams make their final presentations before a panel of judges, most of whom are potential investors. Xiao’s team, Cheap Avocados, won the competition for their presentation of a grocery equivalent to the cheap gas finder. The mobile phone grocery application finds the neighborhood store with the best deal for a shopper’s entire basket of groceries. For their efforts at the weekend event — business model creation, coding, designing and market validation — Xiao and his teammates earned the opportunity to refine their project and present it to potential investors. “Most of us were engineers,” Xiao said. “If I hadn’t done the NSF program, we probably would never have been able to present such a valid business model.”
See more on the Acomni cost set-point thermostat, Page 3.
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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A Good Year for Senior Casey Mackin, One of the UA’s Top Students Humble, understated Casey Mackin is leaving behind plenty of reminders of his accomplishments at the University of Arizona. “He is one of the most talented undergraduate students I’ve ever come across at the UA,” said Roman Lysecky, director of the Embedded Systems Design Laboratory. The honor’s student, who will graduate in the spring of 2014, has worked with faculty mentors Lysecky and Jonathan Sprinkle for the last few years on the NSF-funded Data Adaptable Reconfigurable Embedded Systems, or DARES, project to improve computing performance and efficiency. “Even though he is a genius,” said Sprinkle, “Casey goes about his business and lets the work speak for itself.”
Mackin has participated in two NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates summer programs off campus. At Duke University, he worked on improving web server speeds and reducing power, and at the University of California, Berkeley, he worked on information technology for sustainability. “It is important to continue finding ways to improve computers because it leads to advancements in other research, technology and everyday life,” said Mackin, who has already co-authored one published IEEE conference paper and is co-author on another professional paper under review. During his time at the UA, Mackin had his name permanently etched on the Pillars of Excellence wall in the UA Bookstores at the Student Union Memorial Center and received a highly competitive Astronaut Scholarship Foundation award.
A $10,000 Astronaut Scholarship Foundation award, presented by former Skylab astronaut Ed Gibson, is among Casey Mackin’s undergraduate accomplishments.
In addition to his work with DARES creating custom middleware that allows hardware and software components to communicate,
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“When you look at his background and what he has done you realize that he, and others like him, are going to ensure our nation is really in good hands” said former Skylab astronaut Ed Gibson, who was on campus in September 2012 to present a $10,000 check to Mackin.
Mackin, who was born in Germany and attended high school in Sierra Vista, Ariz., says he intends to pursue a doctorate and is ready to make big contributions in the field.
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
“What I find interesting is a new idea,” he said, “and the big thing for me is being able to have the freedom to realize my own ideas.” Mackin’s ECE professors have no doubt that is exactly what he will do. “He is cut out to do this kind of work,” Sprinkle said. “Casey is interested in working on problems that will help society and that nobody else has solved before.”
IEEE Antennas and Propagation Doctoral Research Award For the last two years ECE students supervised by Hao Xin have been among only a handful of students internationally to receive Doctoral Research Awards from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. Xiong Wang received the award in 2013 for work in microwaveinduced thermoacoustic imaging, which is being applied to breast cancer imaging and bomb detection. Min Liang received the award in 2012 for research in nextgeneration wireless sensing and communications. “This recognition exemplifies the high-quality research performed at the University of Arizona,” said Xin.
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Student Awards
Grad Student’s Persistence Pays Off with Achievement Scholarship After applying multiple times, Jerrie Fairbanks, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student, was one of 16 UA graduate students and the only College of Engineering student to be named an ARCS scholar in 2013. Achievement Rewards for College Scientists scholars receive $7,000 annually for up to three years. In addition to the ARCS scholarship, the Graduate College awarded Fairbanks $2,000. “I couldn’t believe it,” Fairbanks said of the ARCS award. Fairbanks is doing research in fluorescence Jerrie Fairbanks, a UA electrical and computer engineering grad student who recently spectroscopy, which uses light to obtain data from various received a 2013 ARCS scholarship, says that with Professor Linda Powers as a mentor, it is not hard to get excited about fluorescence spectroscopy. (Photo by Kayla Samoy.) substances. When the correct color spectrum of light is shined on a fluorophore, a molecule that fluoresces, the fluorophore absorbs some of the light then emits light of a researches, designs and builds fluorescence spectroscopy instrumentation. different spectrum. Many fluorescent properties can be measured from a single fluorophore, so fluorescence data can be used in a number of applications. For example, in mining fluorescence is used to identify minerals within various compounds. In biology, it is used to sort cells of different types by binding various fluorophores to the cells.
One project is a blood analyzer, which will identify diseases as opposed to antibodies, to be used by U.S. armed forces for emergency transfusions in the field. The other is a fluorescence spectroscopy instrument for in vivo experiments that obtains real-time data from cells and tissue samples.
Linda Powers, Thomas R. Brown Distinguished Chair in Bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering professor, is Fairbanks’ advisor and inspired him to work in the area.
Despite the difficulty and magnitude of the work, the results are worth it, said Fairbanks, whose interest in engineering evolved over many years.
“She has an energy when she talks about these things and all the different things you can do with them,” Fairbanks said. Fairbanks, who is working on two projects simultaneously,
A Winning Combination “This is the best of both worlds. I am an engineer working in medical school.” Abhishek Pandey
“I’m an engineer at heart; I like to build stuff,” Fairbanks said. “Once you’ve got a working system then there’s a large sense of accomplishment, especially if it’s a system that’s going to be valuable in detecting disease and saving lives.” See more on Professor Linda Powers’ research, Page 6. Sagar Mandava (upper right), Abhishek Pandey, and Mahesh Bharath Keerthivasa all won merit awards at the 2013 meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Mandava won a Summa Cum Laude award (top 3 percent of all papers submitted) recognizing his master’s thesis on new ways to obtain images using compressive measurements. Pandey and Keerthivasan each won Magna Cum Laude awards (top 15 percent) for separate papers on advancing imaging techniques for diagnosis and evaluation of liver disease. Pandey and Keerthivasa are shown here with their doctoral supervisors, Maria Altbach, professor of radiology, and Ali Bilgin, ECE and biomedical engineering professor.
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Open Houses and Outreach
Throughout the year, the department holds a number of hands-on open houses for students to get to know faculty, staff, and one another, and to learn more about opportunities and research projects under way. Also, in 2013, ECE participated in the first major-specific Summer Engineering Academy camps in the UA College of Engineering. The camps allow high-school students to explore different areas of engineering.
In April 2013 ECE had its first official graduate recruiting visit, with nine potential students attending and a number of faculty presenting.
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The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Department News
Online MS Offered
We’re on Facebook!
ECE News
Increasing its efforts to provide educational opportunities for working professionals, ECE, in partnership with the UA Outreach College, now offers an online MS degree.
The department has launched a Facebook page to help alumni and students stay connected.
Get all the latest ECE news at ece.arizona.edu.
Find more information at ece.arizona.edu/graduate-students.
Check us out at facebook.com/ ecearizona.
infinite possibilities
Longtime IT Manager Wins Top UA Employee Award Leo Enfield sees himself as just a cog in the wheel of a machine that makes the UA one of the world’s great research universities. But the fact is he represents the best of the best among University of Arizona staff. At an institution with 15,000 employees, Enfield was singled out to receive the 2013 Billy Joe Varney Award for Excellence. “Leo is a warm, caring person whose credo is to serve others, often at the expense of his own personal priorities,” said Jerzy Rozenblit, UA Distinguished Professor and former head of ECE. After serving a stint in the armed forces, Enfield began his career
at the UA in 1988 as a lab technician in the electrical and computer engineering department and has served the department as electronics technician, support systems analyst, systems programmer and computing manager. He is now in charge of technology management for all eight departments within the College of Engineering, on and off campus. The Billy Joe Varney Award is named for a man who dedicated three decades of service to the University of Arizona, who always put the larger good of the University before his own personal gain, always went the extra mile, and always made others feel
Nancy Emptage, ECE administrative associate, IT manager Leo Enfield (center), and College of Engineering Dean Jeff Goldberg celebrate Enfield’s 2013 Billy Joe Varney Award.
special. The award is given annually to one UA employee who has at least 15 years of continual service to the University and who lives and acts in the spirit of the man for whom it was named.
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Featured Supporter Thank You Thomas R. Brown Foundation ECE Conference Room Honors Homegrown Entrepreneur In a tribute to a man who with a lot of hard work and a bit of good luck morphed a garage startup into one of Arizona’s most successful high-tech electronics firms, ECE has dedicated a conference room to Tom Brown, founder of the Burr-Brown Research Corp. On hand for the Aug. 29, 2012 dedication were trustees of the Thomas R. Brown Foundation, including Brown’s daughters Mary Brown Bernal and Sarah Brown Smallhouse, UA President Ann Weaver Hart , faculty and staff, retired Burr-Brown employees, and former and current Texas Instruments employees. “My father’s success in business prospered because of the close relationship he developed with the UA,” said Smallhouse. “The UA gave Burr-Brown its competitive edge to rise to global excellence.”
family, said Hart, shows how we achieve dreams through shared resources. The Brown family, she said, “truly understands the importance of recruiting and retaining the best faculty, giving financial aid to the best students, and building programs.” Brown, who died in 2002 at the age of 75, founded BurrBrown Corp. in 1956 with friend Page Burr, whom Brown later bought out. The company, one of world’s largest suppliers of high-performance analog semiconductors, was sold to Texas Instruments 32 years ago in a stock deal worth more than $7 billion.
The Thomas R. Brown Foundation has endowed numerous professorships and student scholarships in the College of Engineering and other UA colleges. That ongoing publicprivate relationship between the University and the Brown
“The UA gave Burr-Brown its competitive edge to rise to global excellence.” Sarah Brown Smallhouse
Retired Burr-Brown and Texas Instruments engineer Paul Prazak (who spearheaded the project with UA Distinguished Professor and former ECE head Jerzy Rozenblit), UA President Ann Weaver Hart (right) and Tom Brown’s daughters, Mary Brown Bernal and Sarah Brown Smallhouse (left) cut the ribbon to dedicate the Thomas R. Brown Conference Room.
The Thomas R. Brown Conference Room on the fifth floor of the ECE building is adorned with colorful graphic panels charting the Burr-Brown history decade by decade and showing the ties between Burr-Brown and the University over the years. One of the panels highlights the work of Linda Powers, an ECE professor who holds the Thomas R. Brown Chair in Bioengineering.
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The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Thank you for your recent gift We gratefully acknowledge the support of the following sponsors. Jan. 1, 2012 – June 30, 2013
Individuals
Judith D. Bellamy Kiran K. Bhumana Victor J. Borg Elmo and Edith Bowman Mark A. Casolara John O. Clymer John M. da Cunha Ren Egawa Jerry G. Fossum Marco A. Gardner Michael S. Garrabrants Michael and Arlene Herrick Robert and Debbie Hollyer Gyver Huang Judith S. Johnson Edwin R. Jones David J. Kraemer Thomas and Ann Lundquist Joshua D. Martin Frank and Anne Martinjak Lynn and William McClary John and Elke Reagan John and Mary Reinhardt Barbara and Joseph Riccio Jack Smith Gene and Hyun Sonu Eric and Colleen Stouffer Richard and Janet Vitales David C. Wittwer Gong-san Yu
Foundations
International Foundation for Telemetering Stewart Foundation Texas Instruments Foundation
Corporatations
Agilent Technologies Avirtek Citrix Systems Electro Rent Corp. Google Inc. HP Labs Hydronalix IBM IDEMA Microsoft Microsoft Global Finance NEC Laboratories America Inc. Neustar Inc. Nextgen Aeronautics Inc. NMode Solutions Inc. Raytheon Corp. Rincon Research Corp. Rubio Pharma Space Micro Inc. VM Ware Inc. W. L. Gore & Associates Inc. ZTE USA INC.
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Industrial Advisory Board Larry Bergman Jet Propulsion Laboratory Jennifer Bernhard Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Illinois Anne E. Cortez Conspec Int’l LLC David Crowe Tucson Embedded Systems Bob Dorsey Aerospace Corporation Doug Goodman & Kyle Ferrio Ridgetop Group Inc. Raj Kariya Micron Tony Mulligan Hydronalix Steven R. Omick Rincon Research Corp.
Mark Pierpoint Agilent Software and Modular Solutions Division Paul Prazak Texas Instruments (Retired) Richard B. Scholes Signal Processing Center Raytheon Missile Systems Co. Sarah Smallhouse Thomas R. Brown Foundation Teri Spencer Ephibian Rangam Subramanian National and Homeland Security Directorate Idaho National Laboratory Jim Todsen Texas Instruments Bill Tranter Electrical and Computer Engineering Virginia Tech
Stephen Phillips School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering ASU Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering
At an IAB Board meeting in February 2013, partnerships and collaborations were at the forefront of discussions.
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The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Homecoming 2013 Join Us for Time-Honored Traditions!
Visit with fellow alumni, college faculty and staff, and industry friends.
Friday, November 8
8-10 a.m.
10 a.m.
50th Annual Engineers Breakfast Student Union Memorial Center, Arizona Ballroom North Reservations at engineering.arizona.edu/breakfast
Electrical and Computer Engineering Open House ECE Room 256 From more information: 520.621.6193
Saturday, November 9
UA vs. UCLA: Kickoff time TBA Tents on the Mall: Five hours before kickoff Homecoming Parade: Three hours before kickoff
The University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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DEPAR TMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING
P.O. Box 210104 Tucson, AZ 85721-0104
2013 Annual Magazine
ece.arizona.edu