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ECE students and alumni celebrate research and progress at the 2015 Engineering Graduate Symposium
Posters and presentations were judged by faculty and a visiting group of 14 returning ECE alumni, and winners were chosen in each area of study.
EnlargeEfficient phosphorescent OLEDs, autonomous safety systems for cars, audio-visual emotion recognition, multi-directional radar, graphene nanoelectronics, and groundbreaking resistive random access memory (RRAM) were just a few of the many projects presented by ECE students at 2015’s Graduate Symposium. The College of Engineering’s annual event to highlight research and engage prospective graduate students gave about 80 ECE presenters the chance to demonstrate their work to prospective and fellow students.
Posters and presentations were judged by faculty and a visiting group of 14 returning ECE alumni, and winners were chosen in each area of study. Fifteen ECE students were recognized as 1st or 2nd Place in their division, and two of the three Towner PhD Research Awards went to ECE nominees.
Enlarge14 alumni were invited to campus to judge presentations, meet with students, and enjoy a casual reception at the end of the day. The following alumni were present: Abbas Abbaspour-Tamijani (Qualcomm), Eran Bashan (Hygiea), Sasan Fathpour (University of Central Florida), Mark Ferriss (IBM), Christopher Galbraith (MIT Lincoln Lab), Anne Itsuno (Apple), Tara Javidi (UC-San Diego), Ben Morris (Matrix Computing), Nader Najafi (Integrated Sensing Systems), Ali Nazari (Capital Data Management), Scott Rudolph (Naval Research Laboratory), Michael Thiel (Schlumberger), Scott Wright (Exponent), Kevin Xu (University of Toledo).
Richard and Eleanor Towner Prize for Outstanding Ph.D. Research Award
This is a college-level competition intended to highlight the innovation and creativity demonstrated by our Ph.D. students. Each winner received $2500 and had their name added to a perpetual plaque that is displayed in the lobby outside of Chesebrough Auditorium. Three students were awarded a Towner Prize, two representing ECE:
EnlargeAzadeh Ansari – for “Q-Enhanced Depletion-mediated AlGaN/GaN Resonators.”
Azadeh looked at the acousto-electrical properties of GaN material systems, which are perfect candidates for acoustic devices. These properties have not been fully examined previously. She reported on frequency tunable AlGaN/GaN acoustic resonators that utilize piezoelectric actuation and piezo-resistive readout.
Azadeh was advised by Mina Rais-Zadeh.
EnlargeCheng Zheng – for “Optical Properties and Optoelectronic Applications of Nano-size Metallic Films and Metamaterials.”
Future optoelectronic devices should be compact in size, flexible, and have high efficiency and robust performance. All these merits require developments in the materials that make them. In this presentation, Cheng investigated new optical materials and device concepts. He discovered a new kind of silver film, called aluminum-doped silver. This film is ultra-thin, ultra-smooth, low loss, and is thermally robust and long-term stable.
Cheng was advised by Jay Guo.
Five students earned honorable mention, one representing ECE:
EnlargeParinaz Naghizadeh Ardabili – for “Provision of Non-Excludable Goods on Networks: Incentives, Exit Equilibria, and Applications to Cyber-Security.”
Parinaz aims to understand if, and to what extent, business details about an organization can help provide guidelines for better resource allocation across different preventive measures, in order to effectively protect, detect, and recover from, different forms of security incidents. In this study, she leveraged a broader set of publicly available business details to provide a more fine-grained analysis.
Parinaz was advised by Mingyan Liu.
Technical Session Awards
The following graduate students earned awards for their research projects in areas of research associated with Electrical and Computer Engineering:
Automotive and Transportation Engineering:
Zeng Qiu – 1st place, for “Composite Adaptive Internal Model Control and its Application to Boost-Pressure Control of a Turbocharged Gasoline Engine.” Advised by Jing Sung (NAME).
Gaurav Kumar Singh – 2nd place, for “Constructing User Specific Probabilistic Models of Driver Input via Maneuver Recognition.” Advised by Ram Vasudevan (ME).
Integrated Circuits, VLSI, and Microsystems:
Adam Peczalski – 1st place, for “Temperature Compensated Fused Silica Resonators Using Embedded Nickel-Refilled Trenches.” Advised by Mina Rais-Zadeh.
System and Communication Engineering
Farhad Shirani – 1st place, for “New Lattice Codes for Multiple Descriptions.” Advised by Sandeep Pradhan.
Signal and Image Processing, Computer Vision
Brian Moore – 1st place, for “The accuracy of singular vectors of thresholded low-rank plus noise plus outlier matrices.” Advised by Raj Rao Nadakuditi.
Kevin Moon – 2nd place (tie), for “Meta learning of bounds on the Bayes classifier error.” Advised by Al Hero.
Matthew Prelee – 2nd place (tie), for “New image reconstruction algorithm guided by local gradient SVD.” Advised by Dave Neuhoff.
Applied Electromagnetics and Plasma Science
Brian Tierney – 1st place, for “Generating Arbitrary Radiation Patterns with Metasurfaces.” Advised by Anthony Grbic.
Nikolaos Chiotellis – 2nd place for “Towards the Analytical Design of Tensor Metasurfaces.” Advised by Anthony Gbric.
Control, Dynamics, and Robotics
Erik Miehling – 1st place, for “Optimal Defense Policies for Partially Observable Spreading Processes on Bayesian Attack Graphs.” Advised by Demosthenis Teneketzis.
Optics, Photonics, and Solid-State Devices
Lin Chen – 1st place (tie), for “Vertical Ge/Si Core/Shell Nanowire Juntionless Transistor.” Advised by Wei Lu.
Jaesang Lee – 1st place (tie), for “Current Progress in Blue Phosphorescent Organic Light-emitting Diodes (PHOLED).” Advised by Stephen Forrest.
Alan Teran – 1st place (tie), for “High-efficiency AlGaAs Indoor Photovoltaics.” Advised by Jamie Phillips.
Power and Energy
Michael Fisher – 1st place (tie), for “Shooting Methods for Computation of Parameter Stability Boundaries in Fault Induced Delayed Voltage Recovery.” Advised by Ian Hiskens.
Jonathan Martin – 1st place (tie), for “Corrective Model-Predictive Control in Large Electric Power Systems.” Advised by Ian Hiskens.
Read more about the work of these and other presenters in the Book of Abstracts.
ECE Presenters
View and download photos on Flickr
2014 Engineering Graduate Symposium – ECE
2013 Engineering Graduate Symposium – ECE
2012 Engineering Graduate Symposium – ECE
2011 Engineering Graduate Symposium – ECE