Image by Ph.D. student David Crouse
Features 3 4
Image by Ph.D. student David Crouse
4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 9 9 9
DEPARTMENT HEAD MESSAGE
PROFESSOR ZHOU NAMED A PRESIDENTIAL AWARD RECIPIENT ECE WELCOMES A NEW FACULTY MEMBER LASER-FEST
PROFESSOR FEI RECEIVES AN NSF CAREER AWARD SENIOR DESIGN
PROFESSOR TEHRANIPOOR RECEIVES AN NSF CAREER AWARD
SENIOR DESIGN PROJECT INSPIRES START-UP FOR GRADUATES STUDENT PROFILE: ADAM CYWAR
PROFESSORS GOKIRMAK AND SILVA STUDENTS CAPTURE HONORS
Rajeev Bansal University of Connecticut Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering 371 Fairfield Way, Unit 2157 Storrs, CT 06269-2157
AFFILIATED FACULTY EMERITUS FACULTY
12 STUDENT PROFILE: YASAMAN ARDESHIRPOUR |
Please send correspondence and address corrections to the address below or email rajeev@engr.uconn.edu.
ECE FACULTY PROFILES
10 INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD
2
This newsletter is published for the alumni, faculty, students, corporate supporters and friends of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Suggestions and information are always welcome.
ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING
The creative efforts of the School of Engineering staff members Nan Cooper and Chris LaRosa are gratefully acknowledged.
Message from the Head of the Department s the new head, I have the pleasure of A presenting to you the Fall 2009 edition of our Newsletter. It showcases some of the major achievements from the past year of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Connecticut (UConn), the top public university in New England (U.S. News-America’s Best Colleges.) The ECE Department offers ABET accredited undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering (jointly with the Computer Science and Engineering Department). We also collaborate with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in offering an undergraduate program in Engineering Physics. At the Graduate level, the department offers both M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and participates in the interdisciplinary graduate programs in Biomedical Engineering. Full- time enrollment is around 200 undergraduates and our faculty advise over 140 graduate
students. During the past year, the department awarded 46 B.S.E. degrees, 24 M.S. degrees, and 6 Ph.D. degrees. The faculty members of the ECE Department worked on our 100 sponsored grants/contracts with annual expenditures of $3.8 million dollars. Their scholarly output included 92 referral journal articles, 11 book chapters, 155 conference papers, and 7 patents. Dr. Shengli Zhou received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), while Dr. Yunsi Fei and Dr. Mohammad Tehranipoor received NSF Career awards. Dr. Mohammad Tehranipoor also received the 2008 IEEE Computer Society Meritorious Service Award. The second edition of Dr. John Ayers’ widely used engineering text Digital Integrated Circuits: Analysis and Design was released in 2009.
Among graduate students, Mehdi Daneshpanah received the 2008 IEEE Lasers & Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) Graduate Student Fellowship Award while Yasaman Ardeshipour received the 2009 Society of Women Engineers (SWE) scholarship. After 37 years of service, Dr. Martin Fox retired during the summer of 2009 (but is still teaching for the department). This fall, the department welcomed Dr. Sung-Yeul Park as a new tenure-track faculty member in the area of sustainable/renewable energy. As the following pages show, it has been a great year for the ECE Department and we look forward to another exciting year ahead.
Rajeev Bansal Professor and Head
WWW.ENGR.UCONN.EDU/ECE
|
3
Professor Zhou Named a Presidential Award Recipient
D
r. Shengli Zhou, now an associate professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, was selected to receive one of 67 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) awards presented in 2008. e PECASE Awards are the nation’s highest honor for professionals at the outset of their scientific research careers. It is the first PECASE award made
to a faculty member at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Zhou was among 15 award recipients nominated by the U.S. Department of Defense; he will receive $200,000 per year for five years to support an expansion of his research aimed at developing a multicarrier acoustic modem with channel- and networkadaptivity for underwater autonomous distributed systems. Dr. Zhou was presented the award during a December 19, 2008 ceremony in Washington, DC presided over by Dr. John H. Marburger III, Science Advisor to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In the fall of 2008, Dr. Zhou was selected one of five recipients of the United Technologies
Corporation (UTC) Professorship in Engineering Innovation Award in the School of Engineering. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in 2002, Dr. Zhou joined the University of Connecticut in 2003. He was presented an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program (YIP) last year. e co-director of the UConn Underwater Sensor Network (UWSN) Lab, with Dr. Jun-Hong Cui, Dr. Zhou conducts research involving underwater acoustic communications and networking, multi-user communications, multi-carrier communications, space-time coding, adaptive modulation, and cross-layer designs for wireless systems. In making PECASE selections, nine federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge.
ECE Welcomes a New Faculty Member he Electrical & Computer Engineering Department welcomes Dr. Sung-Yeul Park, who received his Ph.D. in August 2009 and his M.S. degree in 2004, both at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). Dr. Park’s doctoral research involved solid oxide fuel cell power conditioning systems and is related to the process of transferring renewable energy to the utility grid. His research interests include renewable energy power conditioning systems, micro-grid inverters and digital power converter/inverter control. Dr. Park interned with Ballard Power System Corporation in Dearborn, MI, where he was involved in the development of a thermal
T
impedance tester for a high power inverter module of a fuel cell car. Before pursuing his Ph.D., Dr. Park worked in Seoul, Korea as a field application junior engineer with YK Logic Co., Ltd. and as a technical support engineer with Hyun Jung System Co., Ltd. He has one U.S. patent and has co-authored one book and four research papers along with six conference papers. Dr. Park has received several best paper awards, an outstanding writing award in the International Future Energy Challenge (IFEC) in 2007 and a research excellence award at Virginia Tech in 2009.
LASER-FEST Dr. Anthony DeMaria, Professor in Residence, was asked to serve on the LASER-FEST committee to organize worldwide activities in 2010 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the laser. The committee is composed of members of the American Physics Society, the Optical Society of America, and SPIE. Funding is provided by NSF. As part of LASER-FEST, he was asked to write an invited paper entitled “The CO2 Laser: The Work Horse of the Laser Material Processing Industry.” The paper will be published in the Photonic Professional Magazine of the SPIE Society in January, 2010. 4
|
ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING
FACULTY NEWS
Professor Fei Receives an NSF CAREER Award ith pervasive usage of embedded W systems in our daily life and infrastructures, strengthening the security of an embedded system in its design and implementation has become a critical priority for the research community. Professor Yunsi Fei’s CAREER project funded by NSF attempts to attack the problem of embedded system security at a fundamental level, which targets augmenting the embedded processor architecture for run-time secure processing. The architectural support is deliberately made to be transparent to upper-level software; hence, it cannot be easily circumvented by new software security attacks. Meanwhile, in-processor changes offer great efficiency, mitigating the performance degradation caused by traditional software security countermeasures. Since most software attacks gain control of embedded systems by corrupting memory, including both program code compromise and data overwriting, the research team members will be pursuing three research objectives to address random memory corruption. First, they explore effective architectural augmentations of embedded processors to monitor code integrity, and incorporate the monitor in a realistic application-specific instruction set processors (ASIPs) design flow. Second, they utilize the embedded speculative architectures of processors as a cache for legitimate behaviors to validate program control flow, protecting
control data and decision-making data that are vital to system security. The program execution validations are sampled at critical points to reduce the performance degradation. Third, they scale architectural support in a singlecore environment up to more sophisticated and increasingly popular multi-core platforms. The outcomes of the proposed research include a suite of design tools to implement the proposed architectural enhancements and associated system software. The public release of these tools will facilitate further study and real-world adoption of our new security countermeasures. The new approach will lead to a real impact on modern secure embedded processor design. It is expected that the project will also facilitate the integration of research and education across multiple disciplines, including computer architecture of embedded systems, electronic design automation, system synthesis, and compilers, all tailored to secure processing.
Senior Design he 2008-09 school year had 14 senior T design projects—3 completed in the fall and 11 more in the spring. As usual, the seniors worked in interdisciplinary teams to solve challenging design problems posed by industrial partners and faculty advisors. Drs. Quing Zhu, Shengli Zhou, Mohammad Tehranipoor, Martin Fox, John Chandy and Rajeev Bansal served as faculty advisors on the projects. Of the 14 projects, six were sponsored by industrial partners and five were associated with some of our faculty’s cutting-edge research efforts. The external sponsors were Applied Physical Sciences, Dominion, FPL Energy, NCPS Research, Phonon, and Qualtech. The digital temperature controller team sponsored by Phonon was selected as the first prize winner and Dr. Zhu’s ultrasonic pulse generation and transmittance team was selected as the second prize winner.
WWW.ENGR.UCONN.EDU/ECE
|
5
FACULTY PROFILE
Professor Tehranipoor Receives an NSF Career Award odern society is utterly dependent M upon integrated circuits (ICs), or chips, which provide the brains for virtually everything electronic, from cell phones, microwave ovens and automobiles to radars, computers and the Joint Strike Fighter jet. Yet ICs are extraordinarily vulnerable to intentional tampering. Armed with a newly awarded $400,000 five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Professor Mohammad Tehranipoor is intent upon developing techniques for identifying chips that have been deliberately compromised. Dr. Tehranipoor will use the funding to support his research aimed at detecting and localizing so-called hardware “Trojans” in ICs. Named after the Trojan horse the Greeks used in their infiltration and defeat of Troy, a hardware Trojan is a small piece of circuit designed either to disable and/or destroy a system at some future time— referred to as a “time bomb”—or to leak confidential information covertly to the enemy.
Verifying the trustworthiness of an integrated circuit, called IC authentication, is a very complex problem since there is no knowledge about the type, size, and location of the Trojans. Dr. Tehranipoor's research centers on the types of cyber-assaults in which the attacker is assumed to maliciously alter the design before or during fabrication —a type of alteration that is extremely difficult to detect. His efforts focus on the development of methods for the detection of design- and fabrication-level malicious alterations, and methods that reveal deliberate tampering that affects chip reliability, such as changing the chip’s functionality at critical times while it is operating in mission mode. Dr. Tehranipoor has developed a post-manufacturing step to validate that the chip performs as it was originally intended. He is also developing novel design-for-hardware-trust techniques that can significantly help improve the detection of Trojans when using power/delay-based side channel analysis methods.
Dr. Tehranipoor and his graduate student, Hassan Salmani, study an integrated circuit (IC) layout infected with a hardware Trojan.
(L-r): Chris Ladden, Mike Gionfriddo and Omar Ayub.
Senior Design Project Inspires Start-up for Graduates rmed with a novel product develA oped for their senior design project, a penchant for hard work and a creative vision, two young alumni, Mike Gionfriddo and Chris Ladden (Electrical & Computer Engineering ‘06) founded a company on the eve of graduation. The open source company, Liquidware (www.liquidware.com) emerged from the success of their Digital Dashboard project, which they designed and built during their senior year under the guidance of Professor Rajeev Bansal. Liquidware offers a spectrum of products, including cables, components, kits, modular devices, open engines, etc., for a range of do-it-yourself electronic applications. Among the company’s products are OLED touch screens, joystick shields, extender shields, core boards and all manner of computing and peripheral accessories that may be used alone or in combination with other items to create customized and unique devices. According to Chris, the focus is squarely on modularity: “Think of these pieces as LEGO® pieces. You can assemble different pieces to build anything you want.” The company began with one product. For the Digital Dashboard, Chris and Mike—along with their third continued on page 11
6
|
ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING
FACULTY PROFILE
Professors Gokirmak and Silva STUDENT PROFILE
Adam Cywar EDUCATION
• BS (Electrical Engineering), Mathematics Minor Expected May 2010 • Academic Interests: Semiconductor devices, Mathematics
AWARDS/ACHIEVEMENTS
• John and Caroline Kulak Endowed Scholarship in Engineering “in recognition of outstanding academic achievement and potential for future professional accomplishments in Engineering.” (2008) • New England Scholar Award for “outstanding scholastic achievement” (2007 & 2008) • School of Engineering Dean’s List (Spring 2007 – Spring 2009)
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
• A. Cywar, G. Bakan, C. Boztug, H. Silva and A. Gokirmak, “Phase-change oscillations in silicon microwires,” Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 94, pp. 072111, 2009. • G. Bakan, A. Cywar, H. Silva and A. Gokirmak, “Melting and crystallization of nanocrystalline silicon microwires through rapid self-heating,” Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 94, pp. 251910, 2009. Conference Proceedings • G. Bakan, A. Cywar, K. Cil, F. Dirisaglik, H. Silva and A. Gokirmak. “Phase-change oscillations in silicon wires.” IEEE 2009 Device Research Conference Digest, pp. 79-80. • G. Bakan, K. Cil, A. Cywar, H. Silva and A. Gokirmak, “Measurements of liquid silicon resistivity on silicon microwires,” in Mater. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc. Spring 2009, 2009, pp. AA06-06. • G. Bakan, A. Cywar, C. Boztug, M. Akbulut, H. Silva and A. Gokirmak, “Annealing of nanocrystalline silicon micro-bridges with electrical stress,” in Mater. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc. Fall 2008, 2009, pp. LL03-25.
Co-directors, Nanoelectronics Laboratory anometer-scale high performance N CMOS and flash memory devices are designed for extremely high speed and high density in order to achieve large computing power and data storage in small areas at low-costs. The fabrication technology and the know-how currently available for the electronics industry, as well as many of the academic nanofabrication facilities, allow reliable fabrication and characterization of electronic devices in sub-50 nm regime. The nanoelectronics research group, co-directed by Professors Gokirmak and Silva, focuses mainly on the fabrication and electrical characterization of silicon based nanoelectronic devices including MOSFETs and flash memories. Students fabricate devices at the NSF-funded National Nanofabrication Infrastructure Network (NNIN) user facilities and the IBM Watson laboratories. The fabricated structures are experimentally investigated in the nanoelectronics laboratory, which is equipped with high-speed oscilloscopes, a high-sensitivity semiconductor parameter analyzer, current and lock-in amplifiers along with two probe stations with high-magnification microscopes with high-speed video capability. Experimental studies are complemented with numerical modeling using high-performance workstations.
Recently, one of the group’s strong efforts has been on current-induced crystallization of nano-crystalline silicon micro-structures for high performance silicon thin film transistors on glass and plastic substrates for large area electronics such as displays and solar cells. It has been found that these structures can be melted with electrical pulses of 10s of nanoseconds and crystal growth is initiated from the melt at micrometer scale. It was observed that melting starts at one terminal end, indicating strong thermoelectric transport in this single material system. This observation ignited the group’s investigations on thermoelectricity—coupled electronic and thermal transport—in this system. The nanoelectronics group currently has two joint study agreements with the IBM Watson Research Center on fundamental studies on electronic and thermoelectric transport in nanometer scale silicon MOSFETs and phase change memory devices. This research is being supported by grants from NSF and the UConn Research Foundation. Website: www.engr.uconn.edu/electron
Helena Silva
Ali Gokirmak
WWW.ENGR.UCONN.EDU/ECE
|
7
Students Capture Honors KE PENG
Doctoral candidate Ke Peng and his advisor, Dr. Mohammad Tehranipoor (Electrical & Computer Engineering), were honored with a Best Paper Award for their paper presented during the 14th IEEE North Atlantic Test Workshop (NATW). The paper was titled “Efficient Pattern Grading for Small Delay Defects in Digital Integrated Circuits.” It discusses the team’s research involving an efficient pattern evaluation and selection procedure for screening small delay defects (SDDs) in integrated circuits, which arise from physical defects as well as process variations and crosstalk. SDDs introduce small delays whose impact can be significant in cases where the sensitized path is long or critical. The team’s approach involves an efficient pattern evaluation and selection procedure for screening SDDs. Ke received his B.S. degree at Northwestern Polytechnical University (Xi’an, China) in 2004 and his M.S. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, in 2007.
WOOSUN AN & CHULWOO PARK
Doctoral students Woosun An and Chulwoo Park (Electrical & Computer Engineering) were co-authors on a paper that garnered a Best Student Paper award for the Modeling and Simulation Track at
the 14th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposia (ICCRTS). Their paper, presented during the June 15-17 meeting in Washington, DC, was entitled “HMM and Auctionbased Formulations of ISR Coordination Mechanisms for the Expeditionary Strike Group Missions.” Both are advised by Dr. Krishna Pattipati. The paper describes work relating to the development of an analytic model for investigating intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) coordination mechanisms in the context of dynamic and uncertain mission environments, using hidden Markov models and multi-stage auction algorithms. Woosun received his B.S. from the University of Chung Ang , South Korea (2001) and his M.S. from the University of Florida in 2005. He previously received UConn engineering summer fellowship awards in 2007 and 2008. Chulwoo received a B.E. degree from R.O.K. Naval Academy, Korea and his M.S. from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1996 and 2003, respectively.
MEHDI DANESHPANAH
Doctoral student Mehdi DaneshPanah was selected to receive a $3,000 SPIE Scholarship in Optical Science and Engineering. Mehdi is working toward his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering under the guidance of Board of Trustees Distinguished
Professor Bahram Javidi and is a co-author on more than 22 publications, including seven scholarly journal papers, two book chapters and 13 conference proceedings papers. Three of Mehdi’s proceedings have received Best Paper Awards. In 2008, Mehdi was among 12 recipients of the IEEE Lasers & Electro-Optics Society (LEOS) Graduate Student Fellowship Award. His research interests pertain to passive and active 3-D imaging systems, including collaborative multi-perspective imaging and information processing as well as tomographic digital holographic microscopy and its application in stem cell research.
MARCO GUERRIERO & PAOLO BRACA
The Best Student Paper Award 2nd place was given to doctoral student Marco Guerriero and visiting scholar Paolo Braca for “Distributed Estimation with Data Association: Is the Nearest Neighbor the Most Informative?” during the 12th International Conference on Information Fusion in Seattle, WA, July 2009. The paper’s co-authors are Dr. Peter K. Willett, major advisor, and S. Marano and V. Matta.
VISHAL RAVINDRA
Doctoral student Vishal Ravindra, along with his advisor Dr. Yaakov Bar-Shalom and Professor-in-Residence Anthony DeMaria, won the Best Student Paper Award 3rd place for “Feature-Aided Localization of Ground Vehicles Using Passive Acoustic Sensor Arrays” during the 12th International Conference on Information Fusion in Seattle, WA, July 2009.
YASAMAN ARDESHIPOUR Doctoral student Yasaman Ardeshipour received the $1,000 Society of Women Engineers Scholarship. (For more about Yasaman, see p. 12.)
(L-r): Jun-Hong Cui, Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies & Diversity, Yasaman Ardeshirpour and Kevin McLaughlin, Director, Engineering Diversity Program. 8
|
ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING
ECE FACULTY PROFILES ANWAR, A F. Professor, Fellow, SPIE
Quantum size effect devices; transport in semiconductor devices; high frequency noise in electronic devices; GaN-based high power devices anwara@engr.uconn.edu
AYERS, JOHN E. Associate Professor
Semiconductor materials, heteroepitaxial growth, and characterization; defect engineering in heteroepitaxial semiconductors; semiconductor devices, VLSI fabrication jayers@engr.uconn.edu
BAR-SHALOM, YAAKOV M. Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor & Marianne E. Klewin Endowed Professor in Engineering Fellow, IEEE Member, CASE Target tracking with radar, sonar, and infrared sensors; air traffic control, surveillance systems with multiple sensors ybs@engr.uconn.edu
Molly Brewer Research Professor
Anthony DeMaria Professor in Residence Member, NAE and NAS Jie Huang Assistant Research Professor
DONKOR, ERIC Associate Professor Fellow, SPIE Member, CASE
Fiber optic high-speed digital and high-frequency network implementation; quantum computing and communications donkor@engr.uconn.edu
Modeling physiological systems, system identification, signal processing, control theory jenderle@engr.uconn.edu
Applied electromagnetics (EM) rajeev@engr.uconn.edu
Steven K. Boggs Research Professor Fellow, IEEE
Distributed storage, clustered file systems, networking, hardware, parallel architectures, VLSI design and automation chandy@engr.uconn.edu
ENDERLE, JOHN D. Professor Fellow, IEEE and AIMBE
BANSAL, RAJEEV Professor & Department Head Fellow of the Electromagnetics Academy Member, CASE
AFFILIATED FACULTY
CHANDY, JOHN A. Associate Professor & Associate Department Head
Robert S. Lynch Adjunct Lecturer Eric P. Soulsby Lecturer
ESCABI, MONTY Associate Professor
Human perception of sounds, neuronal processing of sound information, neuronal modeling escabi@engr.uconn.edu
EMERITUS FACULTY Peter K. Cheo Fellow, IEEE David Jordan Mahmoud A. Melehy Robert B. Northrop Martin D. Fox
David Kleinman Fellow, IEEE Charles H. Knapp Matthew Mashikian Fellow, IEEE
WWW.ENGR.UCONN.EDU/ECE
|
9
ECE FACULTY PROFILES FEI, YUNSI Assistant Professor
PARK, SUNG-YEUL Assistant Professor
JAIN, FAQUIR C. Professor Member, CASE
PATTIPATI, KRISHNA R Professor Fellow, IEEE Member, CASE
Embedded system and integrated circuit design automation, power analysis and optimization of ICs and systems, mobile computing systems, underwater sensor networks, security in computer architecture, hardware/software co-synthesis yfei@engr.uconn.edu
Design & fab of quantum dot (QD) FETs & circuits; tandem solar cells and lasers; CNT & QD implantable biosensors fcj@engr.uconn.edu
GOKIRMAK, ALI Assistant Professor
Nanofabrication, micro/nanoelectronics, thermo-electrics, electrical characterization, transport, electrical materials processing gokirmak@engr.uconn.edu
JAVIDI, BAHRAM Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Fellow, IEEE, OSA, SPIE
Optics for information systems, 3D imaging, 3D display, 3D image processing, 3D image recognition, bio sensing, biomedical imaging, disease detection, bacteria identification, and information security bahram@engr.uconn.edu
LUH, PETER B. SNET Professor of Communications & Information Technologies Fellow, IEEE; Member, CASE Planning, scheduling & coordination of design, manufacturing, and service activities; power system load/price forecasting and market auctions; building emergency evacuation luh@engr.uconn.edu 10
|
ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING
Power electronics, energy conversion, renewable energy, smart grid applications supark@engr.uconn.edu
Optimization, prognostics and diagnostics, Inference and decisionmaking under uncertainty, multi-object tracking and adaptive organizations krishna@engr.uconn.edu
SILVA, HELENA Assistant Professor
Nanofabrication, micro/nano-electronics, thermo-electrics, electrical characterization, transport, electrical materials processing hsilva@engr.uconn.edu
INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD Zahi Abuhamdeh (TranSwitch) Frank Chan (Naval Undersea Warfare Center) Anthony DeMaria (Coherent) Peter Friedland (ISO New England) Tom Martin (Phonon) Don Masters (Pratt & Whitney) Kathleen F. Maurer, MD, MPHN (The Hartford) Eric Mueller (Coherent) Edmund Murphy (JDS Uniphase) Venk Mutalik (ARRIS Access and Transport)
Gina Portanova (Hamilton Sundstrand) Liu Qiao (Toyota Technical Center USA) David Raunig (Pfizer) Eric Reed (General Electric) Nils R. Sandell, Jr. (BAE Systems) Theodora Saunders (Sikorsky) Daniel Serfaty (Aptima) Paul Singer (General Electric) Michael F. Ahern (Northeast Utilities)
ECE FACULTY PROFILES TAYLOR, GEOFF W. Professor Fellow, IEEE Member, CASE
WILLETT, PETER K. Professor Fellow, IEEE
TEHRANIPOOR, MOHAMMAD Assistant Professor
ZHOU, SHENGLI Associate Professor
WANG, LEI Assistant Professor
ZHU, QUING Professor Member, CASE
Optoelectronic devices and integrated circuits; advanced materials gwt@engr.uconn.edu
Computer aided design and test, delay fault testing, hardware security and trust tehrani@engr.uconn.edu
Low-power, high performance, integrated microsystems, design methodologies for ASIC/SOC, and VLSI signal processing algorithms and architectures leiwang@engr.uconn.edu
Detection, target tracking, and signal processing willett@engr.uconn.edu
Wireless communications, signal processing for communications, and underwater acoustic communications and networking shengli@engr.uconn.edu
Near Infrared light imaging, ultrasonic imaging, photoacoustic imaging, Optical coherence tomography zhu@engr.uconn.edu
Senior Design continued
partner, Johanna Raphael—developed a graphical LCD screen that displayed auto performance parameters such as miles per gallon, RPMs, coolant temperature, air/fuel ratio, engine timing and the like. The device exploits OnBoard Diagnostics Version 2 (OBD-II), a performance sensing and monitoring system found in all passenger vehicles manufactured for sale in the U.S. beginning in 1996. The team used the OBD-II protocol to establish and process communications with the car computer for the acquisition of sensor data. The result was an embedded system that can be installed in any auto dashboard for vehicles manufactured after 1995. The Digital Dashboard inspired the first product out of the gate for Liquidware.
The company’s products are sold online and to bulk distributors, including SparkFun Electronics. The customers for Liquidware products are a diverse lot: engineers, techies, software designers, researchers, hobbyists, students and even artists, who want the flexibility to build their own devices from scratch. “We had an artist buy some of our products. He wanted to use touch screens to present art in a new way. Software designers like to build gadgets, get a taste for the hardware as well as the software. Recently, a guy with the Department of Agriculture in New Zealand contacted us for a range of equipment, including GPS instruments. He intended to attach tracking devices to sheep so the Department could amass and analyze data
concerning sheep grazing patterns, which will help ranchers decide how to design their sheep enclosures.” Naturally, universities are also a growing market. With modular components that snap together and accessible source code and tutorials, Liquidware products have already made their way into a few classrooms and engineering labs. “Professors have talked with us about using our modular units as instructional tools for teaching their students how to develop complex systems such as power networks, for example.” It’s not always about engineering, though, as courses in media arts and physical computing involve similar components— geared towards completely different projects.
WWW.ENGR.UCONN.EDU/ECE
|
11
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering 371 Fairfield Way, Unit 2157 Storrs, CT 06269-2157
Non-Profit Org. US Postage Paid Permit 3 Storrs, CT 06269
Address Service Requested
STUDENT PROFILE
Yasaman Ardeshirpour
“The great thing about Electrical Engineering is that there are no boundaries to what you can learn or the applications on which you can work. You will never get bored. I have worked on many different projects, from electronics devices to telecommunication systems and algorithms, and now I am working on cancer detection. Though all these topics may appear very different, they are all part of electrical engineering.”
EDUCATION
HONORS/AWARDS
• Ph.D. - Electrical Engineering (Electronics, Photonics and Biophotonics), University of Connecticut, Expected 2010. • M.Sc. - Electrical Engineering (Telecommunications) University of Tehran • B.Sc. - Electrical Engineering (Electronics) - University of Tehran
• Society of Women Engineering Scholarship, 2009 • Predoctoral Fellowship Award University of Connecticut, 2009 • Travel grant for Biophotonics Summer School, 2009 • Summer Research Fellowship Award University of Connecticut, 2008 and 2009 • Travel grant for SPIE student chapter leadership workshop and Optics and Photonics conference, 2008
12
|
ELECTRICAL & COMPUTER ENGINEERING
• Clifton W. Sherman Prestige Scholarship, McMaster University • Photonics Research Ontraio Grant for Nato ASI in Biophotonics Summer School • Best Student Paper Award, IEEE CCECE • Khawrazmi Research Award as a team member of PC based digital satellite terminal (VSAT) project. (Khawrazmi Research Award is the most prestigious scientific award in Iran)