UIC Engineering 2014 Fall

Fall/Winter 2014

College Initiative Jump Starts Students’ Careers Gift Celebrates a Lifetime Passion for Engineering Alumni Feature: Making Concrete Changes Q&A with Data Mining Specialist Bing Liu NSF CAREER Grants Back Innovative Faculty Research Promoting a New Product Design Paradigm

Table of Contents 1 Message from the Dean

2 College Initiative Jump Starts Students’ Careers

Alumni 6 Making Concrete Changes 9 The NSF Career Grant: Backing Faculty and University Success 12 Discovery Central Promoting a New Product Design Paradigm 16 The Long Arm of Scholarship Q&A with Data Mining Specialist Bing Liu

Philanthropy 18 Gift Celebrates a Lifetime Passion for Engineering

20 Around the College

On the Cover: Some of the College’s 2014 cohort of Guaranteed Paid Internship Program students

Fall/Winter 2014

Ruchika Akhand (BS ’17), Computer Science Internship: UIC College of Engineering Media Services Jose Anaya (BS ’17), Civil & Materials Engineering Internship:UICNondestructiveEvaluationofCivilStructuresLaboratory Diana Briones (BS ’17), Civil & Materials Engineering Internship: Primera Engineering Grace Brown (BS ’17), Bioengineering Internship: UIC Laboratory for Live-cell Imaging and Ultrafast Laser Microsurgery Joshua Hamilton (BS ’17), Electrical & Computer Engineering Internship: Knowles Electronics Mohammed Hoda (BS ’17), Electrical & Computer Engineering Internship: Exelon Corporation Louis Ludkowski (BS ’17), Civil & Materials Engineering Internship: UIC Transportation Laboratory Tejas Madhavan (BS ’17), Bioengineering Internship: UIC Neuro-Machine Interaction Laboratory

Sara Mohamed (BS ’17), Bioengineering Internship: UIC Acoustics and Vibrations Laboratory Andrew Pable (BS ’17), Electrical & Computer Engineering Internship: UIC Office of Sustainability Neal Patel (BS ’17), Mechanical & Industrial Engineering Internship: Littelfuse Florian Richter (BS ’17), Electrical & Computer Engineering Internship: Knowles Electronics Omar Rubio (BS ’17), Civil & Materials Engineering Internship: UIC Environmental Engineering Laboratory Sri Vadrevu (BS ’17), Electrical & Computer Engineering Internship: Exelon Corporation Bernadette Wilczek (BS ’17), Civil & Materials Engineering Internship: The Burke Group Dawid Zawislak (BS ’17), Computer Science Internship: Argonne National Laboratory

The College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago publishes UIC Engineering.

We welcome your comments and suggestions. Please direct questions about this issue to Joel Super (jsuper@uic.edu).

Associate Director of Communications: Joel Super Editorial Writer: Kirsten Gorton Photographers: Bart Harris, Bruce Powell Graphic Designer: Edward Lawler Copyright © 2014

Please direct address corrections or mailing requests to: Renata Szandra College of Engineering (MC 159) 851 South Morgan Street Chicago, Illinois 60607-7043 (312) 996-0520 or rszandra@uic.edu

Message from the Dean Teaching and research—the things we focus on at the College of Engineering—are fundamentally about the future: about creating knowledge that doesn’t exist today and about assisting students to lead productive and rewarding lives tomorrow.

This issue of UIC Engineering takes a look at some of the unique ways and distinctive arenas in which our students, faculty, and alumni are creating, or have created, their futures by building that thing we call a “career.” For me, these stories demonstrate the power of an engineering education to benefit our entire society by educating and empowering individuals.

“…these stories demonstrate the power of an engineering education to benefit our entire society by educating and empowering individuals.”

Following their freshman year, for instance, some of our students participated in a new career-building program that the College pioneered.

It’s goal? To help undergraduates complete a first internship over the summer that will help start them on their way to a second internship and then on into a professional life (p. 2).

On the faculty front are three assistant professors who have each earned a prestigious NSF CAREER grant that supports the innovative research and teaching of junior faculty (p. 9) and a seasoned and influential computer scientist whose career has been marked by his evolving data-mining research interests (p. 16).

Bringing together faculty and students in a unique way, UIC’s Innovation Center and the College’s Interdisciplinary Product Design course (p. 12) focus on supporting a whole new way of thinking about creating products and services for people pursuing careers in engineering, industrial design, and business.

The story of a donor who spent his entire career rising through the ranks at one firm (p.

18) contrasts with the story of an alumnus whose career steps and wide experience seem to have positioned him perfectly for his current job (p. 6), while our profile of a sophomore poised to start his first co-op (p. 4) contrasts with both.

It’s exciting for me to be part of these many individual stories and I believe that everyone involved in supporting them, from donors and alumni volunteers to faculty and support staff, can all take credit for making these past, current, and future engineering careers possible.

Regards,

Pete Nelson Dean, College of Engineering

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Guaranteed Paid Internship Program

College Initiative Jump Starts Students’ Careers

by Joel Super

W

hether you’re a high school student applying for your very first summer job or a seasoned engineer making the move into senior management, the key to competing is to have the right experience on your résumé. Later, in your professional life, that’s easier.

But what about that first job in your field when you’re just out of college?

Working at an internship while still an undergraduate is a great way to begin amassing that professional experience—and UIC’s College of Engineering launched a new Guaranteed Paid Internship Program (GPIP) in academic year 2013-2014 to help freshman students land that crucial first one. The initial cohort of ninety-one students completed their GPIP in summer, 2014.

(L–R) Bioengineering student Christine Massie (’17) with ECC Director Kate Kaplan

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“Our goal is for every graduating senior to have had two internships because we have very close to a 100 percent placement rate for these students,” said Pete Nelson, dean of the College. “Our GPIP program is helping students get their first internship, which is always the most difficult one to get.”

(L–R) ECC Assistant Director Kathy Corcos with mechanical engineering student David Aboagye (’14)

First-year students in summer 2014 were placed in private companies and UIC laboratories and centers, working with full-time employees, graduate students, and faculty members.

Several of these employers have invited their interns back and one is keeping them on for the year. Overall, the response from both the students and their employers after this first year was highly positive. More than 82 percent of private employers and faculty researchers ranked their students as either outstanding or above average in their technical skills and more than 82 percent of them also ranked students as either outstanding or above average in communication skills. Students overwhelmingly considered their GPIP experience positive: 58.2 percent rated it “excellent” and 41.8 percent rated it “good,” which were the top two response categories.

While the program is called “guaranteed,” noted Kate Kaplan, director of the Engineering Career Center (ECC), “Students aren’t handed an internship. They have to make the grade, including meeting GPA, credit hour, and coursework requirements.” [see sidebar, p 5]

Even though all students don’t participate, she added, promoting internships in the College creates the climate for success called for in a competitive job market. Her office has increased staffing this year to support the College’s commitment to student career development, and one of their goals is educating students to look at internships as a top priority of their education, not as optional.

“Having a good GPA is important, but it’s not everything. Employers today want the whole package,” said Kathy Corcos, assistant director of the ECC. “They want people who are smart, creative, with good communication and presentation skills, a strong work ethic, and good at teamwork.

Internships help students develop that competitive edge.” For people who already have their hands full with school, work, and, often, family commitments, two internships can be a tall order, she added. But doing the first one in the summer and getting paid for it helps with the juggling.

And it gets another message across loud and clear: networking is important. And that’s a lesson you can use for your entire career. :

ECC:Facilitating StudentSuccess The Engineering Career Center provides services to UIC engineering students that will help them gain practical work experience during their time in school and land fulltime positions prior to graduation.

The center oversees the Guaranteed Paid Internship Program; sponsors a yearly Engineering Career Fair where students and potential employers can meet; offers multiple on-campus events including careerrelated workshops, classroom presentations, company recruiter information sessions, an annual Engineering Career Prep Day where students network with alumni and receive résumé and interviewing advice; and serves as a general resource on all issues of professional employment.

www.ecc.uic.edu

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Guaranteed Paid Internship Program GPIP Student Profile:

Florian Richter

F

lorian Richter feels like he’s on his way to something awesome, thanks to hard work, some good advice, and the College of Engineering’s Guaranteed Paid Internship Program (GPIP). A sophomore electrical engineering major, Richter will be starting a six-month co-op during the spring semester with Apple Computer in California. Landing the position, he said, is a direct result of the GPIP summer internship he completed with Knowles Electronics in Itasca, Illinois, where he worked for twelve weeks as part of the application-specific integrated circuits group. Knowles is a global supplier of micro-acoustic solutions and specialty components. “The HR person at Knowles encouraged me to make a LinkedIn profile, and two weeks after posting it, an Apple recruiter contacted me. The skills I’d listed—most of which I’d developed at Knowles—are what the team that I’ll be working on at Apple needs.” The team he’ll join at Apple is responsible for the audio systems in Apple products and he’s eager for the chance to be dealing with not just the audio component, but several parts of the system that need to work together.

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The learning curve for him at Knowles was steep, Richter says, and in more ways than one. For starters, the internship was his first job and the commute took nearly four hours round trip. But when he got there, it was great—he spent the first few weeks reading books his mentor recommended to learn the basics and terminology of audio signal processing. Later, he developed some software to optimize

data collection by running five tests simultaneously and collecting it in a spreadsheet. And by the time he was done, he said, “I’d become a go-to guy for some people regarding a specific test they were conducting.”

While the internship and the mentoring he received at Knowles were critical in positioning him for his Apple co-op, Richter did a lot of advance preparation to land himself where he is. A graduate of Chicago’s Whitney Young High School, he took AP courses there and completed most of his UIC general education requirements at Harold Washington City College the summer before his freshman year. He was already on track to graduate one year early the day he matriculated at UIC. Perhaps most importantly, though, was the college-level electrical engineering course he completed during high school through online open-course provider EdX. (A neighbor had suggested he check out their course offerings.) Both challenging and fun, the class set him on his path to engineering.

The impact of his GPIP internship on his future, he said, will be huge. “It put me in the direction of audio without me knowing I was going into that field.

It helped open up a possibility for me.”

Where does he want his education to lead? “I like the idea of being an integral part of a team. I want to be a very hands-on engineer. Someday, I want to see someone on the bus using something and be able to say ‘I made that.’” :

2015EligibilityCriteria:GuaranteedPaidInternshipProgram ▐

Direct acceptance into the College of Engineering and registration as a full-time beginning freshman for fall 2014

▐

Completion of at least two program-specified first-year engineering courses

▐

Maintaining a 3.2 GPA or greater for fall and spring semesters

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Completion of the Freshman Engineering Success Program

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Completion of twenty-six UIC semester credit hours during freshman year

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Commitment to return to UIC in the sophomore year

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Status as a U.S. citizen or permanent resdent or demonstrated permission to work in the U.S. by May 1, 2015

▐

Completion of Calculus l & ll with a grade of B or higher

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Making Concrete Changes Alumni

by Joel Super

All around the UIC campus, Vytenis Milunas’s dedication to sustainability shows up in ways seen and unseen.

W

hen you’re in charge of all construction projects under $250,000 for an organization as complex as UIC—an urban campus serving 27,000 students, and comprising 15,000,000 square feet of property—you wear lots of hats, observed Vytenis Milunas (BS ’82), MBA, a UIC alum who studied thermodynamics in the College of Engineering. Milunas is director of project management for the university’s Physical Plant Operations.

Nine project managers report to him, and they work on more than 200 projects at a time, taking from one week to six months to a year to complete. “Every day is different and I enjoy it. In the morning, I’m a mechanical engineer, in the afternoon a plumber, or an accountant, then later an architect or advisor to a project manager,” he said.

The many hats he wears mean Milunas has had a significant impact on campus in his eight-year UIC stint. As department head, he’s responsible for all sorts of physical plant projects ranging from replacing flooring and repainting, making HVAC improvements, installing MRIs, PET-CTs, and clean rooms, to spearheading energy conservation measures and overseeing high-profile campus landscaping.

Vytenis Milunas (BS ’82) in the re-landscaped Chicago Circle Memorial Grove south of Science and Engineering Offices (SEO)

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He didn’t know where the path that his

One of UIC’s Heritage Gardens

Landscape looking west from

University Hall

Landscape looking east toward University Hall

focus on energy engineering and his interest in thermodynamics and fluid flow courses would lead, but in retrospect, his career trajectory looks planned. He brings more than thirty years of varied experience to his current role, including engineering positions at General Dynamics, the Archdiocese of Chicago, engineering consulting firms, and Argonne National Laboratories. Campus projects that give him special satisfaction include the Chicago Circle Memorial Grove renovation and a series of building/ laboratory retrofits along with utility metering projects that, together, have generated millions in government grants and rebates for the university from the electrical and gas utilities.

The campus utility metering project took three years to implement and involved installing Web-connected remote-reading energy meters to monitor building energy consumption, allowing everyone who needs the information to access it. “The aggregate data has helped drive home the point when I talk to departments about instituting energy saving measures because we can do before/after documentation. When the counting is done, we anticipate generating $2.8 million in government grants and rebates for projects completed in fiscal year 2014. We generated more than $1.1 million in the six years before that,” Milunas said proudly. The funds go directly back into the campus, a win for all stakeholders. He anticipates that UIC will continue to garner

Bike rack outside SEO

grants and rebates with, for example, a $200,000 rebate resulting from a current project to replace exhaust fans in laboratories in the Science and Engineering South building.

Milunas’s interest in all things energy related has gotten him involved with students fulfilling their senior design course requirements and as a judge for three consecutive years at the College’s annual EXPO, where the projects are showcased. He has suggested projects geared toward campus building improvements including designing a solar water-heating system for a kitchen and another for solar heating for absorption cooling; creating a hydrogen vehicle fueling station; and designing a tracking solar photovoltaic system.

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Concrete Changes in Progress

Chicago Circle Memorial Grove relandscaping from spring 2014…

…through completion in September.

Wearing yet another—very different— hat, Milunas has overseen a landscaping project around University Hall, is part of a Heritage Garden project that involves students in a planting program near the quad, and just completed the relandscaping fronting the Science and Engineering Offices (SEO) along Taylor Street, known as Chicago Circle Memorial Grove.

This last project was part of a broader 2010 campus master plan and was necessary from an aesthetic, utilization, and safety perspective. Buckled asphalt paths, overgrown and diseased trees, and a forbidding high iron fence that shut off the space from the vibrant Taylor Street neighborhood all prevented

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the space from functioning optimally.

Both aesthetically and for ease of maintenance, the landscape architecture firm, CYLA Design Associates, Inc., of Oak Park, recommended use of native plants and large swaths of perennials. They also designed a new central path that retains the space’s flexibility while improving foot traffic flow.

And their selective use of permeable paving addresses campus interest in sustainability/storm water management.

While the revitalized Chicago Circle Memorial Grove captures the attention of most users, there’s a small corner of the property that’s been transformed under his leadership from what Milunas termed “a mud pit and an eyesore” into an asset. A re-envisioning of the

completely shaded space at ground level under the SEO’s east wing is now a simple, beautifully designed concrete and gravel space dedicated to bicycle parking. The project has increased “sustainable vehicular” parking space from a small bike rack open to the elements to some forty covered spots.

The reclaimed space, adjacent to two building entrances, makes a big impact on hundreds of people daily.

For the man of many hats, that’s the definition of a good day’s work. “It filled up the day after it opened,” said Milunas. “I’m happy to see a productive use of the space for the students.” :

The NSF CAREER Grant:

Backing Faculty and University Success

A

by Kirsten Gorton

new assistant professor at a research university takes on a considerable “to-do” list: teaching and advising students, developing original research, and finding funding for that research. So how does one person handle it all?

At UIC, the College of Engineering supports new faculty research with a start-up package as part of their contract.

Assistant professors have access to funds to attend professional conferences, purchase laboratory equipment, and assist with salaries for half-time teaching assistants and graduate research assistants as the tools required to build a research program.

While the College’s support is critical, newly hired professors typically need outside grants to make rapid progress. A program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) called Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) addresses that need by supporting assistant professors without tenure at the beginning of their academic professions, especially in the expanding interdisciplinary research areas of biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and infrastructure and environmental technology.

The benefits to receiving this grant are enormous, both for the individual and his or her institution. It allows professors to pursue research in innovative areas, helps them sustain the research program and develop a professional reputation, and also encourages a focus on undergraduate education along with the broader impacts of their research. A look here at three UIC NSF CAREER winners demonstrates the importance of the grant to the growth of junior faculty and to the success of the College and the university.

Benefit #1: CAREER grants allow professors to pursue research in innovative areas According to Tanya Berger-Wolf, PhD, associate professor of computer science, whose work in computational population biology is unconventional within the realm of computer science, writing her proposal was risky because she wanted to start a whole new field. Before receiving her NSF CAREER award in 2008, computational population biology did not exist. The

Chris Kanich, PhD, assistant professor of computer science, was awarded a five-year $596,970 NSF CAREER grant to create a methodology to identify an individual’s private data that is useful to cyber criminals so that security systems can incorporate these values to protect users.

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field uses computational methods to answer complex ecological questions.

“People advised me not to begin a new field as an assistant professor. But to me, I thought, ‘if not now, when?’”

The CAREER grant gave Professor Berger-Wolf a safety net to venture into unknown territory with the assurance of support for her graduate students.

Berger-Wolf has built an impressive curriculum that includes taking students to Kenya as part of a field computational ecology course. There, ecology and computer science students work on interdisciplinary projects that range from studying collective movement of zebras to understanding the effect of nomadic herders on the local ecosystem.

Chris Kanich, PhD, assistant professor of computer science, who is a 2014 CAREER winner, is doing new research in cloud computing technology with a project called Cloudsweeper. It aims to “better understand the role of clear text password e-mailing, the underground value of stolen accounts, and new ways to improve the security of sensitive, globally accessible information,” Professor Kanich said. He knows that his work would have been incredibly difficult to complete prior to receiving his CAREER award. “Without this grant I wouldn’t be able to fund my research assistants. And they wouldn’t be able to write code to build Cloudsweeper and other tools, conduct user studies, or assist in writing up research publications,” he said.

The College’s other 2014 winner, Ying Liu, PhD, assistant professor of chemical engineering, said that receiving her grant was “a recognition that confirmed the potential of our novel research to have a broader impact on society.” Professor Liu conducts research that’s required to design, optimize, and consistently generate polymeric nanoparticles that encapsulate drugs incapable of dissolving in water.

This process helps deliver the drugs with maximum efficacy. With the support of the NSF CAREER grant, Liu initiated this state-of-art nanotechnology research in her laboratory.

UIC, who helps faculty with writing grant proposals and editing technical papers.

Professor Liu’s long-term educational goal is to “recruit, mentor, and prepare underrepresented minority and female students for careers in STEM disciplines,” she said. To achieve this objective on campus, Professor Liu

Benefit #2: CAREER grants help professors sustain a research program and build Benefit #3: CAREER grants promote a professional reputation undergraduate Unlike most other grants, the NSF education and CAREER grant focuses on the professor’s career plan, not on a specific community outreach project. “Writing a CAREER proposal is an excellent exercise because it requires you to really think of and organize a vision of your research,” said Professor Berger-Wolf. The preparation necessary to submit the proposal helped her think about where her research would lead ten years down the road. “But getting the grant also validated this line of research,” she said. After all, no one had heard of computational population biology before.

With five years under her belt since she was awarded the grant, Professor

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The NSF CAREER proposal is heavily concentrated on outlining education goals and components. While earning the grant rewards a researcher’s intellectual merit, it also promotes undergraduate education.

“The funding is about the faculty member’s career within an institution,” said Daniel Bailey, PhD, manager of research planning for the College of Engineering at

Tanya Berger-Wolf, PhD, associate professor of computer science, was awarded a five-year $620,930 NSF CAREER grant to develop computational tools to study population biology. Combining genetics and social interactions into one computational framework allows her to do things like reconstruct genealogy from genetic samples and analyze the social network dynamics of animals like zebras and baboons, taking into account their behavior and environment.

plans to develop a new senior-level course based on her nanotechnology research for drug delivery, advising undergraduate research projects in the area of manufacturing nanomaterials, and mentoring senior design projects.

But she is also looking beyond UIC’s undergraduate needs. Professor Liu

taught introductory nanoscale science and engineering at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry through their Science Minor Program. She also attends the annual AIChE Chicago Section High School Symposium and has direct contact with teachers and counselors from Chicago public schools with high populations of underrepresented minority students.

Professor Kanich is reaching out by developing a professional development course for middle and high school teachers to give them a deeper understanding of online safety and privacy. He is also working with the local American Civil Liberties Union to host local privacy awareness events that use novel approaches like live demonstrations of a hypothetical cybercriminal stalking a victim. “My aim is to help the public more fully understand the capabilities of online attackers so that everyone can protect their privacy and identity online.”

Ying Liu, PhD, assistant professor of chemical engineering, was awarded a five-year $400,163 NSF CAREER grant. She studies the competitive kinetics required to design, optimize, and consistently generate polymeric nanoparticles that encapsulate drugs incapable of dissolving in water, so that they can be delivered with maximum efficiency.

With an NSF CAREER grant, new professors can aim high and simultaneously make a significant impact in their research field, enhance student learning, and positively affect the broader community. Whether one of these grants gives a professor the opportunity to build original technology, make advances in a current field, or develop an entirely new one, it opens doors to creating a better, richer world. :

The College’s NSF CAREER Winners Within the last twenty years, twenty-eight UIC College of Engineering faculty members have received an NSF CAREER grant.

And the number seems only to be increasing—ten have received awards in the past six years.

Prith Banerjee, 1987 Ludwig Nitsche, 1994 Isabel Cruz, 1996 Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, 1997 Thomas Royston, 1998 Ashfaq Khokhar, 1999 Ajay Kshemkalyani, 1999 John Lillis, 1999 Derong Liu, 1999 Farzad Mashayek, 1999 Daniel Bernstein, 2000 Milos Zefran, 2001 Barbara Di Eugenio, 2002 Jie Liang, 2002 Sudip Mazumder, 2003 Karl Rockne, 2004 Bhaskar DasGupta, 2005 Laxman Saggere, 2005 Daniela Tuninetti, 2006 Randall Meyer, 2008 Tanya Berger-Wolf, 2008 Venkat Venkatakrishnan, 2009 Carmen Lilley, 2009 Zhichun Zhu, 2010 Natasha Devroye, 2011 Wenjing Rao, 2012 Jakob Eriksson, 2012 Ying Liu, 2014 Chris Kanich, 2014

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Discovery H Central An interdisciplinary paradigm on UIC’s campus involves both faculty and students in discovering innovative solutions to consumer product needs.

by Joel Super

(L-R) Krithi Shetty (’15) bioengineering, Victor Nwankwo, MD (MS ’15) bioengineering, and Paige Gillig (’15) industrial design/graphic design in the Innovation Center’s Materials Lab.

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ow might we advance rehabilitation strategies for stroke patients working to overcome gait problems? What market opportunities exist for expanding a successful business model like the video rental service Redbox/Coinstar? Every day, engineers are involved in discovery, in finding pragmatic and innovative solutions to issues like these. At UIC, that often subtle concept is made crystal clear in the form of a cross-disciplinary collaboration that includes an unusual and innovative two-semester College of Engineering course and a unique, independent umbrella campus unit whose mission is to promote collaborative, hands-on work and accelerate new product development by bringing together faculty, students, and external partners.

The Interdisciplinary Product Development (IPD) course and the UIC Innovation Center target discovery by promoting an approach to new product/service/ interface creation that departs from the traditional business model and has a broad mission with a deceptively simple goal: integration of the perspectives that come from engineers, business specialists, industrial and graphic designers, and other disciplines from the very start of the product development process, which creates a rich mix of potential solutions. This approach stands in contrast to the conventional approach in which a business unit decides to

produce a new product, then brings in designers to decide what it should look like, and last of all engages engineers to try and make it work.

The aptly named Innovation Center fosters new ideas and helps develop them into realities in numerous ways, with spaces to test those realities for their innovative potential. It is also there that the IPD class learns this new model of front-end product development.

Nineteen core faculty members from the Colleges of Engineering; Business Administration; Architecture, Design, and the Arts; and Medicine are directly affiliated with the Innovation Center, most of them as researchers/instructors in the Innovation Center’s labs and multiple corporate-sponsored IPD sections.

The IPD program, established in 2002, typically groups about thirty students— ten each from engineering, business, and industrial and/or graphic design— who work together with these seasoned faculty members in a way that addresses real-world needs and supersedes traditional classroom lectures.

UIC is among the few universities that have adopted this visionary approach to teaching product design/service design, according to Michael J. Scott, PhD, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and a major force behind the IPD course. “Twelve years ago, the corporate design world still hadn’t figured out that the ‘over the wall design’ model was a bad idea. Now many more people recognize that this IPD process is the right way to do it,” says Scott.

“IPD teaches students how to deal with complex problems and effectively manage the anxiety of the unknown by applying a structured process that employs a variety of tools and methodologies to eventually create innovative solutions,” adds Stephen Melamed, clinical professor of industrial design and a cofounder of the program with Professor Scott.

“Our interdisciplinary nature is our strength and we are needsbased, so we can bridge academia and industry.”

Peter Pfanner, executive director, UIC Innovation Center

Some past IDP projects with corporate

partners include:

Dell Computer The design and development of a folding, portable education device with two screens—one a traditional color screen like a laptop computer and the other an e-ink screen like those found on an Amazon Kindle.

Dell created a spin-off company to launch the product.

Cobra Electronics

The Right Space for the Job

What Professors Scott and Melamed also know: this process can’t be carried out in a traditional classroom. The UIC Innovation Center was born of this fundamental knowledge. Located in a renovated former grocery store next to the Student Services Building, the center looks different as well. In place of a tiered lecture hall is a large, transformable space that contains four “labs,” a wellequipped machine shop, and several informal meeting spaces. Peter Pfanner, the center’s executive director, brings to his position the experience of an industrial designer with a long history of overseeing consumer product design teams in the corporate and private sectors, most recently at Motorola.

The “classrooms” of the Innovation Center are flexible spaces that serve the IPD students and others working with corporate partners on specific projects and faculty members from across campus who want to take an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving and product design and need the right place to do it. In this context, “products” include objects, services, and management and operations processes, all of which change according to the needs of the partner or the focus of faculty research. Solutions have ranged from technology transfer to new product ideas to re-imagining the future of automated retail.

The design and creation of a new app for mobile devices that incorporates radar detection and red light camera alerts called iRadar.

Elkay Manufacturing The development of a new systematic approach to creating adaptable plumbing for multigenerational kitchen and bathroom applications, which resulted in two patents.

A Course for the Future

In the IPD class, solving the puzzle a corporate partner poses takes two semesters. This time is spent on collaborating to clearly define the intent and expectations for the project; gathering relevant information through interviews, surveys, and technical and market research; identifying the problem’s objectives and constraints; exploring concept solutions; filtering solutions to choose concept directions; and creating the solution’s prototype.

Team communication is essential to the discovery of real-world solutions and to the students’ education. Most have never worked within a crossdisciplinary team comprising engineers, business majors, and graphic and industrial designers. At first, it can be a little disorienting. “Sometimes we speak the same language, sometimes not,”

said current IPD student Norbert Nowak

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(’15), a senior mechanical engineering

student. “But there is great group energy

and communication. The feedback and constructive criticism is good with this group, and sometimes that is hard to come by in group work.”

The course fulfills each engineering student’s senior design requirement.

After twelve years, the curriculum is mature and robust, Professor Scott

are rarely asked to hone the technical project-management, decisionmaking, team-work, and presentation skills so critical for success in today’s engineering workforce. IPD provided me a fun and engaging real-world product development experience that was invaluable in preparing me to be a successful working engineer.” Currently, four labs at the Innovation Center enable and expedite collaborative discovery and solution-finding for teams working toward the development of new projects, whether for corporate partners or as independent faculty projects. [see page 15]

Build It and They Will Come

(L-R) IPD professor Michael Scott, PhD, and Peter Pfanner, the Innovation Center’s executive director

says. The faculty, drawn from all

disciplines relevant to solving the particular problem being addressed, models the interdisciplinary process/philosophy

themselves in the collaborative way they teach. Students leave ready to join a

competitive job market in an economy that increasingly relies on innovation

and visionary entrepreneurs. And this experience gives them the tools and

confidence to start their own companies

or work within the business incubators so important to the economies of Chicago

and other dynamic cities.

Alumna Samantha Melchiori (BS ’05), a mechanical engineering major, took the IPD course soon after it was first offered at UIC. Melchiori, now product development lead for information technologies at Caterpillar, says of her IPD experience: “IPD is a desperately needed part of every engineering school curriculum. As students, we

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Because the Innovation Center’s corporate partners are critical for sponsoring labs, projects, and the IPD classes, Pfanner spends considerable time searching for companies with needs that would benefit from the IPD process.

“They come to us after hearing about what we offer, and I go to them to show what we can provide. It works both ways,” he says.

Because the corporate partners’ challenges vary, the content of the IPD course changes every year. Current corporate partners—Baxter, Cigna, and Sears Holdings Corporation—follow the established process, each sponsoring one class. Their sponsorship gains them fresh ideas, access to student talent, experiential learning about the IPD process for their employees, and solutions that address their needs. For the students, working with representatives from the companies provides real experience, networking connections, and interdisciplinary experience. “Our interdisciplinary nature is our strength and we are needsbased, so we can bridge academia and industry,” says Pfanner. He is fond of saying about the Innovation Center, “All languages spoken here.”

So what about that stroke rehabilitation strategy? Dr. Alexander Aruin, a professor of physical therapy, has worked with the Innovation Center in the Medical Accelerator Lab on a proof-of-concept project through UIC’s Office of Technology Management. He and his team aimed to refine a shoe insert textured with protrusions that create mild discomfort under a patient’s unaffected limb, causing the user to bear more weight on the affected limb, which improves gait during rehabilitation.

The goal is, eventually, to license the product to a manufacturer. And what about a new business for Redbox/ Coinstar? Following up on the insight

that at 4:00 p.m. 70 percent of Americans don’t yet know what they will have for

dinner, a student team developed a system for grocery stores where tired shoppers could use a kiosk to plan a meal based on their stored information and current

preferences. A modified version, which

assisted customers in selecting wine, was launched by a start-up company founded

by one of the students and which included a Redbox executive on the board of

directors. “Where we are today is just the

beginning of where the Innovation Center

and interdisciplinary product design can go in connecting disciplines across campus to take on larger and more complex

problems,” says Pfanner.

The solitary genius having a “Eureka!” moment in the laboratory is very much a popular image of discovery. But today, the experience of discovering new solutions to real-world problems is most definitely a team sport, and it’s played every day by IPD students and researchers at UIC’s Innovation Center.

Editor’s Note: Companies wishing to explore a collaboration with the Innovation Center can contact the executive director at pfanner@uic.edu. To learn more about the Interdisciplinary Product Design program, visit www.ipd.uic.edu. :

The Innovation Center’s Labs at UIC The Medical Accelerator for Devices Lab

individuals, internal groups, external partners (Density)— may block and/or distort a breakthrough idea. The lab aims to understand and create new solutions for corporate clients’ collaborative processes and models so that new ideas can be

in materials and manufacturing processes. Some 168 material samples hang on walls to facilitate group discussion [see photo, page 12] and there are many more, like an entire sample box of Corian surfacing, that either won’t hang or don’t fit.

The D3 Lab: Diversity, Dispersion, and Density

implemented effectively and efficiently.

This lab helps corporations nurture breakthrough ideas and face the “3-D” challenges in large organizations whose complexity can make it difficult for a new idea to thrive—or even to survive.

The many stakeholders with differing incentives, functions, and perspectives (Diversity) may come from different geographic, cultural, and language backgrounds (Dispersion) and many levels—

The Materials Lab

(L-R) Matthew Wizinsky (assistant professor, Design), Jennifer Brier, PhD (associate professor, Gender and Women’s Studies), Anton Tonchev (architecture student), and Andrew Graham (Innovation Center coordinator) discuss how they might modify a video camera and create compact equipment cases (a “toolkit”) to facilitate The History Moves project, a multidisciplinary oral history project that will allow faculty, students, and community partners to collect and display Chicago histories.

A lab dedicated to early stage development of medical devices to determine the concept viability of new medical devices envisioned by students, faculty, or corporate partners by supporting initial user research, early proofof-concept development, and market assessment. The MAD Lab is funded by UIC’s College of Medicine and Office of Technology Management.

The Responsive Media Lab This lab explores new platforms for merging digital and physical experience through material research ranging from paper interfaces to responsive user interface objects like fabric screens, then creating prototypes of multimedia interactive systems.

The lab supports academic and corporate collaborations while conducting independent research and product innovation incubation. [see photo, right]

The Materials Lab is a resource for all the other labs, containing material samples such as vinyl coated polyester, ultra-highmolecular-weight polyethylene, canvas, Teflon, Lucite, polypropylene, and black walnut wood. The lab also allows students to experiment with materials, produce case studies, and conduct exploratory research

Learn more at

historymoves.org 15

The Long Arm of Scholarship

by Kirsten Gorton

16

S

Q&A with Bing Liu, PhD

ixteen years ago, Bing Liu, PhD, UIC professor of computer science, had a hunch that he’d written an important paper. Now, after being cited nearly 2,000 times to date, he knows his hunch was right. The paper—on the integration of two structures of data analysis: classificationruleminingandassociationrulemining—appeared first in the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and continues to make significant industrial and societal impacts.

This year, Professor Liu was awarded the Test of Time award at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference under the auspices of the Association for Computing Machinery. But he’s far from merely riding on the coat tails of his success. His most recent popular work on opinion spam (fake reviews) has been covered in more than sixty media outlets, including the New York Times, Business Week, Time, and The Economist.

Q: Why is data mining important?

A: This has become very important,

especially within the past few years, with big data that has been accumulating from small data. Think about it: everywhere you go, everywhere you turn, there are people recording you, your behavior, everything.

Examples that you see frequently include the product recommendations on Amazon pages and the ads displayed

by Google search. In both cases, the companies have to mine past data to decide what products to recommend to each user and what ads to display on each user’s Web browser to ensure that the user is most likely to click and buy.

All this data has been collected, and it has to be analyzed, which means this area keeps growing. It’s very important to many kinds of people to use this data for all kinds of purposes. So if you want to use it, you have to do data mining. You can’t look at every single data record.

Q: How wide is the range of topics citing your paper?

A: People contact me to do two kinds

of things: one, to improve algorithms, and two, to enhance all kinds of applications.

I have spoken with people involved in medicine and even in natural language (social media) who are interested in integrated mining. They send me e-mails and ask for systems.

Q: Have you collaborated on any major projects?

A: We built a system for a major

telecommunications company in 2006.

They have been using it for structured data. In the beginning, we helped them figure out what caused dropped calls and other issues. And the data has been used for all kinds of other applications in the company, like finding fraud and performing workflow analysis.

Q: How have your scholarly interests evolved?

A: I’ve always been following my

interests, so at different stages there have been slight differences, but it’s still the same broad field. At first, I was interested mostly in what we call structured data (excel-format-type data), but later on— especially after I came to the United States—I became more interested in Web page–type data, where there’s some kind of structure, but not completely.

Later on, I became more interested in natural-language type of data, so I’ve been working on social media and text analysis—text mining, basically. My interests have moved from structured data to Web page data, which is semistructured, to this natural language, or unstructured data.

Q: Why has it evolved this way?

A: Sometimes because of some

interesting ideas you have, right? And also, partly because in the late 1990s and early 2000s the Web got very, very popular. I got interested in certain Web pages, got some ideas, and started doing new research. And then with the further development of the Web, there was the invention of social media. I saw some interesting opportunities there. I knew I could do something and make a bigger impact.

Q: What is the significance of your research on opinion spam?

A: It’s very important because you

want to make sure the information on the Internet is trustworthy. That’s the issue, trying to detect the fraud. Opinions from social media are increasingly used by individuals and organizations for making purchase decisions and choices at

elections and for marketing and product design. Positive opinions often mean profits and fame for businesses and individuals, which unfortunately, gives strong incentives for imposters to game the system by posting fake reviews or opinions to promote or to discredit some target products, services, organizations, individuals, and even ideas without disclosing their true intentions or the person or organization that they are secretly working for.

Opinion spamming not only hurts consumers with false positive opinions and damages businesses with malicious negative reviews, but can also warp opinions and mobilize large groups into positions counter to legal or ethical mores. This can be frightening, especially when spamming must be detected in order to ensure that the social media continues to be a trusted source of public opinion, rather than being full of fakes, lies, and deceptions.

A review is one type of Internet information, but it’s quite a big type that concerns normal consumers. And it’s a big problem. We’re doing more research on this in collaboration with Yelp and also some other universities.

Q: Is there anything more you can share on that?

A: It is essentially a continuation of

our research in the past. This time, it’s a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and Stony Brook University.

And Yelp has supported our proposal.

We’re trying to work a bit more based on each other’s strengths, combining forces to build more sophisticated models to detect fraud.

Q: What’s the most important thing you have learned since you began?

A: There are always so many

interesting things to do—that’s definitely what’s driving me. It’s the same for everyone: you do what interests you most and where your strengths are. :

17

Philanthropy

Gift Celebrates a Lifetime Passion for Engineering

by Joel Super

H

arold and Alice Sandberg are

Sandberg is gratified to have had a long

and headquartered in Chicago that today

a high-bay structural testing

ing at the University of Illinois. He earned

Sandberg was the first new employee hired

the inaugural supporters of

facility to be constructed on the

UIC campus. Sandberg understands in a unique way, said Farhad Ansari, civil and materials engineering professor, that the

visualization and experimental opportunities such a facility offers are something

that would help students enhance their thinking skills to become experienced structural engineers.

and productive relationship with engineerhis bachelor’s (BS ’42) and master’s (MS

’47) degrees in civil engineering from the Urbana-Champaign campus and subse-

quently dedicated a great deal of energy to promoting engineering education at UIC.

The Sandbergs have also included in their estate plan provisions to provide scholarships to students on both campuses. “I

have very much enjoyed being involved

over the years, especially my time at UIC on the College’s Advisory Board and my work with the Civil Engineering Profes-

sional Advisory Council. And, of course,

the chances I had to teach and give guest lectures on bridge design,” he said. In

addition to his service on advisory boards, Sandberg facilitated internships for UIC

students and was a tireless supporter of

engineering at UIC with the state legislature in Springfield.

When he got his first job at Alfred Benesch & Co., a civil engineering firm founded Harold Sandberg testifying before the United States Congress House Science and Technology subcommittee in 1982 about preventing structural failures following the collapses of the pedestrian walkway at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City and the roof of the Civic Center in Hartford.

Bridge for IL Hwy 57 over the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois, constructed in 1968, for which Harold Sandberg was the project principal.

Photo circa 1970, courtesy Alfred Benesch & Company.

18

includes offices around the nation,

by the four founders. He spent his more

than sixty-year career as a civil engineer

there, starting as a building designer and

moving steadily upward, taking the helm as

chairman of the board in 1987 and retiring at the age of 86.

During his tenure at Alfred Benesch & Co., Sandberg served as project manager or senior advisor on high-profile Chicago

projects like the Fairmont Hotel, 900 North Michigan, and Harbor Point Towers proj-

ects, which helped increase the company’s prominence and further burnished its

reputation. Long-time colleague Muthiah

Kasi (himself the firm’s chairman emeritus)

recalled about his former boss and current friend, “Harold liked to work twelve hour days—six on Saturdays—and if I came after 7:00 a.m. he’d let me know I was

late.” Kasi added that Sandberg’s fairness

to everyone was exemplary: “his judgment was always based on the quality of your

Harold and Alice Sandberg became avid travelers after his long and successful career, including an African safari to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary, a visit to Machu Pichu, and a trip he made to Antarctica. Here, they are pictured on one of their many trips. According to former colleague Muthiah Kasi, Sandberg always returned from his travels with photos of interesting structures. “You can’t take engineering out of Harold’s blood,” he said.

work.” Sandberg also designed or served

risk assessments, and corrosion/dete-

Highway Administration’s long-term bridge

and around the country. “He is an engi-

failure/fatigue tests. “The Sandberg gift is

ment of Transportation’s bridge rehabilita-

as project manager for bridges in Illinois

neer who’s beyond textbook design and

analysis, who looks at bridge design as an art and a science,” said Professor Ansari of Sandberg. “If he was in a desert, he could

design a bridge with the material at hand.”

The majority of first-tier research universities include a high-bay structural testing facility as part of their civil engineering

rioration, deformations/movement, and

particularly noteworthy because it is coming from one of the preeminent American

bridge and structural design engineers of

the twentieth century,” said Peter Nelson,

dean of the College. “Harold and Alice’s gift will allow UIC to help Chicago maintain its

place as one of the top structural engineering design centers in the United States.”

infrastructure because these facilities have

The research made possible by such a

large overhead crane) to perform full-scale,

tunities for increased undergraduate and

the size and capacity (typically including a

real-time testing of structural components and systems. These include stress tests,

facility will range broadly and offer opporgraduate student research participation in wide-ranging areas, including the Federal

performance program; the Illinois Departtion and diagnostic/forensic prototype

tests; research in earthquake engineering; and diverse industrial and agency-related research topics.

Professor Ansari believes it’s entirely fitting that the Sandbergs want to support

students,professionals,andfacultymembers who are passionate about civil and materials engineering: “Harold has exemplified during

his career the Confucian principal that if you love what you do, you don’t have to go to work a day in your life.” :

19

Around the College Jie Liang, PhD, Receives Professorship On September 22, UIC’s College of En-

gineering and College of Medicine jointly celebrated the investiture of Jie Liang,

PhD, bioengineering, as the new Richard

and Loan Hill Professor in Bioengineering.

This formal ceremony honored Professor Liang’s extensive work in bioinformatics.

Liang’s is the fourth Richard and Loan Hill Professorship in the College. The professorship will provide support to continue

Professor Liang’s research on developing

A beetle in Africa’s Namib Desert collects water from fog onto its textured back made up of hydrophilic (water-loving) and hydrophobic (waterfearing) surfaces.

Photo: James Anderson

computational tools for studying cellular and genetic structures and activity—

important work to strengthen UIC’s role as a major player in Chicago’s biotechnology sector.

Mechanical Engineers Mimic a Beetle’s Water Collection Funded by the National Science Founda-

tion, Constantine Megaridis, PhD, profes-

sor of mechanical and industrial engineer-

ing, and a team of other investigators, have used beetle-inspired designs to pattern new layouts on surfaces to collect and

disperse small amounts of liquid. Potential applications of this research include

making disposable strips to field-test water samples for E. coli and allowing water col(L-R) Richard Hill (BS ’74) and Jie Liang, PhD

lection from new sources in dry areas.

New Distinguished Professor Alexander Yarin, PhD, professor of me-

chanical and industrial engineering, was selected as a 2014 UIC Distinguished

Professor. This award recognizes faculty each year for their significant impact on

their fields through scholarship, creativity, and leadership. Professor Yarin heads

the Multiscale Mechanics and Nanotechnology Laboratory at UIC. His research

interests include nanotechnology, microand nanofluidics, fluid mechanics and

20

rheology, and heat transfer.

Alexander Yarin, the College’s twelfth distinguished professor

Two Female Students Accepted into Navy’s Elite Program This past spring, two of the College’s

undergraduate students interviewed with

naval officers in San Diego and Washing-

ton D.C. and were accepted into the U.S.

(L–R) Erica Hampton (BS ’16) and Madelyn Ryden (BS ’15)

Navy’s Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate Program (NUPOC). Erica Hampton, junior in electrical engineering, and

Madelyn Ryden, senior in chemical engi-

neering, will finish their degrees with paid

support from the Navy, go on to complete their one-year training in South Carolina,

and will then be deployed to oversee the

operation of the nuclear reactor and propulsion plants aboard naval vessels.

College of Engineering Participates at the UIC Open House In September, UIC held its second annual

of Engineering participated by offering an information session and laboratory tour

for each of the College’s six departments.

Many of the College’s student groups were

also in attendance to showcase the variety of activities offered on campus, including building Baja cars with the Society

of Automotive Engineers and concrete

canoes with the American Society of Civil

Engineers. Approximately 300 prospective students attended.

campus-wide open house for prospec-

A $100,000 Gift to Support Female Students

tour campus facilities, and learn about

Knowles Corporation, a global supplier of

tive students to explore degree options, activities and organizations. The College

advanced micro-acoustic solutions and

specialty components, has committed

$100,000 to the College of Engineering to

support female engineering students. “Our collaboration with the UIC College of Engineering is a natural way for us to support

the development of young women and the skills needed to have a rewarding career,” said Jeff Niew (BS ’88), president and

CEO, who studied mechanical engineering

at UIC. Niew, who is also a member of the College of Engineering’s Advisory Board, spearheaded this gift from his company.

The donation will help fund scholarships for

female students and launch a new women in engineering summer program at UIC

geared toward junior and senior level high school students.

(L–R) The Knowles Corporation gift will help support undergraduate engineering students like Ann Tiempetpisal (BS ’14) and Leslie Malaki (BS ’14), shown here in UIC’s High Pressure Shock Tube Laboratory.

Prospective students inspect a UIC Formula race car

21 21

College of Engineering 851 South Morgan Street Chicago, Illinois 60607-7043

Upcoming Events Alumni!

Engineering Alumni Association Meeting

December 2, 2014 6:30 p.m.

Science and Engineering Offices

Coming in February: Events Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Campus Engineering Week: February 22–28, 2015

Employers!

Join more than 100 recruiters seeking talented engineers at the Engineering Career Fair.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015 Noon–4:00 p.m.

On the UIC campus in the Illinois Room of Student Center East Register online if your company would like to interview talented engineering/computer science students:

http://go.uic.edu/careerfair

26th Annual Engineering EXPO: Coming April 21, 2015