This honor is given by the European Commission for visiting researchers who want to carry out research and teaching assignments and scholarly work for the Erasmus Mundus Masters (EMM) in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology.  The scholarship provides travel and living expenses to visit one (or more) of the four partner universities for up to three months.

Naeemi plans to use his award to visit IMEC-Belgium this summer. He will formulate a concrete collaborative research plan to address the connectivity challenges in nanoscale integrated circuits. In addition, his Ph.D. student, Chenyun Pan, will also spend this summer at IMEC working on a joint research project in developing predictive models for the potential performance of processors implemented with emerging devices and interconnects. 

An ECE faculty member since 2008, Naeemi explores emerging nanoelectronic devices and interconnects, and investigates novel circuit and system concepts for promising emerging devices and interconnects. He is particularly interested in devices based on novel computational state variables such as electron spin in which information is coded in the spin orientation of electrons rather than in their electric field.

In spring 2013, Naeemi received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, enabling him to develop experimentally-validated physical models for graphene interconnects and to optimize and benchmark them against conventional metallic interconnects. This work will potentially enable the design and development of faster and more energy efficient on-chip interconnects using two-dimensional nanomaterials such as graphene.

Naeemi is a member of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors Technical Working Group on Interconnects. He has co-authored eight book chapters and more than 100 papers in refereed journals and international conferences.

Election to NAI Fellow status is a high professional distinction accorded to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. The NAI Fellows will be inducted by Deputy U.S. Commissioner for Patents Andy Faile, from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, during the 3rd Annual Conference of the National Academy of Inventors, on March 7, 2014, in Alexandria, Va., at the headquarters of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Juang is among the 143 innovators elected to NAI Fellow status who represent 94 universities and governmental and non-profit research institutes. Together, they hold more than 5,600 U.S. patents. Included in the 2013 class are:

•          26 presidents and senior leadership of research universities and non-profit research institutes;

•          69 members of the National Academies (IOM, NAS, NAE);

•          five inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame;

•          six recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation;

•          two recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Science; and

•          nine Nobel Laureates, among other major awards and distinctions.

Juang has published close to 300 papers during his time both in industry and at Georgia Tech, where he is a member of the Center for Signal and Information Processing. He holds over 20 patents in the areas of speech analysis, coding, recognition, and enhancements; speaker authentication; machine learning; and stochastic processes. His current areas of research and educational focus are in immersive communication, intelligent communication, and natural communication. Most recent innovations developed under Juang’s tutelage include a world-first real-time full-duplex hands-free stereo teleconferencing system.

Prior to coming to Georgia Tech in 2002, he was the director of Avaya Labs and held many technical leadership roles during his 20-year career at AT&T Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies. While in industry, Juang led a team that is credited with such important inventions as the electret microphone, the network echo canceller, a series of speech CODECs, key algorithms for signal modeling and automatic speech recognition, and the development of a speech server for applications such as AT&T's advanced 800 calls and the Moviefone.

Juang is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, an academician with Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and a Fellow of both IEEE and Bell Labs. He is also the 2014 recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, which recognizes his pioneering contributions to automatic speech recognition and speech coding.

“We are very fortunate to have someone of Fred’s caliber and experience on our faculty,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “His work has brought great benefit to the world and in how we communicate both on the job and for fun everyday. The School is thrilled that he has received this very high and well-deserved honor.”

Describe your average workday: Since I am a college professor, there is no average workday, every day is different. There are some things that I do every day such as teach classes, mentor and advise students in academic, personal, and professional development issues and also independent study projects in robotics. I also write papers, proposals and review papers as the editor of the ASEE Computers in Education Journal. In addition, I perform service by participating on committees and directing the robotics minor and Rose Building Undergraduate Diversity Program (ROSE-BUD). Since my school has a special emphasis on undergraduate science and engineering education, it is very student-centered. There are not very many graduate students so it has a much different model for engineering education than Georgia Tech. It is primarily a teaching institution, so the faculty teach all of the courses and the few graduate students that we have are mostly course-based with just a few thesis-based. Some of our graduate students are graders but they did not teach or TA courses or labs.  Another unique aspect of my department is that it is very hands on with the majority of the courses also having a lab component. This means that I may teach between 2 and 4 classes a quarter which may be 2 to 3 hours of lecture and 3 hours of lab each.

How did ECE prepare you for your current role?  The primary way that I was prepared was that I used my experiences in the engineering classroom at Georgia Tech to frame my teaching philosophy and the way that I instruct my students. It was also my experience at Georgia Tech that inspired me to become an engineering professor. I wanted to see more diversity including women and underrepresented minorities and change the face of the profession to look more like the world that I live in. Before this, I was going to simply be an electrical engineer and my post-retirement job was going to be a high school math teacher.  Since I actually teach ECE, Georgia Tech gave me the foundational knowledge that enabled me to pursue graduate degrees in ECE related to controls and robotics.

What advice would you give current ECE students?  It is very important to develop a network and community of support. This is particularly important for women and underrepresented minorities because there are still so few in engineering in general but particularly in ECE. The numbers are low in the profession as a whole as well as the academy. Having a network of classmates for both studying socializing was how I made it through Georgia Tech. It is important to also find a mentor who will encourage you on those difficult days and also provide advice and guidance on academics, career and personal advice to help you navigate the curriculum and profession. The mentor can be cross gender or cross cultural but he or she should have an appreciation for diversity and what it takes to be successful in the field and understand the value of unique experiences. Unfortunately, as a student at Georgia Tech I was not able to find a mentor but thankfully, I was able to identify several during my graduate program. It is also very important to have good time management, organization, study, communication, and leadership skills. Engineering is about more than just being good at math and science. It is about having the ability to effectively communicate ideas and sell others on your ideas while also being a role model and leader.

What do you think is the most important technological breakthrough of the past 20 years?  This is hard and I would of course be biased. Since my area is robotics, it would be behavior-based robotics in 1986 and how reactive control has changed the way that robotics control systems are designed. Hybrid and feedback controls are topics that I teach in my courses so that students understand the different approaches to implementing AI algorithms on mobile robots to achieve a mission or task. I think that since robotics and in particular Human-Robot Interaction are in their infancy, there is still much to discover to advance the field.

When you aren’t being an electrical/computer engineer, what do you like to do?  I love to spend time with family, in particular my husband and daughter, and also cross stitching, knitting, and crocheting.

Is there anything else you would like to add?  Since I was a dual degree student at Georgia Tech, my experience may be a little different from many. I attended Spelman College for 3 years and Georgia Tech for 2 years. Most of my foundational courses were completed at Spelman, so my time at Tech was particularly intense because I took all engineering courses in 2 years. I also worked several jobs while a student at Tech including in campus dining and at the Spaghetti Factory, which means I had to have a very high work ethic along with time management and organizational skills. All of this means that the experience was rather challenging so a network was vital and an integral part of the survival strategy.

"Georgia Tech is among the best research universities in the world, offering the largest, most diverse electrical and computer engineering program in the United States and regularly turning out the largest number of engineers in America," said Steven W. McLaughlin, professor and the Steve W. Chaddick Chair of Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Maintaining that position requires the best teachers and facilities and, increasingly, key partnerships with companies like Keysight. Thanks to Keysight's support, our students will continue to have access to the industry's leading software and hardware tools."

Keysight's latest in-kind donation is valued at approximately $120 million (book value) over three years and will comprise Keysight EEsof EDA software, support and training. The donation is being given as part of the Keysight EEsof EDA University Alliance program. It also includes a tailored, three-year custom license program that provides member companies of ECE's Georgia Electronic Design Center with access to Keysight's EDA solutions.

"We are dedicated to meaningful collaboration with researchers and educators around the world," said Todd Cutler, general manager of Keysight EEsof EDA. "Our latest gift of software products to Georgia Tech continues this tradition. We are proud to partner with Georgia Tech to help its students become industry-ready engineers."

Academic uses of Keysight EDA software will focus on Keysight's Advanced Design System (ADS) and SystemVue solutions. ADS is the world's leading electronic design automation software for RF, microwave and high-speed digital applications, pioneering innovative and commercially successful technologies such as X-parameters* and 3-D electromagnetic simulators. SystemVue is Keysight's premier platform for designing communications systems. It enables system architects and algorithm developers to innovate the physical layer of wireless and aerospace/defense communications systems and provides unique value to RF, DSP and FPGA/ASIC implementers.

Keysight is dedicated to meaningful collaboration with researchers and educators around the world. In the research lab, our 75-year history of innovation continues to enable new breakthroughs in science and technology. In classrooms and teaching labs, our instruments and software offer students experience with the same tools used by our customers in government and industry.

More information on Keysight EDA software offerings is available at www.keysight.com/find/eesof. For a video on the importance of Keysight's previous donation to Georgia Tech's engineering program, go to www.keysight.com/find/GeorgiaTechandAgilent_video.

About Georgia Institute of Technology

The Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, is one of the nation's leading research universities, providing a focused, technologically based education to more than 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Georgia Tech has many nationally recognized programs, all top-ranked by peers and publications alike, and is ranked in the nation's top 10 public universities by U.S. News and World Report. It offers degrees through the Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Sciences, the Scheller College of Business, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech has more than 100 centers focused on interdisciplinary research that consistently contribute vital research and innovation to American government, industry and business. Visit www.gatech.edu for more information.

About Keysight EEsof EDA Software

Keysight EEsof EDA is the leading supplier of electronic design automation software for microwave, RF, high-frequency, high-speed digital, RF system, electronic system level, circuit, 3-D electromagnetic, physical design and device-modeling applications. More information is available at www.keysight.com/find/eesof.

About Keysight Technologies

Keysight Technologies (NYSE:KEYS) is a global electronic measurement technology and market leader helping to transform its customers' measurement experience through innovations in wireless, modular, and software solutions. Keysight's electronic measurement instruments, systems, software and services are used in the design, development, manufacture, installation, deployment and operation of electronic equipment. The business had revenues of $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2014. Information about Keysight is available at www.keysight.com.

# # #

X-parameters is a trademark and registered trademark of Keysight Technologies in the United States, European Union, Japan and elsewhere. The X-parameters format and underlying equations are open and documented. For more information, visit www.keysight.com/find/eesof-x-parameters-info.

If big problems demand big responses, then it’s only appropriate that the nation’s biggest engineering school steps up to address perhaps the nation’s biggest engineering challenge: energy.

Few sectors hold a greater direct impact on our economy—and nearly every aspect of modern life. Energy fuels our household comforts and conveniences, our vehicles, manufacturing and communications. And our demand for power to support our way of living and doing business is rising rapidly. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts that an increasing global population and growing economies will drive energy demand up more than 50 percent by 2035.

Reliably and affordably powering the present and near future—while still maximizing America’s energy independence and minimizing the risks of climate change—makes for an incredibly difficult puzzle to solve. But it’s also a challenge tailor-made for Tech, an institution known as much for its scientific and technological innovation as it is for its leadership on issues of great societal importance.

Read the full article>>

A decade ago, Erhan Kudeki, Ph.D, then a 20-year member of the electrical engineering (EE) faculty at the University of Illinois, looked on as student interest in one of the nation’s premier EE programs softened.

“In 2004, 2005, and 2006, our enrollments were hurting,” says Kudeki, professor of electrical and computer engineering and now the department’s associate head for undergraduate affairs. “Basically, there was a scare of outsourcing in the minds of parents. Computer science and electrical/computer engineering were not all that popular. Parents were sending their kids into things like mechanical and aerospace.”

Those fears of EE jobs migrating overseas proved baseless, and by 2007, EE enrollment was heading back up. Today, the program is flourishing.

“There’s a huge demand now on anything related to computing and electrical engineering,” Kudeki says. “The numbers we have now are larger than ever. It’s a terrific problem to have.”

The campus at Champaign-Urbana isn’t alone. Students are surging into other EE programs across the country, lured by the prospect of a big payoff in good jobs and the chance to be in one of engineering’s most dynamic and versatile specialties.

In 2013, full-time undergraduate enrollment in EE surged by almost 6,000 over the previous year, hitting 91,336, according to statistics from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). That marked the largest number of enrollees since 2004 — and 25% more than the 2007 low-water mark.

More EE degrees are also being awarded. ASEE data show 10,662 undergraduate EE degrees were earned in 2013. That’s the highest number in 10 years and 6% more than in 2012. Another 2,518 degrees classified as electrical/computer engineering (E/CE) were awarded as well. On top of that, amazingly, more than 10,000 master’s degrees were obtained in 2013 in both EE and E/CE.

More to know

The recovery of student interest in pursuing an EE degree partly reflects the growing stature of the discipline and its value in the marketplace. Even during a perceived downtime, EE was one of the top engineering specialties and remains so today. But its popularity translates to a host of challenges for college EE programs. If growth trends persist, greater selectivity may come into play. Programs may also need to invest in more instructional resources. And all of that may take place amidst the ceaseless struggle of how best to prepare students for the real world.

Noting that “electrical engineering has to reinvent itself every 10 to 20 years,” Kudeki emphasizes the importance of carefully crafted curriculum design, course timing, and teaching methodologies.

“We have to be more efficient in teaching electrical engineering because there’s so much more to teach,” he says. “It’s a question of how we best deliver the larger amount of knowledge we have.”

The Illinois program keys on early undergraduate exposure to core EE classes and flexibility in course selection and specialization in the junior and senior years. Incorporating extensive lab components and coursework that is both broad and deep, program design aims to both weed out weak prospects early on and keep survivors engaged and challenged. On that score, it’s succeeded, Kudeki says; three out of four entering freshmen end up earning an EE degree.

Keeping students on track in an ever-demanding discipline requires more innovative teaching techniques. More EE programs are responding by shaking up how subjects are taught, employing technology-aided instruction tools and different teaching methodologies. Bridging the gap between theory and practical applications is the goal.

Turning education inside out

Digitally enabled devices are becoming central to a more hands-on approach to instruction in EE programs like that at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The Atlanta institution’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been a leader in incorporating more technology-enabled devices and tools into instruction, allowing students to better understand electrical fundamentals through experience.

“Our approach is driven by the knowledge that everyone feels the need to integrate hands-on learning, the more practical side of electrical and computer engineering theory that’s taught in class,” says the school’s Dr. Bonnie Ferri, associate chair for undergraduate affairs and professor in systems and controls. “Now that the technology has moved forward, everyone is just embracing that.”

Connecting devices like Digilent, Inc.’s Analog Discovery and National Instruments’ MyDAQ with a laptop, Ferri says, students interact with oscilloscopes, function generators, dynamic spectrum analyzers, embedded microcontrollers, logic analyzers, and a host of other tools that animate EE concepts. Integral to the learning process, their beauty lies in anywhere/anytime accessibility, she says.

Such tools help form the spear of efforts to shake up the very nature of the EE instructional process. Ferri and other EE educators note the emerging trend of “flipping classes,” whereby instructors have students view lectures digitally, opening up precious classroom time for higher-value engagement.

In a traditional lecture format, she explains, “Class time kind of runs out when they’re getting to the more interesting things, leaving students to deal with applications or difficult problems on their own after class.” But in a flipped class, students come in more prepared to tackle them. “Every Friday in my circuits class, we have ‘bring your devices,’ and we devote that time to working with them.”

Showing the big picture

While the “how” of teaching EE is evolving, so is the “what.” Exposure to the core fundamentals is a given, although there’s more focus on timing and sequencing to ensure adequate retention and timely deployment of key concepts. But as EE’s scope expands, programs are offering more options on classes and areas of emphasis.

A 2013 graduate of the Georgia Tech program, Layla Marshall was drawn to the study of EE because of its versatility. She zeroed in on control systems and audio engineering in her studies, and now works as a contract hardware engineer for Siemens Industry, Inc., in Johnson City, Tenn. Marshall remains attracted to the audio/acoustics field and is mulling a master’s level study of that or mechanical engineering.

“I struggled at first to pick a major, but the more I learned about electrical engineering and how broad it is — and the number of areas you can pursue with a degree — the more I was drawn to it,” she says.

The EE program at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., is structured around that perception. Dr. Karen Panetta, associate dean for undergraduate affairs and professor of electrical and computer engineering, says students should be able to understand EE’s many practical applications and close relationship to other engineering specialties — from mechanical to design to biomedical.

“Programs are introducing students to a variety of what I’ll call ‘interdisciplinary applications’ of electrical engineering,” she says. “We recognize now that there’s no such thing as a pure electrical engineer in a sense.”

Another 2013 Georgia Tech EE graduate, Adam Kitain, offers proof. After graduation, Kitain found his way into a job as an analytics and database strategy consultant for IBM. An internship with now-defunct Research In Motion (RIM) convinced him that his interests lay more in the business development side of technology than the technology itself. While completing his EE degree, he took classes in the Georgia Tech business school and earned a certificate in finance.

“It was more interesting to me to understand why RIM was losing market share than ‘how can I help develop a more efficient RF antenna?’” he says.

Real-world emphasis

Tomorrow’s EEs are also learning the practical skills they’ll need to perform their jobs. One is programming, which is not just for EEs with a computer engineering focus anymore; it’s increasingly essential in a world where embedded controls and computer simulation are commonplace.

“It’s very rare you’re going to find an electrical engineer who doesn’t know how to program,” says Panetta. “We have to simulate everything before we build anything, and simulation is coding.”

At the other end of the skill-building spectrum, EE programs are hitting the softer notes harder. As the practice of engineering becomes ever more people-focused and team-driven, educators are more pressured to emphasize real-world interpersonal and communication skills alongside the technical. And that seems to be taking place earlier in the educational process now, says Colleen Layman, president-elect of Society of Women Engineers and an EE degree holder.

“Two decades ago, it wasn’t until senior year that you really got to start putting things you learned together and focus on teamwork,” says Layman, an associate vice president at HDR, Inc., Omaha. “I’m glad to see that EE education has changed to better reflect how EEs work in the real world.”

In the University of Illinois program, collaborative concepts are emphasized at the earliest stages. Coursework from introductory stages on through to upper-level classes is imbued with the message that “engineers work together, and engineering is all about teamwork,” Kudeki says.

And it becomes essential to senior-year Capstone Design projects that showcase a student’s practical knowledge attainment relative to a chosen specialty or passion.

“The Capstone project has many elements in it that address professionalism, ethics, and being able to communicate,” Kudeki explains. “It’s an advanced composition course as much as it is a design course. Students have to write their initial proposal and various intermediate reports, and the semester ends with a final report as well as presentation in front of their peers.”

The interdisciplinary curriculum focus at Tufts is having the effect of producing more complete graduates, Panetta says. When they understand that EE is not practiced in isolation, they’re honing the people skills needed in today’s engineering workplace.

A realistic scenario today, Panetta says, is one where a prospective employer says, “It’s great you’ve got this kid who can do all the circuit theory, but I really need someone who’s going to be able to go out to my clients who have no technical expertise, be able to redact exactly what they need, and communicate it back to them without them being scared off by it.”

Degree as door-opener

Still, companies hiring newly minted EEs know as they always have that an EE degree is an essential starting point. Even as more programs stress the softer skills, graduates’ grasp of basic technical knowledge of the field is a given. Even in a complex and rapidly changing field, that’s a sufficient springboard to begin what amounts to the next phase of the educational process: on-the-job training.

Recruiters at Peter Basso Associates, Inc., a Troy, Mich., consulting engineering and building design firm, are finding today’s EE graduates generally well-prepared to step into jobs that demand a firm grasp of both core engineering principles and strong interpersonal communication skills. From there, says one of the firm’s principals, Terry Cleis, it’s about acquainting new hires with Basso’s culture.

“The value of an engineering degree is the same as it’s always been — it basically teaches you how to think and how to logically plod your way through problems,” he says. “It’s a process of finding people who have the basic skill set and an eagerness to learn. Intelligent people is what we want.”

Likewise, Sparling, a consulting and electrical engineering firm in Lynnwood, Wash., courts graduates with not only the requisite technical grounding, but also a comfort level with working collaboratively. Degreed EEs are a natural fit, given Sparling’s broad menu of electrical services for the built environment. But Sparling also considers computer, mechanical, design, and audio engineering majors — even physics majors — because its work is hard to pigeonhole.

“We’re not engineers in cubicles here,” says Karl Pihl, a company principal. “Written and verbal communications skills are very important since we’re working with architects, owners, and other engineers. We need to be able to speak in layman and technical terms at the right time for the right audience.”

Lacking those skills, Sparling has found, even top-notch candidates can wash out. A recent new-grad hire came in flashing a 3.9 GPA and letters of recommendation from professors. That wasn’t enough.

“We took all of that information at face value, but we found out real quick that some of the ‘meat’ in terms of working in groups and on projects was very much missing from this individual’s portfolio,” says another Principal Michael Newbury.

Vetting grads

That experience led to some changes in how Sparling evaluates new graduates. Now, Pihl says, they’re challenging candidates more in interviews to demonstrate a teamwork mentality and reveal how they think. The applicant’s degree, from a university’s satellite program, also demonstrated that not all EE degrees are equal.

“Maybe it’s a matter of faculty, staff, research resources, and facilities, but it seems to us like there’s some work to do to get those satellite programs up to snuff relative to their main campuses,” Pihl says.

Internship and co-op programs help reduce such hiring misfires, and that common industry practice has continued to grow. A tighter labor market, more graduates, engineering specialization, and cutthroat competition for business have likely boosted reliance on “test drives” to vet prospective talent.

Basso routinely has co-op students on staff — about half of whom come onboard, Cleis says. Sparling quickly inserts most of its interns into “real paying projects with real deadlines,” Pihl says, as a way to size them up and expose them to the nuances of the work they’d be performing.

That’s also an important consideration for S-E-A, Ltd., a Columbus, Ohio, forensic engineering firm. One of its electrical engineers, Sam Sudler, says students it brings on as interns benefit from early exposure to a very specialized application of what’s taught in school. They’re being evaluated, he says, for the ability to “use scientific methods to collect information, analyze it, and develop hypotheses.”

Preparation for a world in which new technological frontiers are constantly opening and communication and collaboration are essential will be academia’s call to action in educating tomorrow’s electrical engineers. As more students pursue EE degrees, curricula will have to continue adapting to ensure that candidates are getting both the fundamental and specialized knowledge and basic skills that will translate to the marketplace. Engineering educators may be uniquely qualified to do that.

“As engineers we’re innovators,” Ferri says. “We like to think of ourselves in EE or CE as ‘the magic makers.’ We have to think of new ideas and better ways of doing things.”

The title of the award-winning poster was “Electrical Interconnect and Microfluidic Cooling within 3D ICs and Silicon Interposer.” Oh’s coauthors on the work were Li Zheng and Yue Zhang, his fellow Ph.D. students in the Integrated 3D Systems Group, which is led by Bakir.

The poster presented a three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) system with an embedded microfluidic cooling heat sink (MFHS). In the proposed 3D IC system, high power tiers contain embedded MFHS and high-aspect ratio (23:1) through-silicon vias (TSVs) routed through the integrated MFHS. Each tier has dedicated solder-based electrical and fluidic microbumps for electrical interconnection and fluidic delivery, respectively. In addition, thermal characterization of a microfluidic heat sink with embedded TSVs was also presented for the first time.

The award-winning ECE students include William Song, William Wahby, Yarui Peng, Monodeep Kar, and Khondker (Zakir) Ahmed. Descriptions of their papers and their work follow.

William Song took top honors in the System Design: Architectures and Thermal/Reliability Management Session. His paper, entitled "Lifetime Reliability Characterization and Management of Many-Core Processors," represented the work of the Computer Architecture and Systems Laboratory, led by his Ph.D. advisor and ECE Professor Sudhakar Yalamanchili. Yalamanchili and ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay were Song’s coauthors on the paper.

Song’s paper presents a characterization method for understanding how parallel applications create reliability variation in a multicore processor and how such variability is projected onto processor-level lifetime reliability. The key observation in Song’s paper leads to proposals for dynamic reliability management techniques that minimize the variance of reliability distribution on a multicore die and balance long term reliability-performance tradeoffs.

William Wahby won the award in the 3D Session. His paper was entitled “A Virtual Integration Platform for 3DIC Design Space Exploration” and was co-authored by his colleagues in the Integrated 3D Systems (I3DS) Research Group, Li Zheng and Yang Zhang, and his Ph.D. research advisor and ECE Associate Professor Muhannad Bakir.

Wahby’s paper described the development of a pathfinding tool to aid in the development of next generation 3D integrated circuits. To create the tool, he combined novel models developed by the I3DS Lab to account for wire length, power consumption, power delivery, and heat transfer in 3DICs.

To demonstrate its capabilities, the simulation tool was used to investigate the performance and power implications of transforming a conventional 32nm CPU core into a monolithic 3D design. The pathfinding tool allows researchers and engineers to rapidly compare the impacts of new technologies on future designs and to better understand the true costs and benefits of different design methodologies.

Yarui Peng received the top prize in the Circuit Design Tools Session. His paper was entitled “Fast and Accurate Full-Chip Extraction and Optimization of TSV-to-Wire Coupling” and was co-authored by Dusan Petranovic, a researcher at Mentor Graphics, and Peng’s Ph.D. advisor and ECE Professor Sung Kyu Lim. The paper presented research performed in the Georgia Tech Computer-Aided Design (GTCAD) Lab, led by Lim, in the area of parasitic extraction for 3DICs.

This paper shows the first demonstration of modeling and extraction of parasitic capacitance between Through-Silicon Vias (TSVs) and their surrounding wires in a 3D integrated circuit. For a fast and accurate full-chip extraction, the authors proposed a pattern-matching-based algorithm that considers the physical dimensions of TSVs and neighboring wires and captures their field interactions.

The team’s extraction method is accurate within 1.9 percent average error for a full-chip-level design while requiring negligible runtime and memory compared with a field solver. To reduce TSV-to-wire coupling, the authors presented two full-chip optimization methods that increase keep-out-zone and guard ring protection that are shown to be highly effective in noise reduction with minimal overhead.

Monodeep Kar took top honors in the Analog Design Tools Session for his paper entitled "Impact of the Process Variation in Inductive Integrated Voltage Regulators.” His co-authors were Sergio Carlo, a fellow Ph.D. researcher; Harish Krishnamurthy, a researcher at Intel Labs; and Kar’s and Carlo’s Ph.D. advisor and ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay.

The paper studied a critical challenge – the variation in process parameters – in the deployment of an Integrated Voltage Regulator (IVR) for high-performance microprocessors. The paper studied the effects of variations in integrated passives, power train FETs, and controller transistors. Compared to an off-chip VR, Kar and his team’s findings showed that variations in IVR induce much larger shifts in the transient response of the IVR and power loss. The study also provides critical insight on how to design robust IVRs.



Khondker (Zakir) Ahmed won the award in the System Design with Sensors Session. His paper was entitled "Multi-Domain Power Delivery System for Microwatt Wireless Sensor Networks” and was co-authored by his Ph.D. advisor and ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay.

Harvesting energy from the environment is an attractive approach for powering ultra-low-power wireless sensor nodes. Ahmed's paper presented a power delivery system for wireless sensor network electronics that are capable of harvesting from 10mV input and generates two domains by cascaded boost (up to 3V) and cascaded buck-boost (0.5V-1.2V) for RF supply and digital load supply, respectively. The system delivers RF and digital loads with a combined efficiency of 72 percent at 33mW and 10mW respectively, and consumes 280nA bias current. The design provides an interesting approach to address the critical power delivery and management challenges for ultra-low-power devices. 



Both Kar’s and Ahmed’s papers presented research performed in the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem (GREEN) Lab, led by Mukhopadhyay, in the area of integrated voltage converters and regulators for powering integrated circuits. These awards are recognitions of innovative, practical, and high-impact research being performed in ECE in the critical area of power delivery of electronic systems.

Lourenco is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he is advised by John D. Cressler, the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics.

Lourenco’s paper, entitled “On the Transient Response of a Complementary (npn + pnp) SiGe HBT BiCMOS Technology,” was coauthored with Cressler, Z.E. Fleetwood, P.S. Chakraborty, N.J.-H. Roche, A. Khachatrian, D. McMorrow, S.P. Buchner, J.S. Melinger, J.H. Warner, P. Paki-Amouzou, M. Kaynak, and B. Tillack. This work investigated the fundamental mechanisms associated with transient radiation events in silicon-germanium (SiGe) technology operating in space environments, and leveraged this understanding to suggest new strategies for the development of radiation-hardened systems using such SiGe technologies.

A full-length journal paper based upon the conference presentation has already been accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, and will appear in December. This work was supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Naval Research Laboratory, and IHP Microelectronics.

In recent years, executive leadership in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) has asked the questions “What life skills are we providing to current ECE students?” and “What is the best way to teach those skills?” One reason ECE’s Innovation in Education Committee was formed was to answer them. The committee, which is co-chaired by Bonnie Ferri, associate chair for undergraduate affairs, and Doug Williams, senior associate chair, has developed and launched innovative teaching methods that move ECE away from the traditional focus on what we teach to the broader framework of how we teach. The result is a curriculum emphasizing real-world application, teamwork, and creative problem solving that prepares students for the global workplace and gives them the confidence to impact the world. Following are some examples of leading-edge methods that ECE employs.

Hands-on Education
ECE is a leader on the Georgia Tech campus and among ECE departments across the country in integrating student-owned devices into lecture-based courses. The School’s curriculum includes eight classes that use either a digital acquisition board or a microcontroller kit, allowing students to work on projects and experiments any time and anywhere—from dorm rooms to classrooms. The result is improved learning of fundamental concepts and retention of information, as well as student confidence in their competency of the material. Almost 2,300 ECE students are involved in hands-on learning each year.

Flipped Classes
Lectures are delivered online with the class period dedicated to interactive and hands-on teaching. ECE leads the campus in the number of flipped classes and volume of students. The current ECE curriculum includes eight undergraduate courses and two graduate courses that follow this model and feature topics such as robotics, optics, circuits, and electromagnetics. ECE faculty members who have taught a flipped class are Bonnie Ferri, Vincent Mooney, Alenka Zajic, Morris Cohen, Magnus Egerstedt, Tom Gaylord, and Mary Ann Weitnauer.

Massive Open Online Courses
The School has successfully experimented with three Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Linear Circuits, taught by Bonnie Ferri, Bruno Frasier, and Nathan Parrish; Introduction to Electronics, taught by Bonnie Ferri and Allen Robinson; and Control of Mobile Robots, taught by Magnus Egerstedt. Students from all over the world have signed up for these courses in impressive numbers. For example, the Linear Circuits course has just finished its third offering with a total of 42,000 student registrants, 400,000 completed homework problems, and more than a million lecture views.

Undergraduate Research
ECE offers undergraduate students a variety of ways to get involved in leading-edge research projects and gain hands-on experience to complement their studies. Individual or group projects can be short- or long-term and cover a wide range of student interests from NASA-sponsored rocket propelled vehicles to robots that play music alongside humans. Options for undergraduate research include:

• Opportunity Research Scholars Program (ORS)
• Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program
• ECE's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
• The Research Option in ECE

Online Learning Networks
The Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) is an online question and answer system for concept practice that was developed by ECE Professor Jim McClellan and a team from the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program. It was first used in Introduction to Signal Processing (ECE-2025/6) in fall 2009 and quickly became an essential part of the homework assignments, providing more than 273 questions for practice. Since 2010, 1,732 students have used ITS in the course, and they have answered a total of 353,851 questions.

Piazza is a third party, online Q & A platform where students, TAs, and professors come together to learn and teach. Anyone can ask and answer questions on this community-edited platform. The platform is integrated with T-Square and enables students to do labs remotely, post pictures, and use the discussion forum to help each other.

Real-world Experience
Senior undergraduate students apply knowledge and skills from earlier coursework to solve real-world challenges in the two-semester Senior Design course sequence. Working in teams, students complete a project requiring specification, design, implementation, and testing. Projects are often multidisciplinary, allowing students to gain cross training in other engineering fields. The student teams’ efforts are showcased at an end-of-semester Capstone Design Expo, which is the largest in the country.

Entrepreneurial Confidence
In addition to preparing students to hit the ground running in industry, ECE also equips them with one of the most important life skills—the ability to create their own jobs. The ECE curriculum fosters entrepreneurial confidence.

• Center for Engineering and Technology Entrepreneurship (CREATE):  An online map of campus entrepreneurship resources, courses, mentorships, and ECE startups.
• Startup Lab and Startup Summer courses teach students how to create a startup from customer discovery to developing a minimum viable product.
  

Ferri, who has been at the forefront of the School’s education innovations, says, “In today’s university system it’s easy for small departments to experiment with new forms of teaching, but what makes ECE’s work in this area so groundbreaking is our size. We are the largest producer of electrical and computer engineers in the country and we are using incredibly innovative methods at a huge scale. In fact, our faculty has been invited to speak in workshops all over the country to share our methods with peer institutions. I’m proud to be a part of a team that is changing the face of engineering education.”

An associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Moore will be among 77 young engineering faculty members selected from across the U.S. to participate in this event. He and his colleagues were chosen for their work in developing and implementing innovative educational approaches in various engineering disciplines. At this event, Moore and his colleagues will share ideas and bring back concepts to their home institutions for best practices, innovation, and continued commitment to improving teaching methods.

Moore has explored using technology to increase student engagement since first joining the ECE faculty in 2004. First based at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus, he taught many students who were at remote locations. To help improve teacher-student interaction, Moore used Tablet PCs paired with Dyknow software to allow transmission of content between himself and each student – and vice versa. Through this method, he was able to engage every student through polls and exercises and use their responses to fuel discussion across local and remote sites.

Since moving to Georgia Tech’s Atlanta campus in 2013, Moore has joined ECE’s Innovative Education Committee, which is dedicated to improving the School’s learning environment. He is now modifying his previous work at GT-Savannah to address student engagement in a required undergraduate course that has over 200 students. In place of Dyknow and Tablet PCs, Moore is utilizing the Triton Data Collection System, or “clickers,” which allow for in-class polling and exercises designed to encourage attendance and preparation for lecture. The “clickers” are also used for assessment exams, scheduled before traditional written exams, to encourage students to think critically about what they are learning prior to taking the full written exam.

Moore will join four more Georgia Tech College of Engineering faculty members – Alexander Alexeev and Baratunde Cola of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering; Kamran Paynabar of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; and Manu Platt of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering – at this event, making Georgia Tech the institution with the most participants at the symposium.

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to physical and virtual objects that have unique identities and are connected to the Internet to facilitate intelligent applications that make energy, logistics, industrial control, retail agriculture, and many other domains “smarter.” IoT is rapidly gaining momentum driven by the advancements in sensor networks, mobile devices, wireless communications, networking, and cloud technologies. Published in September 2014, The Internet of Things: A Hands-On Approach is written as a textbook for colleges and universities and also for IoT vendors and service providers who may be interested in offering a broader perspective of IoT to accompany their own customer and developer training programs.

Released in December 2013, Cloud Computing: A Hands-On Approach is written as a textbook on cloud computing for educational programs at colleges and universities, and also for cloud service providers who may be interested in offering a broader perspective of cloud computing to accompany their own customer and developer training programs. The book covers the basic technologies that form the foundations of cloud computing, the programming aspects of cloud computing with a view toward rapid prototyping complex applications, and specialized aspects of cloud computing such as cloud application benchmarking, multimedia cloud applications, cloud security, and big data analytics. To date, almost 20 universities have adopted or are evaluating the book, and an Asian edition was recently released.

The title of Kimionis’ paper is "RF Tag Front-End Design for Uncompromised Communication and Harvesting," coauthored with ECE Professor Emmanouil M. Tentzeris, his Ph.D. advisor.

In this work, a novel RF front-end is designed, analyzed, and implemented that overcomes the critical limitation of compromised communication performance of wireless sensor network nodes that employ backscattering radio as a low-cost, low-power communication means when employing an energy harvester. The presented results could have a significant impact in the first real-world, large-scale implementation of autonomous, long-range Internet-of-Things, machine-to-machine (M2M), emergency response, and "smart skin" topologies effectively utilizing multiple forms of ambient energy.

IEEE RFID-TA 2014 is the premier IEEE conference in RFID technical applications. It is sponsored by the IEEE CRFID committee, which is endorsed by nine IEEE societies.

The presentation of the medal was preceded by a speech highlighting Ougazzaden’s contributions to the City of Metz. He was praised for the visibility that his work in optoelectronics, materials, and device design has brought to the city and for his role in creating the Georgia Tech-CNRS UMI Lab, which is focused on research in non-linear optics and dynamics, smart materials, and computer science.

Ougazzaden was also recognized for his 17 years of industrial experience that has helped to attract industrial partners to the city such as the Open Lab with Peugeot PSA, and his leadership in the creation of Institut Lafayette and as the director of Georgia Tech-Lorraine.

Ougazzaden joined the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty in 2005 and was appointed director of Georgia Tech-Lorraine in 2010.

*****************

Cutline for photo above: ECE Professor Abdallah Ougazzaden (left) is presented with the Medal of the City of Metz by Mayor Dominique Gros.

Ayazi joined the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) faculty in 1999, where he leads the Integrated MEMS (IMEMS) Laboratory and the Center for MEMS and Microsystems Technologies. He and his team of 10 graduate students and three postdoctoral fellows work in the area of integrated micro and nano electro mechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS), with a focus on micro and nano mechanical resonators and on mixed-signal interface circuits for MEMS and sensors.

Ayazi has graduated 20 Ph.D. students and advised eight postdoctoral fellows, and he has published over 200 refereed journal and conference papers and seven parts of books with his students and faculty colleagues. He and his graduate students have also won several best paper awards at IEEE conferences.     

A Fellow of the IEEE, Ayazi is the editor for the IEEE Transactions on Electronic Devices and is a past editor of the IEEE/ASME Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, a post that he held for seven years. He has held leadership roles in the top MEMS and electronics conferences and workshops, including most recently as general chair for the 2014 IEEE MEMS Conference. He has been involved with numerous research centers at Georgia Tech, including the Nanotechnology Research Center, the Georgia Electronic Design Center, and the Packaging Research Center.

During his career at Georgia Tech, Ayazi has been very involved in entrepreneurial activities. He is the co-founder and CTO of Qualtré, a spinout company of the IMEMS Lab that develops silicon bulk acoustic wave gyroscopes and motion sensors that power today’s consumer electronics and personal navigation systems. A microresonator technology that Ayazi and his students developed at Georgia Tech was licensed to Integrated Device Technology (IDT), and the first product offering based on this technology, CrystalFree™ pMEMS™ Oscillators, was announced by IDT last year. He also holds 42 patents mainly in the areas of MEMS resonator and gyroscope technologies.

Ayazi is a past recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award, and the ECE Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award.

The title of Banerjee’s award-winning paper is “Self-Learning MIMO-RF Receiver Systems: Process Resilient Real-Time Adaptation to Channel Conditions for Low Power Operation,” coauthored by his fellow ECE Ph.D. students – Shreyas Sen, Barry Muldrey, Xian Wang – and ECE Professor Abhijit Chatterjee, who serves as the Ph.D. advisor for all of the student authors, including Banerjee.

Prior research has established that dynamically trading-off the performance of the RF front-end for reduced power consumption across changing channel conditions, using a feedback control system that modulates circuit and algorithmic level “tuning knobs” in real-time, leads to significant power savings. Optimal power control strategy also depends on the process conditions corresponding to the involved RF devices. This factor complicates the problem of designing the feedback control system that guarantees the best control strategy for minimizing power consumption across all channel conditions and process corners.

Since this problem is largely intractable due to the complexity of simulation across all channel conditions and process corners, Banerjee and his coauthors have proposed a “self-learning” strategy for adaptive MIMO-RF systems in this paper. In this approach, RF devices learn their own performance vs. power consumption vs. tuning knob relationships “on-the-fly” and formulate the optimum reconfiguration strategy using neural-network-based learning techniques during real-time operation. The methodology is demonstrated for a MIMO-RF receiver front-end and is supported by hardware validation leading to significant power savings in minimal learning time.

Lim joined the ECE faculty in 2001 after graduating with his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. He leads the Georgia Tech Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Lab, where he advises eight Ph.D. students, three master’s students, and two undergraduate students. Lim and his students work on the architecture, circuit design, and CAD tool development for 3D integrated circuits (IC). He is the author of two textbooks, Practical Problems in VLSI Physical Design Automation and Design for High Performance, Low Power, and Reliable 3D Integrated Circuits. He currently serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design.

Lim has published 51 refereed journal papers and 168 refereed conference papers. His research on 3D IC reliability was featured as a Research Highlight in the January 2014 issue of Communications of the ACM. His work has led to Best Paper Award nominations at the ACM Design Automation Conference, the flagship conference in the field of electronic design automation, in 2011, 2012, and 2014, and the flagship journal, IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design, in 2011 and 2012.

Lim’s team recently developed the world’s first multi-core 3D IC that is fully verified with real-world applications. In addition, the team has developed CAD tools that have been transferred to the U.S. Department of Defense (2011), Intel (2012), Qualcomm (2012), and the University of California at San Diego (2014). This work was presented at the 2012 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the flagship conference in systems and circuits.

In 2010, Lim established the Georgia Tech and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) dual bachelor’s and master’s degree programs. He has been active with many different ECE standing committees and has worked as the chair of the VLSI Systems and Digital Design technical interest group. On campus, he serves as the faculty advisor for the Korean Undergraduate Student Association and the Korean Graduate Student Association.

Lim is a past recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award. He and his students have also won three best in session awards from SRC TECHCON in the last several years.

Sivakumar joined the ECE faculty in 2000, where he leads the Georgia Tech Networks and Mobile Computing Research Group. He and his current team of graduate students develop algorithms and protocols for wireless networks and mobile computing. Sivakumar has graduated 20 Ph.D. and M.S. students, and has published over 125 refereed journal and conference papers and book chapters with his students and faculty colleagues. He has served on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, the ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, the Elsevier Computer Networks Journal, and the ACM/Baltzer Wireless Networks Journal. In addition, he has chaired several ACM and IEEE conferences.

While at Georgia Tech, Sivakumar has been active in entrepreneurial activities. He is the co-founder and CTO at StarMobile, Inc., a venture-backed enterprise mobility technology start-up that mobilizes enterprise applications at a fraction of the cost and time of other approaches in the market. He also was the founder and CTO of Asankya, Inc., a venture-backed enterprise application optimization start-up that was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2011.

Sivakumar is the founder of the Center for Engineering and Technology Entrepreneurship (CREATE), a student-focused entrepreneurship initiative that is open to all Georgia Tech students. He also led the development of two successful entrepreneurial educational initiatives – Startup Lab, a course on startup basics, and Startup Summer, a faculty-led, student-focused intensive program for student teams to launch startups based on their ideas, inventions, and prototypes.

Sivakumar also served as associate director of the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute from 2006-2012 and is a co-PI for the GT I/UCRC Center on Optical Wireless Applications. He is an IEEE Fellow and a past recipient of the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award, and he has won several best paper awards including at ACM MobiCom, the IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, IEEE/CreateNet Broadnets, and the IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking.

About the Holman Family and the Holman Chair

The Holman Chair was established by Wayne J. Holman, III in memory of his grandfather, Wayne J. Holman, Sr., EE 1901, and his father, Wayne J. Holman, Jr., EE 1928, to honor their lifetime accomplishments and their legacies at Georgia Tech.

Holman, Sr., was a member of one of the first classes of graduates in the field of electrical engineering and was captain of the football team. He went on to build a career with Central Hudson Gas and Electric Company in New York, later founding and leading his own utility company.

Holman, Jr. served as the president of his senior class at Georgia Tech. Following graduation, he became an instructor at Yale University, where he earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering and then joined his father at Central Hudson Gas and Electric Company. He was one of the first Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree in business and engineering administration, and later earned a doctorate in economics from New York University. Holman, Jr. became president of Chicopee Manufacturing Corporation, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, serving for 14 years before being named as treasurer of Johnson & Johnson, then as director of the company’s executive committee.

Throughout his career, Holman, Jr. was a member of many philanthropic and educational boards and received numerous accolades from his peers for his achievements. He also maintained a strong loyalty to and involvement with his alma mater, serving as a trustee of the Georgia Tech Foundation, heading the Greater New York Georgia Tech Alumni Club, and delivering the 75^th commencement address in 1958.

Holman, Jr. created a lasting legacy for generations of Georgia Tech graduates by establishing the first Class Memorial Fund as a way for alumni to give back in commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of their graduation. By creating the first class memorial fund, he instilled a sense of duty and devotion to Georgia Tech in his classmates and encouraged all alumni who followed to create their own class legacies. Through the Holman Fund, the legacies of these two men of accomplishment will continue to grow in perpetuity, serving as inspiration to future generations of faculty and students at Georgia Tech.

Co-advised by ECE Associate Professors Maysam Ghovanloo and Elliot Moore, Olubanjo was honored for her paper entitled “Tracheal Activity Recognition Based on Acoustic Signals.” Tracheal activities detected by a neck-worn device are among signals that, if recognized properly, can contribute to effective health monitoring. In this paper co-written with Ghovanloo, Olubanjo explored novel signal processing algorithms to detect and classify common tracheal events that can provide insight into an individual’s health and well-being, such as breathing, chewing, swallowing, coughing, clearing the throat, and speech. Monitoring the patients’ compliance with their prescribed medication regimens and estimating the energy balance in the obese and overweight population are among other applications of a tracheal activity recognition system that is currently under development in the GT-Bionics Lab, which is led by Ghovanloo.

Toreyin’s paper was entitled “A Low-Power, Time-Division-Multiplexed Vector Matrix-Multiplier for a Vestibular Prosthesis,” and his coauthor was his Ph.D. advisor Pamela Bhatti. A vestibular prosthesis can potentially improve the quality-of-life for persons suffering from balance or vision problems caused by bilateral vestibular dysfunction, disorders associated with the brain and inner ear. By replacing the function of peripheral vestibular organs, the prosthesis senses 3D angular and linear head motions by using inertial sensors and selectively stimulates the corresponding vestibular neurons. Toreyin’s paper reports on the first integrated circuit (IC), known as a vector matrix multiplier, designed to improve the effectiveness of stimulating vestibular neurons. Operating in the CMOS subthreshold region, the IC performs a 3-by-3 vector matrix multiplication of rate sensor outputs to reduce misalignment between implanted angular rate sensors and associated peripheral sense organs, and provides a means to precompensate for unwanted electrical stimulation of vestibular neurons.

Chi was honored for his CICC paper, "A Multi-Phase Sub-Harmonic Injection Locking Technique for Bandwidth Extension in Silicon-Based THz Signal Generation," co-authored by Jun Luo, a Ph.D. student visiting Georgia Tech from Tsinghua University (Beijing, China); Song Hu, a Ph.D. student at the Georgia Tech GEMS lab; and his Ph.D. advisor, ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang.

Chi's paper presented research performed in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab in the area of sub-mmwave and terahertz integrated electronics research. A major existing challenge in this area is to realize a high-performance, low-cost silicon-based integrated THz source with high spectrum purity and a wide frequency tuning range. The paper addresses this unmet need by proposing and demonstrating a novel, multi-phase sub-harmonic injection locking circuit topology, which can "actively" multiply a 40 GHz signal to generate a 500 GHz signal while maintaining high DC-to-THz energy conversion efficiency and spectrum purity.

Compared with existing circuit approaches, this multi-phase sub-harmonic injection locking scheme extends the frequency tuning bandwidth by 150 percent to 200 percent under the same RF injection power. Chi's IC chip demonstrates state-of-the-art performance with a frequency tuning range of 4.4 percent and a phase noise of -77.6dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset among the reported fully integrated silicon-based source at 500 GHz.

Photo cutline: Don Thelen (left), of ON Semiconductor and the 2014 IEEE-CICC technical program chair, presents ECE Ph.D. student Taiyun Chi with the Intel/Texas Instruments/Catalyst Foundation Student Scholarship Award.

Lin won the award for his paper entitled “Distance-Aware Multi-Carrier Indoor Terahertz Communications with Antenna Array Selection,” coauthored with his Ph.D. advisor and ECE Professor Geoffrey Li.

Terahertz (THz) band communications, with large unregulated frequency resources, is envisioned as a key technology by alleviating the spectrum limitation of current wireless systems. Lin's paper considers a future, indoor ultra-speed THz communication scenario, where the access point, equipped with multiple antenna subarrays, is deployed to serve multiple users with different distances. By exploiting the transmission windows in the THz band, a low-complexity, distance-aware multi-carrier transmission scheme is developed.

Specifically, Lin has proposed an adaptive beamforming strategy with antenna subarray selection that dynamically generates different numbers of beams for different users. Simulation results show that the THz system can effectively support tera-bit-per-second (Tbps) transmissions. This work builds a theoretical foundation for the THz band transmission.

The College of Engineering (CoE) is tied with Caltech among bachelor’s programs at universities that offer doctoral degrees, as reported in the annual U.S. News publication called America’s Best Colleges. All of the programs offered by CoE, the nation’s largest and most diverse engineering college, placed among the top eight of their respective areas.

The Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering is again No. 1 among similar schools, while Tech’s programs in aerospace, biomedical, civil, environmental and mechanical engineering are all ranked in the top five in the nation in their disciplines. The college is the second-ranked public engineering institution in the country behind the University of California—Berkeley.

“It is gratifying to know that U.S. News & World Report recognizes Georgia Tech’s excellence in undergraduate engineering education, “said Gary S. May, dean of engineering at Georgia Tech. “This shows we are doing an outstanding job at producing a high level of academic quality within the college. The ranking is a reflection of the efforts of our faculty, staff and students whose hard work and commitment to excellence truly make us a world-class technological university.”

U.S. News & World Report Undergraduate Rankings, published September 9, 2014

Industrial and Systems Engineering: 1st

Civil Engineering: 2nd

Aerospace Engineering: 3rd

Environmental Engineering: 3rd

Biomedical Engineering: 4th

Mechanical Engineering: 5th

Computer Engineering: 6th

Electrical Engineering: 6th

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering: 7th

Materials Science and Engineering: 8th

Schlag was born in Greensboro, North Carolina on June 21, 1938. He received his B.S.E.E. degree from Duke University in 1960 and his M.S.E.E. and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1964 and 1967, respectively. In the early 1960s, Schlag worked at Philco Corporation. He was appointed to the Georgia Tech ECE faculty in 1967 and was promoted to professor in 1979, where he taught and did research in computer applications, computer aided design, and neural networks. Over the years, he served as a consultant for Georgia Power Company, Siemens Corporation, and King and Spalding.

In 2001, Schlag was appointed as associate chair for ECE operations, where he oversaw facility and financial operations for the School. During that time, he was responsible for ECE’s planning and coordination related to the Technology Square Research Building, the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, and the Marcus Nanotechnology Building. He also coordinated the development of processes and software tools that provided support to the ECE research project and instructional accounting functions. He retired in 2004 after 37 years of service to ECE and Georgia Tech, but continued to work part-time with the School until 2008.

Schlag is survived by his wife, Katharine Leonard Schlag; his four daughters, Leslie Schlag, Elizabeth Stuff (Ron), Diana Winter (Eric), and Cynthia Morneweck (Rob); and eight grandchildren, Helen, Mark, Shelby, Kate, Julia, Jacob, Elise, and Luke.

UPDATE 9/15/2014: A memorial service will be held on Thursday, September 25 at 11 am at the Academy of Medicine, located at 875 W. Peachtree St., Atlanta, Georgia 30309. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the American Kidney Foundation.

The M.S. ECE degree that is offered in Shenzhen is identical to its counterpart offered at the Atlanta campus, and the admission and degree requirements are also the same as in Atlanta. GT-Shenzhen is located inside the Shenzhen High Tech Industry Park, in close proximity to hundreds of high tech companies, making it easy for students to gain internship experiences. GT-Shenzhen is less than four miles from the border crossing with Hong Kong, thus excursions to Hong Kong (and Macau) are on the minds of many program participants.

"We are very excited about the launch of the new M.S. Degree Program in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Shenzhen, China. This program is just one more example of how Georgia Tech is expanding its global footprint and helping to define the technological research university of the 21st century,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. “The initial class has some truly outstanding students who in partnership with faculty, industry, and business leaders in China will help to expand our global reach and impact."

Among the inaugural class of GT-Shenzhen students are Rick Hofstra who graduated with a 4.0 GPA from Texas A&M University. Asked why he chose GT-Shenzhen among his many other options, Hofstra replied “I decided to come to Georgia Tech-Shenzhen because I know Georgia Tech has one of the best electrical engineering programs in the world. On top of that, my wife and I want to travel and experience other cultures while we are younger. We really wanted to take advantage of an affordable and unique chance to learn a new language and experience China.”

Another American student, Alec Green, graduated from Purdue University and studied abroad in Switzerland. Green’s objectives for joining the GT-Shenzhen program include developing his Chinese language ability while at the same time getting a better sense of the culture and living conditions in China. “Through Georgia Tech's partnership with local tech companies, I am also hoping to get some idea of how tech companies operate in China, and how a westerner might fit into a tech role here,” Green said.

At an April 23, 2014 media briefing in Shenzhen, Consul General Jennifer Galt of the U.S. Consulate General in Guangzhou gave an inspiring speech about U.S.-China cooperative education. “An investment in cooperative education programs between the U.S. and China is an investment that pays dividends for all of us,” Galt said. “These programs bridge language barriers, open lines of communication, and connect people in both immediate and lasting ways. Georgia Tech’s program here in Shenzhen is thus another terrific step forward in continuing to build relations between the United States and China.” The full text and video of Ms. Galt’s speech can be found on GT-Shenzhen’s website.

Current Georgia Tech students can easily switch campuses for one semester to study abroad in Shenzhen. Even though this is an ECE program, non-ECE students are also welcome to use GT-Shenzhen as a platform to gain international experience in China and take ECE classes as electives. A small number of non-ECE courses are also available at GT-Shenzhen each semester. Degree seeking students from other U.S. institutions can apply to study at GT-Shenzhen for one semester as transient students and transfer Georgia Tech course credits back to their home institution.

“We thank Tianjin University for helping Georgia Tech launch this new initiative in Shenzhen,” said G. Tong Zhou, ECE professor and director of the GT-Shenzhen program. “Having had bilateral summer programs with Georgia Tech since 2009, Tianjin University has been a generous supporter of Georgia Tech’s efforts in China and is an important partner for GT-Shenzhen.” 

For more information about GT-Shenzhen, please visit www.shenzhen.gatech.edu.

Mukhopadhyay, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, leads the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem (GREEN) Lab. He shares this honor with his Ph.D. students, Boris Alexandrov and Khondker Zakir Ahmed.

The title of their award-winning paper is “An On-Chip Autonomous Thermoelectric Energy Management System for Energy-Efficient Active Cooling.” Thermal management is a key challenge for today’s integrated circuits (IC) operation. In the past, researchers have studied the use of thermoelectric coolers (TEC), which provide additional cooling when a current is passed through the device, for on-chip cooling. Embedding a TE module (TEM) within the package has shown potential for on-demand cooling of ICs, but the need for this additional energy reduces the effectiveness of TECs and has been a key concern for their use.

This work presents and experimentally demonstrates a major step to alleviate this challenge. Mukhopadhyay and his team have developed an on-chip thermoelectric energy management system for energy-efficient, on-demand active cooling of integrated circuits. The proposed on-chip system monitors the IC temperature and provides cooling during critical thermal events by sending a current through the TEM. When the temperature is not high enough, the same TEM is used to harvest the otherwise wasted heat energy generated by the IC and reduce the net cooling energy. The design is implemented in a CMOS test-chip and tested with a thermoelectric device. The successful demonstration of this control system will fuel innovations in thermoelectric devices, as well as in the architectural techniques to address the thermal challenges of future processors.

******************************************

Pictured in the above photo from left to right are Khondker Zakir Ahmed, ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay, and Boris Alexandrov.

An assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Zajic received this award with her coauthors Meisam Naderi and Matthias Patzold, a Ph.D. student and professor, respectively, from the University of Agder in Norway. The title of the team’s award-winning paper is “A Geometry-Based Channel Model for Shallow Underwater Acoustic Channels under Rough Surface and Bottom Scattering Conditions.”

Many scientific, defense, and safety endeavors require communications between untethered submerged devices and/or vehicles. Examples include sensor networks for seismic monitoring, analysis of resource deposits, oceanographic and environmental studies, and tactical surveillance, as well as communications between Unmanned or Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (UUVs or AUVs) for deep-water construction, repairs, scientific or resource exploration, and defense applications.

As the first step toward making these applications feasible, scientists and engineers need to understand underwater propagation mechanisms and how they affect communication systems. In the awarded paper, Zajic and her colleagues develop a stochastic geometry-based channel model for wideband shallow underwater acoustic (UWA) channels under the assumption that the ocean surface and bottom are rough. The paper also proposes a new UWA channel simulator based on a technique known as the equally spaced scatterers method (MESS).

This paper is the result of Zajic’s Georgia Electronic Design Center collaboration with the University of Agder and their work on the S2EuNet project, an effort sponsored by the European Commission that will strengthen international partnerships in the areas of next generation mobile systems and wireless networks.

Trivedi is the second student from Georgia Tech to win this fellowship over the last 13 years. He is a member of the Gigascale Reliable Energy Efficient Nanosystem Lab, which is directed by his Ph.D. advisor Saibal Mukhopadhyay. Both Trivedi and Mukhopadhyay are affiliated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

In his thesis, Trivedi studies the applications of emerging technologies that will enable ultra-low power computing. He is specifically looking at the unique and rich characteristics of several emerging technologies, such as Tunnel FET, that can play a prominent role in alternate computing architectures such as those inspired by neuromorphic computing.

An ultra-low power Tunnel FET-based neuromorphic design can be process variation resilient and energy efficient, while exploiting parallelism and benefiting from mass transistor density at nanometer scaled technologies to deliver high performance. Ultra-low power neuromorphic designs can be used to solve complex tasks such as recognition and classification in remotely and ubiquitously deployed electronics, and provides outstanding opportunities for upcoming computing platforms such as the internet-of-things.

Trivedi also investigates other state-of-the-art technologies such as FinFET and 3D integration in aspects of arising variability. He has also designed and measured a test-chip to reduce power dissipation in CMOS designs while tolerating process and temperature variability.

Wang joined the faculty in January 2012 after working with Intel and Skyworks Solutions. He is a member of the Georgia Electronic Design Center, and he leads the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System (GEMS) Lab, where he advises a team of six Ph.D. students, three M.S. students, and several undergraduate researchers. They are developing design methodologies for silicon-based THz electronics, reconfigurable RF circuits and systems for wireless communications and radar, multi-modality biosensors and actuators for cell-based drug screening and large-scale stem cell manufacturing, and real-time 3-D guided surgery technologies.

Wang has published 40 refereed journal and conference papers and has been issued 13 U.S. patents. He and his team have received numerous honors, including several best student paper and student design awards, and he serves on technical program committees for several highly regarded conferences. Wang also chairs the IEEE Atlanta joint chapter of the Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) and Circuits and Systems Society (CAS).

An enthusiastic advocate for high quality teaching and student mentoring, Wang will take part in the Class of 1969 Teaching Scholars Program, run by the Georgia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), during this upcoming year. He is also a past participant in CETL’s Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows Program.

The title of Li’s award-winning paper is “Cognitive Radio Networking and Communications: An Overview,” published in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology in September 2011 (vol. 60, no. 7, pp. 3386-3407). The paper addresses the fact that more and more applications, such as smart phones, require high-speed wireless communications while radio spectrum is limited. Cognitive radio (CR) is the enabling technology for supporting dynamic spectrum access and can improve spectrum efficiency. The paper gives a systematic overview on CR networking and communications that will provide researchers and practitioners with a cross-layer view on designing CR networks.

Sharing in this award with Li are his coauthors Ying-Chang Liang, of the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore; Kwang-Cheng Chen, National Taiwan University; and Petri Mahonen, of RWTH Aachen University (Germany).

The A. Richard Newton Educator ABIE Award recognizes the development of innovative teaching practices and approaches that attract girls and women to computing, engineering, and math. A robotics researcher, teacher, and mentor, Howard has engaged hundreds of female and minority students in computing, engineering, and science through numerous K-12 outreach programs and summer camps.

Before coming to Georgia Tech, Howard worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Caltech from 1993-2005, where she led research efforts on various robotic projects that led to her being named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. While at JPL, she founded and ran the Pasadena Delta Academy, a mentoring program for at-risk teen girls focused on STEM education, and the JPL Undergraduate Mentoring Program for Women, which provided mentoring support to undergraduate women engineering students.

A faculty member at Georgia Tech since 2005, Howard directs the Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Lab, where she blends control theory, human-robot interaction methods, and learning to the area of field and service robotics. She is the faculty lead of the I-Natural Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) Team, a multi-year multidisciplinary research team of undergraduates tasked to design, build, and test interfaces that enable humans to naturally interact with robots in performing activities of daily living. She has also teamed with faculty at the Atlanta Girls School to introduce a similar experience for a group of its 11^th and 12^th grade students.

In 2008, Howard received worldwide attention for her SnoMote robots, designed to study the impact of global warming on the Antarctic iceshelfs. She started a live blog to document the last glacier field trails in 2010 as part of a virtual scientist live videoconference with three minority-serving Boston high schools.

Over the last five years in Atlanta, Howard has hosted middle and high school robotics camps that have involved over 350 minority and female students and students with disabilities. At these camps, students were asked to solve challenges ranging from designing their own NASA lunar colony and robot assistants to programming AIBO robotic dogs to programming a robot avatar using a gaming scenario. She has also developed three educational software packages that allow K-12 teachers to adopt her hands-on learning initiatives.

Howard will join five other women receiving ABIE awards at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. In addition to Howard’s education award, these women will be honored for their achievements in technical leadership, social impact, international change agent, and emerging faculty member leadership.

The Anita Borg Institute (ABI), a non-profit organization focused on advancing women in computing, hosts the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. This event is now the world’s largest gathering of women technologists, featuring keynotes by prominent women in technology, career workshops, and technical tracks from leading researchers.

Established through the generosity of the Class of 1969 and facilitated by the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL), this initiative allows Georgia Tech scholars to investigate a particular teaching and learning topic. During this upcoming academic year, Wang and his fellow scholars will focus on "Engaging Large Classes."

Wang has been an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering since spring 2012, where he teaches and conducts research in circuit design and microelectronics. Passionate about continuous improvement of his teaching skills, he took part in the CETL Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows Program last year.

"Teaching large classes can be both very challenging and rewarding!" said Wang. "High quality teaching is very critical to foster our future engineers, scientists, and innovators. I am excited to participate in this CETL Teaching Scholar program, share my experiences in teaching, and learn from other Teaching Scholars."

The team, all from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was presented with this honor on June 3 at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, held in Melbourne, Australia. Their award-winning paper is entitled “A Scalable Design Methodology for Energy Minimization of STTRAM: A Circuit and Architecture Perspective,” and the work presented in this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation and Intel Corporation.

Spin-Torque-Transfer RAM (STTRAM) is an emerging non-volatile memory technology that can retain information with practically no energy loss; it has the potential to dramatically transform the energy landscape of future computing systems. However, to realize the energy-efficiency potential of STTRAM in designing energy-efficient processing architectures, the interactions between the unique device physics of STTRAM, processor architecture, and the applications must be understood. This paper presents a modeling and analysis framework that can be used to understand these interactions, particularly from an energy perspective. The framework uses this understanding to explore the circuit-architecture design space of this emerging memory technology for the design of energy-efficient memory hierarchies in modern processors.

This paper has served as a timely bridge between the physics of Magnetic Tunneling Junction (MTJ) devices, circuit techniques for STTRAM cell design, and microarchitectural considerations for the use of STTRAM technology in caches. The energy analysis and observations from this paper have also made important contributions in understanding the potential role of STTRAM in computing.

******************************************

Pictured in the photos from left to right are ECE Professor Sudhakar Yalamanchili, Subho Chatterjee, Circuits and Systems Society (CAS) President-Elect Franco Maloberti, and Thanos Stouraitis who is the CAS Past President.

The title of Sarvey's award-winning paper is "Thermal and Electrical Effects of Staggered Micropin-Fin Dimensions for Cooling of 3D Microsystems." His coauthors are his Ph.D. advisor and ECE Associate Professor Muhannad Bakir and his fellow lab mates and ECE Ph.D. students Yang Zhang, Yue Zhang, and Hanju Oh in the Integrated 3D Systems Group.

As integrated circuit scaling hits major technical and economic limitations, 3D integration has become one of the most promising methods of continuing this trend in increasing system performance. However, 3D stacking of chips only exacerbates heat dissipation, which is already a major performance barrier.

A promising solution to the 3D thermal problem is microfluidic cooling, where a liquid coolant is pumped through micro-scale cooling structures built directly into the silicon. The high heat transfer coefficients of these small structures, as well as their close proximity to the heat generating circuitry, make them superior to traditional cooling systems.

Although often ignored in the thermal community, electrical signals must also be routed through these microfluidic heat sinks. To address this issue, Bakir's group has built copper through-silicon vias (TSVs) in micropin-fin heat sinks. In this work, the electrical impacts of micropin-fin dimensions were analyzed in terms of inter-tier signaling delay. Several electrically inspired micropin-fin heat sinks were fabricated and tested. The extracted thermal resistances were then used to simulate the temperature of an interposer-cooled memory on processor (Intel Core i7) stack, yielding up to a 23.3 K drop in maximum processor temperature.

The Honorable Pranab Mukherjee, president of India, presented Swaminathan and 30 additional distinguished recipients with this honor on July 19 at the NITT campus, which is currently celebrating its 50-Year Golden Jubilee. Suresh Sitaraman, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, was also recognized with the same award at this event.

Swaminathan received his bachelor of engineering degree in electronics and communications from NITT in 1985 and went on to earn his master’s and doctoral degrees from Syracuse University in 1989 and 1991, respectively. In addition to his accomplishments at Georgia Tech and IBM, Swaminathan was recognized for helping to shape the design aspects of packaging that have led to the development of system on package technologies around the world, including the creation of an electronic packaging program at NITT and the education of engineers and scientists in India from both the private and public sectors.

Swaminathan is a faculty member at Georgia Tech, where he currently holds the John Pippin Chair in Electromagnetics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is the director of the Interconnect and Packaging Center. He also served as the deputy director of the Microsystems Packaging Research Center, a National Science Foundation-sponsored Engineering Research Center. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he worked for IBM on the packaging for supercomputers.

As the leader of the Mixed-Signal Design Research Group in ECE, Swaminathan has graduated 35 Ph.D. and 17 M.S. students. He has published more than 400 technical articles, holds 27 patents, and has authored three books, all related to electronic packaging. He also co-founded and founded two spin-off companies, Jacket Micro Devices (JMD), which focused on integrated RF modules and substrates for wireless applications, and E-System Design, which focuses on the development of CAD tools for integrated 3D microsystems.

Swaminathan’s research has been recognized through numerous awards, including 16 best paper and best student paper awards, a Technical Excellence Award from Semiconductor Research Corporation in 2007, the IBM Outstanding Faculty Award in 2004 and 2005, the Georgia Tech ECE Outstanding Graduate Research Advisor Award in 2002, and the 2014 IEEE Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology Society Outstanding Sustained Technical Excellence Award. A Fellow of the IEEE, Dr. Swaminathan has also served as the Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society.

*****************

In the group photo, Swaminathan is pictured in the top row, second from the left, while Sitaraman is in the middle row on the left end of the row.

Many processes across the life, physical, and social sciences are thought of as dynamic complex systems, where sophisticated and unpredictable behavior arises from interactions between connected components. Despite the apparent complexity, these systems often have a hidden underlying structure that can provide a much simpler description for their behavior if it is accurately captured.

Rozell and his research team are developing fundamental mathematical analyses and algorithms for using complex systems data to learn about basic building blocks for this structure in a given system and to track how this structure changes in time. While there are many potential applications of this work, Rozell and his group currently focus on neuroscience, with an emphasis on how information is represented in sensory and motor neural systems. They also study social networks and collaborative filtering, with an emphasis on personalized learning, and they examine interactions in the physical world, with an emphasis on the physics of both solid body and fluid motion.

An associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 2008, Rozell is the second faculty member from ECE and the fourth faculty member from Georgia Tech to receive this honor. Past recipients include Robert J. Butera (ECE, 2000), Joshua S. Weitz (School of Biology, 2008), and Martha A. Grover (School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, 2011).

Ph.D. student Abhinav Parihar is working with Arijit Raychowdhury, and associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, on understanding synchronization phenomenon in coupled relaxation oscillators along with collaborators from Penn State and Cornell University. Recent experimental demonstrations of coupled integrated oscillators using Vanadium dioxide (VO₂) by Professor Suman Datta’s research group in Penn State are being studied by researchers in Georgia Tech who have further demonstrated the associative computing nature of such oscillatory systems. Vanadium dioxide (VO₂) is called a "wacky oxide" because it transitions from a conducting metal to an insulating semiconductor and vice versa with the addition of a small amount of heat or electrical current. In a device configuration this oxide has been connected, via negative feedback, to create sustained oscillations that can be electrically coupled to neighboring oscillators using appropriate coupling functions. This coupled system could provide the basis for non-Boolean computing. The results were first reported in the May 14, 2014 online issue of Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports [1]. It was also featured on the National Science Foundation’s front page as a top news story on May 23, 2014. The results of the findings have been further reported by a number of press articles [2-4] and Professor Raychowdhury and Professor Datta also presented their outlook on such non-Boolean computing paradigms on ‘Weltanschauung’ on Houston’s Public Radio network on June 26, 2014.

Abhinav Parihar is funded by Intel Corporation and Georgia Tech.

[1] N. Shukla, A. Parihar, E. Freeman, H. Paik, G. Stone, V. Narayanan, H. Wen, Z. Cai, V. Gopalan, R. Engel-Herbert, D. G. Schlom, A. Raychowdhury, and S. Datta, “Synchronized charge oscillations in correlated electron systems,” Sci. Rep., vol. 4, May 2014.
[2] Science Daily Article
[3] Communications of the ACM Article
[4] Daily News Article

Thomson Reuters analyzes data using its “Web of Science and InCites platforms to determine which researchers have produced work that is most frequently acknowledged by peers.” The citation data was reviewed for the past 11 years to identify those who published the highest impact work. The five faculty members from the College of Engineering had highly cited papers ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field and year of publication. According to Thomson Reuters, “these researchers are, undoubtedly, among the most influential scientific minds of our time.”

Ian Akyildiz, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Akyildiz is an influential researcher in wireless networking. His lab has produced three papers among the 10 most popular articles published in IEEE Communication Society journals and four papers among the 10 most downloaded papers published in “Computer Networks” (Elsevier).

Ye (Geoffrey) Li, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Li’s research interests include statistical signal processing and communications. He has won the Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in 2010 and WTC Wireless Recognition Award in 2013 from IEEE Communications Society.  He has published over 300 refereed journal and conference papers in addition to 25 granted patents.

Mark Prausnitz, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Working in the area of biophysical methods of drug deliver, Prausnitz is advancing microneedles from device design and fabrication through pharmaceutical formulation and pre-clinical animal studies through studies in human subjects. A major area of focus involves the use of microneedle patches to apply vaccines to the skin in a painless, minimally invasive manner.

Zhong Lin Wang, Materials Science and Engineering
Wang is a pioneer and world leader in nanoscience and nanotechnology. He has authored and co-authored six scientific reference and textbooks and over 800 peer reviewed journal articles. He coined and pioneered the field of piezotronics and piezo-phototronics. His discovery and breakthroughs in developing nanogenerators establish the principle and technological road map for harvesting mechanical energy from environment and biological systems.

Younan Xia, Biomedical Engineering
The current research of Xiaand his group centers on the design and synthesis of novel nanomaterials for a broad range of applications, including nanomedicine, regenerative medicine, cancer theranostics, tissue engineering, controlled release, catalysis, and fuel cell technology.

To see the full report on Highly Cited Researchers and the selection of the year’s Hottest Researchers, click here.

At the event, Zhang and his Ph.D. students in GTSR presented their work on maritime mobile sensor networks. By conducting various research surveys using marine mobile sensor platforms, they have contributed to environmental sensing and monitoring. During summer 2011, they conducted an oil spill survey in Louisiana using multiple autonomous marine vehicles, including two student-built and one commercial.

Starting in late 2011, the GTSR lab personnel participated in a number of underwater glider deployments in collaboration with the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. In these deployments, underwater gliders collected data to investigate oceanic processes such as phytoplankton blooms. To increase the sampling performance of gliders, they studied the real-time guidance of gliders.

GTSR is based in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where Zhang is an associate professor. Pictured in the top photo at the “Robots for Good” exhibition are (left to right) Dongsik Chang, Zhang, Klementyna Szwaykowska (a Ph.D. graduate of Zhang’s lab who now works at the Naval Research Lab), Shayok Mukhopadhyay, and Sean Maxon. 

The paper is entitled "A +27.3dBm Transformer-Based Digital Doherty Polar Power Amplifier Fully Integrated in Bulk CMOS," and the co-authors include Wang's Ph.D. students Song Hu and Jong Seok Park; Outmane Chlieh, a Ph.D. student advised by ECE Professor John Papapolymerou; and Shouhei Kousai, a senior design engineer at Toshiba Corporation. 

In the paper, the team proposed a novel digital Doherty polar power amplifier (PA) circuit architecture and implemented it in a standard 65 nm CMOS process. This architecture leverages digital reconfigurability and achieves optimum Doherty active load-modulation operation for maximum PA back-off efficiency enhancement and optimum AM-AM and AM-PM linearization. These desired properties enabled the wireless transmission of high data-rate with drastically enhanced efficiency, and extended battery life in mobile devices.

In addition, the team demonstrated that this digital Doherty architecture can be reconfigured to achieve robust PA performance against antenna load variations. This aspect of the design opens the door for in-field transmitter reconfiguration to ensure optimum wireless transmission under different or even time-varying radiation environments. This digital Doherty PA circuit architecture can also be further extended to other integrated circuit processes to address defense-related applications.

The work presented in this RFIC paper is sponsored by the Toshiba membership in the GEDC and by Toshiba's in-kind donations of CMOS multiproject wafer fabrication runs. 

***********************

Pictured in the photo left to right are Hua Wang, Wang's Ph.D. students Jong Seok Park and Song Hu (first author), and Lawrence Kushner of BAE Systems. Kushner served as the general conference chair for the 2014 IEEE RFIC.

Chosen as the best publication in the Components: Characterization and Modeling category, the paper is entitled "Power Multiplexing for Thermal Field Management in Many-Core Processors." Coauthors are ECE Professors Saibal Mukhopadhyay and Sudhakar Yalamanchili; their graduated ECE Ph.D. students Minki Cho, Chad Kersey, and Nikhil Sathe; ME Assistant Professor Satish Kumar; and Man Prakash Gupta, Kumar's current ME Ph.D. student.

Power and thermal management have emerged as some of the most challenging problems facing today's computing industry. While it has become possible to design chips with many fast cores, the challenge is to be able to extract maximum performance without violating temperature constraints. Running the cores too hot slows down the processors, increases wasted energy, and decreases chip lifetime.

This team’s paper presented a simple, yet effective approach known as power multiplexing, which periodically migrates the locations of active cores on a chip to redistribute the generated heat. Such spatiotemporal redistribution of power and heat reduces the peak temperature and produces a more uniform thermal field, thus mitigating the negative impact of peak temperatures and thermal gradients on performance and reliability. 

Supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, Intel Corporation, and an IBM Faculty Award, this work reflects the multidisciplinary approach necessary to solving many critical problems facing the chip industry and demonstrates Georgia Tech’s longstanding commitment to collaborative research.

***********************

Pictured in the photo from left to right are ME Assistant Professor Satish Kumar; ECE Associate Professor Saibal Mukhopadhyay; Minki Cho, Mukhopadhyay's Ph.D. graduate, currently at Intel Labs, Hillsboro, Oregon; and Jie Xue, president of the IEEE Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology Society.

Based at Georgia Tech-Lorraine (GT-L), Li is a Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is advised by Abdallah Ougazzaden, an ECE professor and director of GT-L.

Li was recognized for her paper, "BAlN Thin Layers for Deep UV Applications," which she coauthored with Suresh Sundaram, Youssef El Gmili, and Tarik Moudakir of the CNRS UMI 2958; Frédéric Genty and Ouarda Legrani of the Université of Lorraine; Russ Dupuis, ECE professor at the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta; Paul Voss, ECE associate professor at GT-L; Jean Paul Salvestrini of the CNRS UMI 2958 and the Université of Lorraine; and Ougazzaden.

This work is devoted to a Metalorganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) growth study of boron aluminum nitride (BAlN) materials and the remarkable progress made toward improving crystalline quality and extending the limit of boron incorporation. Supported by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (the French equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the United States), this project aims to demonstrate the first vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) operating in the deep UV region that can be used in medical and environmental applications.

These promising results achieved advance prospects for MOVPE-grown boron alloys, which can offer extremely large freedom for band gap, strain engineering with tailoring of refractive index for III-nitrides-based devices, including short wavelength optoelectronics and high power, high frequency electronics.

A Ph.D. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, Keilman is conducting research on photonic crystals with his Ph.D. advisor David S. Citrin (who is temporarily based at the Georgia Tech-Lorraine campus) and with researchers at École Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France.

Photonic crystals are periodic arrangements of dielectrics. Analogous to the band gap that may exist for electrons in solid materials, photonic crystals may exhibit a photonic band gap–a range of frequencies where light is unable to propagate through the structure. Thus, of the various applications of photonic crystals, one is to exclude light within a given frequency band.

Keilman's research is focused on how the properties of photonic crystals are degraded by the inevitable presence of disorder, such as uncontrolled variations in the dielectric constant and slight discrepancies in the position and size of the constituent parts. Disorder tends to permit light to propagate in the photonic band gap of the otherwise perfect photonic crystal.

Keilman is exploring structures that look ordered when one zooms in on a small region, but shows considerable disorder when one zooms out. Such structures may provide some of the benefits of ordered photonic crystals while relaxing the stringent requirements imposed in fabricating perfect structures.

Alexopoulos is an electrical engineering major and an undergraduate researcher in the Microwave Circuit Technology Laboratory. He is supervised by John Papapolymerou, who is a Ken Byers Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Alexopoulos’ research focuses on Radio Frequency (RF)/microwave circuit technology for wireless communications, sensors, and radars. He investigates the potential for simultaneous cooling and tuning of RF/microwave circuits. One portion of his research is to design circuits that will reduce current costs. These circuits are built on multiple layers of organic substrates that can also provide environmentally friendly solutions.

Alexopoulos also studies the creation and characterization of microfluidic channels built into high-power RF/microwave amplifier circuits that can increase performance by providing avenues for heat dissipation. The possible tuning effects of the introduction of these small fluid channels on these circuits is also being investigated.

Spin-logic aims at reducing power consumption of electronic devices, thereby improving battery life and reducing energy consumption in computing for a whole range of electronic product applications from portable devices to data centers.

“After more than four decades of exponential growth in the performance of electronic integrated circuits, it is now apparent that improving the energy efficiency of computing is a primary challenge,” said Ian A. Young, a collaborator and co-author of the research and a Senior Fellow at Intel Corporation. “There is a global search for information processing elements that use computational state variables other than electronic charge, and these devices are being sought to bring in new functionalities and further lower the power dissipation in computers.”

One of the main motivations behind the search for a next-generation computing switch beyond CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) devices is to sustain the advancement of Moore’s Law. Nanomagnetic/spintronic devices provide a complementary option to electronics. The added functionality of this option includes the non-volatility of information on-chip, which is in essence a combination of logic and memory functions. However, to benefit from the increase in density of the on-chip devices, there has to be adequate connectivity among the switches—which is the focus of the Georgia Tech research effort spearheaded by Azad Naeemi, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

Among the potential alternatives, devices based on nanoscale magnets in the field of spintronics have received special attention thanks to their advantages in terms of robustness and enhanced functionality. Magnets are non-volatile: their state remains even if the power to the circuit is switched off. Thus, the circuits do not consume power when not used—a very desirable property for modern tablets and smart phones.

One of the most important aspects of any new information processing element is how fast and power efficient they can communicate over an interconnect system with one another. In today’s CMOS chips, more energy is consumed communicating between transistor logic functions than actually processing of information. The Georgia Tech research has therefore focused on this important aspect of communicating between spin-logic devices and demonstrates that interconnects are an even more important challenge for beyond-CMOS switches.

To analyze spintronic interconnects, the Georgia Tech team and their Intel collaborators have developed compact models for spin transport in copper and aluminum—taking into account the scattering at wire surfaces and grain boundaries that become quite dominant at nanoscale dimensions. The research team has also developed compact models for the nanomagnet dynamic, electronic and spintronic transport through magnet to non-magnet interfaces, electric currents and spin diffusion. These models are all based on familiar electrical elements such as resistors and capacitors and can therefore be analyzed using standard circuit simulation tools such as SPICE.

“This work is showing the way for how spintronics can create energy-efficient computation by including not only the spin logic functional circuit blocks, but also the interconnect system parameters,” said Jon Candelaria, director of Interconnect and Packaging Sciences at SRC. ”This will help establish a much more realistic and accurate prediction of computing performance and power with spintronics.”

The research paper was presented at the IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference on May 24 in San Jose, Calif., (http://www.iitc-conference.org/novel-systems-ii.html). The co-authors are Rouhollah Mousavi Iraei and Nickvash Kani, both Georgia Tech ECE Ph.D. students; Phillip Bonhomme, an M.S.E.C.E. graduate of Georgia Tech who now works at Intel; Sasikanth Manipatruni, Dmitri E. Nikonov, and Ian A. Young, all of Intel; and Naeemi.

Swaminathan was honored "for significant and sustained contributions that have helped shape the design aspects of packaging in the areas of power delivery, system on package technologies, and 3D integration."

A faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 1994, Swaminathan holds the John Pippin Chair in Electromagnetics, and he is the director of the Interconnect and Packaging Center. He previously served as the deputy director of the Microsystems Packaging Research Center from 2004-2008.

Swaminathan leads the Mixed Signal Design Group in ECE, where he and his team conduct research in computational electromagnetics, multi-physics modeling, computer-aided design, 3D integration, nano materials, microwave design, RF sensors, and high-speed signaling.

He has published more than 400 technical articles, holds 27 issued patents, and is the author and co-editor of three books, all related to electronic packaging. He is the co-founder and founder, respectively, of two spin-off companies, Jacket Micro Devices and E-System Design.

Akbar’s project, entitled “Hybrid Inertial Microwave Reflectometry (HIMR)”, was selected for final round presentation at the Broadcom Technical Conference. Students presented a short talk and took part in a three-hour poster session in front of Broadcom’s top engineers. At the Thursday night banquet, Akbar won runner-up, taking home a cash prize of $1,000.

Akbar is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and is a member of the Propagation Group, which is led by ECE Associate Professor Gregory D. Durgin.

As for the research, HIMR is a technique for remote motion capture that was co-invented by Akbar, Durgin (Akbar’s advisor), and ECE Professor David G. Taylor. Where most radio localization techniques struggle to break the 1-meter accuracy floor, HIMR can track absolute position in real time with an accuracy of 1-2 mm using low-powered 5.8 GHz RFIDs equipped with accelerometer circuitry. The technology applications include sports motion capture, diagnosis of traumatic brain injury, and precise robotic way-faring, to name just a few.

The event was hosted by Jill Auerbach, director of ORS and the Office of Undergraduate Research in ECE, and Steven McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair.

Prior to the event, ORS teams were judged by panels of ECE faculty members who scored their work based on research knowledge, research quality, and presentation skills. This year, first place went to the team consisting of Damilola Apatira, Kevin Berman, Shad Hepner, and Olivia Wasdin.  The team was mentored by Ph.D. student Blake Marshall and advised by Dr. Greg Durgin. Their project was titled “5.8 GHz Energy Harvesting Circuitry Matching for Variable Loads.”

The second place team, Sinan Liu and Sridhar Sivapurapu, was mentored by Ph.D. student David Zhang and advised by Dr. Madhavan Swaminathan. They won for their research that was titled “Improving the Signal Integrity in High Speed Circuits.”

Read more about the winning research projects:

5.8 GHz Energy Harvesting Circuitry Matching for Variable Loads
Radio frequency-to-direct current (RF-to-DC) energy harvesting efficiency degrades when impedance mismatch between rectennas and DC loads occur. Low-power microcontrollers are used with RF-to-DC energy harvesters for sensing applications and backscatter communications, but the microcontroller's impedance can vary, which results in reduced efficiency of energy harvesting circuitry. This research proposes a 5.8 GHz energy harvesting circuit that matches itself to a variable load by implementing a single control line from the microcontroller to an RF switch to increase energy conversion efficiency.

Improving the Signal Integrity in High Speed Circuits
A major flaw with the power plane design of printed circuit boards (PCBs) is that there are return path discontinuities (RPDs).  These discontinuities result in loss of signal integrity within the PCB.  This project's main goal is to improve the signal integrity of a PCB through investigation of various power transmission line board designs and the components used.

A member of the Center for Signal and Information Processing, Kressner conducts research in the areas of signal processing and biomedical engineering applied to the human auditory system. She is advised by ECE Assistant Professor Christopher J. Rozell.

Currently, nearly all signal processing algorithms in modern hearing aids and cochlear implants fail to improve speech intelligibility, particularly in the presence of background noise when improvements are most needed. By exploiting the underlying structure in speech as well as some of the latest results in the signal processing community, Kressner aims to improve these algorithms and point the way to new approaches for improving speech understanding in challenging listening situations. Ultimately, she hopes this work will aid the growing population of hearing-impaired listeners to preserve their quality of life by helping them to maintain communication with their loved ones. 

The Chih Foundation was founded by Samuel C.M. Chih and his wife, Amy. He is the president and CEO of Sunrich Technology, an international company which supplies professional computer interface cards. Chih earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York College at Buffalo and both his master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. He is currently a member of the Georgia Tech Advisory Board.

By 2030, 40% of Americans will suffer from cardiovascular disease and the annual costs will approach $1 trillion. Cardiovascular monitoring at home could improve the quality of care and life for these millions of patients, and reduce healthcare costs for all Americans. This article describes technologies developed for unobtrusively assessing the mechanical aspects of cardiovascular function at home using ballistocardiography (BCG). A weighing scale was modified for BCG measurement, and tested in collaboration with engineers and clinicians to demonstrate clinical relevance. Recent work focusing on creating a framework for measuring the BCG using wearable sensors is also discussed.

By 2030, the American Heart Association projects that 40% of Americans (150 million) will suffer from cardiovascular disease and the annual costs will approach $1 trillion [1]. Cardiovascular monitoring at home could improve the quality of care and life for these millions of patients, and reduce healthcare costs for all Americans. Rather than reacting to catastrophic cardiac events such as heart attacks or strokes in the emergency room, care could be delivered proactively by tailoring treatment strategies to the changing needs of the patients. To accelerate this transition from reactive to proactive care, we need systems-level innovations in multi-modal physiological monitoring and signal interpretation. These solutions would leverage advances in embedded systems and sensor technology to achieve accurate and robust monitoring of clinically relevant parameters in the home.

In work started at Stanford during my doctoral studies advised by Professor Gregory Kovacs, and now continuing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in my group (Inan Lab), my research has focused on creating such systems for non-invasive cardiovascular monitoring at home: specifically, I am interested in improving the available methods for unobtrusively measuring mechanical aspects of cardiovascular function. One example is a modified electronic weighing scale designed to monitor the electrical and mechanical health of the heart [2-4]. With this scale, I measured fluctuations in bodyweight resulting from the movement of blood throughout the vasculature - the ballistocardiogram (BCG) - and combined physiologic insights with feature extraction concepts to interpret the BCG signals and uncover their potential clinical relevance. The BCG is a measure of the mechanical forces of the body in reaction to cardiac ejection of blood into the vasculature, and was originally measured using elaborate tables and beds in the mid-1900s [e.g., [5]]. By connecting the strain gauges in an electronic weighing scale to custom electronics, and developing dedicated algorithms for pre-processing and feature extraction, I was able to measure and interpret the BCG signal measured from a person standing upright on a scale [2].

Subsequently, I conducted multiple clinical studies with healthy and diseased populations in collaboration with cardiologists in the Stanford Medical School, local clinics, and recently with Dr. Liviu Klein and Professor Shuvo Roy at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine to demonstrate the efficacy of this device for home health monitoring. In the work at Stanford, together with other engineers (Drs. Giovangrandi, Etemadi, and Wiard) and clinicians (Drs. Liang and Froelicher), I demonstrated that the BCG signals from the modified weighing scale could accurately track changes in a person's cardiac output [3], cardiac contractility [6], and beat-by-beat left ventricular function during arrhythmias [2]. On the engineering side, we found that the BCG measurements were repeatable, and developed techniques for improving the robustness to motion artifacts and floor vibrations [7-8].

Most recently, I am leading efforts at Georgia Tech in developing systems for accurately measuring the BCG signal with wearable sensors. This could allow the assessment of a person's cardiovascular performance during normal activities of daily living, by monitoring the hemodynamics in response to various stressors. Previous efforts to measure the BCG with wearable sensors have used accelerometers affixed to the torso skin or head, but the resultant waveforms from these measurements are significantly different from those measured in the traditional BCG literature and from the scale system. Their interpretation as "BCG" signals is thus unclear, and techniques developed for BCG signals may not directly transfer over to the wearable domain. Fundamentally, the BCG represents the movements of the center of mass of the body in response to the heartbeat, while an accelerometer on the body measures the local accelerations of the torso skin or head. My group has recently found that relating these locally measured accelerations to whole body displacements is possible with a transfer function, but can be subject-dependent, and we have thus made recommendations for optimal placement locations of the accelerometer for capturing BCG information [9]. These findings can help pave the way for future work in developing technologies for continuously assessing hemodynamics at home, and thus enabling proactive care.

Acknowledgements
This work was carried out in collaboration with Drs. Gregory T. A. Kovacs, Laurent Giovangrandi, Mozziyar Etemadi, and Richard Wiard at Stanford, and Drs. Liviu Klein and Shuvo Roy at the University of California at San Francisco.

Cohen was chosen for this award “for contributions to ELF/VLF radio wave instrumentation, propagation, and generation in the ionosphere and magnetosphere, and for initiating and fostering an international network of young scientists in developing countries.”

One achievement for which Cohen is being honored is a low-frequency radio receiver known as AWESOME (Atmospheric Weather Electromagnetic System for Observation Modeling and Education), which he developed with his Ph.D. advisor and colleagues while in graduate school at Stanford University. The AWESOME has formed the basis of a global lightning geolocation network, and separately, an international network under the auspices of a United Nations/NASA-sponsored program to form global collaborative communities between developing and developed countries.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Cohen was appointed AAAS Science Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation, where he worked on the fast-growing trend of crowdfunding and open access policies for the Engineering directorate.

Cohen joined Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty in October 2013, where he leads the Low Frequency Radio Group. He and his group study the natural electricity of the Earth, including lightning, the electrically charged upper atmosphere, and the radiation-filled space environment. They use radio waves at low frequencies measured all around the world to understand them, and they develop resulting practical applications.

Cohen has been involved with URSI activities since 2006, including chairing and convening many conference sessions at URSI meetings. He is an associate editor of Radio Science and an author of more than 50 peer-reviewed journal publications. Cohen has been an elected member of URSI Commissions F (propagation and remote sensing) and G (ionospheric radio and propagation) since 2011. He won several URSI best student paper honors, and in 2011, he received the Young Scientist Award from the URSI General Assembly.

Kiani’s thesis was entitled “Wireless Power and Data Transmission to High-Performance Implantable Medical Devices.” His proposed wireless data and power transmission techniques have promising prospects for use in implantable medical devices such as biosensors and neural recording/stimulation devices, neural interfacing experiments in enriched environments, RFID, smartcards, near-field communication, wireless sensors, and charging mobile devices and electric vehicles. Advised by Maysam Ghovanloo, Kiani defended his thesis in December 2013 and graduated on May 2. He currently works as a postdoctoral fellow in the GT-Bionics Lab in the School of ECE at Georgia Tech.

Li’s thesis was entitled “Densely Integrated Photonic Circuits for On-Chip Signal Processing.” In his thesis, Li demonstrated photonic structures that are essential for state-of-the-art photonic signal processing systems for RF and wireless signals. Advised by Ali Adibi, Li graduated in May 2013 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Wu’s thesis was entitled “Bio-Inspired Cooperative Exploration Using Mobile Sensor Networks.” The algorithms developed in her research can be applied to allow networked mobile robots to track pollutants in the environment during events such as oil spills or water contamination. Advised by Fumin Zhang, Wu graduated in August 2013. She is now an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, located in Troy, N.Y. 

The Class of 1969 Teaching Fellows Program is designed for early career professionals who want to develop their full teaching potential. During this academic-year-long experience, the Teaching Fellows will explore various aspects of teaching and learning in weekly seminars, receive private assistance with teaching, and undertake a project to improve student learning in one of their courses.

Davenport joined the ECE faculty in August 2012, where he is a member of the Center for Signal and Information Processing. He has taught both undergraduate and graduate signal processing courses and an undergraduate probability course that have been enthusiastically received by the students. Davenport has been recognized with CETL’s Class of 1940 Teaching Effectiveness Award and the 2014 LexisNexis Dean’s Excellence Award, which spotlights outstanding educators from among the untenured junior faculty at the assistant professor level in the College of Engineering.

The book is a completely revised and expanded version of its 2009 predecessor. It covers power-supply systems, microelectronic devices, single-transistor primitives, analog building blocks, negative feedback, bias currents and reference circuits, small-signal response, circuit blocks, system implementations, circuit protection, and characterization of linear regulators.

Rincón-Mora has been on the ECE faculty since 2001, where he conducts research on power management integrated circuits (ICs), analog ICs, system-on-chip microelectronics, system-in-package microelectronics, self-powered/self-sustaining chips, and energy harvesting ICs. Rincón-Mora is a Fellow of IEEE and the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Her winning paper was entitled “Tier-Independent Microfluidic Cooling for Heterogeneous 3D ICs with Nonuniform Power Dissipation.” A doctoral candidate in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Zhang coauthored this work with fellow Ph.D. student Li Zheng and her Ph.D. advisor and ECE Associate Professor Muhannad Bakir.

Cooling is a significant challenge for high-performance and high-power 3D integrated circuits (ICs). In her paper, Zhang and her colleagues present, for the first time, a tier-specific microfluidic cooling scheme using a two-tier multicore processor thermal testbed. The flow rate of each tier is tailored according to its power dissipation. Tier-specific cooling is shown to reduce the pumping power by 37.5% and thus preventing over-cooling and minimizing thermal gradient in a 3D ICs stack.

Wang is developing a new execution model for dynamic parallelism found in unstructured applications with irregular data structures such as relational queries and graph analysis. The goal is to pursue both the compiler and micro-architectural support of this model to discover and exploit dynamically formed pockets of structured data parallelism in irregular applications that can use GPU compute and memory bandwidth.

Wang works in the Computer Architecture and Systems Laboratory (CASL), which is led by ECE Professor Sudhakar Yalamanchili. Wang is Yalamanchili’s second student to receive an NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship. Fellow CASL Ph.D. student Haicheng Wu was selected this honor in both 2011-12 and 2012-13. 

The NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship Program is open to applicants worldwide. Eligibility criteria include completion of the first year of Ph.D. level studies in the areas of computer science, computer engineering, system architecture, electrical engineering or a related area. To learn more about the program, visit http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/04/17/acing-gpu-u/#sthash.MKVsu1vW.dpuf.

Event hosts were Holmes Hawkins (BEE ’90), partner and head of the Intellectual Property Practice Group at King & Spalding, and Keefe Bohannan (BEE ’95), applications engineer district manager at Agilent Technologies.

Individuals who received awards at campus ceremonies held earlier in the spring were also recognized at this program, as well as employees who received college degrees and Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Awards.

Below are the recipients of the 2014 Roger P. Webb Awards. Congratulations to everyone on another fantastic year!

ECE Student Awards

ECE Staff Awards

ECE Faculty Awards

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

John Cressler – Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award

James Hamblen – Class of 1934 Outstanding Innovative Use of Education Technology Award

Bernard Kippelen – Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award

A.P. Sakis Meliopoulos – Outstanding Professional Education Award

Christopher Rozell  - Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award

Seven ECE students were among the top award winners at the annual Georgia Tech Student Honors Day, held on April 17 at the Georgia Tech Student Center Ballroom.

James Sutehall – Davidson Family Tau Beta Pi Senior Engineering Cup

This is the highest honor that an undergraduate engineering student can earn at Georgia Tech. Based not only on excellent scholarship, but also outstanding accomplishments and contributions, the award recognizes the top Georgia Tech engineering undergraduate who has demonstrated academic excellence, leadership, and service to the field and the Institute, and who has shown potential for continuing growth.

Joseph Guinta, Brian Nemsick – 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.

Christopher Wang – Kelley Music Scholarship

This scholarship is awarded each semester through audition to students who demonstrate outstanding musicality, collaboration, and creativity in music performance and/or technical prowess.

In addition, the following ECE-specific awards were recognized by College of Engineering Associate Dean Laurence Jacobs at this event, in addition to the Roger P. Webb Awards Program held on April 23.

James Sutehall – Outstanding Electrical Engineering Senior Award

Jiaqi Xue – Outstanding Computer Engineering Senior Award

Ahmad Beirami, Lu Lu – ECE Graduate Research Assistant Excellence Award

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

Wahby’s research focuses on the optimal design of 3D integrated circuits (3DICs), which are attractive due to their potential to reduce energy and improve performance of silicon nanoelectronic computing systems. To address this need, he is developing an integrated virtual design platform to explore the optimal design of 3D systems. The design platform simultaneously simulates the electrical performance, power consumption, and thermal profile of a 3DIC. This platform will enable designers to quickly compare the impact of emerging transistor technologies, wiring materials, and integration/packaging technologies on the power and performance of the next generation of nanoelectronic computing systems. 

In his online class, “Control of Mobile Robots,” Egerstedt demonstrated the basics of control theory with a collection of robotic sidekicks that shimmied, scurried and skittered at his will. With students from around the world watching videos and taking exams, the course was embraced as a success.

How to top that? Easy: Do it all over again and put students in charge of robot-building.  

That’s what Egerstedt, the Schlumberger professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, did for the second version of his massive open online course (MOOC), offered in spring through Coursera. Using low-cost, open-source hardware, Egerstedt and a cadre of his graduate students gave MOOC participants the chance to bring their own robots to life.

“In my mind, it’s a game changer,” Egerstedt said. “This hasn’t been attempted before, and it’s been really exciting.” Egerstedt’s MOOCs are open to anyone with Internet access, not just Georgia Tech students, and that made the new gamble even bigger. Although the first run of his class drew praise, Egerstedt was eager to throw hardware into the mix to help bridge “the practice-theory gap.”

After all, it’s one thing to watch a professor direct robots in a video; it’s quite another to do it yourself on a robot assembled with your own hands.

When some of his graduate students developed a robot for cheap, Egerstedt decided to follow through with the idea.

He partnered with SparkFun Electronics, Texas Instruments and MathWorks to bring low-cost parts to students, who were eventually able to build a machine named the QuickBot for about $140 to $220 each (depending on how advanced their robots were).

The excitement surrounding the QuickBot took Egerstedt by surprise. It wasn’t long before MOOC enrollees were sharing photos of QuickBots they’d tricked out to look like teddy bears and spaceships.

“It’s incredibly satisfying to see pictures of their different robots,” he said.

Ph.D. student Rowland O’Flaherty (one of the QuickBot’s creators) led the MOOC’s lectures on hardware, and he was surprised by students’ outburst of enthusiasm.  

“It’s kind of taking on a life of its own,” O’Flaherty said.

To encourage discussion, O’Flaherty built a website “for the conversation to carry on after the course.” Called O’Botics, the site can be edited by anyone and includes the code for the QuickBot. Visitor can add their own robots to the page, as well.

The course’s new material introduced some challenges. O’Flaherty pointed out that building a robot alone is very different from building one as a blueprint for students, many of whom had little or no previous experience with robotics. One small mistake could lead hundreds of students astray.

In Egerstedt’s first MOOC, students flooded the course forums to offer help with math and problem-solving. This time, they also supported each other in robot building, while O’Flaherty and fellow graduate students Jean-Pierre de la Croix and Smriti Chopra checked in regularly to give advice and answer questions.

In all, Egerstedt said, well over a thousand MOOC students built robots, and he’s excited to see what they do next.

“I think,” he said, “that this is going to live on beyond the course.”

Cai shares this honor with his co-author, Vladimir M. Shalaev of Purdue University, for their book entitled Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications, published by Springer Press in 2010. They will be presented with this award at SPIE Optics+Photonics 2014, to be held August 17-21 in San Diego. This honor is presented to the author(s) of the most influential scientific or technical book on optics published in the last six years, and it is judged by the impact that it has had on research, teaching, or the optics business.

Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications covers basic aspects and recent advances in the study of optical metamaterials, artificially structured materials with nanoscale inclusions and strikingly unconventional properties at optical frequencies. Important recent developments and applications such as super lenses and cloaking devices are among the topics discussed in the book, which will be of interest to both newcomers and advanced researchers in this rapidly evolving field.

A member of the ECE faculty since 2012, Cai leads the Laboratory for Advanced Photonics and Optoelectronics and also holds a joint appointment with the School of Materials Science and Engineering. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Stanford University. Cai received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University in 2000 and 2002, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2008, all in electrical/electronic engineering.

The team–made up of Mitch Costley, Jennifer Howard, and Marcelo Sandoval, all Ph.D. students in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Scheller College of Business M.B.A. student Eric Crane– will now move on to represent the southeast region in the U.S. Department of Energy's National Clean Energy Business Plan Finals, which will be held June 11-12 in Washington, D.C. Costley, Howard, and Sandoval conduct research in the Advanced Computational Electricity Systems Laboratory and are advised by ECE Associate Professor Santiago Grijalva.

The ACC Clean Energy Challenge is a business plan competition encouraging students from all U.S. southeastern universities to develop business plans for new clean energy companies focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency improvements, and advanced fuels/vehicles. As part of the Obama Administration’s effort to support and empower the next generation of American clean energy entrepreneurs, the Department of Energy selected the ACC Clean Energy Challenge and five additional regional competitions in the U.S. as part of its inaugural nationwide network of student-focused clean energy business plan competitions over the next three years.

Nico Van Duijn

What started as a social outlet ten years ago is now opening a pathway to the 2016 Summer Olympics for electrical engineering major Nico Van Duijn. Van Duijn, who is originally from Switzerland, started swimming purely for fun. He joined a club team near his hometown of Zurich that was casual and leisure-focused with an abundance of games and horseplay.

As the years progressed and Van Duijn grew closer to his teammates, the team slowly moved to competitive swimming. “I had always enjoyed measuring myself against others and making a competition out of nearly every aspect of my life. Swimming was the perfect match,” explained Van Duijn.

Van Duijn’s competitive spirit helps to motivate him as he juggles his current role as an ECE student with training and competing for both the Georgia Tech Varsity Swim Team and the Swiss National Team.

“Swimming is one of the most time-intensive sports when it is exercised on an internationally competitive level. It is not uncommon for world-class swimmers to practice over 30 hours per week, which makes the 20-hour limit by the NCAA look pretty easy,” he explains.

Couple the time demands of training and travel for competitions with the rigor of a full class load and it’s a wonder Van Duijn can keep up with either. But he knows that dedication and lack of sleep now could later mean a spot on the Swiss Olympic Swim Team.

Still, he holds no illusion that professional swimming will be his bread and butter.  “Sadly, it is almost impossible to make money swimming. There are very few individuals like Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte who make more than the bare minimum to pay for their expenses,” said Van Duijn.

So the plan is that graduate school will follow soon after his bachelor’s degree is awarded, but first, more swimming and a push toward Rio.

Jimmy Sutehall

Jimmy Sutehall understands what it means to be thankful for each day. When he was a freshman in high school, he was diagnosed with an astrocytoma brain tumor. After surgery to remove the tumor, his short-term memory and ability to walk were affected. Although the procedure was a success, Sutehall essentially had to relearn how to learn. Now a student in ECE, he maintains a 4.0 GPA and credits his illness and recovery with providing useful perspective and strength.

“It broke me in a lot of ways, but it also allowed me to be rebuilt. There have been times at Georgia Tech when life has been hectic, stressful, and tough,” said Sutehall. “But even in the hardest times, I always remember this: as long as I can breathe, walk, and talk, I don’t have any reason to complain.”

These days, his experience beating the brain tumor drives him to help others. Every spring break, Sutehall takes a mission trip to Nicaragua through Amigos for Christ, an organization that brings clean drinking water to Nicaraguans, and the Georgia Tech Catholic Center. His time spent digging ditches, installing solar panels for wells, and wiring electrical panels has taught him about the inherent goodness of engineering.

“I saw firsthand the ways that engineering can be used to help others and save lives. I hope to continue to use engineering to save lives, both through mission trips and the job I have after graduation,” said Sutehall.

Upon graduation, the electrical engineering major plans to start working full time with L-3 Mustang Technology as an algorithm engineer, but first he’ll spend time hiking Hadrian’s Wall in England and completing the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain.

Olivia Wasdin

A switch from basketball to volleyball in 8^th grade propelled Olivia Wasdin to pursue her number one passion and she is not looking back. And while volleyball may be her top priority, her studies in electrical engineering take a close second. In fact, volleyball and electrical engineering have played a delicate dance throughout her undergraduate years with one influencing the other at every turn.

Wasdin chose to pursue electrical engineering because of its broad nature and exciting possibilities. She said, “I think electricity is awesome. It’s powerful, it’s dangerous, and it’s everywhere. I couldn’t imagine pursuing another major.”

Although Wasdin knew she was studying the right subject, she still felt lost during her first year and a half at Tech. She only began to hit her stride once she realized that competitive academics didn’t motivate her in the same way as competitive volleyball.

She got involved with a club volleyball team made up of other female Tech students and was president of the club for three years. During this time, Wasdin had to learn how to become her own strength and conditioning coach and engage in high-level training, all while balancing school and a part-time job.

As a student, her school projects go hand in hand with her love of sports. Inspired by countless hours at the gym, her team project for Senior Design is a “Weightlifting Energy Harvesting System” that harvests mechanical energy from a cable weightlifting machine and uses it to charge batteries and power a fitness tracking system.

After graduation, Wasdin will enter an M.B.A. program at Savannah State University and play on the Savannah State Athletics Women’s Volleyball Team. Beyond that, she’ll try to join a professional volleyball league overseas. “I wake up every day to get one step closer to my goal of playing professional volleyball,” she said.

But what if the stars don’t align after all? Wasdin is unfazed. “What’s a better backup plan than an EE degree from Tech?”

The Georgia Tech Research & Innovation Conference (GTRIC) is a yearly event that captures and exhibits the cutting-edge scientific and technological research conducted by graduate students here at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Graduate students from all disciplines participate to give their research Institute-wide exposure and compete for travel awards and scholarship prizes.

Sadeghian's presentation was titled “Detector for Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording.” Her research involves synchronization and detection for two-dimensional magnetic recording, a new technology for super high density data storage. A key challenge for this technology is the development of signal processing strategies of manageable complexity that are able to effectively mitigate the two-dimensional interference inherent in the problem. She has developed a detector that can recover all data tracks requiring low signal-to-noise ratio.

The following ECE students also received honors in the competition:

Innovation Finalists

Reza Abbaspour
Umair Altaf
Franceso Amato
Nishanth Mehanathan

GTRIC Travel Grant Recipients

Temiloluwa Olubanjo
Gareth Guvanasen
Robert Schmid
Hanuma Teja Maddali

This award recognizes an individual who has performed exemplary service in encouraging students and/or mentoring young engineers to advance their careers in the areas of RF/microwave and/or wireless engineering. A faculty member at Georgia Tech since 2002, Cressler holds the Schlumberger Chair in Electronics in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He and his team are interested in the understanding, development, and application of new types of silicon-based, bandgap-engineered microelectronic devices and circuits for high-speed electronics in emerging 21st century communications systems. 

Widely recognized as one of the world's foremost experts in silicon-germanium technology, Cressler has graduated 47 Ph.D. students (including 38 from Georgia Tech) and 39 M.S. students (including 31 from Georgia Tech). Graduates of his research group hold university faculty positions and occupy high-level management or principal engineering positions across the microelectronics industry. 

In addition to the Henning Mentoring Award, Cressler has also been recognized for his inspirational teaching and guidance with a number of accolades. He will receive the 2014 Georgia Tech Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award at the Institute’s annual Faculty Staff Honors Luncheon on April 11. In 2013, he was presented with the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a faculty member at Georgia Tech. He has also received the 2011 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award, the 2010 Georgia Tech Class of 1940 W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher Award, the 2007 Georgia Tech Outstanding Faculty Leadership for the Development of Graduate Research Assistants Award, and the 1996 C. Holmes MacDonald National Outstanding Teacher Award, which is given by Eta Kappa Nu. 

Cressler and his team have published over 500 refereed journal and conference papers, 30 book chapters, and six books (including his debut historical novel, Emeralds of the Alhambra). He is involved with four different IEEE professional societies and is currently editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, the flagship journal of the IEEE Electron Devices Society. In addition, he has previously served as associate editor for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and the IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science.

An associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, Durgin was also interviewed about the disappearance of MH370 by the Associated Press, which resulted in placements in hundreds of media outlets around the world, including the Christian Science Monitor, Fox News, National Public Radio, Business Insider, and the Huffington Post. He was also featured in an article for Wired.

Durgin’s satellite communications courses often incorporate opportunities for students to translate theory into real-world challenges. In his 2006 offering of ECE 6390 Satellite Communications and Navigation, Durgin gave his students a radiolocation scavenger hunt, where they had to use Doppler shift to locate a large commercial jet that crashed in the ocean, so that the U.S. Coast Guard could be dispatched to rescue any survivors.

Their winning paper was entitled "The Positive Effects of Verbal Encouragement in Mathematics Education Using a Social Robot." Brown is a Ph.D. student in the Human-Automation Systems Lab, which is led by Howard.

Studies have shown that using verbal encouragement strategies in education helps to maximize learning. This idea is derived from traditional classroom settings where teachers use behavioral strategies to maintain student engagement. Motivated by these educational practices, Brown and Howard have examined using a Socially Interactive Robotic Tutor (SIRT) that incorporates a variety of verbal cues into multiple math learning scenarios.

In their paper, Brown and Howard present the robotic tutor, the methods used to engage students in the learning scenario, and results from integrating the robotic tutor in the classroom environment. Results derived from 44 students engaging with SIRT during a tablet-based math test show that, when compared to non-interactive methods, verbal cues are able to increase and/or maintain student engagement regardless of student age and math content level.

According to the award announcement, “Thomas Pinkney Barnwell, III is considered one of the historically most important contributors to the field of signal processing over the last 50 years for the breadth of his digital signal processing innovations that have advanced the very foundations of the field.” Barnwell will receive this award at the IEEE Sections Congress, scheduled for August 23, 2014 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Barnwell came to Georgia Tech in 1971 and was the School’s first faculty member in the area of digital signal processing (DSP), after receiving his Ph.D. from MIT where he worked on the MIT Reading Machine, the first programmatic attempt to build a machine to read a book out loud as an aid for the visually impaired. His vision at Georgia Tech was to create a broad program that addressed basic unsolved research problems in a context that also emphasized application development, deployment, and education.

Thanks to this approach, Georgia Tech attracted substantial research and development funds and several stellar faculty members in the mid-1970s. This group formed the founding core of 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. In fact, he is the third faculty member from ECE to receive the Kilby Signal Processing Medal. Previous recipients include ECE Professor James H. McClellan and ECE Regents’ Professor Emeritus Ronald W. Schafer. Barnwell is also credited with creating and managing the DSP Laboratory, which eventually morphed into what is now the ECE Computer Support Group.

“This is a tremendous honor for Tom both personally and professionally, and our amazing faculty track record in receiving this award speaks of the high regard in which our digital signal processing program is held around the world,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE.

Barnwell retired from ECE in 2006 after 35 years of service and held the title of the Arbutus Chair in Distributed Engineering Education and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

Among the first Georgia Tech and ECE faculty members involved in start-up company activity with the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), Barnwell co-founded Atlanta Signal Processors, Inc. (ASPI Digital) in 1981 with Schafer and ECE Regents’ Professor Emeritus Russell M. Mersereau. 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.

Barnwell and his students are responsible for some of the most important research breakthroughs in DSP over the last three decades:

• The recursive correlation algorithm, also called “Barnwell Windowing,” was included in the ITU G.728 low delay speech coding standard, which has been used worldwide since its development as an important component in the international speech telephony network.
• Maximally decimated perfect reconstruction systems based on filter banks, often called Smith-Barnwell filters, was a fundamental discovery that has powered all subsequent filter bank and wavelet theory. This area is now clearly one of the most important technologies of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, with a myriad of applications in speech, audio, image, video, and many other technology areas. This work was the Georgia Tech Ph.D. research of Mark J.T. Smith, Barnwell’s past student who is now the dean of the Graduate School at Purdue University.
• Barnwell also developed cyclo-static multiprocessor architectures, a class of optimal solutions for many core DSP algorithms on synchronous multiprocessors. This work has increasing value as multiprocessor architectures become more common, and it has already been used for optimizing algorithms on single and multiple DSP processors.
• He and his collaborators developed objective measures for speech quality testing, which led to the first book in this area that was co-authored by Barnwell, ECE Professor Mark A. Clements, and Schuyler R. Quackenbush. Also a past Ph.D. student of Barnwell’s, Quackenbush is currently the chair of the MPEG Audio Subgroup – a position he has held since 1998. This group standardized MP3 and has been the major driving force for audio coding and compression worldwide for the past two decades.
• The invention of MELP (mixed excitation linear predictive coder), a speech coder that led to improved technology for digital transmission and storage of speech signals, was made the new military standard in digital speech compression by the U.S. Department of Defense Digital Voice Processors Consortium in 1996. NATO made this technology its standard in 2002 and has been called the most influential speech coder of the early 21^st century. Primarily the Georgia Tech Ph.D. research of Alan McCree, another Ph.D. graduate of Barnwell’s program, it achieved the rare accomplishment in which academic Ph.D. research led directly to a federal and NATO standard, all in less than a decade.

In the mid-1990s after returning from a leave of absence to work at ASPI, Barnwell spearheaded a campuswide effort, led largely by ECE faculty, to create a technology enhanced education program. In 2002, that effort became more formalized with his appointment as director of the new Arbutus Center for Distributed Engineering Education, which created, tested, and distributed new technologies for education applications, as well as content development and education delivery tools to other educational institutions. Through the use of these innovative applications, Georgia Tech has delivered classes to students around the globe and has made the classroom available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“It is truly humbling to receive the Jack Kilby Medal, and I was very surprised when I got the news,” Barnwell said. “To me, being part of the DSP revolution of the second half of the 20^th century was one of the great adventures of all time, and I was lucky enough to arrive on the scene at exactly the right time.

“In addition, I arrived at exactly the right place, because Georgia Tech in the early 1970s was determined to become a major research institution. The challenges were huge, but so were the opportunities–you cannot ask for more than that,” he continued. “The Georgia Tech DSP research program was (and is) very much a team activity, and being part of that amazing group of faculty and students as they grew to worldwide preeminence has been the joy of my life.”

“Given the current student/faculty ratios, economic factors, and tightening federal research dollars from the last year, the School of ECE is doing an extraordinary job both in education and research,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE.

“The innovation and ingenuity that I see from our faculty, staff, and students on a daily basis are inspiring and invigorating,” McLaughlin said. “I sincerely appreciate the hard work, dedication, and creativity of our faculty, staff, and students that keeps us ranked among the very best in the country.”

The College of Engineering placed sixth overall and second among public universities, and for the third year in a row, all 11 of the programs within the College are in the top 10. Georgia Tech appears on the top 10 list of engineering specialties more than any other ranked institution. Tech’s programs in business, computer science, mathematics, and physical science also placed well in the annual rankings.

About the U.S. News & World Report Rankings

Rankings for the engineering colleges (or engineering schools as they are known at some universities) that provided data were calculated based on a weighted average of 10 indicators, while specific specialty rankings are based on peer assessments. To see more information on how the rankings are determined, visit  http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/2014/03/10/methodology-2015-best-engineering-schools-rankings.

The bandwidth and energy demands from multicore microprocessors, along with the increasing need for heterogeneous nanoelectronic systems featuring RF, logic, and memory, have caused the semiconductor industry to explore 3D and 2.5D integration methodologies. The key technology driving this integration innovation is through-silicon-vias (TSVs). Parag and Bakir have designed, fabricated, and characterized a new generation of electrical TSVs that exhibit low electrical loss and thermomechanical stress. Two examples of the novel TSVs are: 1) photodefined polymer-clad TSVs and 2) photodefined polymer-embedded vias. With respect to the first approach, TSVs consist of "thick" polymer dielectric liner, which is in contrast to current state-of-the-art TSVs that feature thin silicon dioxide liner. The thick polymer liner helps reduce TSV stress and electrical loss. With respect to the second approach, TSVs consist of copper vias embedded in photodefined polymer wells that help attain even greater reduction in electrical loss.

To characterize the fabricated TSV technologies, both thermomechanical and electrical characterizations were performed in this research. First, in collaboration with Dr. Suresh Sitaraman (George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering), thermomechanical strain characterization was performed for the fabricated polymer-clad TSVs using synchrotron x-ray diffraction (XRD) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, demonstrating 30 percent reduction in the maximum first principal strain in the silicon compared to state-of-the-art TSVs. Then, high-frequency characterization was performed for the fabricated polymer-embedded vias, demonstrating up to 80 percent reduction in the TSV insertion loss at 50 GHz compared to state-of-the-art TSVs.

The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems of interest to IBM and which are fundamental to innovation including innovative software, new types of computers, technology, and interdisciplinary projects that create social and business value. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are awarded a stipend for one academic year and are matched with an IBM mentor according to their technical interests.

Christopher J. Rozell and Mark A. Davenport, both ECE assistant professors, received National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Awards, and Davenport also received an Air Force Young Investigator Award. They are both members of the Center for Signal and Information Processing, considered one of the world’s most preeminent groups of digital signal processing academic and research faculty.

“It is truly a major achievement for Mark and Chris to receive these three highly regarded awards in the area of big data within literally a matter of days,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of ECE. “I really look forward to watching them continue to enhance their already excellent capabilities as researchers and educators in this emerging, exciting field.”

A member of the ECE faculty since 2008, Rozell received an NSF CAREER Award for his project entitled "Exploiting Low-Dimensional Structure in Data for More Effective, Efficient, and Interactive Machine Intelligence." In this work, he is developing fundamental theory and algorithms for processing large-scale data, resulting in research that has potential benefits in any area of science and technology where data plays a fundamental role.

Rozell will develop mathematical approaches to improve the ability of machines to effectively recognize when multiple data examples arise from the same underlying phenomenon, efficiently reduce data sizes while still retaining crucial information for decision making, and optimally interact with people to learn about new data from human experts. While he will focus on developing general tools, Rozell will use computer vision tasks such as object labeling to provide accepted benchmarks for the resulting methods. To complement these technical objectives, he will also engage, recruit, and educate a diverse collection of students to STEM careers by developing curricular and outreach materials that illustrate how mathematics can be used in information systems.

A member of the ECE faculty since 2012, Davenport received the NSF CAREER Award for his project, "Learning from Coarse, Nonmetric, and Incomplete Data."  In addition, he was awarded a grant from the Air Force Young Investigator Research Program for his project, "Solving Inference and Inverse Problems Using Soft Data." Both projects center on developing mathematical models and algorithms for dealing with data that is "soft" in the sense that it consists of qualitative data like categories and comparisons rather than precise numerical values. Such data frequently arises in contexts where a key source of data consists of judgments made by people, as occurs in recommendation systems, personalized and predictive medicine, and personalized learning.

In this research, Davenport will study how low-dimensional models can be used in these contexts to help perform inference and tackle inverse problems where data, in addition to being “soft”, may also be dynamically changing and highly incomplete. While such challenges arise in many applications, a particularly important focus of Davenport’s research will be on the application of these techniques to personalized learning systems that aim to help automatically design customized assignments that are tailored to a student’s individual needs.

Faculty Bios

Christopher J. Rozell

Rozell holds the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professorship in ECE. He is the recipient of the 2014 Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award and the 2013 Georgia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning/BP Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. Prior to joining Tech, Rozell spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley. While a Ph.D. student at Rice University, he held a Texas Instruments Distinguished Graduate Fellowship and the Nettie S. Autrey Memorial Fellowship. Rozell’s research and educational interests include biological and computational vision, theoretical and computational neuroscience, high-dimensional data analysis, distributed computing in novel architectures, and applications in imaging, remote sensing, and biotechnology.

Mark A. Davenport

Prior to his arrival at Tech, Davenport spent two years as an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University and as a visitor with the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, France. While a Ph.D. student at Rice University, Davenport was a co-recipient of the 2007 Hershel M. Rich Invention Award for his work on the single-pixel camera and compressive sensing, and in 2011 he was awarded the Ralph Budd Award for the best Ph.D. thesis in the George R. Brown School of Engineering. His research and educational interests are in the areas of statistical signal processing, machine learning, low-dimensional signal models, and compressive sensing and low-rank matrix recovery.

Entitled “FastBeam: Practical Fast Beamforming for Indoor Environments,” the award-winning paper presented a solution that uses a suite of algorithmic strategies to enable fast and practical indoor Wi-Fi beamforming using only received signal strength indicator (RSSI). FastBeam consists of both optimality-preserving techniques and heuristic approaches that are selectively applied depending on the rate of change of the channel. The paper also presents experimental results from an implementation of FastBeam on the Phocus Array System with eight antennas. The results show that FastBeam reduces the time complexity for RSSI-based beamforming by an average of 50 percent and by up to 75 percent compared to existing approaches. This translates into a data rate improvement of 40 to 80 percent.

Shih is an ECE Ph.D. student and is advised by Sivakumar, who is a Ken Byers Professor in ECE and is the leader of the Georgia Tech Networks and Mobile Computing Group.

Both Park and Hu are Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab, based in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Their advisor is ECE Assistant Professor Hua Wang. 

Park is developing novel design methodologies and implementation techniques to realize ultra-compact and low-loss passive networks for RF and mm-wave circuits in a standard CMOS process. These passive networks include filters, quadrature hybrids, power combiners/splitters, and beam-forming networks for phased-array systems with concurrent multi-beam operations.

Hu is creating advanced wireless transmitter technologies by leveraging digitally intensive circuit architectures. Compared to conventional RF transmitter architectures, these digital transmitter architectures are particularly conducive to System-on-Chip integration in a highly scaled CMOS process (28nm and below) to realize low-cost energy-efficient mobile wireless data links. These circuit architectures achieve enhanced transmitter performance in back-off energy efficiency, linearity, bandwidth, and reliability.

Alford is president and CEO of Allied Energy Services, based in Conyers, Ga., and is currently responsible for over $5 billion of energy projects in Central and North America. He has also served as co-chair of the Pine 2 Energy Coalition. Nationally known for his entrepreneurship and strategic planning expertise, Alford has developed six startup companies.

Prior to joining Allied, Alford was president and CEO of A&C Enercom, a full-service utility consulting firm that employed over 700 people with 31 offices nationwide. He founded A&C Enercom in 1978, and it grew to be one of the most respected utility service companies in the utility industry. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment on energy policy issues.

A proud “helluva engineer,” Alford serves on several boards at Georgia Tech and is a past chairman for the advisory boards of both the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the College of Engineering. He has also served as chair of the Board of Trustees for the Georgia Tech Alumni Association and was awarded the Dean Griffin Award for Community Service in 2001 and was inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni in 1997. This year, he and his wife were inducted into the Hill Society, a prestigious association of alumni, corporations, foundations, and friends who are principal philanthropists of Georgia Tech.

Alford is currently a member of the University System of Georgia Board of Regents, a body of volunteers that oversees the 31 colleges and universities that comprise the University System. The Board also has oversight of the Georgia Archives and the Georgia Public Library System. From 1983-1993, he was a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, where he served as chair of the energy subcommittee, chair of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority oversight committee, and chair of the DeKalb and Rockdale County Legislative Delegation. He is active in many non-profit and charitable organizations in the City of Conyers-Rockdale County area.

Tabrizian is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Integrated MEMS Laboratory in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and he graduated with his Ph.D. last December under the direction of ECE Professor Farrokh Ayazi. Ayazi was also a co-author on the paper.

In this paper, Tabrizian and Ayazi presented a micro-mechanical pressure sensor that uses a combination of different resonance modes of a thin vertical silicon membrane for the realization of absolute pressure sensing. The novel combinatorial sensing scheme introduced in this work is based on independent excitation of two high-Q acoustic eigen-modes of the membrane, with a small frequency split but a large difference in sensitivity to the mass-loading effect of ambient gas molecules. A linear combination of these modes is then used as a pressure sensor with an amplified sensitivity. 

Such an approach not only improves the sensitivity and resolution, but also obviates the need for low-pressure hermetic encapsulation that is commonly used in MEMS differential pressure sensors. This work is part of the team's research on the investigation and utilization of a piezoelectrically-activated single crystal silicon platform as a test bed for controllable and designable mixed-domain physical interactions. Such interactions can be used for implementation of various low-power micro- and nano-physical sensors that can be integrated on a single die to realize monolithic sensor nodes and single-chip sensor fusion.

Born in Kalamazoo, Mich. on April 1, 1942, Dr. Dorsey received the B.A. degree from Purdue University in 1964 in Creative Writing, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Systems Science from Michigan State University in 1969 and 1980, respectively. He served honorably in Vietnam as a Navy officer aboard the carrier Valley Forge and later as a member of the Beach Jumpers.

Dr. Dorsey taught in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 30 years, before retiring in 2010 and earning the title of Professor Emeritus. Among the more recent courses he taught were ECE 2040 Circuit Analysis, ECE 3085 Linear Systems, ECE 4551 Principles of Feedback Control, and ECE 6551 Digital Control, as well as ECE Senior Design. He was devoted to giving the students an extremely clear and complete exposition of the technical subject, punctuated with colorful and entertaining stories from his varied experiences. His scholarly contributions include numerous papers on topics ranging from robotics to large scale power systems, the textbook entitled Continuous and Discrete Control Systems with CD-ROM (McGraw-Hill, 2001), and the development of several instructional laboratories at Georgia Tech. During his career at Georgia Tech, he supervised one postdoctoral fellow and graduated 12 Ph.D. students and 11 master’s students.

Dr. Dorsey won the Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award in the School of ECE in 2007-08; this honor was determined by a majority vote of the ECE senior class. He was also a Senior Member of IEEE.

He was married to Mary Ann (Ingram) Weitnauer from 1984-2011 and is survived by his sons, James Edward Dorsey and Andrew Thomas Dorsey, and his siblings, Jackie Benton, Barbara Gunger, and Thomas Dorsey.

Memorial Service Information (Updated January 31)

A memorial service for ECE Professor Emeritus John F. Dorsey will be held at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, February 11 at the chapel of A.S. Turner and Sons, 2773 N. Decatur Road, Decatur, Ga. 30033, (404) 292-1551. The family will receive friends at the funeral home one hour prior to, as well as just after the service.

Recipients of these awards will be honored at the annual Roger P. Webb Awards Program, which will take place April 23 from 3-5 p.m. in the Klaus Building Atrium. To nominate an individual for an award, please visit the 2014 Roger P. Webb Awards Program website for specific instructions on how to submit nomination packages. 

For more information about this event, contact Andrew Peterson at 404.894.4697, peterson@ece.gatech.edu for general inquiries. For specific award categories, contact:

Student awards: Greg Durgin, 404.894.2951, durgin@ece.gatech.edu

Staff awards: Linda Dillon, 404.894.7574, linda.dillon@ece.gatech.edu

Faculty awards: Jackie Nemeth, 404.894.2906, jackie.nemeth@ece.gatech.edu