Campus News

Micatu Inc. donates high-tech optical sensors for campus microgrid

Company founded by RIT engineering alumnus Michael Oshetski also provides research funding for assessment of power quality and usage

Micatu Inc. donated its groundbreaking Gridview optical sensors to Rochester Institute of Technology for a new campus learning lab. The equipment allows faculty and students to monitor renewable integration and manage the addition of distributed energy resources onto the campus microgrid.

The donation of the equipment for an outdoor learning laboratory by Micatu also includes $150,000 in funding for research projects related to assessing power quality, big data analytics, and infrastructure.

“The utility industry is often considered old and slow to move and therefore not considered innovative for new college engineering grads. As an industry, we are not attracting the talent we need to drive the next generation of grid modernization,” said Michael Oshetski ’03 (electrical engineering), founder and chief executive officer of Micatu. “Micatu is helping the industry bridge the gap to modernization with a revolutionary power quality measurement technology platform that provides unprecedented visibility into what’s happening on the electric grid. I hope the use of our optical sensors at this microlevel demonstrates that the industry is open to innovation and that students will get excited about potential opportunities to be part of creating the modern grid.”

Optical sensors were installed onto RIT electrical facilities by Micatu technologies and electricians from O’Connell Electric, a Rochester-based contractor. Sensors will provide vital information about voltage and current on the grid needed to measure and predict system fluctuations and patterns. This information can be used to mitigate outages and failures before they occur. Microgrids today consist of alternative energy sources—hydropower and solar power, for example, and although they may be smaller than some traditional utility grids, they can provide needed supplemental energy resources. The key aspects of Micatu’s system is its use of optical technology, which is more costeffective, as well as its ability to provide timely analytics to regional providers.

By giving students practical, hands-on experience with the campus microgrid, RIT’s outdoor lab encourages students to pursue careers in the electric industry—a critical initiative as utilities struggle with replacing a large number of retiring employees, along with the knowledge and experience they have contributed over several decades. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor estimated that 50 percent of the energy utility workforce is expected to retire by 2028. A 2017 report by the U.S. Department of Energy states that 63 percent of utilities said job candidates have insufficient qualifications and certifications, while an additional 47 percent lack experience, training, or technical skills.

“Micatu’s donation adds tremendous value to the College of Engineering Technology’s strength and focus in the area of fiber optics and optoelectronics research and education,” said S. Manian Ramkumar, dean of RIT’s College of Engineering Technology. “The optical sensors will serve as hardware training tools at the undergraduate and graduate level and will enhance our ability to teach power distribution grids and the effective measurement of power quality on transmission lines. This donation also highlights the power of collaboration between our engineering schools and utilize our individual strengths for the benefit of the donor.”

Course development will include topics related to use of AI and machine learning, data analysis, and microgrid management. Tomorrow’s engineers will not only need to understand the electrical engineering aspects of the grid but will also require a background in the data sciences to collect and analyze a wide range of information that will be critical to managing the grid’s changing topography.

“Michael Oshetski is a perfect example of an RIT alumnus who is making a difference and improving the world,” said Doreen Edwards, dean of RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering. “Mike co-founded a company that developed optical sensor technology to improve the electric grid’s efficiency and resiliency. Through his gift, we are able to build a real-world lab where our students can learn about the complexities of designing a smart grid that will continue to incorporate more renewable energy sources.”

Research planning is underway and being led by faculty members Katie McConky, associate professor, and Bing Yan, assistant professor, both in RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering. Through preliminary talks with Micatu, the current plan is to hire two graduate students in the fall to focus on developing the infrastructure and skills to handle the enormous quantity of data these sensors will produce.

“The data includes information on power quality and environmental information such as temperature,” said McConky. “We will be working with Micatu this summer to identify a project that will support their needs, but also allow our students to develop the big data analytics skills necessary to work with massive real time data sets. One project that we have discussed would be to identify anomalous readings, and then to understand if there is any correlation between these readings and the variables that are being collected.”

RIT Graduates its first doctoral student in new electrical and computer engineering program

Expansion of doctoral degree options offers increased opportunities for graduates

Dimitris Chachlakis became the first student to be awarded the new Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering this May from Rochester Institute of Technology.

The new degree, recently approved by the New York State Department of Education, builds upon the Ph.D. in engineering, a multi-disciplinary degree established several years ago, and since then refined into three distinct programs. Chachlakis transitioned into the new degree program and focused studies on the trending area of multi-modal tensor data analytics and machine learning.

“The Ph.D. in engineering was recommended to me by my adviser,” said Chachlakis, who came to RIT from the Technical University of Crete, Greece. “Getting into the program, I was exposed to diverse disciplines and learned how to collaborate. History has shown that when people come together from the different disciplines, you can see that they all can accomplish so much more.”

That collaboration included responsibilities as a research assistant in the MILOS Lab in the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, and as co-author of multiple papers for peer-reviewed journals in the area of signal processing and machine learning. In his doctoral dissertation he proposed new theory for the joint analysis of data from multiple sources, based on L1 Norm formulations.

“We are trying to develop new fundamental theory, applicable in anything in science and engineering that rely on data processing,” said Chachlakis. “The L1 norm is basically a new formulation for taking the multi-dimensional array, also known as a tensor, and analyzing it into main components while suppressing data corruption and noise. And tensors are ideal data structures for capturing inter-dependencies across the dimensions.”

Tensors can be used for data assessment and analysis, specifically to refine how big data sets from multiple sources can be best assessed and ensure that the information is reliable. That reliability is essential for applications using computer vision, or improving MRI technology in health care, for example.

Dimitris Chachlakis recently received his doctoral degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and was congratulated by his faculty adviser and mentor, Professor Panos Markopoulos from RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering.

The three new doctoral programs are an evolution and replacement of the Ph.D. in engineering, a degree program established by RIT’s engineering college in 2014. The foundations of the program were its multidisciplinary look at problem solving and its emphasis in meeting demands based on national initiatives from the U.S. Departments of Labor, Energy, Transportation and Health and Human Services. The program had eight students enrolled in its first year and had expanded to 90 by 2020.

The foundations of that Ph.D. in engineering have not changed, and have been thoroughly integrated into four separate areas with associated disciplines: electrical and computer engineering, mechanical and industrial engineering, and biomedical and chemical engineering—and the focus remains on using a multidisciplinary approach to solving today’s global problems.

Students in the original doctoral program were offered the option to complete coursework in the program or transition to one of the new doctoral programs. Chachlakis decided on the latter, and in spring, defended his dissertation, titled “Theory and Algorithms for Reliable Multimodal Data Analysis, Machine Learning and Signal Processing.”

Chachlakis started at his new job at Digimarc virtually just a few days after graduation. He intends to move to the company headquarters in Oregon toward the end of summer. The company is best known for its digital watermarking technology, and Chachlakis will be part of its engineering R&D team.

“This will be my first job after earning the Ph.D. and I’m expecting that this is going to be satisfying, and also the team that I am going to join, I feel like they have a noble cause—that makes me feel even better about it,” he said. “I feel like I am contributing to society by working and improving the technology they already have. When I was doing my undergraduate work, I really didn’t have a plan of what I was going to do next. In retrospect, I would do the Ph.D. again a thousand times over. It was challenging, not only because of the workload and the commitment, but moving to a new country by myself. Thankfully, RIT welcomed me, and made the transition much easier. I feel I have learned so much during my Ph.D. studies, and I think that is invaluable.”