2019 Annual Magazine The University of Arizona Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering P.O. Box 210104 Tucson, AZ 85721-0104 520.621.6193 head@ece.arizona.edu ece.engineering.arizona.edu The annual ECE magazine is published for alumni and friends of the University of Arizona Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering. All contents Š2019 Arizona Board of Regents. All rights reserved. The University of Arizona is an equal opportunity, affirmative action institution. The university prohibits discrimination in its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation or gender identity, and is committed to maintaining an environment free from sexual harassment and retaliation. Produced by Susan Novosel and UA Engineering Marketing and Communications. Illustrations and graphic design by Dennis Rhodes. Contributing writers: Emily Dieckman, Miles Schneiderman and Paul Tumarkin. Photography: Pete Brown, Jacob Chinn and Paul Tumarkin.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
A Model of Success: Welcome to ECE by Tamal Bose
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ECE by the Numbers
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Design Day and Student Awards
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Ali Bilgin, Janet Meiling Roveda and Jerzy Rozenblit: Boots on the Ground for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
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Marwan Krunz: Bringing 5G Whiz to a Cell Network Near You
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Kathleen Melde: Going Wireless for Chip-to-Chip Communications
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Ali Akoglu: Five Nanosecond Decision-Making: New Chip Design Speeds Up Calculations
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Kelly Potter: Systems Designed to Take the Heat and Sustain Nations
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Hao Xin: Lunewave Startup Improves Vision for Self-Driving Vehicles
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Ravi Tandon: Secure and Efficient Big Data Processing
20 Jonathan Sprinkle: The End of the Road for Stop-and-Go Traffic 22
Faculty Acknowledgements
24 ECE Welcomes New Faculty 25
Core Faculty
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Research Areas, Books, Monographs, Editorships and Patents
28 Alumni News 29
Thank You for Your Gift
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Industrial Advisory Board
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IAB Member Profile: Anthony Mulligan
A Model of Success: Welcome to ECE by Tamal Bose Dear friends, I am excited to deliver this news to alumni, industry partners, donors, students, faculty members, staff and colleagues. You are what makes ECE great. Thank you to our: • Students, whose academic diligence is translating to professional success. • Faculty, whose new ways of teaching are improving outcomes in Arizona and around the world. • Researchers, who are doing life-changing work and commercializing their inventions. • Funders and donors, who support our students, faculty, programs and research. • Staff, whose hard work and commitment are invaluable. It is an honor to lead such a progressive engineering department.
Extending Global Reach
TAMAL BOSE Professor
On-campus enrollment is at about 400 undergraduates and 200 graduate students, half MS and half PhD. Online programs are growing fast. Enrollment for the 4-year-old online MS degree program is at 150, and recruitment is in full swing for the fully online BS program launched last year. The University of Mauritius will become the site of ECE’s first micro-campus in fall 2019. The department is also negotiating with several universities in other countries for micro-campuses. Year after year, ECE graduate students are winning fellowships and best-paper awards, and undergraduates are on multidisciplinary teams that take top prizes for industry-sponsored projects at the UA’s Engineering Design Day.
Cultivating Entrepreneurial Community About a quarter of ECE faculty members are operating successful startups. Two recent UA spinoffs – Hao Xin’s Lunewave and Bane Vasic’s Codelucida – are experiencing rapid growth as they move their inventions to market with the help of venture capital and angel investments. The economic health of our region and country are dependent on business endeavors such as these.
Accumulating Recognition and Awards Four new faculty members joined the department last year: assistant professors Boulat Bash and Quntao Zhuang, assistant professor of practice Rawa Adla, and professor of practice Dale Hetherington. The National Science Foundation has renewed its support of the Broadband Wireless Access Center for a second five-year term. The NSF Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center, led by Salim Hariri, was also renewed for another five years. Faculty awards are also stacking up. Ravi Tandon won early career awards from NSF and Keysight. Ming Li got a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, and Ali Akoglu received a substantial DARPA research award.
Leaving Legacies and Looking Forward The department is sad to announce the retirement of Miklos Szilagyi, who served ECE for 36 years and left an exceptional legacy of scholarship. He will be missed. We look forward to another year of working to improve the lives of people in Arizona, across the nation and throughout the world. Best regards,
Tamal Bose Professor and Department Head
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ECE by the Numbers
*Minority Students – Students who identify as belonging to one or more of the following ethnic groups: Black/African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native.
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Design Day and Student Awards Engineering Design Day The ECE department was well represented at Engineering Design Day 2018. Teams with ECE members won $25,000 in prize money. Design Day showcases the yearlong capstone design work of UA engineering seniors. Teams receive dedicated budgets and the support of professional mentors to plan, build and test tools and technologies in areas ranging from aerospace to electronics to energy to medicine. Some projects result in patents, commercial projects or full-time job offers. The annual event has been held since 2001. (Left) Teams 17003, top, and 17079 at Engineering Design Day 2018.
Student Interface Awards for Excellence The annual Student Interface Awards for Excellence recognize ECE faculty, staff and teaching assistants who support our students by making them feel they are essential and valued members of the university community.
2017–2018 Winners (From left) Faculty awardees Michael Marcellin, Kay Thamvichai and Tosiron Adegbija; staff awardee Sydney Donaldson; teaching assistant awardee Sree Ramya Malladi.
Outstanding ECE Senior and Graduate Student Each semester, the College of Engineering honors outstanding students nominated by their professors and department heads.
GARRETT VANHOY, OUTSTANDING GRADUATE STUDENT Garrett taught two challenging ECE classes as a lecturer and received the Junior Faculty Award for Excellence at the Student Interface in 2015 and 2016. He put into practice many of the skills he gained in the Research Experience for Undergraduates program to find success as a graduate student and researcher. His expertise in the field of cognitive radios as well as his solid theoretical background in wireless communications have made him a valuable contributor to ongoing research in massive MIMO and other 5G technologies. Garrett Vanhoy
SPENCER VALANCIUS, OUTSTANDING SENIOR
Spencer Valancius
Spencer is a five-year U.S. Army veteran. His background spans both the software and hardware implementation realms with industry-relevant skills. His paper “Balancing the Learning Ability and Memory Demand of a PerceptronBased Dynamically Trainable Neural Network” was published in the Journal of Supercomputing in 2018. He is also a co-author of the paper “Filling the Gaps of the TrueNorth Chip,” which will be submitted to the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, and the lead author of “Implementation of IBM’s TrueNorth Chip on a FieldProgrammable Gate Array,” which will be submitted to the journal ACM Transactions of Reconfigurable Systems and Technology.
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Boots on the Ground for the Fourth Industrial Revolution ECE researchers are making medical scanning smarter, using virtual tools to train surgeons and creating sensors for remote patient care.
ALI BILGIN: AI FOR MRI ECE associate professor Ali Bilgin has spent more than a decade making magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, faster and more efficient. Now he’s teaching the technology to make decisions for itself and speeding up the image-creation process. “These artificial intelligence methods are now complementing what we’ve done over the past decade in terms of the data acquisition, so now we have a fast pipeline overall,” said Bilgin. “We can acquire data very quickly and come up with an image very quickly.”
ALI BILGIN Associate Professor
With faster image scanning, patients spend less time lying perfectly still in an MRI tube, reducing their discomfort and the likelihood that movement – even breathing or digestion – will cause artifacts, or inaccuracies, in the image. However, reducing scan time can mean increasing post-processing time. The MRI gathers raw data more quickly, but the process of performing the computations to put together the image is lengthier. That is, until artificial intelligence methods made image processing faster and easier.
Bilgin also wants to add more quantitative information to the images. These days, extensively trained radiologists make determinations about images – whether someone has a cyst, for example. “Historically, this is how they do it, and they are fantastic at it,” Bilgin said. “But by taking absolute measurements, you can make decisions based on actual values instead of eyeballing things. Just by getting the quantitative values, we may be able to make more precise decisions.”
ECE researchers use the 3 Tesla research MRI scanner at the Biosciences Research Laboratory. (From left) Manoj Saranathan, Ali Bilgin, Mahesh Keerthivasan, Artin Majdi, Jose Rosado-Toro, Lavanya Umapathy, Phillip Martin, Zhiyang Fu and Charles Iglehart.
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The 150,000-square-foot UA Bioscience Research Laboratories Building houses an integrated imaging facility that includes a 3 Tesla human MRI scanner.
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JERZY ROZENBLIT: VIRTUAL REALITY FOR SURGICAL TRAINING Jerzy Rozenblit, University Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering, is using virtual reality to help surgeons in training practice doing laparoscopic surgery. “Essentially, we are able to reconstruct training space for our subjects, for learning how to execute particular laparoscopic tasks,” Rozenblit said. “You see the operating space, and it feels like you are in the operating field yourself.” Rozenblit’s electromechanical Computer Aided Surgical Trainer nudges a person’s hand in the right direction. And Microsoft’s HoloLens enables trainers to introduce unexpected events, such as an artery bursting, to test a surgeon’s proficiency.
JERZY ROZENBLIT University Distinguished Professor and Raymond J. Oglethorpe Endowed Chair
“It’s very similar to, say, aviation cockpit training, where the instructor might suddenly introduce an engine failure to see how the aspiring pilot would react to it,” Rozenblit said. “Will they go through all the proper steps needed to react to this emergency?”
A $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation is funding the research. This year Rozenblit will conduct a small pilot study followed by a statistical study with 150 to 200 surgeons, from beginners to experts. He is looking toward the day when surgeons will use these techniques to learn to operate sophisticated robots like the da Vinci Surgical System, which enables surgeons to perform complex operations through a few small incisions.
(Left) Overall setup and use of the Computer Aided Surgical Trainer.
(Right) C2SHIP planning meeting.
JANET ROVEDA: SENSORS FOR REMOTE CARE Health care-in-place is the practice of monitoring and caring for patients remotely – in their own homes, or in place. To develop the UA Center to Stream Healthcare in Place, or C2SHIP, professor Janet Roveda and a team of UA researchers are working with five other universities – the University of Southern California, Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Missouri, the California Institute of Technology and the University of Texas – plus about 22 pharmaceutical, medical and technology giants, including Google and IBM.
JANET MEILING ROVEDA Professor
Patients wear on their bodies data-collecting sensors that wirelessly transmit information to medical professionals, who in turn monitor patient care in real time and can even adjust treatment through the sensors. Roveda’s team is focused on speeding up the data exchange and collaborating with other UA researchers to develop a prototype.
“We basically want to shorten the time it takes to get information from a patient to the hospital or the clinic,” Roveda said. Additional ECE faculty involved with C2SHIP are co-investigators Linda Powers, Kathie Melde and Hao Xin, as well as Roman Lysecky and Jerzy Rozenblit. “We are putting all of the pieces together in-house at the UA,” said Roveda. “Then, what we’ll do with this prototype is use the best cybersecurity technology to secure it. One of ECE’s major strengths is wireless cybersecurity.” 2019 ANNUAL M AG A ZINE
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Bringing 5G Whiz to a Cell Network Near You
Energy
Ag Tech
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Manufacturing, Construction, Mining
Transportation & Logistics
Small Data
Connectivity
Sensing Consumer loT
Smart City
Fog Computing The next phase of the Broadband Wireless Access and Applications Center will focus on applications for 5G technologies, including mobile edge computing, also known as “fog computing.”
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ou’ve probably heard the terms 3G, 4G and maybe even 5G. They’re all generations of cellular systems, ranging from the very first analog cellphones running on 1G to today’s high-speed smartphones running on 4G. UA researchers are working with industry on 5G – even faster systems with extremely low latency, which means minimal delays in processing. “5G is happening as we speak,” said Marwan Krunz, ECE’s Kenneth Von Behren Endowed Professor and director of the Broadband Wireless Access and Applications Center. “It’s a leap forward from 4G, both in terms of speed and in terms of what it can do. This low latency allows us to do things that were not imagined before: remote surgery, interactive vehicles, autonomous vehicles, which all require very rapid responses.”
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The UA BWAC team, which includes Krunz and Tamal Bose, head of ECE, is using a $550,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, plus more than $1.25 million in funding from industry partners – such as Raytheon, Keysight, General Dynamics, L3 Technologies and DENSO – to lead five universities and more than 17 companies on a five-year second phase of the project. Phase 1 was focused on specific technologies like cognitive and software-defined radio. Phase 2 centers on partnering with units across campus that will use 5G in their research areas, such as health and telemedicine or smart transportation. Said Krunz, “Wireless technology is really the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” which is fusing technology and blurring the lines between cyberphysical systems.
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FROM CLOUD-BASED TO FOG-BASED Data stored in cloud-based applications, such as Dropbox or Google Docs, doesn’t live on computers – it lives in remote data centers. With applications that demand a virtually instantaneous response, like telemedicine or smart transportation, the distance between user and cloud becomes a concern. Researchers are addressing it with mobile edge computing. “Mobile edge computing is cloud computing brought physically closer to the user,” said Krunz. “We sometimes call it fog computing, because clouds are farther away while fog is closer.” In a smart transportation system, for example, the data center
envisioning and working on the next generation of Wi-Fi systems that operate over unlicensed spectrum, but at much higher capacity than Wi-Fi. People refer to it as Wi-Gig.” Antenna size decreases as radio frequency increases, so multiple mmW antennas can occupy a small space and send and receive data without interfering with one another. Past technologies required larger antennas more widely spaced out to avoid interference. “Antennas are getting smaller and smaller,” Krunz said. “In our lab, we have a grid of 64 antennas that’s about the size of the bottom of a coffee cup.”
“Mobile edge computing is cloud computing brought physically closer to the user,” said Krunz. “We sometimes call it fog computing, because clouds are farther away while fog is closer.” — MARWAN KRUNZ, Kenneth Von Behren Endowed Professor
could be in a unit attached to a traffic light. In a medical setting, it might be in an on-site router – anything that would allow for information sharing with minimal delay. “New capabilities such as 5G are changing the options for vehicleto-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications,” said Larry Head, interim dean of the College of Engineering and director of the UA Transportation Research Institute. “I suspect in the future, we will be able to send significantly more data with very low latency. The work BWAC is doing is paving the way for these transformations.”
THE WI-GIG REVOLUTION
They say with great power comes great responsibility, so, aside from researching how to most effectively use mmW frequencies, the BWAC team is also developing heightened security measures for wireless communications and ensuring systems like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can operate on the same frequencies without getting in each other’s way. “Wireless applications are just ubiquitous – everybody is demanding more and faster data all the time,” said Bose, coprincipal investigator on the project. “And BWAC is a prominent National Science Foundation center working on spectrum issues and wireless security.”
One thing making this research possible is the Federal Communications Commission opening up millimeter wave, or mmW, frequencies, which are high on the radio frequency spectrum. Every wireless transmission – from Wi-Fi to AM and FM radio to simple devices like garage door openers – operates somewhere on this spectrum. Companies and industry spend billions of dollars to determine who gets pieces of the spectrum. “The FCC made a small experiment in the late ’90s and unlicensed a small amount of spectrum to something people didn’t know much about at the time: Wi-Fi,” Krunz said. “They figured they’d see what innovation could bring, and they got the WiFi revolution, complete with hot spots and everything. We’re
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Going Wireless for Chip-to-Chip Communications
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n the early days, connecting a computer to the worldwide web required an Ethernet cable. Then came Wi-Fi, and computers connected to the internet via radio waves. Now ECE professor Kathleen Melde is using tiny antennas instead of wires for communications inside computers themselves. “If I have a computer with a lot of different chips that need to talk to each other, and I use physical wires to connect them, that’s going to get very complicated and bulky, and the wires can fail,” Melde said.
MAKING NONTRADITIONAL CONNECTIONS Most of the computers consumers buy off the shelf today are multicore computers. The chips inside the computers contain multiple cores, or units, that receive instructions and perform calculations to carry out specific functions.
Recent computer engineering research has focused on improving systems on chips, or the connections between the different cores in individual chips, making them smaller, faster and KATHLEEN MELDE more efficient. However, there is a limit to the Professor If the wires inside fail, they are difficult to fix, number of cores that can fit on a single chip, so added Prabhat Baniya, a doctoral student working a key workaround has been to use several chips with Melde. within the same computer, which also need to communicate with “Wires have to be laid out on a board, and once you’ve laid the one other. These systems are called networks on chips, or NoCs. wires, you can’t change it,” he explained. “It’s like wiring for a house: It’s very difficult to change once you’ve already set up the electrical system.”
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Switched-Beam Array
Chip-to-chip communication using reconfigurable antenna arrays. “Colonies of ants can take something really huge and work in unison to move it. Similarly, multicores in computers work in unison to share a task,” Melde explained. “The traditional way of doing this is with wires. We’re removing the wires between chips altogether and putting in small, reconfigurable antennas, allowing the chips to communicate with one another.”
Perhaps the biggest advantage of using 60 GHz is that signals on this frequency have high levels of attenuation, or loss of signal over space. That’s a disadvantage if communications are being sent over a long range, but with extremely short-range communications, like between two chips on the same computer, it’s a plus.
USING NOT JUST ANY ANTENNAS
“If I put two computers right near each other, then the 60 GHz on one computer is not going to interfere with the 60 GHz on another computer,” Melde said. “That’s what’s really special about 60 GHz.”
The reconfigurable antennas can communicate in eight different directions – north, south, east, west and four ways diagonally – and change paths as needed. Communications between chips won’t get stuck in a bottleneck simply because there’s a broken physical link between two chips. Since the chips are communicating via antenna beam, if one channel doesn’t work, the data has seven other paths along which to travel. “When you have a wireless system, you have to wait for a channel to broadcast,” said Janet Meiling Roveda, an ECE professor who has collaborated with Melde. “With Dr. Melde’s technology, you won’t have to wait for a channel to free up before you send a signal.” The antennas operate on a 60 GHz frequency, part of the millimeter wave frequencies. The Federal Communications Commission recently made these frequencies on the high end of the radio frequency spectrum available for free. Because antenna size decreases as frequency increases, the antennas in these chips can be about 20 times smaller than the antennas in a typical cellphone. Plus, circuits that operate at this frequency are already available, so Melde’s team doesn’t have to manufacture them.
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(Top of previous page) Kathleen Melde and PhD student Prabhat Baniya analyze the field visualization of their antenna arrays. (Above) Fabricated antenna array prototype next to a penny for size comparison.
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Five Nanosecond Decision-Making: NEW CHIP DESIGN SPEEDS UP CALCULATIONS
Scheduling based on three types of processors: Three applications arrive in random order. The scheduler dynamically delegates the tasks at run time to minimize the total execution time.
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omputer scientists develop algorithms that control everything from unmanned aerial vehicles to desktop computers and cellphones. But matching the code to widely varying hardware systems can be difficult and time consuming.
University, the University of Michigan, Arm, EpiSys and GDMS. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is funding the project. The UA’s portion of the grant is $820,000.
“Each of these hardware architectures comes with its own programming environment, and you need a hardware expert who understands what’s under the hood so you can restructure your algorithms to overlap the target hardware architecture,” said ECE associate professor Ali Akoglu. “Only then do you get optimal performance.” Akoglu is partnering with researchers from private companies and other universities to develop intelligent systems on chips, or SoCs, that automatically map software to hardware, fast. Collaborators include Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon
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(From left) PhD students Nirmal Kumbhare and Joshua Mack with Ali Akoglu in the Reconfigurable Computing Lab.
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“Each of these hardware architectures comes with its own programming environment, and you need a hardware expert who understands what’s under the hood so you can restructure your algorithms to overlap the target hardware architecture,” said ECE associate professor Ali Akoglu. “Only then do you get optimal performance.” — ALI AKOGLU, Associate Professor
DESIGNING FOR DARPA
FIVE TASKS AND FIVE NANOSECONDS
These new chip-based systems won’t just automatically map software to hardware. DARPA wants them to be domain-specific – that is, still able to complete more than one task but without being so generalized they sacrifice speed or quality of functions for quantity.
There’s one more element that makes this new technology stand out. The DARPA grant stipulates that the SoC must run five applications at a time. Like a student taking five classes that all involve completing a series of assignments, the chip has to do some careful planning and resource allocation to quickly and efficiently complete each task for each application.
Additionally, the SoCs must be able to incorporate new applications as technology advances. For example, if a computer scientist develops code for a brand-new function – like sending holograms via text – the SoC must map the software for that technology onto the hardware of the chip. The team’s answer to DARPA’s challenge is a “domain-focused advanced softwarereconfigurable heterogeneous SoC,” or DASH-SoC. “When you bring in a graduate student to work with a new hardware architecture, it takes three to six months for them to learn the programming environment and another six months to optimize it,” said Akoglu, director of the Reconfigurable Computing Lab and site director of the NSF Center for Cloud and Autonomic Computing. “When you consider this productivity problem, having a system interface that translates your code to a target architecture at the push of a button is a very ambitious goal.” While computer engineers like Akoglu create algorithms that everyone from heart surgeons to biologists use to better predict outcomes, DARPA wants systems specifically for software radio, which includes applications ranging from cellphones to national security. 2019 ANNUAL M AG A ZINE
Akoglu and ASU’s Umit Ogras are leading the development of an intelligent scheduler that maps out which physical areas of the chip complete which tasks when. The scheduler will improve over time via machine learning, the way a student would create a more efficient schedule during senior year than freshman year. “The intelligent scheduler will learn how to schedule the tasks for specialized processors and control the power needed to process them,” Ogras said. “As a result, we will deliver very powerful, energyefficient and easy-to-use SoCs that can be used in a wide range of communications and radar applications.” DARPA’s goal is an intelligent scheduler that takes only five nanoseconds for each decision. Chips with such intelligent scheduling technology don’t exist, so creating them at all is ambitious. Designing such a fast system adds an entirely different dimension. “That five nanoseconds business is giving me high blood pressure,” Akoglu joked. “But without setting these aggressive goals, we can’t push technology to the next level.”
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Systems Designed to Take the Heat and Sustain Nations
1. Environmental degradation chamber at the Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy. 2. ECE PhD student Teh Lai inside an environmental degradation chamber. 3. (From left) ECE undergrad Frances Willberg, recent graduates Nicholas Everhart and Matthew Dzurick, and graduate student Manuelito Chief at the Tucson Electric Power-Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy test yard. 4. Professor Kelly Potter with UA students at the TEP/AzRISE photovoltaic test yard. 5–6. Exterior and interior views of off-grid greenhouse facilities.
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here’s no place in the United States better for harnessing the sun’s power than southern Arizona. But the higher levels of heat and ultraviolet radiation can also affect the photovoltaic, or PV, systems that turn solar energy into electricity. “The ultraviolet light from the sun tends to degrade some of the materials that make up the PV modules,” said ECE professor Kelly Potter. “This can lead to delamination, microcracking, corrosion and all kinds of other things that decrease the modules’ efficiency.” Microcracks – which weren’t necessarily problematic in milder climates where the PV systems were constructed and tested – can expand more quickly in the intense heat, drastic daytime and nighttime temperature differences, and monsoon humidity of the Southwest.
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Decreases in energy efficiency might seem small at first, but over time they stack up, costing utility companies like Tucson Electric Power – and their customers – time and money.
PLANNING FOR EXTREMES Potter, who has a background in optical materials, and her students are investigating ways to make the photovoltaic modules and battery systems better for environments like that found in southern Arizona. Additionally, Potter is researching how to protect space-based optical systems from X-rays, gamma rays and other destructive forms of radiation beyond Earth’s atmosphere. For example, gamma radiation from a solar flare can change optical fiber lines
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“We want to develop a system that is useful, meaningful, transferable and maintainable,” said Potter. “The idea is to take the structure and produce meaningful crops that are useful to the community, because if sweet potatoes grow well, but no one likes to eat sweet potatoes, then you’ve failed.” — KELLY POTTER, Professor
on a satellite from transparent to dark, interfering with the line’s ability to transmit light. “That means my signal would either be completely eliminated or reduced greatly,” Potter said. “And since it costs a lot of money to send stuff into space, you can imagine you don’t want your instruments up there to do that – you want them to function.”
SUSTAINABILITY FOR NAVAJO COMMUNITIES A few years ago, Potter’s work with renewable energy and resilient materials steered her toward the Indigenous Food, Energy, Water Security and Sovereignty, or Indigi-FEWSS, project.
“We want to develop a system that is useful, meaningful, transferable and maintainable,” said Potter. “The idea is to take the structure and produce meaningful crops that are useful to the community, because if sweet potatoes grow well, but no one likes to eat sweet potatoes, then you’ve failed.” Armed with the experience, knowledge and skills to help communities in need, students in Indigi-FEWSS can continue their work on a larger scale. “It is absolutely some of the most fun work I think you can be involved in,” said Potter. “It’s one of the few times that as a student or faculty member you get to collaborate across so many disciplines in such an effective, targeted way.”
Funded by a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, Indigi-FEWSS is the brainchild of UA soil, water and environmental science professor Karletta Chief. The project brings together professors in engineering, water and soil, and education to address food, energy and water security and workforce development in indigenous communities. “ECE is contributing expertise and knowledge in solar and organic photovoltaic systems as well as in learning modules to train tribal college students in energy concepts,” Chief said. About 35 percent of the homes in the Navajo Nation aren’t connected to central power or water, leaving an estimated 54,000 people without safe drinking water or sanitation, according to the latest census. And groundwater in the area is high in saline. “That’s not necessarily ideal for growing crops, it’s not ideal for livestock and it’s certainly not ideal for people,” Potter said. Indigi-FEWSS is working with Diné College in Apache County, which serves the Navajo Nation, to create a solar-powered agricultural greenhouse that includes water filtration and photovoltaic systems for clean water and power. Potter and two ECE graduate students are designing the electrical systems.
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Karletta Chief, left, with Indigi-FEWSS students in a UA Controlled Environment Agriculture Center greenhouse. (Photo by Torran Anderson)
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Lunewave Startup Improves Vision for Self-Driving Vehicles
The Luneburg lens design is smaller than a golf ball, making it an ideal, compact option for applications such as automotive radar. (Photo by Paul Tumarkin/Tech Launch Arizona)
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unewave, co-founded in 2017 by professor Hao Xin with his brother John and former student and current postdoctoral researcher Min Liang, designs and manufactures specialized Luneburg lens antennas and radar sensors that can act as the “eyes” of self-driving cars. These technologies, based on research Hao conducted as an ECE professor, have broad applications in sensing and detection, autonomous cars and drones, pollution, water vapor detection, and wireless communication.
Currently, commonly used technologies for advanced driver assistance systems require multiple expensive sensors – including lidar, ultrasonic and optics with limited ranges and sensitivity to adverse weather conditions.
HAO XIN
The UA-invented technologies, on the other hand, use a 3D-printed Luneburg lens, embedded electronics and metalized film dielectrics to replace multiple more expensive conventional sensors. Lunewave vehicle safety systems also scan more efficiently, avoid interference from other intruding radar systems and cover a full 360 degrees. The spherical sensors can detect objects with high resolution, even at long range and in
“If there’s a person or an animal crossing the Professor street at night or when it’s snowing, for example, our radar will be helpful in detecting the object poor weather. and in slowing the vehicle down to prevent a collision,” Hao said. “It will provide information to the computer of the car about “The lens itself is very small,” Hao said. “It’s smaller than a golf which direction to steer to avoid the object or whether to brake.”
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ball, but it’s everything packaged together. And it’s quite sturdy – it can be mounted on a car bumper or in other places.”
something realistic, with practical applications. It’s very exciting and very promising.
STARTUP SUPPORT BY TECH LAUNCH ARIZONA Hao Xin and his team worked with Tech Launch Arizona, or TLA, the office of the UA that commercializes inventions stemming from university research, to protect the intellectual property of Lunewave and develop the company launch strategy. According to Bob Sleeper, TLA licensing manager for the College of Engineering, the technologies offer an affordable option for a previously prohibitively expensive solution. “Together, these two technologies may prove to be the key to allow traditionally expensive luxury car automotive safety systems to be included on much more popular and less expensive cars,” Sleeper said. “Lunewave has the technology and leadership to significantly change the way connected and autonomous vehicles ‘see’ the world around them.”
$5M IN SEED FUNDING Lunewave is currently backed by six venture capital firms, led by Fraser McCombs Capital, along with three strategic investors, including BMW i Ventures, SAIC Ventures and Baidu Ventures. “We are very grateful for the immense support from top-tier investors and high-profile strategic partners,” said John Xin, Lunewave CEO. “Fraser McCombs Capital and others bring deep experience across the global automotive and technology industry, and we are looking forward to hiring top talent and accelerating development to meet demand from customers.” The technology is currently being tested in the newer models of some cars not yet available for sale, but Hao Xin hopes Lunewave’s radars will be ready for mass production in about two years, so they can be available as an affordable feature on regular cars. “As professors, we do a lot of research and create new technologies,” Hao said. “It’s important to convert these new technologies into real products that will actually change people’s lives. We’ve taken this technology and converted it into
IEEE Fellow ECE professor Hao Xin was elevated to IEEE fellow “for his contributions to electromagnetic metamaterials and 3D printing of metamaterial structures” in January 2018. Metamaterials are designed to have properties not found in nature, like a negative refractive index, which bends energy waves backward. Xin’s research into negative refraction has brought the world one step closer toward the possibility of invisibility cloaks. He has also developed ways of 3D printing antennas and radio frequency circuits, which are used to wirelessly transfer information. Kwai-Man Luk, chair professor of electronic engineering at City University of Hong Kong, nominated Xin for the award. “His research outcome has not only enabled efficient fabrication of electromagnetic metamaterials, but also led to new designs that were not able to be fabricated before,” he wrote in his nomination letter.
(Above) Postdoctoral research associate Min Liang, left, and professor Hao Xin with a 3D-printed prototype of a Luneburg lens-based antenna.
Lunewave Takes Top Prize at 2018 IoT World Competition Lunewave won the top award at the Internet of Things World’s 2018 startup pitch competition after being evaluated by a judging panel of industry-focused investors. The IoT World Conference in Santa Clara, California, is an annual global event where more than 12,000 attendees focus on innovation and trends in the internet of things.
2019 ANNUAL M AG A ZINE
Kyle Ellicott, left, chief labs officer and co-founder of ReadWrite Labs, presents John Xin, right, Lunewave’s CEO, with the 2018 IoT World Competition Award.
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Secure and Efficient Big Data Processing
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he National Science Foundation in 2017 granted ECE assistant professor Ravi Tandon a $500,000 Early Career Development Award – the organization’s highest honor for junior faculty – to support his research in large-scale data computing. Businesses, ranging from banks, hospitals and insurance companies to tech giants like Google and Amazon, are processing huge amounts of data every day. To do it efficiently, they divide large computing tasks into smaller chunks and assign the tasks to different machines. For example, by dividing a task into 10 pieces and sending it to 10 machines, computations should theoretically be made 10 times faster. But that’s not the case in reality. “These machines are working on smaller tasks, but in many cases, they need to communicate with each other,” Tandon said. “Let’s say I’ve computed some part of an algorithm. I may now need to send my result to another machine to do the next step, and this machine may need to communicate the subsequent result to another machine. So, there is cross talk between machines within a cluster.” The time computers spend communicating with one another is known as communication overhead, and it often turns out that a significant portion of the overall time spent on a task is dedicated to overhead.
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One method for streamlining communication processes involves introducing redundancies into computations, such as having more than one machine doing the same task or transmitting multiple copies of the same piece of data. This approach originated in the fields of information and coding theory, and it is doubly useful because it also addresses another barrier to effective computing: node failures. After all, even if only one machine out of 10,000 fails, it could hold up the entire process. “When transmitting data over a noisy system, once in a while your information will be lost,” Tandon said. “You have to add protection, such as redundancies, so that even if some information is lost, you still have protected data. I’m interested in the introduction of redundancy in an efficient manner and bringing that idea to the problem of big-data computing.”
A NEW KIND OF SECURITY Big-data computing isn’t Tandon’s only NSF-funded project. He is also working on a relatively new concept for wireless security called physical-layer security, which takes advantage of the way broadcast signals travel by reflecting off different surfaces. This series of reflections means that the information a person receives is in part dependent on their location – being in a different place means a reflection might come at a slightly different angle.
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“We rely on wireless communications for pretty much every single device. So, the implications of making large-scale computing more efficient are enormous.” — RAVI TANDON, Assistant Professor
“Due to this randomness, the channel between a transmitter and a legitimate receiver will almost always be different than the channel from a transmitter to an illegitimate receiver,” Tandon said. “It is this difference that we exploit.” How do they exploit it? When transmitting information, a sender can add artificial noise in such a way that the message comes through clearly for the intended recipient but is obscured for eavesdroppers.
PUSHING THE LIMITS Another area of interest for Tandon is digital privacy and information retrieval, something that affects most people every day, whether they know it or not. “When you watch a movie on Netflix or YouTube, you are revealing your personal preferences about what movies you like to watch to the service provider – that’s how they have a ‘recommended videos’ feature,” Tandon said. “The question we’re interested in is whether we can retrieve information from a server without revealing which information we wanted to get. For example, can I watch The Shawshank Redemption without Netflix knowing that I watched that particular movie?” Tandon is investigating possibilities for keeping preferences private, like downloading part of a movie from one source and another part from a different source, thereby leaving all the providers in the dark. Like all his research, Tandon’s forays into digital privacy involve testing the fundamental limits of such systems and finding out exactly how far they can be pushed. The effects are farreaching: Anyone who uses the internet, even for something as simple as a Google search, is affected by big-data computing and vulnerable to potential data breaches. “We rely on wireless communications on nearly every single device,” Tandon said. “So the implications of making large-scale computing more efficient are enormous.”
2019 ANNUAL M AG A ZINE
Tandon Receives Keysight’s Early Career Award For his work in wireless networks and cloud computing, Keysight Technologies honored ECE assistant professor Ravi Tandon with its 2018 Early Career Professor Award. The award recognizes research-enabling design, testing or measurement of electronic systems. Tandon is working on mechanisms to store, access and compute data in distributed cloud environments, reducing communications overhead while preserving data reliability and security. He also explores methods for signal interference management, a challenge for future networks. “Ravi Tandon has already established himself as a top researcher and academic,” said Tamal Bose, ECE department head. “As he advances in his career, Ravi is going to be a superstar in our field.”
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(Above, from left) Ravi Tandon in a research discussion with ECE PhD students Mohamed Attia and Wei-Ting Chang.
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The End of the Road for Stop-and-Go Traffic
1–3. CAT vehicle field experiment in August 2018. (Photos by John de Dios and Alan Davis). 4. The CAT vehicle team celebrates a successful outcome. (Photo by John de Dios and Alan Davis) 5. Department head Tamal Bose, fourth from left in top row, with 2018 REU students. (Photo by Nancy Emptage) 6. Canyon View Elementary School students with the CAT vehicle. (Photo by Julie T. Farbarik/WikiMedia Commons)
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hat familiar traffic pattern. It develops on crowded roads when vehicles try to keep up with the car ahead of them. One car speeds up, so the car behind it changes speed to keep pace. Then another car merges into traffic, or the road curves, and everyone hits their brakes to slow down. Jonathan Sprinkle, ECE’s Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor, and a team of researchers have discovered that the presence of an autonomous vehicle can dissipate the stop-and-go traffic caused by human driving behavior. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cyber-Physical Systems program, involved the UA’s Cognitive and Autonomous, or CAT, vehicle circling a track with 20 other human-driven cars. The CAT vehicle is equipped with an array of sensors that provide information about how fast each tire is going and superfine position localization so researchers can estimate the distance between the CAT vehicle and other cars. And users can control its velocity remotely. Researchers found that by controlling the pace of the CAT vehicle, they could smooth out the traffic flow for all of the cars, reduce fuel consumption by up to 40 percent and decrease the need for braking.
ECE funded the CAT vehicle to jump-start research into autonomous vehicles. “Part of the democratization of the research here is to see how to make the test bed more usable by other researchers, by other countries, by other faculty and other institutions, so it can lead to more discovery,” Sprinkle said.
GETTING STUDENTS INTO RESEARCH EARLY The CAT vehicle provides an immersive learning opportunity for students through the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. Funded by the NSF, the program enlists students from all over the country to spend a summer at the UA working with the CAT vehicle. They remotely control the vehicle to carry out experiments and analyze their data.
JONATHAN SPRINKLE
“People who otherwise might not have had opportunities to work with autonomous vehicles apply to the summer program and come to the UA for 10 weeks,” Sprinkle said. “And at the end of it, they’re able to show off that they can drive a car autonomously.”
Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor
“This method is intuitively going to lead to fewer accidents, and it’s going to make your drive a lot less stressful,” Sprinkle said. “And you don’t have to wait until all cars are autonomous to get this benefit. We saw this result with only one car out of 20. So it’s the kind of benefit that you can see in the short term, before we achieve this vision of autonomous vehicles being pervasive in society.” In fact, the research group’s latest activity is examining the effectiveness of an available technology, adaptive cruise control – which automatically adjusts a vehicle’s speed to keep a safe distance from cars ahead – on improving traffic flow.
Sprinkle and his students also take the CAT vehicle to elementary schools and teach children simple programming languages to make the car drive around. “You get to show them, ‘You may only be in fourth grade, but you can already make a self-driving car move around,’” Sprinkle said. “What a great message. It’s all made possible by investments from the National Science Foundation and others to really explore what technology can be and how it can make people’s lives better.”
REACHING BEYOND ARIZONA Collaboration has been key to the success of the project. Sprinkle’s ECE team is working with researchers from other University of Arizona colleges as well as Rutgers University, Temple University and the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. And the graduate students in his lab, Rahul Kumar Bhadani, Matt Bunting and Nathalie Risso, have been invaluable. “Our work wouldn’t be possible without them,” Sprinkle said. “They’re doing the technical work that allows the theory to be explored and the work to be carried out.”
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Faculty Acknowledgements Fink Pieces Together Prognostics for Healthy Humans and Prospering Plants ECE associate professor Wolfgang Fink has a knack for seeing how the pieces of a puzzle fit together and finding connections across disciplines to solve a world of problems. These days he is focused on predictive health management, particularly in space, where specially trained, difficult-to-replace astronauts don’t necessarily have access to doctors. If engineers can perfect these health-maintenance methods in space, using them to monitor, improve and maintain human health on Earth should be easy, he said. For this research, he was named a fellow of the Prognostics and Health Management Society in 2018. Fink is one of the founding members of the Mars Agricultural Research Consortium, where he is helping develop techniques to grow plants in Martian greenhouses. He hopes the same predictive measures can be used to plot of the health of lifesustaining crops on Earth. Fink is also working on ways to use smartphones for conducting medical examinations, with particular attention on cloud-based tele-ophthalmology. “It would be something that provides quality health care to those in austere environments like third-world countries, to those deployed in the field or on a ship,” he said. “Basically any area
Wolfgang Fink, right, accepts his fellowship award at the Annual Conference of the Prognostics and Health Management Society 2018. (From left) Brian Weiss, general conference co-chair; Andy Hess, PHM Society president; Rhonda Walthall, PHM Society vice president; and Wolfgang Fink, PHM fellow. (Photo by Chetan Kulkarni)
where you do not have an expert within tens of miles or more.” Fink was recognized as an Arizona Center for Accelerated Biomedical Innovation fellow in 2018, a College of Engineering da Vinci fellow in 2015, and a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in 2012. He is the inaugural Edward and Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair at the University of Arizona.
Melde Takes Her Seat in the “D-Suite” Kathleen “Kathie” Melde, a member of the ECE faculty since 1996, has been named associate dean of faculty affairs for the College of Engineering – the first time in her years at the UA that a female faculty member has held an appointment in the dean’s office. Melde is enthusiastic about contributing to the college’s continued progress. “I’m really going to be an advocate for the faculty, to make sure their priorities and concerns are voiced to the college, as well as to communicate changes to the college back to the faculty in an effective way,” she said. “I would call myself ‘the people dean.’” Melde has received recognition for both her research and teaching techniques throughout her career. She was made an IEEE fellow in 2012 and named a teaching fellow for the college from 2012 to 2014. Melde will transition from professor and director of ECE graduate studies into her new position during the spring 2019 semester. “I am excited to have Kathie in this important role,” said Larry Head, interim dean of the College of Engineering. “The associate dean for faculty affairs will help our college improve diversity, faculty development, collaborations and culture. This is critical to the growth and success of the college.”
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KATHLEEN MELDE
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Szilagyi Retires After 36-Year Tenure Professor Miklos Szilagyi’s professional career in areas ranging from applied physics to computer science, and from biomedical engineering to science and education policy, has spanned 61 years, the last 36 of which he spent at the University of Arizona. He retired in December 2018. “I produced the most important work of my life here at the UA,” Szilagyi said. “My textbook on electron and ion optics is still used for study. I also accomplished some of my most important research right here in the ECE department, the solution to the problem of electron optical synthesis. It had been considered unsolvable even by Nobel Prize winners.” Szilagyi has three doctorates in science and engineering. He introduced a number of new courses to ECE on topics including artificial intelligence, neural networks, agent-based simulation and complexity.
MIKLOS SZILAGYI
Szilagyi has authored 14 books and 103 research publications and has two patents. He is currently working on his 15th book. He has lived in seven countries and speaks four languages: Hungarian, Russian, English and Danish. He was a member of the UA Speakers’ Bureau and served on the UA Faculty Senate. “At one point I was called the ‘conscience’ of this university,” he remembered fondly. Szilagyi received the Brody Prize of the Hungarian Physical Society and was a United Nations Industrial Development Organization fellow. He has served on the editorial boards for the International Journal of BioSciences and Technology and Games Review and the advisory board for the International Journal of Cybernetics and Systemics. He is a member of the American Physical Society and a senior member of IEEE. His name has been repeatedly listed in reference books such as Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America.
Reagan Offers 50-Year Personal Retrospective on Lidar Professor Emeritus John A. Reagan’s very first conference presentation was on lidar, or remote-sensing light waves, at the 49th annual American Meteorological Society meeting in 1969. In January 2019, at the 99th annual AMS meeting, he presented a personal retrospective about the field’s biggest advances and most notable events over the last half-century. “I had no idea that 50 years later I would still be talking about lidar,” he said. “But most ways that you can employ lidar to sense things, I’ve been involved with.” Reagan first learned of lidar as a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin in 1964, and he built his first lidar system in late 1965. Since then, he’s worked with most types of lidar and has witnessed the technology’s advancement and expansion into areas like autonomous vehicles, space navigation and atmospheric sensing – which could mean improved weather predictions in the future. “It is very gratifying and humbling to have been in at the ground floor when it started, and to still be working on it when the technology got into space,” he said.
JOHN A. REAGAN
Reagan joined the faculty at the University of Arizona after finishing his doctorate in 1967, where he spent the next several decades continuing his lidar research and training graduate students to become the next generation of experts in the field. “The reason I came to the UA was because they had a history of cooperating among electrical engineering, atmospheric sciences and the newly formed College of Optical Sciences,” Reagan said. “The idea of interdisciplinary research was exciting, because it enables so many things to happen or be thought of that otherwise wouldn’t be.” Reagan is a fellow of IEEE and a member of the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and SPIE. He has participated on professional and governmental committees, panels and task forces related to lidar remote sensing.
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ECE Welcomes New Faculty RAWA ADLA Rawa Adla started as an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering after spending 12 years in Michigan. She earned her master’s degree in computer and information sciences at the University of Michigan and her doctorate at the University of Detroit Mercy, where she was also a professor. She then became a researcher for the Crash Avoidance Metrics Partnership, a collaboration between Ford and General Motors to improve traffic safety by developing crash-avoidance technologies in passenger vehicles. It was a good fit for Adla, whose research focuses on autonomous driving and connected vehicles, but she wanted to return to academia, and the University of Arizona, with its opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration, offered the perfect opportunity to do so.
BOULAT BASH Boulat Bash joins the department after working at Raytheon BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for three and a half years. Boulat earned an undergraduate degree in economics at Dartmouth College and his MS and PhD degrees in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Bash visited the UA last fall to deliver a colloquium at the College of Optical Sciences, and his wife fell in love with Tucson, so he jumped at the chance to apply for a position here. His research is focused on covert communications, which involves not only protecting the content of communications from adversaries, but keeping adversaries from detecting that communication is happening at all.
DALE HETHERINGTON Dale Hetherington started as a professor of practice in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering after a 25-year career at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The move to Tucson is a return home for Hetherington, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Arizona in 1989 and 1992, respectively. At Sandia National Laboratories, Hetherington worked as a fabrication manager, researching and developing semiconductor devices for different applications. He has also served as a guest lecturer at MIT and IMEC and an adjunct faculty member at the University of New Mexico.
QUNTAO ZHUANG Quntao Zhuang joins the department after finishing a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, where he also worked as a research assistant. Though he studied physics, he selected Jeffrey Shapiro, a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing Science, as his doctoral adviser. There, he met current UA faculty members Zheshen Zhang and Saikat Guha. The team researched quantum information science, which lies at the intersection of physics, computer science, communications and biology, and he looks forward to continuing his research here at the UA.
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Core Faculty
Salim Hariri
Linda S. Powers
Professor
Thomas R. Brown Endowed Chair and Professor
PhD, University of Southern California
PhD, Harvard University
Tosiron Adegbija
Raymond Kostuk
Jeffrey J. Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Professor
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Florida
PhD, Stanford University
PhD, University of Texas at Austin
Ali Akoglu
Marwan Krunz
Janet Meiling Roveda
Associate Professor
Kenneth Von Behren Endowed Professor
Professor
PhD, Arizona State University
PhD, Michigan State University
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
Ali Bilgin
Loukas Lazos
Jerzy W. Rozenblit
Associate Professor
Associate Professor
PhD, The University of Arizona
PhD, University of Washington
Oglethorpe Endowed Chair and University Distinguished Professor PhD, Wayne State University
Tamal Bose
Ming Li
Jonathan Sprinkle
Professor and Department Head
Associate Professor
PhD, Southern Illinois University
PhD, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Litton Industries John M. Leonis Distinguished Associate Professor PhD, Vanderbilt University
Siyang Cao
Roman Lysecky
Ravi Tandon
Assistant Professor
Professor
Assistant Professor
PhD, The Ohio State University
PhD, University of California, Riverside
PhD, University of Maryland, College Park
Gregory Ditzler
Michael W. Marcellin
Assistant Professor
Regents’ Professor and International Foundation for Telemetering Professor
Ratchaneekorn “Kay” Thamvichai
PhD, Drexel University
Professor of Practice
PhD, Texas A&M University
PhD, University of Colorado Boulder
Ivan B. Djordjevic
Michael M. Marefat
Hal S. Tharp
Professor
Associate Professor
PhD, University of Nis, Serbia
PhD, Purdue University
Associate Professor and Associate Department Head PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Steven L. Dvorak
Kathleen Melde
Bane Vasic
Professor
Professor
Professor
PhD, University of Colorado Boulder
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
PhD, University of Nis, Serbia
Wolfgang Fink
Kelly Potter
Hao Xin
Edward & Maria Keonjian Endowed Chair and Associate Professor
Professor
Professor
PhD, The University of Arizona
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PhD, University of Tübingen, Germany 2019 ANNUAL M AG A ZINE
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RESEARCH AREAS
BOOKS AND MONOGRAPHS Djordjevic, Ivan: Advanced Optical and Wireless Communications. Springer International Publishing, 2017.
Autonomous Systems and Robotics Biomedical Technologies Circuits, Microelectronics and Very-Large-Scale Integration
Hariri, Salim, and Cihan Tunc: High Performance Distributed Systems: Programming, Architecture, Networking. Sentia Publishing, 2017. (Digital)
Communications, Coding and Information Theory
Lysecky, Roman, and Frank Vahid: Fundamental Programming Concepts, zyBooks, 2018. (Digital)
Computer Architecture and Cloud/Distributed Computing
Lysecky, Roman, and Frank Vahid: Introduction to Computer Systems and Assembly Programming. zyBooks, 2017. (Digital)
Optics, Photonics and Terahertz Devices and Systems
Sprinkle, Jonathan: Modern Control Systems Interactive eText. Pearson, 2016. (Digital)
Signal, Image and Video Processing
Szilagyi, Miklos: Complexity: A Primer. Amazon, 2017. (Digital)
Software Engineering and Embedded Systems Wireless Networking, Security and Systems
RESEARCH CENTERS AND INSTITUTES Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy
Xin, Hao, and Min Liang: “3D Additive Manufacturing of Antennas,” Antenna Engineering Handbook. Edited by J. Volakis. McGraw Hill Education, 2018. Xin, Hao, Jitao Zhang and Mingguang Tuo: “THz Photoconductive Antennas,” Developments in Antenna Analysis and Design: Volume 2. Edited by R. Mittra. IET, 2018.
AzRISE is a response to the challenge of planning for largescale, affordable solar energy power generation and training the workforce that will make the transition possible. Research goals include identifying, funding and coordinating Arizona-specific solar energy research opportunities, developing intellectual property, and promoting development and widespread adoption of solar energy. Director: Kelly Potter
Broadband Wireless Access and Applications Center BWAC researchers are developing technology and standards to create flexible, efficient, reliable and secure wireless access and application solutions to support the tremendous growth in wireless data traffic. BWAC is funded by the National Science Foundation and works with industry and academic partners to pursue large-scale research programs and create new visions for the wireless industry. Director: Marwan Krunz; co-director: Tamal Bose
Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center CAC is a National Science Foundation Industry and University Cooperative Research Center with a focus on the research and design of information systems and services that are self-managed with minimal involvement by users and administrators. The center broadly encompasses cloud computing systems and applications, including storage and networking, data center design, cybersecurity and systems software. Co-director: Salim Hariri; co-director: Ali Akoglu
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EDITORSHIPS AND PATENTS Bilgin, Ali Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging
Li, Ming Editor, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications Editor, IEEE Wireless Communications Letters
“System and method for estimating phase measurements in magnetic resonance imaging.” Issued September 2018. Patent No. 10,067,211
Melde, Kathleen
“System and method for field map estimation.” Issued August 2017. Patent No. 9,733,329
Executive Editor, Journal of Radiation Effects Research and
Ditzler, Gregory Associate Editor, Cluster Computing Journal: The Journal of
Networks, Software Tools and Applications Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and
Learning Systems
Djordjevic, Ivan Senior Editor, IEEE Communications Letters Editorial Board, Journal of Optics Editorial Board, Physical Communication Editorial Board, Frequenz: Journal of RF-Engineering and
Telecommunications Associate Editor, International Journal of Optics
Fink, Wolfgang Guest Editor, Special Issue on PHM for Human Health & Performance, International Journal for Prognostics and Health
Management Editorial Board, Journal of Interdisciplinary Economic Research
Editorial Board, United Scholars Publications
Potter, Kelly Engineering Editorial Advisory Board, Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids
Powers, Linda Editorial Board, Biophysical Journal
Rozenblit, Jerzy Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics Associate Editor, Journal of Surgery and Clinical Interventions Associate Editor, Transactions of the Society for Computer
Simulation Editorial Board, Journal of Computing and Information Technology
Szilagyi, Miklos Editorial Board, International Journal of BioSciences and Technology Editorial Advisory Board, Games Review
Tandon, Ravi Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Vasic, Bane Editorial Board, IEEE Transactions on Magnetics
“Apparatus for electrical stimulation of a cell and method of use.” Issued January 2018. Patent No. 9,867,988
Xin, Hao
“Automatic feature analysis, comparison, and anomaly detection.” Issued January 2018. Japanese Patent No. JP6272892B2
Associate Editor, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
“The method of automatic feature analysis, comparison and abnormality detection.” Issued June 2017. Chinese Patent No. ZL201380058287.7
Hariri, Salim Editor-in-Chief, Cluster Computing Journal: The Journal of
Networks, Software Tools and Applications
Krunz, Marwan Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
Associate Editor, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Radio Frequency Identification Guest Editor, Special Issue: 2-Dimensional Materials for Antenna Applications, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters Guest Editor, Special Issue on Three-Dimensional Printed Antennas and Electromagnetic Structures, IEEE Antennas and
Wireless Propagation Letters “Millimeter-wave reflect-array for compressive threat detection in security screening applications.” Issued May 2018. Patent No. 9,970,870
Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications
and Networking
Lazos, Loukas Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Information and Forensics
Security Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing
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Alumni News ENGINEERING LEADERSHIP Susan Gray has been promoted to senior vice president and chief operating officer of UNS Energy and its subsidiaries, including Tucson Electric Power, or TEP, and UniSource Energy Services. She oversees the generation, transmission and distribution operations that provide safe, reliable energy to more than 650,000 customers across Arizona. Gray began work at TEP more than two decades ago as an engineer. She serves on advisory boards for the College of Engineering and Eller College, two professional association boards, and the board of directors for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Tucson. Gray earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Arizona.
FROM HITTING THE BOOKS TO HITTING HOME RUNS
SUSAN GRAY
TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE
Even though Anthony Vega was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in 2012 and has been playing for the Long Island Ducks since 2015, earning a college degree was always a priority for him. “Even if I made it to the major leagues, it was something I wanted to finish,” he said. “I’m the kind of person that once I start something, I want to see it through. Nobody in my family had ever gotten a degree before.” Vega balanced his time as a member of the Ducks with his schoolwork, and earned his bachelor’s degree in ECE in May 2018. His biggest piece of advice to incoming students: Learn how to manage your time early so you can be successful in the classroom and fulfilled outside of it.
The American Indian Science and Engineering Society presented its 2018 Technical Excellence Award to Nedlaya Francisco, IBM advisory software engineer and an ECE alumna, at the society’s annual conference in Oklahoma City in October 2018. Francisco has worked at IBM for 14 years, in the area of secure and reliable storage systems for people and businesses. She has 29 issued patents and three published inventions, and volunteers as a robotics teacher with precollege students. She has presented Lego robotics courses at Shiprock High School in New Mexico and at the Pascua Yacqui Clubhouse in Tucson, Arizona.
“I enjoyed my time at the UA, and I’m glad that the college and the department gave me a way to achieve a dream of mine,” he said. “I’ll forever be grateful to the University of Arizona, and particularly to my academic adviser, Sydney Donaldson.”
NEDLAYA FRANCISCO (photo by David Cournoyer, courtesy of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Winds of Change)
ANTHONY VEGA (photo courtesy of Anthony Vega)
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Thank You for Your Gift ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING SUPPORTERS January 2017 – December 2018
INDIVIDUALS
Justine M. Saugen
Jose C. Acedo
John P. and Helen S. Schaefer
Tracy Barclay
Dilli P. Sharma
Sarvesh Bhardwaj and Mini Kohli
Jack Smith
Sandra K. Bidwell
Gene H. and Hyun Sonu
Tamal Bose
Eric S. and Colleen Stouffer
Julian D. Bostick
Kevin C. and Diane Sullivan
Adam M. and Cindy Brooks
Laura and Michael J. Suriano
Edward B. and Renee Bukoski
Larry L. and Sue Tretter
Janet M. Canez
Michelle and Steven Tugenberg
Robert D. and Janet Cass
James A. West
Kenneth A. and Linda Bussey Crawford Kirk A. Damron Hemant N. and Divya Dhulla Lewis R. and Raleigh Dove James A. and Michelle Elsenbeck Robert J. Feugate Michael G. and Arlene Herrick Walter T. Higgins
CORPORATIONS AND FOUNDATIONS Caterpillar FutureWei Technologies Keysight Technologies MathWorks International Foundation for Telemetering Salt River Project Zeteo Tech LLC
Mong J. Kim Raymond C. Lau Alan H. Marshak Patrick and Kathy Maynard Walter D. and Sharon McDonald John and Nadine Miner Rabah M. Mulla David E. and Ellen Murphy Jimmy R. and Linda Naylor Todd G. and Jaynegas M. Peterson John A. Reagan
Invest in the Success of ECE Students, Faculty and Programs Support from alumni, friends and corporate partners is key to ensuring continued excellence in the UA Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Generous contributions not only support student scholarships, but also fund academic programs and research projects and help the department attract and retain prominent faculty. To make a donation, visit ece.engineering.arizona.edu/givetoday or call 520.621.6193.
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Industrial Advisory Board Mary Bailey
Anthony Mulligan
Robert Semelsberger
President Rincon Research Corp.
CEO Hydronalix
Vice President Rincon Research Corp.
Anne E. Cortez
Truong Nguyen
Randal R. Sylvester
Chief Operating Officer Conspec International
Senior Vice President L3 Technologies Inc.
L. Thomas Heiser
Professor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California, San Diego
President and CEO Ridgetop Group Inc.
Stephen Phillips
Michael Jackson Corporate Vice President Research and Development Cadence Design Systems
Professor and Director School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering Arizona State University
Mark Pierpoint Raj Kariya Manager, DRAM PE Micron Technology
Vice President and General Manager Keysight Technologies
Jim Todsen Engineering Director Texas Instruments
William H. Tranter Professor Emeritus and Bradley Professor of Communications Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Virginia Tech
Greg Waterfall Paul Prazak
Patrick Marcus
Texas Instruments (Retired)
Marketing Manager Texas Instruments
President Marcus Engineering LLC
Richard Reinhart
Daniel G. Watt
Dave Milne
Glenn Research Center NASA
COO and Senior Vice President Broadband Communications System Sector L3 Technologies Inc.
Senior Chief Engineer Control Systems Honeywell Aerospace
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Richard B. Scholes Department Manager, RF Seeker Advanced Systems Signal Processing Center Raytheon Missile Systems
T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F A R I Z O N A D E PA R T M E N T O F E L E C T R I C A L A N D C O M P U T E R E N G I N E E R I N G
Industrial Advisory Board Member Profile Anthony Mulligan CEO, HYDRONALIX Q: How did you come to be involved with the department as an advisory board member? I met with ECE Department Head Tamal Bose when he first joined the University of Arizona in 2012. I was very impressed with his vision and passion for the future of the ECE department, so I accepted the opportunity to help him as an advisory board member.
Q: How familiar were you with ECE prior to becoming an advisory board member? I graduated from University of Arizona with my mechanical engineering degree in 1988, so I had many friends from the ECE department. Over the next 20 years, my company Advanced Ceramics Research hired many talented ECE graduates and interns. During that time, I had a lot of interaction with department faculty and students.
Q: How would you describe your involvement with the department? Do you have any accomplishments of which you’re especially proud? At ACR and Hydronalix, I have had many successful projects teaming up with the ECE department and the numerous graduates and interns we have hired. It has been rewarding to steward and mentor young graduates from the department as they transition to successful professionals over the last 28 years. I am especially proud of some of our recent advanced-technology Navy programs that our ECE alumni have done such an incredible job on. I have been very proud to see their work respected and acknowledged on an international level and in the Pentagon.
Anthony Mulligan is a founder and CEO of Hydronalix Inc., which develops small unmanned surface vehicles in Sahuarita, Arizona. The company is internationally known for the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard, also known as the robotic lifeguard EMILY, a remote-controlled buoy that can rescue potential drowning victims 10 times faster than any swimmer. Mulligan is a UA College of Engineering alumnus who received the university’s professional achievement award in 2009, the college’s Leo B. Hart Humanitarian Award in 2016 and the Thomas R. Brown Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award. He has 15 U.S. patents and over a dozen foreign patents, as well as 32 years of research, development and production contracting experience. Previously, Mulligan founded a successful high-technology company called Advanced Ceramics Research Inc. in 1989 and served as CEO until its acquisition by BAE Systems in 2009. (Above) Anthony Mulligan on an EMILY technology briefing visit to the Pentagon. (Photo courtesy of Anthony Mulligan) (Left) Mulligan with Vice Adm. Mathias Winter, head of the Joint Strike Fighter program, at the ONR booth in Washington, D.C. (Photo courtesy of Anthony Mulligan)
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