Ferri is being recognized for her longstanding commitment to engineering education and innovative use of technology, her prolific publication record, and her influence on other faculty at Georgia Tech. A faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 1988, Ferri was the first female Ph.D. graduate in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech and was ECE’s first female faculty member. She has served as the School’s associate chair for undergraduate affairs since 2013 and was its associate chair for graduate affairs from 2006-2012.

Ferri has introduced inexpensive, portable hands-on experiments into ECE courses, including core lecture-based courses that traditionally had no laboratory component. She has also redesigned the core circuits courses, taken by both ECE and non-ECE majors, to use innovative flipped and blended classroom techniques driven by course analytics. By implementing these tools and responding to student feedback, student engagement and performance has dramatically improved, as well as consistency in coverage and quality across multiple sections of the courses.

“I love the ‘aha moment’,” said Ferri. “I see it all the time with the hands-on experiments in class, when students’ eyes light up because an abstract concept comes to life and suddenly makes sense. You would be surprised at how many just break out laughing because they get such a kick out of it. That reaction is the best part of teaching.”

Through a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Ferri created the Teaching Enhancement through Small-Scale Affordable Labs Center to develop and integrate these portable experiments across the ECE curriculum. Approximately 3,000 students per year use these devices in ECE courses, taught by over 25 instructors. Over 700 K-12 students have also been exposed via camps, workshops, and tours of ECE facilities. Ferri has also been awarded an NSF grant with researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Virginia Tech, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Howard University, and Morgan State University. Their goal is to build a community of developers and users of these experiments that are not only centered on ECE topics, but can be expanded to other STEM fields.

Ferri has been consistently involved in educational issues within the Georgia Tech community. She currently co-chairs the “Commission on Creating the Next in Education,” charged with making recommendations for the Institute to become a leader in innovative and effective education and co-curricular programs. During 2013-2014, she led the GT1000 Review Task Force, which reviewed the status of this freshman seminar course and made recommendations on how to enhance its effectiveness in providing resources and advice to promote student success in college.

Ferri has also had an international impact on engineering education. She has conducted NSF-sponsored workshops at premier engineering education conferences, devised and shared best practices at numerous cross-disciplinary events, and published her work on student learning, strategies, and results in the top conferences and journals in the field of engineering education. She was an invited speaker at a National Academy of Engineering symposium on education.

“Bonnie’s reputation among students and colleagues consistently upholds not only the tremendous impact that she has had on our students, but also the caring and compassionate heart she has for them, her clear vision of their potential, and her ardent desire for their success,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and ECE professor. “We sincerely appreciate her many years of hard work and dedication to our students and to improving our instructional programs.”

Obikwelu is a new ECE Ph.D. student specializing in power engineering and is currently a GTA for ECE 3040A–Microelectronics/Solid State Devices. He is currently focusing his literature review efforts on the topic of wide area monitoring, control, and protection. Obikwelu is also interested in research aimed at the use of synchronized wide-area measurements to facilitate “smart” wide-area system control and system protection decision-making in response to, or as a means of expediently mitigating the scale of wide-area power system disturbances.

Prior to enrolling in the ECE doctoral program, Obikwelu held engineering positions at Xcel Energy, Pike Energy Solutions/UC Synergistic, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratory, and Consumers Energy. He is a 2005 B.S.E.E. graduate of Wayne State University and a 2008 M.S.E.E. graduate of Michigan Technological University.

By focusing on science, technology, engineering, and math in this fellowship program, 3M encourages student interest and awareness in STEM fields at the K-12 level and works to build high performing and diverse global talent at the college/university level.

The paper, titled "Control and Stability Analysis of Modular Multilevel Converter Under Low-Frequency Operation," was published in IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, vol. 62, no.9, pp. 5329-5339, 2015.

The modular multilevel converter (MMC) has become one of the most attractive converter topologies for medium and high-voltage/power applications due to its modularity and scalability. The MMC has been widely investigated for high-voltage direct current transmission systems. The salient features of the MMC make it a potential candidate for medium-voltage adjustable speed drive systems. Nevertheless, one of the main technical challenges associated with the operation of MMC under constant-torque low-speed operation of the MMC-based adjustable-speed drive system is the large magnitude of the submodule (SM) capacitor voltage ripple due to the inverse dependence of the SM capacitor voltage ripple on the speed of the machine. This leads to increased rating values of the converter and/or instability. The paper presents novel control strategies to reduce the SM capacitor voltage ripple under constant-torque low-speed operation of an MMC-based adjustable-speed drive system. The paper also proves the stability of the proposed control strategies based on Lyapunov analysis of singularly perturbed nonlinear nonautonomous systems.

Debnath received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Purdue University in May 2015, under the supervision of Saeedifard, who previously worked at Purdue and is now an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of ECE. Debnath is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he is involved in research on HVDC systems, wireless power transfer systems, and 3D printed solar inverters.

Wahby’s research paper was one of two chosen from SRC TECHCON to be recognized at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium. He is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he works in the Integrated 3D Systems Group and is advised by ECE Professor Muhannad Bakir.

Wahby’s paper, which won in the SRC TECHCON packaging and 3D IC integration track, is entitled "Impact of alternate wiring materials on sequential monolithic 3DICs." This work focuses on quantifying the impact of the use of tungsten (or other high-resistivity metals or alloys) as an on-chip wiring material in monolithic 3D ICs. Copper is unsuitable for use as an on-chip interconnect in serially-fabricated monolithic 3D ICs for any logic tier below the topmost, as the fabrication of each logic tier exposes all lower tiers to temperatures far in excess of what copper interconnects can withstand. Through extensive modeling of 2D and 3D wiring networks, Wahby was able to show that the use of high-resistivity metals in monolithic 3D ICs typically increases the number of metal levels required for signal routing on each logic tier, which impacts the fabrication cost and performance of these systems. 

This award is the highest honor presented to Ph.D. students by the IEEE SSCS and recognizes unique contributions in advancing the state-of-the-art in circuit design. Nasir and Park are the second and third Georgia Tech students to receive this honor since its inception in 1983. 

Saad Bin Nasir

A fourth year Ph.D. student, Nasir is the first Georgia Tech student working in the area of digital and mixed-signal design to win this award. He is a member of the Integrated Circuits and Systems Research Lab, where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Arijit Raychowdhury. Nasir is the author or co-author of over 15 peer-reviewed publications in premier conferences and journals in the areas of integrated circuits and systems. He received a Best in Session Award in the power management track at SRC TECHCON 2016, held on September 12-13 in Austin, Texas. 

The IEEE SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award is recognition of Nasir’s research on fine-grained spatio-temporal power management on a chip. On-die power management continues to be a significant challenge in low power system on chips (SoCs) and microprocessors as digital systems undergo large changes in operating conditions across “dynamic voltage and frequency scaling” (DVFS) states.

Nasir’s research has resulted in the design of novel digital and hybrid linear voltage regulators based on advanced control-theoretic laws and modeling. His work has enabled ultra-low voltage linear regulators with high gain and bandwidth. Silicon measurements on regulator topologies that utilize information from across the software stack have demonstrated best-in-class response times and energy efficiencies. These embedded linear voltage regulators have enabled unprecedented levels of power/performance trade-off for mobile SoCs and server-class chips.

This research has been funded by SRC, Intel, and Qualcomm. Nasir’s research outcomes have gained significant traction with both semiconductor companies and academia, and have already made it into industrial prototypes and test-chips.

Jong Seok Park

A fifth year Ph.D. student, Park is a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS), led by ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang. This is the second consecutive year that a GEMS Lab student has won this award. Song Hu, who is also advised by Wang, received this award in 2015-2016 and was the first Georgia Tech student to receive this honor. 

Park is the author or co-author of 26 peer-reviewed conference and journal publications, all in the area of integrated circuits and systems. He has received multiple prestigious student awards and fellowships, including the Doctoral Study Abroad Fellowship (The Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies KFAS), the Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2014, co-recipient of the 2014 IEEE RFIC Best Student Paper Award (1st Place), leading author of the 2015 IEEE CICC Best Student Paper Award (2nd Place), and the 2015 Catalyst Foundation/IBM/Intel IEEE CICC Student Scholarship Award. He was also the lead author of the 2016 IEEE Sensors Conference Best Live Demo Award (2nd Place).

This SSCS Predoctoral Achievement Award is in recognition of Park's Ph.D. research on “Multi-Modality Cellular Interface with Single-Cell Resolution and Tissue-Level Field-of-View (FoV).” The physiological responses of cells are widely used as powerful sensing tools in cell-based assays to characterize the potency and toxicity of new drugs, determine the patient-specific treatment in personalized medicine, and detect biohazards and pollutants in environmental monitoring. However, cells are highly complex systems that often undergo concurrent multi-physics responses when subjected to external biochemical stimuli. Existing electronic sensors are mostly of single-modality and each can only respond to one type of physiological signal, such as electrochemical or optical signals, from the cells. Such single-modality sensors fundamentally cannot capture the complex multi-physics cell physiology and largely limit our understanding. 

Park’s Ph.D. research explores and demonstrates a novel multi-modality cellular interfacing array platform with joint sensing/actuation capabilities using nano-electronic CMOS processes to achieve simultaneous monitoring of multiple orthogonal cellular physiological responses. This platform will potentially enable holistic cellular characterization and impact many areas including drug screening, stem cell manufacturing, regenerative medicine, implantable bioelectronics, neural/cognitive science, synthetic biology, and hybrid biotic/abiotic (cells/semiconductor) systems.

Park’s related research has been supported by NSF, SRC, ONR, and Intel, and has been published at several premier conferences and journals, including the 2015 IEEE ISSCC. Live demonstrations of Jong Seok's research were performed at the 2015 IEEE BioCAS and 2016 IEEE Sensors conferences and won the Best Live Demo Award (2nd Place) at the 2016 IEEE Sensors conference.

Munson is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine (GTL). He is advised by Abdallah Ougazzaden, director of GTL and an ECE professor.

Munson and the Georgia Tech Lorraine team’s winning proposal was entitled “A Battery for an Eternal Heart,” which proposed the creation of a long-life betavoltaic battery that is small enough to fit in future pacemakers and can power the device for over 100 years with no need to recharge it. This long battery lifespan is possible due to the source material Nickel 63, in conjunction with gallium nitride, a highly durable semiconductor.

One of the main issues facing pacemaker technology today is that their batteries use lithium ion technology, which has a lifespan limited to 5 to 10 years in practice and results in the need for multiple replacements of the battery over time. By having a battery that has a nearly unlimited lifespan, the need for potentially costly and dangerous surgery can be drastically reduced, improving the quality of life for the hundreds of thousands of patients that have pacemakers implanted worldwide each year.

This long-life battery technology can also be used in other areas where the replacement of batteries is difficult or cost-prohibitive, such as sensors to monitor the health of bridges, space exploration, and underground or underwater sensing equipment.

Photo cutline: The 2016 MC6 Trophy is presented to ECE Ph.D. student Charles Munson (right) by Michel Corioland, commercial director of Ingerop (center).

Park’s and Aziz’s paper, entitled “Live Demonstration: CMOS Multi-Modality Sensing Array for Drug Screening and Cell-Based Assays,” was led by the Georgia Tech Electronics and Microsystem (GEMS) Lab, and is based on a collaboration with labs led by Mark Styczynski, an associate professor in Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Hee Cheol Cho, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Joining Park and Aziz as coauthors on the paper are ECE Ph.D. student Taiyun Chi who is also advised by Wang; Amy Su, a Ph.D. student advised by Styczynski; and Andrew Zhao, Cho's former Ph.D. student. 

In this paper, the team presents a live demonstration of a CMOS multi-modality cellular biosensor array chip that can facilitate drug screening and cell-based assays. The multi-modality sensing functionality enables real-time measurements of multiple physiological parameters of biological cells and cell clusters, such as their electrical potential, impedance, optical opacity, and bioluminescent imaging.

Compared with existing single-modality sensors, the team's multi-modality sensor captures multi-physics cellular responses with a high spatiotemporal resolution, substantially expanding the capabilities of monitoring cellular states and understanding complex drug mechanistic effects. For the live demonstration, the team operated the CMOS sensor chip with testing various bio-samples, including on-chip cultured E. Coli bacteria colonies, to present its multi-modality sensing capability and clinical relevance.

The demo may be viewed at http://ieee-sensors2016.org/demos and is labeled as Demo 7. This work was sponsored by Semiconductor Research Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and the Office of Naval Research.

Capstone Design is a culminating senior-level course, where students work in teams to design, build, and test prototypes with real world applications. At the end of each fall and spring semester, students showcase their efforts at the Capstone Design Expo.

Winning the ECE prize was Raising the Steaks, a drone-mounted RFID scanning system that takes inventory of cattle in a herd. The drone flies routes autonomously once programmed for a specific enclosure. Raising the Steaks team members include electrical engineering majors Jorge Juarez, Bryan Dahlqvist, Jesse Baker, and George Tzintzarov and computer engineering major Ashley Hrebik.

ECE students were part of the interdisciplinary team, PH571, that took the top prize in the interdisciplinary category. The team aims to build a versatile hybrid-electric vehicle that excels in urban commuting, long-range travel, and high performance driving. PH571 team members include mechanical engineering majors Ben Horst, Josh Preissle, and Dylan Radford; electrical engineering majors Blake Fuller and Riley Exterovich; and computer engineering major Louis Williams.

Congratulations to all of our seniors. We can’t wait to see what you do next!

Read more about the Fall 2016 Capstone Design Expo

Learn more about the ECE teams

Learn more about the interdisciplinary teams

Award recipients are selected for extraordinary effectiveness in classroom teaching, educational innovations, inspiration transmitted to students, direct impact and involvement with students, and impact on the postgraduate success of students. 

Zajic has been a member of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty for four years, where she teaches Introduction to Signal Processing, Electromagnetics, and Physical Foundations of Computing. This past spring, Zajic received the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, which is determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class, and is a past participant in the Class of 1969 Teaching Scholars Program, which is run by the Georgia Tech Center for Teaching and Learning.

On November 30, ACM named Beyah among its group of 45 Distinguished Members for their individual contributions to the field of computing, which have advanced the science, engineering, and education of computing, and highlight the growing role of computing in the major technological advances shaping society today. 

A member of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty since 2011, Beyah holds the Motorola Foundation Professorship and is the School’s associate chair for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation. He leads the Communications Assurance and Performance (CAP) Group and is a member of the Communications Systems Center (CSC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy (IISP). Prior to returning to Georgia Tech, where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1999 and 2003 respectively, Beyah was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University, a research faculty member with the CSC, and a consultant with Andersen Consulting’s (now Accenture) Network Solutions Group.

Beyah’s research interests include network security, network traffic characterization and performance, privacy, and cyber-physical systems security with a focus on critical infrastructure. His group has discovered critical flaws in many power grid devices across the globe, and this work has resulted in the development of security patches for these devices. Beyah’s work has been highlighted in many news outlets, including NSF Science 360 Radio, NetworkWorld, and Forbes. 

Initiated in 2006, the ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes those members with at least 15 years of professional experience who have made significant accomplishments or achieved a significant impact on the computing field. The program consists of three categories–Distinguished Scientists, Distinguished Engineers, and Distinguished Educators.

Murthy was one of 10 Georgia Tech Ph.D. students to compete in the final round of this contest, where he presented his research dissertation topic, “Recovering Kinetic Energy Using Electric Motors.” The objective of his research is to develop optimal regenerative braking control strategies, using optimal control theory, to maximize kinetic energy recovery during braking events, for surface and interior permanent-magnet synchronous machines, and induction machines. 

A contest developed by the University of Queensland, 3MT aims to develop academic, presentation, and research communication skills and supports students’ abilities to effectively explain their research in language appropriate to an intelligent but nonspecialist audience in a three-minute timeframe. 3MT does not “water down” research, but requires students to consolidate their ideas and concisely explain their research discoveries.

Held at New York University in New York City, CSAW is the world’s largest student-run security games, which feature six different competitions for students ranging from high school grades through those who are in doctoral programs.

Beyah is the Motorola Foundation Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is the School’s associate chair for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation, and Liao is his Ph.D. student in the Communications Assurance and Performance Group. They were honored for their paper, “Acing the IOC Game: Toward Automatic Discovery and Analysis of Open-Source Cyber Threat Intelligence,” which they coauthored with Kan Yuan, Xiaofeng Wang, and Luyi Xing, their colleagues at Indiana University-Bloomington, and Zhou Li, their colleague who works at RSA.

To adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber threats, security professionals are actively exchanging Indicators of Compromise (IOC), such as malware signatures and botnet IPs through public sources like blogs, forums, and tweets. With hundreds of thousands of sources in the wild, the IOC data are produced at a high volume and velocity today, which becomes increasingly hard to manage by humans. This team’s paper describes a solution that they developed which uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to automate the reading of these threat indicators. This allows: 1) quicker deployment of accurate signatures/rules into defense mechanisms like intrusion detection systems; and 2) discovery of unknown relationships of various attack campaigns.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Cho is advised by Zhang, an ECE associate professor who leads the Georgia Tech Systems Research Lab.

Cho and Zhang were honored for their paper entitled “An Adaptive Control Law for Controlled Lagrangian Particle Tracking.” Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) serve as mobile sensors for measuring environmental fields in the ocean. However, navigation of AUVs is a challenging task due to influence from unknown ocean currents. This paper presents an adaptive control law that increases the accuracy of navigation while estimating ocean current.

This award, presented by the International Solid-State Alliance, recognizes outstanding lifetime contributions of researchers to the solid-state lighting field. Dupuis invented the process that is the basis of virtually all production of high-brightness LEDs, laser diodes, solar cells, and high-speed optoelectronic devices. 

Dupuis currently studies the growth of III-V compound semiconductor devices by MOCVD, including materials in the InAlGaN/GaN, InAlGaAsP/GaAs, InAlGaAsSb, and InAlGaAsP/InP systems. He and two of his colleagues were awarded the 2002 National Medal of Technology for their work on developing and commercializing LEDs.

In 2015, Dupuis was one of five pioneers to receive the Draper Prize for Engineering in recognition of the significant benefit to society created by the initial development and commercialization of LED technologies. He has also been recognized with the IEEE Edison Medal and as a Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his achievements in this field. 

This year, three Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate students were able to attend. Caitlyn Caggia, Lakshmi Raju, and Delgermaa Nergui, who are all electrical engineering majors, were sponsored by the Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering (WECE) student organization. The organization took care of their travel expenses and the conference registration.

The three-day event, which took place October 19 – 21, 2016, provides female technologists from all over the world the chance to celebrate the achievements of women in the computing field. The event includes presentations by influential entrepreneurs, academics, and business leaders—all in the fields of computing and technology. Also on offer are ample opportunities to network and socialize, professional development activities, and a career fair. Caitlyn Caggia describes it as the perfect way to transition from being a student to being a professional.

At first concerned that the conference would have too narrow of a focus on computing, the Georgia Tech women quickly learned that there were a variety of topics relevant to women in technology in all stages of their careers, from students to executives. In fact, being an electrical engineer had a decided advantage in terms of talking with recruiters.

“There were hundreds of companies recruiting from Google and Facebook to J.P. Morgan Chase to Hewlett-Packard. Being an electrical engineer came in handy as EEs were in short supply at the conference and it was a great talking point with many recruiters,” said Raju.

The conference was organized by thematic areas of interest called “Clusters” which included Technology, Products A to Z, Open Source World, Emerging Technology, Career, and Organization Transformation. Featured keynote speakers included Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM; Susan Cain, author of Quiet: How to Harness the Strength of Introverts to Transform How We Work, Lead, and Innovate; Latanya Sweeney, professor at Harvard University and Editor-in-Chief of Technology Science; Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce; and Megan Smith, the United States Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

One panel that was a favorite of the Georgia Tech students was Insights from the Top Companies Leadership Index featuring senior technologists from Intel, Accenture, Allstate, and Bank of America. The four women who made up the panel described how they are increasing representation of women technologists in their companies through recruitment, retention, and advancement.

“There was some really genuine, encouraging feedback from executives about what they’ve done to inspire lasting change. One particularly memorable speaker was a woman from Intel. She discussed some best practices at Intel that really worked, and also went through some of their well-intentioned attempts that ended in complete failure. For example, forcing company-wide educational sessions was less effective than one-on-one mentoring type programs to increase exposure and awareness,” said Caggia.

The three-day trip also included multiple interviews with industry representatives and lots of useful tips for developing new skills and finding your dream job. In addition to gaining insight into what they may want to do after they graduate, Caggia, Raju, and Nergui appreciated the general sense of comradery, the high energy atmosphere, and the wisdom imparted by women who are paving the path for future generations of female technologists.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Kim was honored for his paper entitled “All-Soft Sensing Platform based on Liquid Metal for Liquid- and Gas-Phase VOC Detection.” His coauthors include his Ph.D. advisor and ECE Professor Oliver Brand and Kim’s fellow ECE Ph.D. students Hommood Alrowais and Choongsoon Kim, who are also advised by Brand.

This paper introduces an all-soft microfluidic sensing platform based on liquid metal (eutectic gallium-indium alloy, EGaIn) and poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) for volatile organic compound (VOC) detection in the liquid and gas phase. For device fabrication, an advanced liquid metal patterning method based on soft lithography is used to form interdigitated capacitors and integrate them with microfluidics. To highlight flexibility and stretchability, the electrical characteristics of the interdigitated capacitor are investigated subject to mechanical loading. Finally, VOC detection is demonstrated using the all-soft microfluidic sensing platform in both the liquid and gas phase.

Thanks to its softness, lightweight, flexibility, and stretchability, the proposed chemical sensing platform is suited for wearable sensing applications either on the skin or on clothing and for potential applications in next-generation sensing electronics for the Internet of Things (IoT).

While robots have the potential to be very intelligent, if there’s one thing that books, movies, and even our own experiences have shown, it’s that they also can be remarkably dumb. So one sure-fire way for the U.S. to continue leading the robotics world is by investing in education. Not only are these machines getting smarter every day, but so too are other countries, training the kind of workers required to operate robots that can coat cars on assembly lines with paint and produce sneakers faster than ever.

That’s one takeaway from a new report released Monday by a group of 120 robotics experts. Intended to brief the U.S. government on the state of robotics so that the government can better plan for the future, the Roadmap to Robotics report is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (as well as a few universities) and written by experts from the private sector as well as academic institutions like like Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale.

The Georgia Tech professors who helped write the report are Magnus Egerstedt and Ayanna Howard from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Jaydev Desai and Charlie Kemp from the Georgia Tech/Emory Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Sonia Chernova in the School of Interactive Computing. 

Read the rest of the Fortune article by Jonathan Vanian, published November 7, 2016.  

Rohatgi’s project is entitled “Pushing the Efficiency Limit of Low-Cost, Industrially-Relevant Silicon Solar Cells by Advancing Cell Structures and Technology Innovations.” It will be funded for $1.125 million for the next three years. This project will advance manufacturable silicon cell technologies to above 22% efficiency through the use of passivated selective emitter and selective back surface field (BSF) contact geometries. The improved contact and metallization methods investigated during the course of the project will reduce recombination and improve cell performance by up to 2% absolute efficiency. Multiple fabrication methodologies will be investigated to determine the most cost-effective method for producing the laterally patterned doping profiles needed to realize this high performance cell technology.

Joining Rohatgi on this project as subcontractors are Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems and the University of Konstanz, which are both located in Germany. Rohatgi is the founding director of the first university-based, Department of Energy Center of Excellence in Photovoltaics Research and Education, and he holds the John H. Weitnauer Chair in the College of Engineering and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. Rohatgi has published over 500 technical papers and has been issued a total of 41 patents, including 19 U.S. patents. He is the founder and CTO of Suniva, Inc., a Georgia Tech spin-off company that is the first silicon solar cell manufacturing company in the southeast.

In addition, Suniva, Inc., a Georgia Tech spin-off founded by Rohatgi, was named as one of 21 projects funded by the Technology to Market Program. Suniva received a two-year $1.997 million contract from this SunShot Initiative, and Rohatgi is a subcontractor on the project. The company, which is the first silicon solar cell manufacturer in the southeast, will work on developing an advanced passivated emitter rear cell (PERC) structure that utilizes an aluminum grid on the back side instead of a conventional full-area aluminum structure. These bifacial cells will have lower stress and thus can be thinned down to save on silicon material costs. In addition, performance improvements are proposed that would lead to much finer silver gridlines to improve cell and module efficiency. These enhancements in the cell performance can feed directly into Suniva’s high-volume manufacturing line.

One of SunShot’s goals is to drive down the levelized cost of utility-scale solar electricity to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour without incentives by 2020. The projects and new funding aim to reach costs well below that threshold, furthering the Obama Administration’s commitment to advancing solar technology as a resource for clean energy in America’s low-carbon economy.

“Since 2008, the commitments made by the Department of Energy have contributed to solar PV’s deployment growing 30-fold and overall costs falling more than 60 percent,” said Under Secretary for Science and Energy Franklin Orr. “Continuing to invest in solar technologies will help to drive down costs even further for American consumers and ensure that the U.S. maintains global leadership in this century’s clean energy economy.”

The ASE section covers the physics of charging and discharging of thunderclouds and lightning, radio wave generation and propagation, impacts on the upper atmosphere, and the space environment. This includes a portion of Cohen’s research area, which is global detection and propagation analysis of Low Frequency (LF, 1-500 kHz) radio waves from lightning and radio transmitters, as well as novel antenna techniques to generate LF waves with compact antennas. Applications for this research include global navigation, communication, and geophysical remote sensing of lightning, the near-Earth space environment, and the radiation belts. The LF Radio Lab, led by Cohen, and its students are highly interdisciplinary, combining custom-built cutting edge radio detection hardware, advanced signal processing, and theoretical electromagnetic simulations.

Cohen is an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he has been a faculty member since 2013. He is a winner of the 2015 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award and was also chosen for the 2014 Santimay Basu Prize, an award given once per three years to an under-35 scientist by the International Union of Radio Science (URSI).

These Ph.D. students from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) were honored for their paper entitled “NeuroSensor: A 3D Image Sensor with Integrated Neural Accelerator.” Their co-authors on the paper are their Ph.D. advisor and ECE Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay, ECE Regents’ Professor Sudhakar Yalamanchili, and Denny Lie, Mukhopadhyay’s former Ph.D. student who now works at Intel. Amir, Kim, and Kung are all current members of the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem (GREEN) Lab, which is led by Mukhopadhyay.

Neuro-inspired deep learning algorithms have emerged as a key enabler for performing complex tasks such as feature extraction, classification, and recognition on image/video data. Currently, such complex processing is mainly performed at the back-end machines. There is a growing need to push learning algorithms into the sensor front-end to facilitate fast decision making and reduce the demand on communication bandwidth. However, the size, weight, and power constraints limit the ability to perform complex processing in the sensor.

This paper presents an innovative system design concept to enable integration of deep learning architecture within a image sensor. The device is known as the NeuroSensor – a 3D stacked image sensor with an integrated neural network. The NeuroSensor performs on-chip neural computation for in-field decision making and classification, and thus reduces latency and energy consumption for data movement between the sensor and host. The design and analysis presented in the paper creates a new research direction on how to enable complex machine learning at the sensor front-end.

This paper is a key milestone in the research performed at the GREEN lab on intelligent and autonomous image sensors. This is also one of many key publications, and the second best paper award received by GREEN Lab students in 2016 on this research topic. The research is supported in part by Mukhopadhyay’s National Science Foundation CAREER Award and Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.

Pickren has been earning miles in United’s Bug Bounty Program since October 2015. The program, started in May 2015, incentivizes researchers to identify and report potential security issues that could affect the company’s websites, apps, or online portals. Mileage awards can range in value based upon a qualifying bug’s potential impact to United or the airline’s customers. Since the program’s inception, Pickren has been the most successful participant, earning more than twice as many miles as any other participant.

"Ryan is an exceptionally talented researcher and a big reason why our program has been so successful," said Arlan McMillan, United's chief information security officer. "His creative submissions have helped strengthen our security environment, and we are grateful for his partnership and professionalism."

Pickren was inspired to try the program after taking an “Introduction to Cybersecurity” course with Professor Raheem Beyah. Beyah mentioned the program to his students and Pickren was immediately intrigued.

Initially compelled by the possibility of free air travel, Pickren soon found that working the program had other benefits. “I took a look at the program and realized how fun it was. My main motivation to keep at it was that I found it fascinating,” said Pickren.

Upon realizing his success in the program, Pickren knew he wanted to give back to the Institute that taught him everything he knows about cybersecurity and computer bugs.

 “I wanted to help student organizations that help others by removing one hurdle they face in the funding game--air travel. With these miles, Tech’s student organizations that do charity work should be set for airfare for a long time,” said Pickren.

The gift is one of the largest in-kind donations made to the Institute by a current undergraduate student.

“We couldn’t be prouder of Ryan. We always enjoy seeing how our students apply the knowledge they gain in class to real-world challenges. Not only is he applying that in an incredibly creative way, he is sharing his success with current and future Georgia Tech students. It is a generous, inspired, and impressive legacy — all while he is still a student. Wow!” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE at Georgia Tech.

The list includes domains from Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, and according to the team, the malicious content can be difficult to spot.

Researchers say hackers could hide components of malware in separate locations in the cloud, allowing them to go untracked as individual items – but, these seemingly innocent pieces can quickly be assembled to launch an attack.

In the study, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of California Santa Barbara created a scanning tool called ‘BarFinder’ to track down the unique features of bad repositories. 

The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation and involves ECE Professor Raheem Beyah and his Ph.D. student Xiaojing Liao.

Read the entire article at The Daily Mail.

Read the article at the A.V. Club website.

In his role as associate chair, Romberg will oversee all aspects of the School’s research enterprise and research program space-related issues. He will also work to integrate junior faculty members into ECE research activities and coordinate ECE responses to and participation in College- and Institute-level research initiatives, as well as other large-scale initiatives.

Romberg joined the ECE faculty in 2006 and conducts research that is on the interface between signal processing, applied harmonic analysis, and optimization. He and his current team of six Ph.D. students are interested in both the mathematical theory and real-world implementation of algorithms to make difficult processing tasks much easier.

A couple of examples of Romberg’s work have been in the news recently, including a project with MIT colleagues where they have developed a computational imaging system that can correctly identify letters on the top nine sheets of paper in a book and that could be used to examine manuscripts that are too fragile to handle. He has also worked with ECE Associate Professor Arijit Raychowdhury to develop a low-power, always-on camera with gesture recognition that can watch for specific types of movement without draining batteries or running up electricity bills. These stories have appeared in media outlets such as Wired, Yahoo! Finance, NSF Science 360 News Service, TechCrunch, Motherboard, Inverse, LiveScience, the Associated Press, PBS Newshour, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Romberg has published 90 refereed journal and conference papers, and he has made over 150 keynote and lecture presentations during his career. From 2008-2011, he was an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and he is currently on the editorial board for the SIAM Journal on Imaging Science and is guest editor for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. Romberg has also served on the review board for the Army Research Office, where he was part of the team that assessed a sector of the applied mathematics program, and on the technical advisory group for HRL, where he assessed their research programs in complex networks, sensor exploitation, and neural systems.

Dedicated to high quality teaching and scholarship, Romberg has contributed to the Connexions Project at Rice University since he was a graduate student and is an author of signal processing modules that have been accessed over a million times. He has also developed an open database of probability questions now being used by multiple professors in ECE and at three other universities. At Georgia Tech, Romberg has created three courses from scratch–ECE 3077 Introduction to Probability and Statistics; an advanced DSP graduate course that draws students from ECE, ISyE, and mathematics; and a graduate course on convex optimization. He has participated in the Center for Teaching and Learning Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows Program and has received a teaching effectiveness award from that same group.

The cross-disciplinary nature of Romberg’s work can be seen through his campus activities. He is a member of the steering committee for the Algorithms and Randomness Center in the College of Computing and is on the search committee for the chair of the School of Mathematics. He is an associate director of the newly formed Machine Learning IRC, and played an active role in the development of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS).

Romberg is a past recipient of several prestigious honors including the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the PECASE Award, and the Packard Fellowship. He also participated in the National Academy of Engineering’s U.S. Frontiers in Engineering Symposium in 2010 and received the SPIE Pioneer Award in 2013. He has also been honored with a Rice University Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus Award in 2010 and the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2012.

In this new position, Beyah will manage activities associated with the School’s large number of corporate partners and affiliates, support the partnership with the ECE Advisory Board, and will lead strategic initiatives internal and external to the School. He will also work with faculty members to develop and sustain a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship within their groups.

Beyah joined the ECE faculty in 2011, where he holds the Motorola Foundation Professorship. He leads the Communications Assurance and Performance (CAP) Group and is a member of the Communications Systems Center (CSC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy (IISP). Prior to returning to Georgia Tech, Beyah was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University, a research faculty member with the CSC, and a consultant with Andersen Consulting’s (now Accenture) Network Solutions Group. A two-time Georgia Tech ECE alumnus, he earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1999 and 2003, respectively. He currently holds the Motorola Foundation Professorship in ECE.

Beyah’s research interests include network security, network traffic characterization and performance, privacy, and cyber-physical systems security with a focus on critical infrastructure. His group has discovered critical flaws in many power grid devices across the globe, and this work has resulted in the development of security patches for these devices.

Beyah’s work has been highlighted in many news outlets, including NSF Science 360 Radio, NetworkWorld, and Forbes. He is an NSF CAREER Award recipient, was one of 12 junior faculty members selected for DARPA’s 2010 Computer Science Study Panel, and received the inaugural Department of Computer Science Outstanding Performance Award while at Georgia State University. His work has resulted in 114 refereed or invited publications, and he has served as an associate editor or guest editor for several journals in the field.

Beyah has graduated six Ph.D. students and over 18 M.S. students, and his research group currently consists of five Ph.D. students and two M.S. students.

He is currently the chair of ECE’s Computer Systems and Software (CSS) group, and he is leading the formation of ECE’s new proposed M.S. Cyber Security degree.

Beyah is a member of the Georgia Tech Sloan University Center of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) committee and currently serves as director of the Georgia Tech Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. Prior to becoming director of SURE, Beyah regularly served as a graduate student mentor and faculty advisor with the program. He is also a faculty advisor for the Georgia Tech Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation Program and is a regular participant in the Georgia Tech FOCUS Program, an annual graduate student recruitment event that takes place over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Along with two faculty members in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Beyah co-founded the Academic and Research Leadership Network (ARLN). Supported by 17 engineering deans and the NSF, the mission of ARLN is to increase the representation of underrepresented groups in the academy.

Beyah is a member of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences Board of Visitors and a member of MARTA’s Cyber Security Advisory Board. He has contributed to the Atlanta community through activities with Atlanta Public Schools and is a 2014 graduate of Leadership Atlanta, the city’s most prestigious executive leadership program and a 2011 graduate of Leadership Georgia. He is a member of AAAS and ASEE, a lifetime member of NSBE, and a senior member of ACM and IEEE.

Egerstedt joined the ECE faculty in 2001 and held the Schlumberger Professorship since 2013. He conducts research in the areas of control theory and robotics, with particular focus on control and coordination of complex networks, such as multi-robot systems, mobile sensor networks, and cyber-physical systems.

Egerstedt was recently named as the executive director for Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines and had previously served as ECE’s associate chair for research and external affairs since 2014. He leads the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, where he currently advises 11 graduate students, and he has published four books and over 300 refereed journal and conference publications.

Egerstedt is not only an established educational leader in ECE and in the systems and controls group, but also on campus and in the massive open online course (MOOC) arena. He was instrumental in establishing the multidisciplinary Ph.D. program in robotics and was one of the first faculty members at Georgia Tech to teach a Coursera MOOC called "Control of Mobile Robots," which has enrolled over 100,000 students since it was first offered. In 2015, Egerstedt received several awards for his achievements in education, including the John R. Ragazzini Education Award from the American Automatic Control Council and two awards at the Georgia Tech Faculty Staff Honors Luncheon–the Professional Education Award and the Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Advisor Award.  

Elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2012, Egerstedt is an IEEE Control Systems Society Distinguished Lecturer. He is also a past recipient of the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, the NSF CAREER Award, and the W. Marshall Leach/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, which is determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class.

Weitnauer joined the ECE faculty in 1989, after graduating with her bachelor's and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech, and was the School’s third female faculty member. She is the director of the Smart Antenna Research Laboratory, where she and her team apply both real and virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architectures to wireless networks with emphases on WLAN, ad hoc, mesh, and sensor networks, often with demonstration on networks of software defined radios. Weitnauer has graduated 26 Ph.D. and 2 M.S. students and currently advises three Ph.D. students. In addition, she has advised 56 M.S. special problems students, 38 undergraduate researchers, and 13 capstone design teams. She has been active in course development, most recently by helping develop the blended method of teaching ECE 2040 Circuit Analysis and in recording some of the MOOC videos for ECE 3710 Linear Circuits.

Weitnauer is the author or co-author of over 190 refereed journal and conference papers, including four conference papers that won Best Paper Awards, and she holds 23 patents and invention disclosures. She was an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing from 2009-2012 and is currently associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. She is a senior member of IEEE and has been a visiting professor at Aalborg University in Denmark and Idaho National Labs.  

Throughout her career, Weitnauer has been consistently involved in many different Georgia Tech faculty governance committees, most recently as a member of the Institute's Statutes Committee and the Georgia Tech Executive Board, and in creating a supportive environment for women at Georgia Tech. From 2006-2012, Weitnauer held the Georgia Tech ADVANCE Professorship, where she led activities to support the advancement of female tenure-track faculty in the College of Engineering. She has served on several search committees, including committees for the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair, the ELSYS lab director at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, and the vice president for Institute Diversity.

“Please join me in congratulating Mary Ann on her new role and in lending her your support as she takes on these new responsibilities,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “With her many years of diverse experiences at Georgia Tech, I am sure that she will excel and serve ECE very well as senior associate chair.”

A Regents’ Professor Emeritus in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Mersereau is being specifically recognized “for sustained technical contributions to multidimensional signal processing.” He will receive this award at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), scheduled for March 5-9, 2017 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Mersereau began his career at Georgia Tech in 1975 after receiving his Ph.D. at MIT. He was among several faculty members who founded the Center for Signal and Image Processing (now known as the Center for Signal and Information Processing), considered one of the world’s most preeminent groups of digital signal processing academic and research faculty. He is a founding father of the field of multidimensional signal processing, pioneering the development of the fundamental concepts, methodologies, and tools in sampling, representing, and processing digital signals of two and higher dimensions that are used in image and video processing. His work on 2D digital filtering, hexagonal sampling, and reconstruction of multidimensional signals from their projections have impacted diverse fields ranging from crystallography, fluorescence microscopy, ultrasound and MRI imaging, cellular wireless technology, social media networks technology, and robotics.

“This is a tremendous honor for Russ both personally and professionally, and this award shows the high regard in which our digital signal processing faculty members, both past and present, are held around the world,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE at Georgia Tech.

Mersereau retired from ECE in 2008 after 33 years of service and held the title of Regents’ Professor for 22 years, where he was committed to excellence in research, education and professional service. He is the author of four influential textbooks and approximately 300 journal and conference papers.

During his career, Mersereau graduated over 50 Ph.D. students and numerous master’s students and taught over 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students. He is a two-time recipient of the Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class, in 1978 and 1989, and he also received Georgia Tech’s W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award in 1995. His dedication to advising graduate students was recognized with the Sigma Xi Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Advisor Award in 1995 and the Georgia Tech Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award in 2002.

A Fellow of the IEEE, Mersereau is also the recipient of the Society Award, the highest honor from the IEEE Signal Processing Society “in recognition of sustained technical contributions to and seminal writing in multidimensional digital signal processing and for active leadership in the Society.” He has served as an associate editor for several IEEE Transactions, editorial board member for the Proceedings of the IEEE, and vice president for awards and membership for the IEEE Signal Processing Society; he also helped to organize two ICASSP conferences held in Atlanta.

Among the first Georgia Tech and ECE faculty members involved in start-up company activity with the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), Mersereau co-founded Atlanta Signal Processors, Inc. (ASPI Digital) in 1981 with ECE Professor Emeritus Thomas P. Barnwell and ECE Regents’ Professor Emeritus Ronald W. Schafer. ASPI, which produced hardware and software tools for DSP algorithm development and multimedia on high-speed microprocessors, graduated from ATDC in 1990 and was acquired by Polycom, Inc. in 2001.

“I felt deeply honored and quite surprised to be nominated and to be selected for this honor,” Mersereau said. “Any accomplishments that I achieved are a tribute to the stimulating environment that I found in the School of ECE and the students and faculty that it has been able to attract over the years.”

Howard is part of a class of 10 inventors from across the United States representing companies, universities, and small businesses that have over 1,100 patents among them. They were welcomed and recognized at “Celebrate Invention,” held July 14 in Washington, DC, where they shared their stories as inventors, introduced their inventions, and talked about their impacts on solving global problems.

Howard holds the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where she has been a faculty member since 2005. She is the founder and CTO of Zyrobotics, which develops STEM apps and technologies that combine education and therapy to help achieve developmental milestones for children of all abilities.

Now in its third year, the AAAS-Lemelson partnership strives to enrich a fresh and diverse generation of young inventors worldwide by expanding global understanding of the role of invention in creating new products; building new intuitive businesses; cultivating the importance of invention education to foster innovation; and influencing policy makers, thought leaders, and the public. The program provides communications training and travel expenses for the ambassadors who commit to making at least two presentations about inventing during their year-long tenure with this activity.

A senior research technologist at National Electric Energy Testing Research and Applications Center, Hill has worked as the SPDC SC 3.6 chair since spring 2006. As chair, he oversees the operation of 12 working groups.

In addition, Hill initiated and maintains a master working group member and standards list for all of the subcommittee working groups. He was also responsible for the creation of and continued guidance of four new working groups addressing emerging technologies: Wind Power Facilities Surge Protection Guide Working Group, Surge Protection of Photovoltaic Facilities Working Group, Smart Grid Surge Protection Guide Working Group, and Electric Vehicle Service Equipment Surge Protection Guide Working Group.

Verriest coauthored this presentation entitled “Reachability of a Cascade of Linear Systems with Communication Delays" with the late Uwe Helmke of the Institute of Mathematics at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Würzburg, Germany and Paul Fuhrmann of the Department of Mathematics at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel. The research is in the area of mathematical systems theory and was conducted while Verriest was on professional development leave in Würzburg last fall.

Verriest and his colleagues derived necessary and sufficient conditions for a notion of "restricted reachability,” when only the states of certain subsystems in a cascade of systems need to be controllable. This is a more general formulation of a motivating problem when a string of robots communicate from one to the next, while the first in the chain receives the control signals. In this case, the states of the communication systems between the robots are of no concern, but the robots' states are. Similarly, the states of a river need to be controlled at certain geographic locations such as population centers, while not as much control is needed in the levels of intermediate floodplains. These conditions, cast in a polynomial systems theoretic framework, generalize the Necessary and Sufficient Condition for full reachability of a cascade, derived by Helmke and Fuhrmann in 2015.

Shahane received the award for his paper entitled “Modeling, Design and Demonstration of Low-temperature, Low-pressure and High-throughput Thermocompression Bonding of Copper Interconnections without Solders.” He is a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech currently advised by Rao R. Tummala, the Joseph M. Pettit Chair Professor in Electronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and mentored by Vanessa Smet, a research scientist with the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center.

The need for higher I/O density, performance, and miniaturization at low cost in emerging high-performance systems, at lower power consumption, is projected to drive off-chip interconnection pitches to 20µm and below in the coming years. This requirement has been reinforced through recent trends towards complex packaging solutions such as 2.5D interposer packages and 3D IC integration in advanced mobile and computing applications. This aggressive pitch scaling has pushed solder-based interconnections, including the current copper (Cu)-pillar technology, to their limits in electrical and thermal performance, as well as processability and reliability with risks of solder bridging and stress management challenges.

As a result, solid-state bonding technologies have gained momentum to address the pitch scaling grand challenge. All-Cu interconnections have been highly sought after by the semiconductor industry as the ultimate interconnection node for their superior electrical and thermal performance, at low cost. Direct Cu-Cu bonding, however, faces three main fundamental challenges: 1) copper oxidation, 2) low-diffusivity of Cu at low assembly temperatures, and 3) high elastic modulus, giving low tolerance to non-coplanarities and warpage. Current approaches consequently rely heavily on sub-micron planarization by chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP), or complex surface activation treatments, escalating costs and limiting their applicability to wafer-level processing only. New solutions are therefore required to address these fundamental and manufacturability challenges.

This paper focuses on mitigating these challenges through a fundamental engineering of the bonding interfaces by applying thin noble surface finish metallurgies on Cu bumps and pads to prevent oxidation and achieve low-temperature assembly at <200^oC while retaining the properties of bulk all-Cu interconnections.

Robert J. Butera, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been named as interim associate dean for research and innovation in the College of Engineering (CoE) Dean’s Office, effective July 1. Butera also holds a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). He previously served as director of the Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program from 2005-2008 and as faculty director of Graduate Studies at Georgia Tech from 2009-2011.

A member of the ECE faculty since 1999, Butera was also co-director of the Grand Challenges Living Learning Community from 2012-2015. Since 2014, he has co-directed the Neural Engineering Research Center, which brings together neural engineering researchers from across campus.

Stephen P. DeWeerth, who has served as Tech’s CoE associate dean for research and innovation since 2013, has been named dean of the College of Engineering at Lehigh University, effective September 1. A member of the Georgia Tech faculty since 1991, DeWeerth is a professor in both ECE and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

From 2010-2013, DeWeerth served as the founding chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, and he has also been the director of Graduate Studies for the joint Georgia Tech/Emory University Biomedical Engineering Ph.D. program. DeWeerth has been serving as BME’s interim department chair, and he will be succeeded in that role by C. Ross Ethier, who is a professor and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

“Rob will do an outstanding job in his new role as interim associate dean for the College of Engineering, and we are grateful to him for stepping into this complex and important role,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor. “We also extend our congratulations to Steve as he embarks on the next phase of his career, and we wish him much success in the years to come.”

Read more about the leadership changes that affect the CoE Dean’s Office, ECE, and BME. 

In May 2016, Frank Lambert, principal research engineer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech, led a group of students from the Student Chapter of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) on a trip to Thoman to provide one of the many resources the village desperately needed—an inexpensive, reliable source of power. The team installed a solar-powered micro grid system in the health center, which now provides 24/7 power and replaces a costly diesel generator.

Lambert, who has been going on mission trips to Haiti since 2013, also extended an opportunity to another student group from ECE’s Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) Program, which matches undergraduate students with a Ph.D. mentor and a research project. The “Thing in a Hut” team, as they are fondly called by faculty advisor Ron Harley, was working on a prototype for a smaller solar-powered system that would provide LED light and phone charging for single family houses. These solutions, though small, can make a big impact on a community that typically has only kerosene lamps for light and often have to travel several miles to charge cell phones—their only connection to the larger world.

When the ORS team, which was made up of undergraduate students Edlawit “Julie” Bezabih, Elizabeth Robelo, Kyron Longwood, Tshim Tshimanga, Wondewosen Kihinet, and Ph.D mentor Liyao Wu, embarked on this project, they had no idea they would have the chance to actually install their system and see it work. For some, it was the first time they had traveled outside the United States and the experience broadened their world view significantly.

“The trip was something that has left an imprint on me that will last for the rest of my life. Not only was it the first time that I was given an opportunity to travel outside of the United States and grab a taste of the world, but I was also fortunate enough to participate in social and humanitarian efforts that improved the livelihood of the Haitian people. The trip also made me realize how much first world countries take things for granted,” said Longwood.

After lengthy testing in Atlanta, the team’s focus shifted to the installation of two identical prototypes. The first system was installed in the local pastor’s house. Unsure of what type of houses they would be working on, they faced some unexpected challenges. They found that the installation kit they brought wasn’t useful. The roof tops were weak, which meant only Bezabih and Robelo were light enough to perform the installation of the solar panels. In the case of the second house, which belonged to a woman and her children, the team had to create a new mount for the solar panels in order for them to be correctly positioned for maximum sun exposure. Luckily, the larger IEEE PES group was on hand to provide guidance and troubleshooting. While the first installation took three days, the second installation went more smoothly and took only one.

Ph.D. mentor Wu explained that the end result consisted of a controller board that interfaced with the roof panels to charge LED lights and phones via USB ports. After each installation, the team showed the family how the system worked and how to use it.

“Living in the US, we take electricity for granted; you do not think about whether a building will have it or not. It’s incredible that our system can change a life so drastically. Now they will not have the inconvenience of traveling several miles just to charge their cell phones. They will no longer have to use kerosene lamps at night. It's a great feeling knowing that you've given these people who have nothing one less thing to worry about it. The best part is knowing that as long as the sun is shining they will have electricity readily available,” said Robelo.

Two houses are now outfitted with the system, but there are millions more that could benefit from the work that future ORS teams hope to do. Now the task at hand will involve improving the prototype to make it lighter, smaller, and more efficient. And the possibility that Georgia Tech teams could teach the Haitians how to build and install the systems themselves would mean a scalable solution that provides employment.

To learn more about Opportunity Research Scholars and to get involved, please visit the website.

Images: 1) Julie Bezabih 2) ORS Team in Atlanta (from left): Elizabeth Robelo, Julie Bezabih, Wondewosen Kihinet, Liyao Wu, Kyron Longwood. 3) ORS Team inside the 2nd house with the owner and her daughter. 4) Liyao Wu, Kyron Longwood, Elizabeth Robelo, and Julie Bezabih. 5) Liyao Wu and Patrick Pierre. 6) Elizabeth Robelo and Julie Bezabih.

Pierre didn’t always want to be an electrical engineer. His talent in math actually led him down a different path. His first bachelor’s degree was in economics from the State University of Haiti where he was the school’s top student. He imagined that he would pursue a position in business management or possibly enter an MBA program with a scholarship offered by the Haitian government. In order to get ready for the next steps in his career, he attended a language institute at Georgia Tech in 2000 where he spent two semesters learning English. Upon his return to Haiti, he was devastated to learn that his scholarship for graduate study had evaporated due to political unrest.

Discouraged and unsure what to do next, he moved back to the United States where he had some family and hoped he could build a better life with more opportunities than he could find in Haiti. Pierre worked at a number of jobs in Florida and Massachusetts and eventually met his wife, who is also Haitian, in Boston. Life was stable, but something was still missing.

“I looked at how Haitian immigrants in the States lived. Most couldn’t use their degrees and were working two or three jobs just to survive. They were never home; they never saw their kids,” said Pierre.

In order to provide the kind of life that he wanted for his family, Pierre realized that he needed to go back to school. He enrolled in Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida, and essentially started over. He took calculus and physics courses and began studying for an associate’s degree while working full-time. Toward the end of his program at Hillsborough, Pierre went back to Haiti for a visit. It was then that he had his “light bulb moment.”

“Growing up, I remember studying by the light of a kerosene lamp. Going back in 2010, I saw the same struggles that I dealt with as a kid. Most homes still didn’t have reliable access to electricity. People’s quality of life hadn’t really improved at all in the years since I was young,” said Pierre.

The path became clear to Pierre—he would get a degree in electrical engineering so that he could do something to help countries like Haiti. While weighing his electrical engineering program options (he was considering both Georgia Tech and the University of South Florida), he saw something on the Georgia Tech website that cemented his decision. Following the devastating Haitian earthquake in January 2010, Pierre saw an announcement on Georgia Tech’s website for a campus-wide vigil.

“I knew then—those are my people, that will be my academic home,” said Pierre.

The years at Tech were tough, but Pierre’s desire to earn a degree that could be used to help improve people’s lives kept him going.

“If it was just for me, I would probably have dropped out. But it was bigger than me. I got an EE degree to be a voice for people in countries like Haiti,” said Pierre.

Fast forward to spring 2016 and Pierre was on the cusp of gaining his electrical engineering degree when a serendipitous opportunity presented itself. Teams of students in the IEEE Power and Energy Society and the Opportunity Research Scholars Program were traveling to Haiti to install solar-based microgrid systems in a remote village called Thoman. The systems would provide cheap, reliable power to people who either had none or relied on expensive diesel generators. Pierre knew he had to go.

Helping with the installation, as well as acting as an unofficial translator, Pierre was an oddity to some of the villagers, especially the children.

“The kids were really interested in all of the visiting engineers and would flock to us. Because I spoke Creole (the native language of Haiti) as well as English, they didn’t know what to make of me. I overhead them asking each other, ‘Is he one of us or one of them?’ The adults in Thoman said it was the first time they had seen a Haitian come to help,” said Pierre.

In a few weeks, Pierre and his wife and daughter will move to Miami where he has a job waiting with Florida Power and Light. He hopes to continue the work that was started in Haiti and is open to the possibility of leading more projects there in the future. For now, he is satisfied with the way his Georgia Tech journey brought him back to his roots.

“I like to use an electrical engineering analogy to describe my experience. When you build a circuit, you always have to come back to close the loop if you want it to work. That’s the best way to describe my journey so far,” said Pierre.

Images: 1) Jiaqing Li and Patrick Pierre hang with the Thoman locals. 2) Patrick Pierre on the Thoman health center roof.

An interdisciplinary team of clinicians and electrical, computer and biomedical engineers has been developing next-generation, at-home technology aimed at detecting heart issues—and preventing related hospitalizations. This team includes ECE Assistant Professor Omer Inan.

To read more, see the project summary at the IEEE Xplore Innovation Spotlight. 

Alam received the award for his poster entitled “Investigation of p-contact performance for InGaN/InGaN Multi Quantum Well (MQW) light emitting diodes emitting in blue to green region.” His coauthors on the paper are Ougazzaden, Suresh Sundaram (GTL-CNRS), Xin Li (ECE, Atlanta campus), Youssef El Gmili (CNRS), Helge Haas (CEA-LETI Minatec Campus), Miryam Elouneg-Jamroz (CEA-LETI Minatec Campus), Ivan Christophe Robin (CEA-LETI Minatec Campus), Paul Voss (ECE, GTL campus), and Jean-Paul Salvestrini (University of Lorraine).

Solid state lighting has received much attention for its potential to reduce energy consumption up to 85 percent, compared to conventional lighting. GaN-based light emitting diodes (LEDs) have applications for solid state lighting because the tunable bandgap of InGaN/GaN-based Multi Quantum Well (MQW) LEDs makes it possible to produce light across the entire visible spectral range.

To realize good quality white light with high Color Rendering Index (CRI), monolithic integration of Red-Green-Blue (RGB) is important. Though blue LED has fairly good performance and has been commercially successful, Green LED efficacy is less than 50 percent and still needs to improve to get high CRI white light by RGB combination for solid state lighting. Therefore, for structures with higher Indium (In) content in InGaN alloys like green LEDs, improvement from InGaN architecture to p-contact performance is still necessary, and to compete with conventional lighting, the extraction efficiency is yet to be improved, particularly in the “green-gap” regime.

Epitaxial growth of p-GaN for green LEDs must be done at a lower temperature than conventional GaN growth temperature to avoid phase segregation of In due to thermal load on MQW from temperature during p-GaN growth. Hence, the study of p-GaN growth temperature and contact performance for these devices is important for the success of solid state lighting.

Photo caption:  Pictured with Saiful Alam (2^nd from left) are Daniel Alquier, professor and deputy director of GREMAN project at the University of Tours; Yvon Cordier, CNRS research director, head of CRHEA-CNRS, and Konstantinos Zekentes, principal researcher at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas.

Pollmann is an undergraduate researcher who has been advised by Alenka Zajic for the last two years through the Opportunity Research Scholars Program. He is also pursuing the undergraduate research option and is working on an undergraduate thesis entitled “Localization of EM Emanations from FPGAs” with Zajic, who is an assistant professor in Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Smartcards, cellphones, and laptops can be susceptible to side-channel attacks, which are the exploitation of low-power electronic signals that a wireless electronic device like a laptop emits as electromagnetic waves even when it is not connected to the Internet. With the trend towards internet-of-things (IoT) and millions of connected devices, defense against side-channel attacks becomes even more important. Pollmann is working on developing techniques to identify sources of these low-power electronics signals with the goal of eliminating them and hence preventing side-channel attacks.

In his presentation, Shen explained that silicon has become a favored substrate, but new research demonstrates the advantages of using Gallium Nitride (GaN) for next generation high power and high speed applications.

Read the entire article on the ECE ILLINOIS web site

Tentzeris joined the faculty of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in 1998 after graduating with his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He leads the ATHENA Research Group, where he currently advises one visiting research scientist, nine Ph.D. students, two master’s students, and nine undergraduate researchers. He has graduated 28 Ph.D. students and 18 master’s students.

Tentzeris and his team have developed very successful research and academic programs in 3D/inkjet-printed electronics and modules, flexible electronics, origami antennas and morphing electromagnetics, highly integrated multilayer packaging for RF and wireless applications, paper-based RFIDs and sensors, wireless sensors and biosensors, “green” electronics, energy harvesting and wireless power transfer, and nanotechnology applications in RF, microwave MEMS, and system-on-package integrated antennas.

He has served as the chair of the ECE electromagnetics technical interest group, the associate director for RFID/sensors research in the Georgia Electronic Design Center, and associate director for RF research and the RF alliance leader for the Packaging Research Center (now known as the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center).

Tentzeris has published more than 600 papers in refereed journal and conference publications, five books, and 23 book chapters, and he has served as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, IEEE Transactions on Advanced Packaging, and the International Journal on Antennas and Propagation, Proceedings of the IEEE. Tentzeris’ students have received numerous best paper and best poster awards at IEEE conferences. He also served as a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society from 2010-2012 and now serves as a distinguished lecturer for the IEEE Council on RFID.

An IEEE Fellow since 2010, Tentzeris has received numerous honors, including the 2014 ECE Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award; the 2010 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Piergiorgio L. E. Uslenghi Letters Prize Paper Award; the 2010 Georgia Tech Senior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award; the 2003 IEEE Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award; the 2003 NASA Godfrey "Art" Anzic Collaborative Distinguished Publication Award; and the 2002 ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award.

With the support of a five-year, $2.86 million R01 grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), and Northwestern University are working to address this issue by building wearable and weighing-scale-based ballistocardiogram (BCG) technology for monitoring HF patients at home. This technology quantifies mechanical aspects of cardiovascular function by recording the movements of the body caused by the contraction of the heart and ejection of blood into the aorta, the body’s main trunk of the arterial system.

“The ultimate goal of this research is to create an unobtrusive wearable system for continuously monitoring HF patients at home, automatically assessing their risk of experiencing a cardiac event, and providing feedback to caregivers and the patients themselves,” said Omer Inan, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

According to Inan, the central innovation supporting these efforts is the proposed measurement of hemodynamic responses–or forces involved in the circulation of blood–to stressors experienced in normal activities of daily living, such as walking or climbing stairs. These responses will be measured by using wearable BCG. Inan and his colleagues will work on four specific areas with this research:

•     clarify the underlying mechanisms involved in creating wearable BCG signals;

•     develop novel predictive analytics algorithms for BCG signals measured from HF patients at home;

•     design and implement a wearable sensing system for estimating cardiac output, blood pressure, and activity level from ambulatory patients; and

•     evaluate the wearable sensing system with both healthy and HF patients during cardiopulmonary stress testing and pilot the new system for a small population of patients at their homes.

Inan will supervise all engineering aspects of the project, including leading the Georgia Tech team in designing and building the weighing scale and wearable BCG sensing systems, and he will work with May Wang and James M. Rehg to analyze the measured data. Wang, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, will advise on the predictive algorithm development and data analytics aspects of the project. Rehg, a professor in Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, will work on the software implementation for the interactive computing aspects, leveraging the technology developed in the Mobile Sensor Data to Knowledge (MD2K) Center of Excellence, which he co-directs.

Collaborating with the Georgia Tech team are UCSF and Northwestern colleagues. Liviu Klein and Teresa DeMarco, both heart failure cardiologists in the School of Medicine, will handle all clinical aspects of the project, including patient enrollment, and performing and interpreting the cardiac catheterization and cardiopulmonary stress tests. Shuvo Roy, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, and Mozziyar Etemadi, a recent M.D./Ph.D. graduate of Roy’s lab and currently with the Department of Anesthesiology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, will work with Inan and his lab on the embedded systems development and will work with the clinical team to deploy the sensing systems.

The first aim will build a strong foundation for better understanding the wearable BCG signal – a measurement of body vibrations in response to the heartbeat – and will inform the placement and modality of the sensor for optimizing the sensing, said Inan. The evaluation of this wearable prototype will include usability testing to assess comfort and robustness to practical challenges, such as the device rubbing on clothing and signal quality disruptions due to walking or other body movements. Based on the results, the design will be refined and improved.

While the team anticipates that the wearable BCG device will provide the best solution, the project risk is mitigated through the more mature, existing scale-based system that Inan developed previously in his graduate and post-doctoral work. These scale-based systems would also be usable in the home, but only for stationary measurements as compared to the continuous monitoring capability offered by wearable BCG systems.

“Successful completion of this project could ultimately reduce heart failure-related hospitalizations, which would improve quality of life for elderly Americans and reduce overall healthcare costs,” said Liviu Klein of UCSF.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Heart, Lung, And Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HL130619. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

[1]   D. Mozaffarian, E. J. Benjamin, A. S. Go, D. K. Arnett, M. J. Blaha, M. Cushman, S. R. Das, S. de Ferranti, J.-P. Després, H. J. Fullerton, V. J. Howard, M. D. Huffman, C. R. Isasi, M. C. Jiménez, S. E. Judd, B. M. Kissela, J. H. Lichtman, L. D. Lisabeth, S. Liu, R. H. Mackey, D. J. Magid, D. K. McGuire, E. R. Mohler, C. S. Moy, P. Muntner, M. E. Mussolino, K. Nasir, R. W. Neumar, G. Nichol, L. Palaniappan, D. K. Pandey, M. J. Reeves, C. J. Rodriguez, W. Rosamond, P. D. Sorlie, J. Stein, A. Towfighi, T. N. Turan, S. S. Virani, D. Woo, R. W. Yeh, and M. B. Turner, "Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics—2016 Update: A Report From the American Heart Association," Circulation, 2015.

Cutlines for accompanying photos:

Members of the Inan Research Laboratory take data while working on wearable and weighing-scale-based technology for monitoring heart failure patients at home. Pictured L-R are Hazar Ashouri, Omer Inan, Abdul Qadir Javaid, and Andrew Carek.

Members of the Inan Research Laboratory work on wearable and weighing-scale-based technology. Pictured L-R are Omer Inan, Abdul Qadir Javaid, Andrew Carek, and Hazar Ashouri.

Facilitated by Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, this program gathers together a small, interdisciplinary group of early career faculty members who want to develop their full teaching potential.

The program aims to broaden faculty members’ perspectives with insight into evidence-based best practices and exposure to new and innovative teaching methods. During this academic-year-long program, the Teaching Fellows will explore various aspects of teaching and learning in weekly seminars, receive private assistance with teaching, and develop and pilot initiatives that can be used for the education component of major award applications.

Inan joined the ECE faculty in 2013 and is a member of the bioengineering technical interest group. He teaches undergraduate courses in biomedical instrumentation, biosystems analysis, and the Introduction to ECE Design course for freshmen, and he has developed and taught an ECE graduate course, Biomedical Sensing Systems. Inan was also recently recognized with the 2016 Lockheed Martin Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award.

Lan is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he is advised by ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai. Lan’s research on the electrical manipulation and extraction of nonlinear optical signals from artificial and natural nanomaterials has led to a number of articles in high profile publications such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, and Nano Letters.

The DJ Lovell Scholarship is the third significant award that Lan has received in recent months. In late 2015, he also received the MRS Graduate Student Award and the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad. 

The title of the award winning paper is "A 5GHz All-Passive Negative Feedback Network for RF Front-End Self-Steering Beam-Forming with Zero DC Power Consumption.” Huang and Chi co-wrote this paper with their Ph.D. advisor Hua Wang, who leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab and who holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship in the School of ECE.

In this paper, the team proposed and demonstrated an all-passive RF front-end phased-array beam-forming scheme that can autonomously form a receiver beam and track the direction of an unknown incident RF beam. The beam-former only consists of fully integrated passive components and consumes zero DC power. More importantly, the proposed beam-former processes the signal information in both phase and voltage domains, and the nonlinear conversions between the two signal domains are exploited to achieve a negative feedback loop with a large loop gain for high-accuracy phased-array beam-forming and autonomous beam-tracking.

A proof-of-concept, four-element self-steering beam-former is implemented in a standard 130nm CMOS process and occupies a tiny integrated circuit chip area of 4.1mm2. To the best of the team's knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an all-passive negative feedback network capable of performing front-end self-steering beam-forming with zero DC power. The demonstration of this all-passive scheme outperforms any reported active self-steering beam-formers that often consume hundreds of milli-watt or watts of power consumption.

This all-passive RF front-end self-steering phased-array beam-forming scheme can be widely employed in energy-constrained, large-scaled phased-array or MIMO systems, such as 5G communication and high-performance radars, low-power field-deployable sensors, and energy harvesting systems.

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Sixty individuals – including five Georgia Tech alumni, two who are alumnae of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) – will be part of the second cohort of the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship program in the state, which will be offered at Columbus State University, Georgia State University, Kennesaw State University, Mercer University, and Piedmont College during the 2016–17 academic year. The highly competitive program recruits both recent graduates and career changers with strong backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and math—the STEM fields—and prepares them specifically to teach in high-need secondary schools.

“The Woodrow Wilson Fellowship is about putting well-trained, committed educators in not only the fields of highest demand in our technology-driven age, but in the schools of highest need here in Georgia,” said Deal. “STEM education plays a critical role in our state’s competitiveness and future economic prosperity and the most important thing we can do for our students in this field is ensure they have effective teachers. This opportunity for teachers is leading to a brighter future for students as they prepare for the 21^st century workforce.”

The two ECE alumnae who will participate in this program are Wanda Harding and Deidre Paris.

Harding, who earned her master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1993, will attend Piedmont College for her teacher training. She has served as technical director for the NOAA Joint Polar Satellite System and is a former senior mission manager for the NASA Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Station, including the 2011 launch of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover. She has also worked as a systems engineer for the International Space Station Program with the Italian Space Agency.

Paris, who holds three graduate degrees from Georgia Tech, will attend Columbus State University for her teacher training. She earned an M.S. in computer engineering and power system planning in 1994, an M.S. in environmental and urban policy in 1996, and a Ph.D. in construction engineering management in 2002. She has worked as a college professor, teaching engineering and mathematics, and she has been an artificial intelligence researcher. She has collaborated with NASA, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Lawrence Livermore National Labs, and the Army Environmental Policy Institute.

The three additional Georgia Tech alumni participating in the program are Sara Turmel, a 2016 bachelor’s in materials science and engineering graduate who will attend Georgia State University; Michael Fusia, a 2006 bachelor’s in physics graduate who will attend Kennesaw State University; and Jill Furstenau, a 1982 industrial engineering major who will attend Piedmont College.

The Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship focuses on preparing top-quality educators for many of Georgia’s most underserved public schools.  Each Fellow receives $30,000 to complete a specially designed, cutting-edge master’s degree program based on a yearlong classroom experience. In return, Fellows commit to teach for three years in the urban and rural Georgia schools that most need strong STEM teachers. Throughout the three-year commitment, Fellows receive ongoing support and mentoring.

“Under Governor Deal’s leadership, Georgia has demonstrated a strong commitment to identifying, recruiting, and preparing top candidates for STEM teaching careers throughout the state,” Levine said. “Across the nation, we hear of struggles to get exemplary teachers, particularly those who teach subjects like science and math, to serve in high-need schools. Through the hard work of the governor, the legislature, partner universities, and local school districts, we are working together to ensure Georgia’s urban and rural communities have the strong teachers our children need to learn and succeed in the 21^st century. Together, we are committed to meeting the staffing needs of Georgia’s high-need schools.”

Through the Teaching Fellowship program, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation will contribute to the University System of Georgia’s initiative to produce 20,000 new teachers by 2020. Woodrow Wilson is administering the program, with in-state coordination by the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education and support from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation. Current project funding is $9.36 million.

The university partners, selected in a statewide review by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, have spent the past year and a half tailoring their teacher preparation programs to meet the Fellowship’s standards for intensive clinical work and rigorous related coursework. All five participating universities received $400,000 matching grants to develop their teacher preparation programs based on standards set by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. For each of the program’s three years, the participating Georgia colleges and universities will be able to enroll 12 Fellows, totaling 180 Fellows over that three-year period.

The Woodrow Wilson Foundation is also partnering with a wide range of school districts across the state on this effort, including Atlanta Public Schools, Banks County School System, Bibb County School District, Chattahoochee County School District, Athens-Clarke County School District, Cobb County School District, Dodge County Schools, Franklin County Schools, Fulton County Schools, Gwinnett County Public Schools, Habersham County Schools, Hall County Schools, Houston County Schools, Marietta City Schools, Marion County School System, Monroe County Schools, Muscogee County Schools, Paulding County School District, Stephens County School System, Union County Schools, Walton County Public Schools, and White County School District.

“The Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education is proud to serve as the in-state coordinating agency for this program that is delivering real, genuine results after only two short years,” said GPEE President Steve Dolinger. “Throughout the Georgia Partnership’s 24+ year history, we have consistently supported strategies to improve teacher effectiveness.” He added, “The Woodrow Wilson Georgia Teaching Fellowship program is both enhancing the teacher training programs at five universities and producing highly qualified STEM teachers for the partnering school systems. This is a winning program for Georgia.”

Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio are currently Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship states. The Georgia program brings the Woodrow Wilson Foundation’s total commitment to the Fellowship to more than $90 million nationally. More information on the national program can be found at http://woodrow.org/fellowships/ww-teaching-fellowships/.

Patrick Riccards is the contact and source for this press release originally issued by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Program. For more information about the program, contact Riccards at 703-298-8283, riccards@woodrow.org 

Since joining Georgia Tech in 2012, Davenport has taught courses ranging from introductory undergraduate courses in signal processing and in probability and statistics, to advanced graduate courses that he has developed on subjects like statistical machine learning and harmonic analysis. These courses have varied in size from 15-20 students to as many as 100 students.

Davenport teaches courses covering theoretical topics and which are known for being mathematically rigorous. These subjects are known for invoking anxiety, or even dread, in many students, yet he consistently achieves the extraordinary feat of receiving teaching ratings in the 4.8-5.0 range from his students, according to ECE Associate Professor Justin K. Romberg. Much of this success can be attributed to his incorporating in-class activities where students work together to solve problems and reflect on their own about what they have learned through writing assignments.

Using this “semi-flipped” classroom format allows students to get a deeper and quicker understanding of the material and provides Davenport with feedback about concepts with which the students are struggling. As a researcher, he uses the electronic platform used for these in-class problem sets to collect data that help him and colleagues in cognitive science to understand better how students learn and retain mathematical concepts, according to ECE Associate Professor Christopher J. Rozell.

And students heartily endorse these methods. They say that Davenport has a knack for breaking down a difficult concept into its simplest parts while still respecting the integrity of the problem, all while making difficult subjects fun and enjoyable.

“It wasn’t just his ability to simplify, but [his] using different approaches and methods to appeal to various learning types,” said a student from ECE 3077–Probability and Statistics for ECEs.

“The way the professor interacts with students is truly unique. [He is] very approachable and friendly. [He has] an exceptional ability to impart enthusiasm about the topic to students (like me who had no prior background in the area), and promote further learning,” said a student from ECE 6254–Statistical Signal Processing and Analysis.

“Professor Davenport is very talented and made great efforts to adapt to what worked best for the students. He was fun and made a difficult subject enjoyable,” said a student from ECE 2026–Introduction to Signal Processing. “For instance, ‘Fourier Analysis’ sounded treacherous at first, but after his explanation, I was like ‘Oh…that’s it?’”

Davenport has already received multiple honors for his efforts, including the 2015 Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award. Also in 2015, he was awarded the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award, which is determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class. He was also selected to participate in the Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows Program in 2014. As a part of this program, Davenport studied a variety of strategies for effective teaching and worked to incorporate various forms of improved student feedback into the graduate courses he teaches at Georgia Tech.

Beyond his classroom activities, Davenport advises six Ph.D. students and has worked with nine undergraduate students on independent research projects, including multiple President’s Undergraduate Research Awards Program recipients. Many of these undergraduate researchers took his classes and sought out ways to work with him further. Davenport is also a faculty associate for the Georgia Tech Grand Challenges Program, where he mentors a larger group of students from various majors, and is involved with outreach initiatives with the East Lake Foundation and Atlanta’s Charles R. Drew Charter School.

“Research universities exist in our society is to create knowledge. As a professor, I think that my job is to help guide students in acquiring the knowledge and skills that they need to become knowledge creators themselves, whether that takes place in the classroom, in a research setting, through mentoring programs, or in online forums,” Davenport said. “While there are many demands on a professor’s time, I believe that all of these activities ultimately boil down to the central role of teaching, both inside and outside of the classroom.” 

Durgin’s paper, entitled “RF Thermoelectric Generation for Passive RFID,” presents a new Georgia Tech invention – an RF Thermoelectric Generator (RFTG) – which can be used to convert very low levels of RF power into usable voltages for computation, sensing, and communication. 

Counter-intuitively, a nano-scale RFTG can be shown to outperform conventional diode- and transistor-based RF harvesting circuitry, which have hit fundamental limits in recent years. The paper projects that RFID and RF energy-harvesting sensors using RFTGs could operate without a power supply at distances exceeding 100m from readers and/or radio transmission sources – a factor of 4 improvement over the state-of-the-art.

IEEE RFID 2016 is the annual flagship international conference for the Council of RFID (CRFID), known for its long papers and low acceptance rates (ieee-rfid.2016.org). CRFID was elevated to Council status within the IEEE last year – essentially a “society for societies,” capable of engaging multi-disciplinary technologies. Incidentally, Georgia Tech has been instrumental in the growth of CRFID, with ECE’s own Manos Tentzeris and Gisele Bennett making formative contributions to the council. 

For the 2016 conference, ECE’s Mary Ann Weitnauer also gave an invited talk entitled, “Reliable Sensor Communications with On Demand Network MIMO,” that was extremely well-received as part of the conference’s “hot topics” session. Qiongjie Lin, Huanyu Zhang, Hongxian Tian, Sean Nowlan, Gedeon Nyengele, Sajith Mohan Chakkedath, and Jim Stratigos were coauthors of this work. The talk presented a new communications scheme for reliably reading RFID and low-powered, transmit-only wireless sensors that could enable numerous internet-of-things applications.

Microgrids are self-contained power systems that can draw electricity from the traditional grid when available, but can also disconnect and operate as an independent energy source for single businesses or a home. The systems are gaining popularity in the developing world as a means of providing power to areas that do not have stable access to the conventional electric power grid. Georgia Tech’s IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Student Chapter, led by electrical engineering graduate students Jeremiah Deboever, Felipe Larrain, Szilard Liptak, and Ashley Stone, plans to install the microgrid system to support a newly-constructed health center in the remote mountain village of Thoman, Haiti. The health clinic, located about 50 miles east of the country’s capital and largest city, Port-au-Prince, provides health and dental care for the more than 4,000 people living in Thoman and surrounding villages.

Even before the 2010 earthquake, Haiti’s power infrastructure and maximum generating capacity of 200 MW was insufficient to meet the country’s peak power demand, said IEEE-PES Faculty Advisor Frank Lambert, a principal research engineer with Georgia Tech’s National Electric Energy Testing Research and Applications Center (NEETRAC).

“Some seven million people in Haiti are without power; only an estimated 25 percent of the population have access to electricity services,” said Lambert. “And in rural communities like Thoman where the majority of Haitians live, the problem is even more challenging because it can be difficult and expensive to reach grid power.”          

Power distribution lines were extended last year to connect Thoman to Haiti’s main power grid, but service is so erratic that the health clinic must operate almost exclusively from a diesel generator. Given the high cost and limited access to diesel fuel, the students wanted to develop a more affordable, reliable power solution to meet the health clinic’s needs.

The team evaluated several power generating units, including a standalone diesel generator (DG), photovoltaic (PV) panels with batteries, and the combination of PV panels with batteries and a DG to determine which options would provide the most power at the lowest cost. Each option was evaluated by several technical and economic criteria, such as daily energy production, maximum annual capacity shortage, and net present value. The team also incorporated other factors into their assessment: the system had to be easy to use, big enough to meet the clinic’s future needs, and contain only off the shelf components that could be replaced. The team developed a hybrid microgrid system that included a 7.2 kW PV array and a battery bank to eliminate the need for the diesel generator in day-to-day operations. The diesel generator would only be used to provide backup power when needed.

“A standalone diesel generator would have been cheaper to install than a solar system,” said Liptak, one of the project’s system designers. “But it consumes an incredible amount of fuel, and over the entire lifetime of the project, would have ended up being twice as expensive as the solar solution. An additional benefit of the solar-based system is that it’s clean and maintenance is minimal.”

After nearly a year of design, basic and detailed engineering that included a site visit to Thoman to test and validate the solar design, the team will install the microgrid in Thoman in May. Students secured donations from corporate sponsors to fund 100 percent of the project. The microgrid’s PV solar panels were provided by the Georgia Tech Research Institute; local companies Trojan Battery Company and Schneider Electronics provided the battery pack and the power electronics, respectively. The costs of shipping the microgrid components to Haiti were provided by But God Ministries.

For system designer Larrain, a Ph.D. student specializing in organic solar technologies in Georgia Tech’s Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics, the project provided a real-world context for the work he does every day.

“As a Ph.D. student, my mind is typically focused on understanding the science behind the operation of these devices,” said Larrain. “I rarely see the customer side of solar energy-based solutions or get into the details of practical applications. This project provides a great complement to what I do by exposing me to a direct application of the technology I want to improve, and really highlights how, in the end, any technology that we develop is intended for a customer, to solve a very specific need.”

Liptak, who recently returned to Georgia Tech from an internship with a microgrid company in Kenya, said that microgrids have great potential in the electrification of the developing world.

“With the growing penetration of renewable technologies and distributed generation with storage, these local microgrids could one day form a national grid similar to what we have in the developed world,” said Liptak.

The IEEE PES Student Chapter hopes to build upon the experience gained from the Thoman microgrid project to develop a similar power generation and distribution system for another health center of Galette Chambon, Haiti next year.

Story written by Allison Caughey, formerly of the Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute

This textbook is part of the “Hands-On Approach” series from the same authors. A previous book in the series, Cloud Computing, was recognized by ACM Computing Reviews as part of the 19th Annual Best in Computing in the 2014 list as a “Notable Book."

Cloud computing, mobile applications, Internet of Things, and analytics-driven business intelligence are changing the face of information technology and its use in business. Recent industry surveys predict that there will be millions of new jobs created in the areas of big data and analytics.

This new textbook attempts to provide a solid foundation in the areas of big data science and analytics in a manner that can be taught in colleges and universities to students who have completed at least one course in programming languages. Through extensive use of examples and case studies, with full code support, the book allows students to learn through doing. Corporations wishing to jump start their internal developments in the areas of big data and analytics may also find the book useful.

The book proposes a new design methodology and associated patterns for big data analytics applications that allows the use of design frameworks and big data stacks from leading cloud vendors such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Detailed examples in Python and class-tested case studies describe implementation of big data analytics applications using these tools and frameworks, including Hadoop, MapReduce, Pig, Hive, Spark, Storm, Kafka, HBase, and other NoSQL databases and connectors.

To learn more about the book, please visit http://www.big-data-analytics-book.com.

10-Year Service Awards

Nigel Hampton

Ayanna Howard

Xiaoli Ma

Abdallah Ougazzaden

Tasha Torrence

Paul Voss

25-Year Service Awards

David Schimmel

Whit Smith

Rochelle Williams

Thank you for your hard work and dedication to ECE and Georgia Tech!

Event hosts were Keefe Bohannan (BEE ’95), applications engineering district manager for Keysight Technologies, and Leslie Sibert, vice president for distribution at Georgia Power.

Individuals receiving awards and recognitions at other campus ceremonies were also honored at this program. ECE Outstanding GTA Award winners were also recognized; they were Motaz Alfarraj, Qiang Hu, Jacob Keilman, Victor Rodriguez Toro, Tina Setter, and Taimour Wehbe.

Below are the recipients of the 2016 Roger P. Webb Awards. Congratulations to everyone on another fantastic year!

STUDENT AWARDS

Outstanding ECE Sophomore Award

Kristine L. Scott

Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society for ECE, recognizes the sophomore electrical or computer engineering student with the highest scholastic average.

ECE Junior Scholar Award

Alexander Popescu

This award is presented to the student who has junior standing and has the highest GPA in ECE.

ECE Undergraduate Research Award                                      

Jennifer Hunter

This award recognizes an undergraduate student who has demonstrated an unusually strong aptitude for research.

Most Outstanding ECE Senior Co-op Award                           

Elisabeth Sarah Bradley

This award is presented to the ECE senior co-op student who is considered of the highest caliber by his/her co-op employer.

Outstanding Service to Georgia’s Community Award                     

Sean Rodrigues

Investing time in community activities can have significant rewards for Georgia Tech in the future, and this award recognizes students who participate in and organize such activities and helps to motivate other students to do the same.

ECE Faculty Award                                                                        

Matthew Arceri

This award is given to the electrical or computer engineering student who, in the opinion of the ECE faculty, has done the most to improve the educational environment within ECE or Georgia Tech and has contributed significantly to both student welfare and student-faculty interactions.

Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award               

Alan Dong

Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society for ECE, recognizes the senior electrical engineering student who has a very high scholastic average and who plays an active role in extracurricular activities.

Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award   

Ratchapong Tangkijvorakul

Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society for ECE, recognizes the senior computer engineering student who has a very high scholastic average and who plays an active role in extracurricular activities. 

ECE Senior Scholar Award                                                         

Steven Burg, Enmao Diao, Aditya Garg, William Gauspohl, Joseph Guinta, Richard Liou, Shai Messingher, Chryssia Natalia, Thanh-Phong Nguyen, Marius Petrut, Colin Sanders, Wesley Smith, Lee Thompson, Jonathan Tuck, Hanbin Ying     

These awards are given to the electrical or computer engineering seniors with the highest academic average.

Colonel Oscar P. Cleaver Awards                                                         

Siddharth J. Varughese (Fall 2015), Andrew McRae (Spring 2016)

These awards are made to the outstanding graduate students in ECE, as determined by scores made on the doctoral preliminary examinations during 2015-16.

ECE Graduate Teaching Assistant Excellence Award                     

Westin Williams

Teaching undergraduates is one of ECE’s most important missions, and this award recognizes excellence in this area. Teaching assistants are necessary to ensure that every student has the opportunity for personal attention during their course of study.

ECE Graduate Research Assistant Excellence Award                    

Song Hu, Nelson Lourenco

Research is the cornerstone to ECE’s success. Nurturing bright and hardworking graduate research assistants (GRAs) are among the most important factors in ensuring that ECE remains a leader in the research community. These awards will be given to the GRAs who have demonstrated particular excellence in performing their duties.

STAFF AWARDS

Hats Off Performance Award                                                    

Joi Adams, Angela Elleby

These awards recognize the classified staff members who have demonstrated exceptional job performance and/or service to ECE above and beyond the call of duty.

Research Spotlight Award                                                                      

Yuguo Tao

This award is presented to a researcher who has made a significant contribution to the research efforts in ECE.

Academic Spotlight Award                                                                     

Joyelle Harris 

This award is presented to the researcher, classified employee, or general faculty member who has made a significant contribution to the ECE teaching or academic program. 

FACULTY AWARDS

Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award                                       

Muhannad Bakir

This award recognizes the most outstanding assistant professors and/or associate professors in ECE with less than 10 years since their initial faculty appointment.

ECE Outreach Award                                                                                

Patricio Vela

This award is presented to a faculty member for leadership and/or significant participation in outreach activities to interest and involve K-12 students in engineering, to increase participation of women and underrepresented minorities in engineering, and/or to recruit such students to the School of ECE. 

Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award        

Alenka Zajic

W. Marshall Leach, Jr./Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award         

John Cressler

The Eta Kappa Nu teaching awards are presented to the most outstanding classroom instructors–one junior faculty member and one senior faculty member–as determined by the ECE senior class.

D. Scott Wills ECE Distinguished Mentor Award                               

Andrew Peterson

This award is presented to a faculty member whose mentoring of junior faculty–in connection with teaching or research activities over an extended period of time–is judged to be outstanding.

Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award                           

Raghupathy Sivakumar

This award is presented to the senior faculty member who has made significant contributions throughout his/her career.

Tuck’s stellar academic record, which boasts a 4.0 GPA, has been punctuated by a passion for research. He participated in two Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) projects. During his first year with ORS, he was selected for an interdisciplinary team comprised of chemical and electrical engineering students. The group investigated the effects of molecular weight and crosslinker functionality on dielectric films and was advised by Professor Paul Kohl. At the end of his sophomore year, he applied for the intensive ECE Research Option program that recognizes undergraduate students who have participated in a concentrated research effort that results in an undergraduate thesis.

During his junior and senior year, he joined Professor Ayanna Howard’s ORS team and worked in the Human-Automation Systems Laboratory on assistive rehabilitative technology for people with disabilities.

To date, Tuck has three publications, an invited talk, and a patent—all major achievements for an undergraduate student. He credits getting involved in research early in his academic career with much of his success.

“I would encourage any undergraduate to get involved in undergraduate research—the earlier the better. Research enhanced my ability to perform in class, it made me a better public speaker, and it improved the way I tutored students,” said Tuck.

In addition to the Love Scholarship, Jonathan has won several other academic awards including the College of Engineering Most Outstanding Researcher Award and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Most Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

In the summer between his junior and senior year, he conducted research at Stanford University through the Semiconductor Research Corporation supported STARnet program. Tuck worked under Professor Boris Murmann in the area of signal processing applications for ultrasound. At the end of the summer, Tuck’s mind was made up—he would pursue a Ph.D. and Stanford was his institution of choice.

Once Tuck receives his diploma, he will head to Cupertino, California, for a summer-long internship at Apple before starting graduate school at Stanford. As far as the more distant future, Tuck’s career aspirations could evolve in a number of directions including starting a company, as a part of an industry or government R&D team, or even his “dream job” of teaching at Georgia Tech.

Photo: Rafael Bras presents Jonathan Tuck with the Love Family Foundation Scholarship Award.

Robert Butera – Senior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award

Mark Davenport – Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award

Hua Wang – Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award

Wang was also honored at the annual Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Awards Banquet on April 21.

Seven ECE students were among award winners recognized at the annual Georgia Tech Student Honors Celebration, held on April 20 at the Georgia Tech Student Center Ballroom.

The following ECE-specific awards were recognized by College of Engineering Dean Gary May at this event. They and 24 additional students were presented with their awards at the Roger P. Webb Awards Program, held on April 20 prior to the Georgia Tech Student Honors Celebration.

Alan Dong – Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award

Ratchapong Tangkijvorakul – Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award

Jennifer Hunter – ECE Undergraduate Research Award

Elisabeth Sarah Bradley – Most Outstanding ECE Senior Co-op Award

The following ECE students were also recognized with awards, given by other units and groups at Georgia Tech.

Jonathan Tuck – Love Family Foundation Scholarship

This is Georgia Tech’s highest award given to a graduating senior, and it recognizes the senior who has the most outstanding scholastic record of all members of the class.

Gregory Cooke, Ang Deng – Henry Ford II Scholar Awards

These awards are given to engineering students who have the best academic records at the end of the third year of undergraduate study.

Thank you for your hard work and dedication to making Georgia Tech and ECE better places to be!

Since joining Georgia Tech in 1999, Butera has worked with 58 undergraduates in his laboratory on directed research projects. His research focuses on the development of novel techniques for nerve stimulation and recording and studying the dynamics of neuro-electrical activity. His work spans both scientific/laboratory purposes and clinical/human subject applications, so his undergraduate researchers come from a wide range of disciplines.

Some students have been supported by sponsored research or programs such as the President’s Undergraduate Research Awards Program, the Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience Petit Scholars Program, and the ECE Opportunity Research Scholars Program. Undergraduate researchers work directly with Butera or in coordination with another graduate student or postdoctoral fellow in his lab. Those students supervised by graduate students or postdocs meet with Butera regularly throughout the semester and many attend his weekly laboratory meeting.

Besides direct mentorship, Butera taught a successful Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program called “Brain Beats” for several years that had 46 students enrolled and that developed a prototype of a wearable, wireless EEG device. Several of these VIP students transitioned to senior design projects or undergraduate theses or direct mentorship in his lab.

Butera is the founding faculty director of the Grand Challenges Program, which he led from 2012-2015. In addition to his existing mentorship activities, he facilitated three classes of 110 freshmen, where each class of 20 teams each year created a research or design project during their freshman year that most pursued during their sophomore year. Butera still serves as the faculty or technical advisor for two Grand Challenges teams.  

At least 16 alumni from Butera’s lab have received or are pursuing doctoral degrees. Undergraduate researchers in Butera’s lab have gone on to graduate and postdoctoral studies at prestigious universities and are pursuing careers at companies like Gryphon Scientific, Honeywell, Covidien, Schlumberger, and Google. They clearly appreciate not only the research experience gained in the lab, but more importantly, Butera’s personal and professional guidance while they were at Georgia Tech, with many of those relationships still continuing today.

Fleetwood received this award for his research contributions in the field of radiation effects in silicon-germanium (SiGe) microelectronic technologies. His Ph.D. research focuses on correlating fundamental damage mechanisms between highly-energetic particles like space radiation and state-of-the-art laser systems which provide spatial resolution that is impossible to achieve with traditional particle accelerators. His work incorporates advanced modeling techniques that help researchers and scientists to better develop radiation-hardening methods to aid future space missions.

Fleetwood’s research is supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and collaborators at the Naval Research Laboratory.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Fleetwood investigates radiation effects (total ionizing dose and single event effects) in silicon and silicon-germanium (SiGe) based microelectronic technologies. The focus of his Ph.D. dissertation work is on correlating fundamental damage mechanisms between heavy-ion induced single event transients (SETs) and laser-induced SETs in SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs). His research leverages advanced models and simulations in order to identify the underlying physical phenomena involved with single event effects. The aim of his work is to help accelerate testing schedules for costly broad-beam experiments.

Advised by the Schlumberger Chair Professor of Electronics John Cressler, Fleetwood has authored or co-authored 16 publications, including the NSREC 2014 Outstanding Student Paper Award and the BCTM 2015 Best Student Paper Award. His research is supported by collaborations with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

Beyah joined the ECE faculty in 2011, where he leads the Communications Assurance and Performance (CAP) Group and is a member of the Communications Systems Center (CSC) and the Institute for Information Security and Privacy (IISP). Prior to returning to Georgia Tech, Beyah was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University, a research faculty member with the CSC, and a consultant with Andersen Consulting’s (now Accenture) Network Solutions Group. A two-time Georgia Tech ECE alumnus, he earned both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1999 and 2003, respectively.  

Beyah’s research interests include network security, wireless networks, network traffic characterization and performance, privacy, and cyber-physical systems security with a focus on critical infrastructure. His group has discovered critical flaws in many power grid devices across the globe, and this work has resulted in the development of security patches for these devices.

Beyah’s work has been highlighted in many news outlets, including NetworkWorld and Forbes. He is an NSF CAREER Award recipient, was one of 12 junior faculty members selected for DARPA’s 2010 Computer Science Study Panel, and received the inaugural Department of Computer Science Outstanding Performance Award while at Georgia State University.  His work has resulted in 110 refereed or invited publications, and he has served as an associate editor or guest editor for several journals in the field.

Beyah has graduated five Ph.D. students and over a dozen M.S. students. His research group currently consists of five Ph.D. students and two M.S. students, and he currently serves as director of the Georgia Tech Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. Prior to becoming director of SURE, Beyah regularly served as a graduate student mentor and faculty advisor with the program. He is also a faculty advisor for the Georgia Tech Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation Program and is a regular participant in the Georgia Tech FOCUS Program, an annual graduate student recruitment event that takes place over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend.

Beyah is a member of the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences Board of Visitors. He has contributed to the Atlanta community through activities with Atlanta Public Schools and is a 2014 graduate of Leadership Atlanta, the city’s most prestigious executive leadership program.

Rodrigues is currently a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai was his master’s thesis advisor and now serves as his Ph.D. advisor.

Rodrigues will be recognized for his M.S. thesis entitled “Enhancing Chiroptical Signals from Metamaterials via Nonlinear Excitation.” His groundbreaking research on metamaterials has led to two first-authored papers in Advanced Materials, several co-authored papers in journals like Nature Materials and Nature Communications, and two first-authored essays/reviews in Science and Nature Nanotechnology.

Rodrigues graduated with his M.S. degree in December 2015, and his research interests are focused on metamaterials, plasmonics, nonlinear optics, photonics, and microsystems. Rodrigues was also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow Program awardee and a Goizueta GoSTEM Fellow, and in January, he received an Intel scholarship at the annual FOCUS President’s Dinner, which was part of diversity activities hosted over the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend.

Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Moez Karim Aziz, current Ph.D. student advised by Hua Wang, Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor of ECE, in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab. Aziz earned his undergraduate electrical engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Marc Higginson-Rollins, current Ph.D. student advised by ECE Assistant Professor Morris Cohen in the Low Frequency Radio Group. Higginson-Rollins earned his undergraduate electrical engineering degree from the University of Kentucky.

Christopher William Peterson, current Ph.D. student in the Department of ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Peterson earned his undergraduate electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech.

Jonathan Tuck, honorable mention recipient. Tuck is graduating with his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech and will enroll in the Stanford Ph.D. electrical engineering program this fall.

Computer Engineering

Angel Daruna, Ph.D. institution to be determined. Daruna earned his undergraduate computer engineering degree from Georgia Tech. He was the fall 2015 commencement speaker, and among the 2,000 GRFs awarded this year, he is one of only two students receiving this award in the area of computer engineering.

Computers/IS/Engineering

Celine Irvene, honorable mention in Computers/IS/Engineering in the computer security and privacy category. She earned her undergraduate computer engineering degree from Georgia Tech and is now a Ph.D. student advised by Raheem Beyah, the Motorola Foundation Professor of ECE.

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Adibi received a $145,000 award for his project, “An Ultrafast Testbed for Comprehensive Characterization of Photonics, Electronic, and Optoelectronic Properties of Integrated Nanophotonic Structures.” The goal of this DURIP project is to develop an ultrafast characterization testbed for the characterization of high-speed integrated photonic devices such as high-speed integrated photonic modulators and detectors. This tool will facilitate existing research at Georgia Tech and will enable new research for the study of ultrafast, low-power integrated optoelectronic devices and systems, such as modulators, switches, and detectors. Such devices are essential in multiple applications of integrated nanophotonics, including information processing, communications and networking, sensing, and computing.

Adibi was one of 176 researchers representing 96 research institutions that were announced as DURIP award recipients by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) earlier this month. The program supports the purchase of state‑of‑the‑art equipment that augments current university capabilities or develops new capabilities to perform cutting‑edge defense research and associated graduate student research training.

The awards are the result of a merit competition jointly conducted by three DoD research offices: the Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research. A highly competitive program, the three offices solicited proposals from university investigators conducting science and engineering research of importance to national defense. These areas include advances in materials, structures, and manufacturing science; quantum and nanosciences; computing and networks; electronics, electromagnetics, and electro‑optics; acoustics; neuroscience; fluid dynamics; robotics and autonomous systems; and ocean, environmental, and life sciences and engineering.

Swaminathan shares this award with his coauthors KiJin Han, who is his former Ph.D. student and is now an assistant professor at UNIST in South Korea, and Jongwoo Jeong, who is Han’s Ph.D. student at UNIST. They will be presented with this honor at the 66th IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference, to be held May 31-June 3 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The title of the award-winning paper is “Modeling of Through-Silicon Via (TSV) Interposer Considering Depletion Capacitance and Substrate Layer Thickness Effects.” Extracting the parasitics of Through Silicon Vias in 3D integrated circuits is a challenging problem. These effects are affected by the bias voltage applied to the silicon substrate and finite substrate dimensions. Hence, analytical models that have been used in the past have significant error associated with them.

In this work, Swaminathan and his colleagues use the conduction mode basis functions originally derived to model current and charge and modify them by incorporating depletion capacitance. To account for the finite substrate dimensions, multi-layered Green’s function with suitable approximations are used. The method developed has been applied to both simple examples to show accuracy and to TSV arrays to show computational efficiency.

A Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Lan will be presented with this award at the Chinese Consulate in Houston, Texas later this spring. He is advised by ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai.

This award encourages research excellence and recognizes top Chinese Ph.D. students across all fields of study throughout the world. Lan will be recognized for his work in electro-optics in nonlinear metamaterials, which has been published in high profile publications such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, and Nano Letters. At the end of 2015, he also received a Materials Research Society Graduate Silver Award for his research in this area.

Charles’ thesis, entitled “Dynamics and Correlations in Sparse Signal Acquisition,” centers on developing algorithms to analyze time-varying high-dimensional data by exploiting the fact that the information of interest is generally low-dimensional. His work specifically advances algorithms for a particular kind of structure called "sparsity" that has achieved state-of-the-art results in many signal/image processing algorithms. As one example, Charles used his algorithms on a remote sensing task to show that he could take common multispectral imaging and improve the spectral resolution by an order of magnitude to a quality comparable to data from a (much more expensive) hyperspectral imager. In addition to engineering applications, Charles’ work has also provided fundamental analysis of neural network structures for working memory that gives insight into the performance of both biological and machine learning systems. Advised by ECE Associate Professor Christopher J. Rozell, Charles graduated in May 2015 and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.

Sodagar’s thesis, entitled “Enabling Integrated Nanophotonic Devices in Hybrid CMOS-Compatible Material Platforms for Optical Interconnection,” mainly focused on the design and development of a high-speed electro-optic modulator for silicon photonic platforms. Sodagar also demonstrated a series of essential integrated photonic elements that are urgently needed for realization of complex integrated photonic systems. The outcome of his research impacts the telecommunication industry. As an example, his work can be adopted for the next generation of high-speed links within datacenters. Advised by ECE Professor Ali Adibi, Sodagar graduated in August 2015 and is now a senior engineer at Skorpios Technologies, Inc.

Trivedi’s thesis, entitled “Ultra-Low Power Non-Boolean Computing with Tunneling Field-Effect Transistors,” demonstrated evolutionary and disruptive approaches of integrating Tunneling Field-Effect-Transistor (Tunnel FET) technology with non-Boolean computing. In the evolutionary approach, silicon channel Tunnel FETs were applied to Cellular Neural Networks (CNNs) for energy-efficient image processing and associative memory. In the disruptive approach, an atypical gate/source-overlapped heterojunction Tunnel FET (SO-HTFET) was demonstrated to exhibit Gaussian-shaped I_DS-V_GS. The design approaches discussed in Trivedi’s thesis will be useful to enhance computing abilities of low power computing platforms. As examples, medical diagnosis in wearable healthcare devices can be improved and remote sensors can better assess their environment. Advised by ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay, Trivedi graduated in Fall 2015 and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Lucky for Tsao and the other 13,000 engineering students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, there’s now a concrete way to merge foundational knowledge and technical skills with social impact. The Engineering for Social Innovation (ESI) Center matches students with real-world projects for corporations and non-profit agencies. All projects aim to improve the lives of the under-privileged domestic population or people at the bottom of the pyramid in the developing world.

The Center started as a pilot in the summer of 2015 by Dr. Joyelle Harris, a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The Center now boasts four different methods of engaging the student body. The first cohort participates for course credit and includes eight interdisciplinary teams made up of 35 students. As a co-curricular avenue, students can join the Grand Challenges Scholars Program. For extra-curricular options, students can participate in ESI organizations Engineers without Borders or Enterprise-2-Empower. For students who are interested in a work study option, the Center also sponsors ESI Fellows.

Dr. Harris, who is the director of ESI, was aware that many engineering students do not make the connection between what they learn in class and the impact they can make on society. She wanted to provide an opportunity for students to solve actual engineering challenges for non-profit and corporate organizations and see the positive results they can make in someone else’s life.

In addition to mentoring several student teams, Harris also develops and nurtures relationships with the project sponsors. The main criteria when looking for projects and partnerships are: the partner must make a positive societal impact, the partner must have direct touch points with the people they serve, and the projects must have an engineering challenge that builds on Georgia Tech students’ classroom learning.

The program supports a variety of projects including a customized baby seat for orphanages in India, a smart wheelchair, an app for a children’s nutrition bar, a water filter program for Tanzanian villages, and a temperature and light detection system for a summer camp that serves children with disabilities and terminal illnesses.

“I want my students to make the connection between their engineering skills and their benefit to society. For example, customized seating for a child with a disability can cost over $1,000. My students built a chair for disabled children in low-resource regions for under $50. When my students see these kids use the chairs they designed, they know that they can use engineering to make a difference in this world,” said Harris.

As Harris makes more connections, the list of projects, and the need for students, will grow. Harris also hopes to add technology consulting to ESI’s services in the future. She plans to train students to be technology consultants for non-profits, providing the organizations with expert advice on their technology questions and students with more real-world experience for their resumes.

Learn more about some of ESI’s current projects below. To get involved, visit the ESI website.

Smart Wheelchair

Industrial engineering major Brooke Beisner has worked on two different projects under the program. Last semester, she worked on the Smart Wheelchair team in conjunction with The Rehabilitation Engineering and Applied Research (REAR) Lab, headed by Professor Stephen Springle. Students outfitted a Quickie IRIS wheelchair with multiple sensors that measured knee, foot, and back rotation, as well as leg extension. The measurements will be used to analyze wheelchair usage in order to create economical smart wheelchairs that can adjust to the individual needs of users.

Georgia Center for Nonprofits

This semester, Beisner switched teams to work on a database project for the Georgia Center for Nonprofits. Her group is creating a system that automatically generates monthly capacity reports. Right now, the Center is creating them by hand, a tedious job. Phase two of the project will involve improving the backend data query interface to be more user friendly. Students automate the reports by using a suite of Google products.

Evolv Bar

Miller Tsao, a computer science major, and his teammate Christian Harris, a computer engineering major, are getting a chance to flex their application building skills for a non-profit called The Evolv Bar Project, which produces complete nutrition bars that feed children in impoverished countries. The project has been a great learning opportunity. Not only have Tsao and Harris learned to design and develop a first generation iOS mobile app, but they have also learned about the process involved with getting it approved by the App Store.

Tsao and Harris learned to code in AngularJS, HTML, and SASS for the project. They hope that the new application will help the organization advertise and sell up to 50% more bars, in addition to supporting testing of new products and services.

SPOON Foundation

The SPOON Foundation works in orphanages, foster care, and low resource community settings around the world to improve feeding and nutrition for children with disabilities. The children are usually fed in ways that do not meet best practices for feeding. One of the most common feeding practices seen in these settings is improper positioning; for instance, children are often fed lying flat on their backs. Even when caregivers attempt to sit them up, they have no means to do so properly. The poor feeding practices contribute to malnutrition, illness, loss of dignity/quality of life, and death. The output of this project is a customized seating solution that enables caregivers to position children properly for feeding. ESI students have already created a prototype out of wood that costs only $50 USD to produce. The prototype will be sent to India in the coming weeks for testing and feedback.

SAFE Water Now

Another example of ESI’s global reach is current projects for SAFE Water Now, a U.S. non-profit that provides knowledge and resources to solve the problem of unsafe drinking water in Tanzania. Safe Water Ceramics, the organization’s manufacturing partner in Arusha, Tanzania, consists of one man who produces sustainable and affordable ceramic water filters for household use. Made of clay, sawdust, and colloidal silver, the filters can last up to five years and cost only $40 USD.

While thousands of filters have been delivered to rural and urban families, schools, and orphanages, the demand continues to grow. Right now, only 100 filters can be produced each month, and that’s where ESI comes in.

Three separate ESI teams are working to make Safe Water Now’s process for creating the filters more efficient. One group is creating a test tube incubator that tests the water before and after it is filtered, by adding a bacterial agent and heating it to an exact temperature. A second group is building a drying tent for the filters that is made out of inexpensive, lightweight, readily available materials. To power the incubator and the drying tent, another team is developing a solar powered generator. With these three innovations in place, which are all still in the prototyping phase, students estimate that production can increase from 100 filters per month to 500.

“This project has been the biggest highlight of my college career. We all want to be able to help, but we don’t always know how. ESI has made taking my skills and applying them to something meaningful an amazing, effortless, and natural process,” said industrial engineering major and member of the SAFE Water Now incubator team, Meriem Guehaiz.

Images: 1. Electrical engineering major Amanda Remus holds a leg brace from the Smart Wheelchair. 2. Dr. Joy Harris with electrical engineering major Allen Ndemera from the Camp Twin Lakes team. 3. Industrial engineering major Bryanna Land and electrical engineering major Kinsey Blackmore are part of the Camp Twin Lakes team. 4. The Georgia Center for Nonprofit team members include computer science graduate student Monica Reddy, computer science major Ishan Waykul, industrial engineering major Stephanie Tang, and computer science major Jeremiah Dir. 5. Mechanical engineering major Taylor Benson and aerospace engineering major Brett Rushing pose with Dr. Joy Harris in front of the Smart Water drying tent framework. 6. Customized seat for the SPOON Foundation project.

The ECE associate chair for faculty development is in charge of the School’s reappointment, promotion, and tenure process and the periodic peer review process. This position also assists in faculty annual reviews and is involved with the School’s Roger P. Webb Awards Program and the ECE Faculty Honors Committee.

“Ayanna will do an exceptional job in this extremely important role for the School,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor. “I am very happy to have such an accomplished and strategic-thinking colleague on the ECE leadership team, and I believe that our faculty will benefit in working with her in the years to come.”

An ECE faculty member since 2005, Howard holds the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and serves as the director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab. Prior to her appointment as the Smith Chair in August 2015, Howard held the Motorola Foundation Professorship for three years. In addition, she served as the chair of the Institute’s multidisciplinary robotics Ph.D. program and currently leads a team of Georgia Tech and Emory University faculty that are developing degree programs in healthcare robotics, the first of their kinds in the United States.

Howard's research is centered on the concept of humanized intelligence, the process of embedding human cognitive ability into the control path of autonomous systems. Her work has resulted in over 200 peer-reviewed publications about projects ranging from scientific rover navigation in glacier environments to assistive robots for the home. Some new research directions include robotic applications for child therapy and rehabilitation, tele-presence for persons with visual impairments, haptic and wearable device interfaces, behavior modeling for diagnosis and intervention, and medical and health care mobile apps.

Howard is the founder and chief technology officer of Zyrobotics, LLC. Launched in September 2013, the company is commercializing assistive technology that enables children with limited mobility to operate tablet computers, smart phones, toys, gaming apps, and interactive robots.

To date, Howard’s work has been highlighted through a number of awards, articles, and televised interviews and programs, including USA Today, TIME Magazine, CNN, and American Public Television. Her recent awards include the 2013 Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award; the 2008 Georgia Tech Faculty Woman of Distinction Award; the 2008 ECE Outreach Award; the 2009 Janice A. Lumpkin Educator of the Year Award, given by the National Society of Black Engineers; the 2014 A. Richard Newton ABIE Award; and the 2016 A. Nico Habermann Award, given by the Computing Research Association. In 2015, she was named as one of the 23 most powerful women engineers in the world by Business Insider.

“I’m extremely excited to have the opportunity to work with our faculty to ensure the world continues to know about all their great accomplishments and all the great things we do in ECE,” said Howard. “I’m looking forward to making sure opportunities are made available for our faculty to advance their development and growth in all ways possible.”

“We are doing an extraordinary job both in education and research. The innovation and ingenuity that I see from our faculty, staff, and students are inspiring and invigorating, thus making ECE an excellent option for prospective graduate students who are looking for a challenging and rewarding educational experience,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “I sincerely appreciate the hard work, dedication, and creativity of our faculty, staff, and students that keep us ranked among the best in the country.”

The College of Engineering placed seventh in the overall rankings and third among all public engineering institutions.

All of the graduate programs in the College ranked in the top 10 of their respective areas, making Georgia Tech the only institution in the nation to garner top 10 rankings for all of its engineering graduate programs for five straight years.

About the U.S. News & World Report Rankings

Rankings for the engineering colleges (or engineering schools as they are known at other universities) that provided data were calculated based on a weighted average of 10 indicators, while specific specialty rankings are based on peer assessments. View more information on how the rankings are determined. 

The purpose of this award is to recognize outstanding educators from among the untenured junior faculty from the Georgia Tech Schools of ECE, Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and the College of Computing. Inan and his colleagues will be honored at an awards ceremony with Lockheed Martin later this spring.

Award recipients are selected for extraordinary effectiveness in classroom teaching, educational innovations, inspiration transmitted to students, direct impact and involvement with students, and impact on the postgraduate success of students.

Inan has been a member of the ECE faculty since 2013, where he is positioned in the bioengineering technical interest group. He teaches ECE 1881 Introduction to ECE Design, a freshman course with an in-class lab component and final project; ECE 4782 Biosystems Analysis; and ECE 4781 Biomedical Instrumentation. Inan revamped both ECE 4781 and ECE 4782, which are senior level courses that draw students from ECE, biomedical engineering, and mechanical engineering.

Outside the classroom, Inan is a strong supporter of undergraduate education through research experience. He involves more than 10 undergraduate students currently in his research group through Georgia Tech programs such as Idea2Prototype, the President’s Undergraduate Research Awards, Opportunity Research Scholars, and Special Problems.

This award recognizes outstanding research achievements at Georgia Tech, as evidenced by publications, program development results, and other research contributions made during the 2015 calendar year. Among his many achievements and recognitions, Wang was honored for his collection of six peer-reviewed journal papers, 15 peer-reviewed conference papers, and one book, all in the field of integrated circuits and systems for energy-efficient, high-precision signal synthesis and analysis.

Results from Wang’s work and that of his students in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab can be seen in applications such as wireless communications for 5G wireless links and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, advanced radar systems, and bioelectronics devices. These results have direct impact on industry for both consumer products and defense electronics. Three journal papers were rated as “popular articles,” based on download usages, and one won the IEEE Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award at the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S). Two conference papers were selected as best student paper award finalists of the 2015 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference.

In 2015, Wang’s graduate students received seven fellowships and awards from several different IEEE societies or best paper or designer awards from IEEE conferences and industry. Wang received the NSF CAREER Award, the Lockheed Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award, and the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award, and he was elevated to IEEE Senior Member in 2015. 

Howard was chosen for this award for her sustained commitment to increasing diversity, combined with her distinction in robotics research. She has a long track record of improving access to research for women and underrepresented minorities, as well as students with disabilities.

Dating back to her work at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the late 1990s, Howard ran a mentoring program for undergraduate women, and continuing today, she works on increasing minority participation at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels. She has provided research opportunities to dozens of undergraduates, of whom 75 percent are underrepresented minorities and/or women.

Howard has been on the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty since 2005, where she currently holds the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair and leads the Human-Automation Systems Laboratory. She also heads up a multidisciplinary team from Georgia Tech and Emory University that will create new bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degree programs and concentrations in healthcare robotics – the first degree programs in this area in the United States.

In the last year, Howard was recognized as one of the 23 most powerful women engineers in the world by Business Insider and was named to The Root 2015, a list of 100 African-Americans responsible for the year’s most significant moments, movements, and ideas.

Muhannad Bakir

John D. Cressler

Magnus Egerstedt

Faramarz Fekri

The Class of 1940 distinction is one of several awards made annually by CETL to instructors of small and large classes. It is based on the Course Instructor Opinion Surveys that were administered in the fall 2014 and spring 2015 semesters. A high response rate (85 percent of greater) and a near-perfect evaluation score are required for consideration.

Bakir, Cressler, Egerstedt, and Fekri will be formally recognized when CETL holds its annual Celebrating Teaching Day on March 15. 

An assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Davenport and his coauthors will be presented with this honor at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, scheduled for March 20-25, 2016 in Shanghai, China.

Davenport and his coauthors Richard Baraniuk (Rice University), Petros Boufounos (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs), and Michael Wakin (Colorado School of Mines) will receive this award for their paper entitled “Signal Processing with Compressive Measurements,” which was published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 4, no. 2, April 2010.

In recent years, a robust theory of "compressive sensing" has been developed that demonstrates the potential for certain randomized measurement schemes to efficiently acquire structured signals (where the number of measurements can be much smaller than the number of Nyquist-rate samples). This has inspired the design of hardware systems that directly implement random measurement protocols. This paper develops methods to solve a range of classical signal processing problems—such as detection, classification, estimation, and filtering—using the kind of compressive measurements generated by such hardware architectures without ever reconstructing the signals involved.

Tenure

Moinuddin K. Qureshi

Promotion to Full Professor

Muhannad S. Bakir

A. Raheem Beyah

Aaron D. Lanterman

Saibal Mukhopadhyay

Justin K. Romberg

The LeanIn.org website provides free lessons in leadership, communication, work/life balance, and short and long-term well-being. The overall theme in these lessons is to step outside of your comfort zone with courage and confidence.

Fair started a Georgia Tech Lean In Chapter in April of 2015 with the help of fellow students Marissa Connor, electrical and computer engineering; Shan Tie, chemical and biomolecular engineering; Dalar Nazarian, chemical and biomolecular engineering; and Chelsea Jean-Mary, electrical and computer engineering. Organized by “circles” of up to eight members, the chapter now has three circles that meet for one hour a month and follow the guided lessons. Each circle is diverse as far as member backgrounds, areas of study, and work experience, but all circles are made up of peers.

“The group provides a support system that is difficult to find organically as a graduate student. Our meetings consist of intimate, genuine conversations with women in similar situations,” said Fair.

Currently the 45 members are all graduate students studying a variety of subjects including computing, science, business, engineering, and architecture. Fair hopes that more students will join as word spreads about the organization, particularly undergraduates. Fair would also like to see men join the group.

“If you’re talking about gender equality, you can’t make change with only half the population,” said Fair.

Getting involved in a circle is easy—fill out this form and a member will contact you. To learn more about the Georgia Tech Lean In Chapter, visit the website.

The award-winning paper, entitled “The Wireless Workhorse: Mixed-Signal Power Amplifiers Leverage Digital and Analog Techniques to Enhance Large-Signal RF Operations,” is based on Wang’s collaboration with Toshiba Corporation and was published in the September 2015 issue of Microwave Magazine.

Wang is the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). His coauthors on the paper are Shouhei Kousai and Kohei Onizuka, collaborators from Toshiba, and Song Hu, an ECE Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab, which Wang directs.

This paper reviews recently reported new architectures for silicon-based power amplifiers (PAs) that exploit mixed-signal (both analog and digital) techniques to substantially improve PA performance, such as PA back-off power efficiency, in-band/out-of-band linearity, and robustness against antenna load variations. These advanced PA architectures and designs have become complex, mixed-signal/mixed-mode RF systems with orchestrated collaborations among analog, digital, and large-signal RF operations.

The team will be presented with the award at the IEEE MTT-S Awards Banquet, which will be held on May 25 in San Francisco during the 2016 International Microwave Symposium.