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ECE IMPACT REPORT 2016/2017
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Message Chair
PHOTO: RICE UNIVERSITY
FROM THE
the nation*, and it shows through this continued and well-deserved recognition. I was honored to attend the White House's announcement of the $400 million Advanced Wireless Research Initiative, helmed by the National Science Foundation. Rice ECE research and our urban-scale testbeds in wireless were prominently featured during the announcement. Our students, the happiest in the Edward W. Knightly country according to the Princeton It has been an exciting year in the Rice Review, have been productive as well. University Department of Electrical and The Rice Integrated Systems and Computer Engineering! We are pleased Circuits laboratory, in particular, has to welcome Palash Bharadwaj and Guru seen a slough of students selected as Naik, new assistant professors whose finalists and winners in Best Paper research lies in the area of Photonics, competitions at conferences around Electronics and Nanodevices. We look the world. Our 2016 M.E.E. and M.S./ forward to all they will accomplish at Ph.D. matriculating classes are a record Rice. We are thrilled that Naomi Halas breaker with a combined 37% women, was named Fellow of the National the highest in department history. We Academy of Inventors, and that assistant are also excited about the formation of professors Aydin Babakhani and the ECE Graduate Student Association. Xaq Pitkow are new winners of NSF They’ve had a strong start, and are CAREER Awards. In addition, Professor engaging with students of all majors and Athanasios Antoulas was recently backgrounds around the campus. We named a 2016 Max Planck Fellow, look forward to seeing what the year and Dr. Lin Zhong was promoted this brings them. summer to full Professor. Our faculty For the second year in a row, are among the most productive in application fees for ECE’s M.S./Ph.D.
program have been waived. We are happy to help prospective students in ECE maximize the money they spend on these application fees. Speaking of maximizing impact, this past year Rice announced $150 million in strategic research initiatives, and we are excited to be a part of these investments in Data Science and Molecular Nanotechnology research, starting with open rank faculty hires. More information on that can be found at ece.rice.edu/jobs. We invite you to flip through these pages to learn more about Rice ECE!
Edward W. Knightly Professor and Chair, ECE Professor, Computer Science
IN THIS ISSUE Faculty News Resarch News Student News Stay Connected
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*Based on Academic Analytics Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSPI) as of Nov. 2015 and AAD2014
Edward Knightly is a professor and the department chair of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research group, the Rice Networks Group, manages the deployment and operation of a large-scale urban wireless network, called Technology for All (TFA), in a Houston under-resourced community. TFA currently serves over 4,000 users. Knightly is an IEEE Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received best paper awards from ACM MobiCom and IEEE SECON and serves on the IMDEA Networks Scientific Council.
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BABAKHANI, PITKOW WIN NSF CAREER AWARDS BY GRACIELA GUTIERREZ & MIKE WILLIAMS
PHOTOS: RICE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Aydin Babakhani, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Dr. Xaq Pitkow, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice, and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and McNair Scholar at Baylor College of Medicine, have won the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacherscholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of both education and research. The award will support their research careers over the next five years. Babakhani is focused on developing terahertz chips that send and receive signals at an unprecedented rate and show potential for revolutionizing the cellular communication industry. THz waves don’t pass easily through water or travel long distances, but many nonmetallic materials are transparent to terahertz waves. (Current cellphone signals share space with television and other wireless technologies in the
longer – and more crowded — radio frequencies.) “If we can build sources that generate good power at one terahertz, we can use them for many important applications,” said Babakhani, who joined Rice in 2011. “High-speed communication is probably the most important application of this work. The need for data is increasing wireless use, and there’s no solution other than going to higher frequencies,” he said. Pitkow’s work focuses on developing theories of the computational function of neural networks in the brain. This information will help to explain how humans use sensory information to construct coherent perceptions of the world. “This is my first grant dedicated purely to theoretical neuroscience. These days there is broad recognition that theoretical work is critical for understanding the brain, but with this award, that recognition translates into real, practical consequences for my lab’s ability to do that work. It’s very exciting,” said Pitkow. His work concentrates on vision and how the brain transforms lowlevel visual features like oriented edges into higher-level representations of
Babakhani, top, and Pitkow
object properties. This work will have broader implications on other sensory systems, how neural representations are learned and transformed and whether those representations are efficient in a quantifiable sense. The CAREER award applicants are subject to a rigorous peer-review process where a panel awards those proposals that are most creative, original and hold potentially transformative concepts within each field of entry. Read more about Babakhani at bit.ly/2cs04pf and Pitkow at bit. ly/2cxWQ1k.
RICE ECE WELCOMES TWO NEW FACULTY MEMBERS BY JENNIFER HUNTER
PHOTOS: RICE UNIVERSITY
Bharadwaj
Naik
The Rice University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) welcomes Dr. Palash Bharadwaj and Dr. Guru Naik, new assistant professors in ECE’s research area of Photonics, Electronics & Nanodevices. Bharadwaj was most recently a postdoctoral researcher in the Photonics Laboratory at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Prior to that he earned his Ph.D. in 2012 from the University of Rochester. Dr. Naik comes to us from Stanford, where he was a postdoctoral researcher. Prior to that he attended Purdue, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2013. Bharadwaj is an experimentalist interested in studying and controlling the interaction of
nanoscale matter with photons and electrons. He likes to answer fundamental questions in nanoscience, and is interested in using these answers for developing novel devices and applications. “I find it very enriching to work at the interface of different disciplines - optics, materials science, solid state physics, chemistry, and of course electrical engineering.” At Rice, Naik will work on challenges such as squeezing down broad-bandwidth solar radiation to narrow-bandwidth; harnessing other forms of energy, such as heat; and waste-heat recovery; chemical sensing, and imaging in infared. “I’m extremely excited to be at Rice and continue my work,” Naik said. Read more: bit.ly/2cxrDhH
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Computing Success
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Professors Aydin Babakhani and Xaq Pitkow received the honor in 2016.
Professor Naomi Halas was inducted in 2015.
15 IEEE Fellows 9 NSF CAREER Awardsº 3 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows 3 American Physical Society Fellows 3 Optical Society of America Fellows 3 NSF Young Investigator Awards 2 DARPA Young Faculty Awards 2 International Society for Optics and Photonics Members 1 American Academy of Arts & Sciences Member 1 National Academy of Engineering Member 1 Sloan Fellow 1 National Academy of Sciences Member 1 National Academy of Inventors Member 1 Materials Research Society Fellow 1 Max Planck Fellow
º3 NSF Research Initiation Awards *Faculty included in this count:Tenure-Track Faculty, Joint Faculty with Baylor College of Medicine, Professors in the Practice, and Emeritus
HALAS NAMED TO NATIONAL ACADEMY OF INVENTORS BY MIKE WILLIAMS
PHOTO: JEFF FITLOW
Rice University professors Naomi Halas, James Tour and K.C. Nicolaou have been named fellows of the National Academy of Inventors. They are among 168 new fellows named by the society Dec. 15. Academy fellows are nominated by their peers for their prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society, according to the academy. Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of chemistry, bioengineering, physics and astronomy, and materials science and nanoengineering, is a pioneer in the study of the fundamental properties and potential applications of light-activated nanoparticles. Her
research has explored how lightAssociation for the Advancement of activated nanomaterials can be used for Science, the Materials Research Society, applications ranging from the treatment the Optical Society, the American of cancer and molecular sensing to Physical Society, the International biomimetic photodetection, and offSociety for Optical Engineering and the grid solar-powered sterilization. Institute for Electrical and Electronics Halas is the first person in the Engineers. Read more: bit.ly/2cOnQum university’s history to be elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering for research done at Rice. She is also the founding director of Rice’s SmalleyCurl Institute, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Halas, center, pictured with ECE graduate students in her lab.
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ANTOULAS NAMED MAX PLANCK FELLOW BY JENNIFER HUNTER
Athanasios Antoulas, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) has been named a 2016 Max Planck Fellow. His host will be the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg. The Max Planck Fellow Program promotes cooperation between outstanding university professors and Max Planck Society researchers. Antoulas’ research interests are in the broad area of dynamical systems and computation including model reduction of large-scale systems. He is the author of a book on the Approximation of Large-Scale Systems, published by SIAM. He studied at ETH Zürich, where he obtained the Diploma of Electrical Engineering in 1975, the Diploma of Mathematics in 1975, and the Ph.D. Degree in Mathematics in 1980. He has been with Rice ECE since 1982.
Antoulas was elected Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in 1991 and he was awarded a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Fellowship in 1995. The scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems investigate biological as Antoulas well as technical processes. Engineers, chemists, physicists, biologists and mathematicians develop mathematical models, design suitable controls, and use their findings as a basis for developing new, more efficient processing concepts. Read more: bit.ly/ThanosMP
BABAKHANI, ASSEFZADEH WIN BEST PAPER AT IEEE RWS
PHOTO: JEFF FITLOW
Babakhani and Assefzadeh
BY JENNIFER HUNTER ECE graduate student Mahdi Assefzadeh and ECE faculty member Aydin Babakhani won Best Paper at the 2016 IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS) Student Paper Competition. This is the second year in a row an ECE student from Babakhani’s Rice Integrated Systems and Circuits (RIRSC) lab has won this award, with Peiyu Chen winning the top prize in 2015. ECE Ph.D. student Himanshu Aggrawal from the RISC lab was also selected as a finalist at the competitive conference. Assefzadeh’s paper, “Picosecond Digital-to-Impulse Generator in Silicon,” was selected out of 6 finalists. “The work is an ultra-short picosecond impulse signal generator with a pulse width of 8 picoseconds,”
Assefzadeh explained. “These highpower, picosecond pulses enable a massive number of new applications in the terahertz domain such as 3D imaging for security and medical applications, as well as broadband spectroscopy. Also, in instrumentation and electronic characterization equipment such as fast mm-wave sampling oscilloscopes, this chip will be used to provide a picosecond spike of voltage for the sampler,” he said. “Mahdi is basically pushing the boundaries of THz impulse radiators,” said adviser Aydin Babakhani. “Generating and producing pulses when you are getting close to psec pulse width becomes exponentially more and more difficult,” he said. The cost of generating such pulses can be astronomical when considering the equipment needed to produce them. Assefzadeh’s work may in fact eliminate much of the cost involved. “Mahdi is working to replace expensive laserbased systems with his silicon chip, that once mass-produced could
average $1 each,” Babakhani noted. Assefzadeh currently holds the world record for generating and radiating the shortest pulse using a silicon-based technology (8-psec). His continued work with Babakhani will in part be funded by Babakhani’s prestigious NSF CAREER Award, announced in January. “It is great to win this prestigious award and to bring this honor back home for Rice. These awards and achievements aren’t possible without the great community and management that we have in our research group RISC, the ECE department, and Rice University,” Assefzadeh said.
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LIGHT AND MATTER MERGE IN QUANTUM COUPLING Rice Scientists Probe Photon-Electron Interactions in Vacuum Cavity Experiments BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Li, a co-author and graduate student in Kono’s group. “In our study, vacuum Rabi splitting is as large as 10 percent of the photon energy. That puts us in the so-called ultrastrong coupling regime. “This is an important regime because, eventually, if the vacuum Rabi splitting becomes larger than the photon energy, the matter goes into a new ground state. That means we can induce a phase transition, which is an
PHOTO: JEFF FITLOW
Where light and matter intersect, the world illuminates. Where light and matter interact so strongly that they become one, they illuminate a world of new physics, according to Rice University scientists. Rice physicists are closing in on a way to create a new condensed matter state in which all the electrons in a material act as one by manipulating them with light and a magnetic field. The effect, made possible by a custombuilt, finely tuned cavity for terahertz radiation, shows one of the strongest light-matter coupling phenomena ever observed. The work by Rice physicist Junichiro Kono and his colleagues is described in Nature Physics. It could help advance technologies like quantum computers and communications by revealing new phenomena to those who study cavity quantum electrodynamics and condensed matter physics, Kono said. Condensed matter in the general sense is anything solid or liquid, but condensed matter physicists study forms that are much more esoteric, like BoseEinstein condensates. A Rice team was one of the first to make a Bose-Einstein condensate in 1995 when it prompted atoms to form a gas at ultracold temperatures in which all the atoms lose their individual identities and behave as a single unit. The Kono team is working toward something similar, but with electrons that are strongly coupled, or “dressed,” with light. Qi Zhang, a former graduate student in Kono’s group and lead author of the paper, designed and constructed an extremely high-quality cavity to contain an ultrathin layer of gallium arsenide, a material they’ve used to study superfluorescence. By tuning the material with a magnetic field to resonate with a certain state of light in the cavity, they prompted the formation of polaritons that act in a collective
manner. “This is a nonlinear optical study of a two-dimensional electronic material,” said Zhang, who based his Ph.D. thesis on the work. “When you use light to probe a material’s electronic structure, you’re usually looking for light absorption or reflection or scattering to see what’s happening in the material. That light is just a weak probe and the process is called linear optics.
ECE student Xinwei Li with Professor Jun Kono, prepares a sample for a cavity quantum
electrodynamics experiment.
“Nonlinear optics means light does something to the material,” he said. “Light is not a small perturbation anymore; it couples strongly with the material. As you change the coupling strength, things change in the material. What we’re doing is the extreme case of nonlinear optics, where the light and matter are coupled so strongly that we don’t have light and matter anymore. We have something in between, called a polariton.” The researchers employed a parameter known as vacuum Rabi splitting to measure the strength of the light-matter coupling. “In more than 99 percent of previous studies of lightmatter coupling in cavities, this value is a negligibly small fraction of the photon energy of the light used,” said Xinwei
important element in condensed matter physics,” he said. Phase transitions are transitions between states of matter, like ice to water to vapor. The specific transition Kono’s team is looking for is the superradiant phase transition in which the polaritons go into an ordered state with macroscopic coherence. Kono said the amount of terahertz light put into the cavity is very weak. “What we depend on is the vacuum fluctuation. Vacuum, in a classical sense, is an empty space. There’s nothing. But in a quantum sense, a vacuum is full of fluctuating photons, having so-called zero-point energy. These vacuum photons are actually what we are using to resonantly excite electrons in our
QUANTUM continued on page 9
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ECE RESEARCH FEATURED IN WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCEMENT The $400 Million Advanced WIreless Research Initiative is led by the National Science Foundation BY B.J. ALMOND
principal investigator for the NSF grant. * They found a way to make the most of the unused UHF TV spectrum by serving up fat streams of data over wireless hotspots that could stretch for miles. * They demonstrated the first system that allows wireless data transmissions over UHF channels during active TV broadcasts, which has the potential to significantly expand the reach of socalled “super Wi-Fi” networks in urban areas. * They teamed up with nonprofit organization Technology For All to launch a free community broadband Wi-Fi network in the East Houston neighborhood of Pecan Park in 2004. That network, TFA-Wireless, now serves a 3-square-mile area. The video shown during the White House announcement is available at bit.ly/29Ib4L0.
PHOTO: TFA
A video showing how Rice University researchers have improved and expanded wireless technology was featured during the July 15 White House announcement of a $400 million Advanced Wireless Research Initiative led by the National Science Foundation. Edward Knightly, professor and department chair of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Rice Networks Group, appears in the video and attended the White House ceremony in Washington, D.C. The initiative is intended to maintain U.S. leadership in the development of wireless technology and produce the next generation of mobile technology. This new program will enable the deployment and use of city-scale testing platforms for advanced wireless research over the next decade. These platforms and the fundamental research supported on them will allow academics, entrepreneurs and the wireless industry to test and develop advanced wireless technology ideas, some of which may translate into key future innovations for fifth-generation systems and more. These efforts are expected to accelerate the deployment of ultralow latency and high-capacity wireless networks that are up to 100 times faster than those currently available. “The Advanced Wireless Research Initiative will amplify and accelerate U.S. leadership in wireless research,”
Knightly said. “The initiative enables an unprecedented mix of urban-scale research platforms and fundamental research.” Knightly and his collaborators have been heavily involved in research on wireless technology, which prompted NSF to ask Knightly to provide a video about his work for the White House announcement. Among the accomplishments of Knightly’s research group: * The Rice researchers won a $2.4 million NSF grant to conduct the most extensive experimental study of wireless technology that uses 100 or more antennas per base station to send tightly focused beams of data to each user, even as they move. A photo of Rice’s Argos Network for this project appears on the NSF website announcing the new White House initiative. Lin Zhong, professor of electrical and computer engineering and of computer science at Rice, is the
TFA Tower Installation.
Image generated by ECE graduate student Tan Nguyen.
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REDEYE COULD LET YOUR PHONE SEE 24/7
Energy-Stingy Tech Could Give Wearable Computers Continuous Vision BY MIKE WILLIAMS
PHOTO: RICE UNIVERSITY
Rice University researchers have just the thing for the age of information overload: an app that sees all and remembers only what it should. RedEye, new technology from Rice’s Efficient Computing Group that was unveiled at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2016) conference in Seoul, South Korea, could provide computers with continuous vision — a first step toward The RedEye team from Rice’s Efficient Computing Group includes (from left) Robert allowing the devices to see what their LiKamWa, Yuan Gao, Yunhui Hou, Mia Polansky and Lin Zhong. owners see and keep track of what they consumption because today’s best He said the energy bottleneck was the need to remember. smartphone cameras, though relatively conversion of images from analog to “The concept is to allow our digital format. computers to assist us by showing them inexpensive, are battery killers, especially when they are processing “Real-world signals are analog, and what we see throughout the day,” said real-time video. converting them to digital signals is group leader Lin Zhong, professor of Zhong and former Rice graduate expensive in terms of energy,” he said. electrical and computer engineering at student Robert LiKamWa began “There’s a physical limit to how much Rice and the co-author of a new study studying the problem in the summer energy savings you can achieve for that about RedEye. “It would be like having a personal assistant who can remember of 2012 when they worked at Microsoft conversion. We decided a better option Research’s Mobility and Networking might be to analyze the signals while someone you met, where you met Research Group in Redmond, Wash., they were still analog.” them, what they told you and other in collaboration with group director The main drawback of processing specific information like prices, dates and Microsoft Distinguished Scientist analog signals — and the reason digital and times.” conversion is the standard first step for Zhong said RedEye is an example of Victor Bahl. LiKamWa said the team measured the energy profiles of most image-processing systems today the kind of technology the computing commercially available, off-the-shelf — is that analog signals are inherently industry is developing for use with image sensors and determined that noisy, LiKamWa said. To make RedEye wearable, hands-free, always-on existing technology would need to be attractive to device makers, the team devices that are designed to support about 100 times more energy-efficient needed to demonstrate that it could people in their daily lives. The trend, for continuous vision to become reliably interpret analog signals. which is sometimes referred to as commercially viable. This was the “We needed to show that we could “pervasive computing” or “ambient intelligence,” centers on technology that motivation behind LiKamWa’s doctoral tell a cat from a dog, for instance, or a table from a chair,” he said. can recognize and even anticipate what thesis, which pursues software and hardware support for efficient computer Rice graduate student Yunhui Hou and someone needs and provide it right vision. undergraduates Mia Polansky and Yuan away. In an award-winning paper a year Gao were also members of the team, “The pervasive-computing later, LiKamWa, Zhong, Bahl and which decided to attack the problem movement foresees devices that are using a combination of the latest personal assistants, which help us in big colleagues showed they could improve and small ways at almost every moment the power consumption of off-the-shelf techniques from machine learning, image sensors tenfold simply through system architecture and circuit design. of our lives,” Zhong said. “But a key software optimization. In the case of machine learning, RedEye enabler of this technology is equipping uses a technique called a “convolutional our devices to see what we see and hear “RedEye grew from that because we still needed another tenfold neural network,” an algorithmic what we hear. Smell, taste and touch improvement in energy efficiency, and structure inspired by the organization may come later, but vision and sound we knew we would need to redesign of the animal visual cortex. will be the initial sensory inputs.” both the hardware and software to Zhong said the bottleneck REDEYE continued on page 9 achieve that,” LiKamWa said. for continuous vision is energy
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ILLUSTRATION: QI ZHANG
cavity. “This general subject is what’s known as cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED),” Kono said. “In cavity QED, the cavity enhances the light so that matter in the cavity resonantly interacts with the vacuum field. What is unique about solid-state cavity QED is that the light typically interacts with this huge number of electrons, which behave like a single gigantic atom.” He said solid-state cavity QED is also key for applications that involve quantum information processing, like quantum computers. “The light-matter interface is important because that’s where so-called lightmatter entanglement occurs. That way, the quantum information of matter can be transferred to light and light can be
sent somewhere. “For improving the utility of cavity QED in quantum information, the stronger the light-matter coupling, the better, and it has to use a scalable, solid-state system instead of atomic or molecular systems,” he said. “That’s what we’ve achieved here.” Zhang is now the Alexei
Abrikosov Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory. Kono is a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering, of physics and astronomy and of materials science and nanoengineering. Li received a “Best First-Year Research Award” from Rice’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for his work on the project.
REDEYE continued from page 8 LiKamWa said Hou brought new ideas related to system architecture circuit design based on previous experience working with specialized processors called analog-todigital converters at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “We bounced ideas off one another regarding architecture and circuit design, and we began to understand the possibilities for doing early processing in order to gather key information in the analog domain,” LiKamWa said. “Conventional systems extract an entire image through the analog-to-digital converter and conduct image processing on the digital file,” he said. “If you can shift that processing into the analog domain, then you will have a much smaller data bandwidth that you need to ship through that ADC bottleneck.” LiKamWa said convolutional neural networks are the state-of-the-art way to perform object recognition, and the combination of these techniques with analog-domain processing presents some unique privacy advantages for RedEye. “The upshot is that we can recognize objects — like cats, dogs, keys, phones, computers, faces, etc. — without actually looking at the image itself,” he said. “We’re just looking at the analog output from the vision sensor. We have an understanding of what’s there without having an actual image. This increases energy efficiency because we can choose to digitize only the images that are worth expending energy to
create. It also may help with privacy implications because we can define a set of rules where the system will automatically discard the raw image after it has finished processing. That image would never be recoverable. So, if there are times, places or specific objects a user doesn’t want to record — and doesn’t want the system to remember — we should design mechanisms to ensure that photos of those things are never created in the first place.” Zhong said research on RedEye is ongoing. He said the team is working on a circuit layout for the RedEye architecture that can be used to test for layout issues, component mismatch, signal crosstalk and other hardware issues. Work is also ongoing to improve performance in low-light environments and other settings with low signal-to-noise ratios, he said. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and a Texas Instruments Graduate Research Fellowship to LiKamWa.
Image generated by ECE graduate student Tan Nguyen.
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This image was generated by a Deep Learning technique named Deep Art, in which the content from one image and the style of another image are combined to create a new image. More photos created using Deep Art can be seen on pages 1, 2, 7, and 12.
ECE TEAM WINS SECOND AT ASAIO STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION “We’ve made so many advances in technology, yet the cane and seeing eye dog remain the only widespread navigational aid used by the blind. A better navigational aid would increase the quality of life and independence of people who are visually impaired or blind,” Gray said. Mauro Zabala, Rachel Gray and Jack Wang
BY JENNIFER HUNTER A team of ECE students won second place in the ASAIO Student Design Competition. Team EagleEye, comprised of students Rachel Gray, Jack Wang and Mauro Zabala, designed a vest to give vision back to the blind, using sensory substitution. “The theory of sensory substitution is that the brain….can use one sensory input to replace another one. We used vibration patterns to represent the visual world, so in essence a person can “feel” vision,” Wang explained. The work builds on a project started by ECE graduate Scott Novich and his Ph.D. adviser, David Eagleman. The first iteration of the vest was desigend to aid the hearing impaired through sensory substitution.
“It is not just about navigation; it is about recovering vision for those who cannot see, using another sense such as tactile feedback.” The team’s overall goal is to improve the quality of life for the visually impaired, and increase their independence through a better navigational aid. “It can be a daunting and even dangerous task to venture to unknown locations without being able to see your surroundings. With this device, hopefully that task will be easier for them and they can feel more comfortable mobilizing by themselves,” Zabala said. “It is not just about navigation; it is about recovering vision for those who
cannot see, using another sense such as tactile feedback,” Wang added. Wang noted that the conference allowed them to practice presentation skills that are so essential for success. “In terms of engineering education, I think something Rice does very well is to not only focus on learning the material, but also focus on presenting what you have learned and achieved,” Wang said. “I think it is very important, as an engineering student, to be able to connect with people who have no knowledge in your domain, to have the skill to explain complicated engineering concepts in very simple and intuitive terms. I think people with this skill are more likely to make a bigger impact.” Eagleman and Novich’s work has continued at startup NeoSensory, where the vest to aid the hearing impaired is being fine-tuned. Neosensory has a pilot program underway with deaf individuals as it pursues a 510k clearance from the Food and Drug Administration. Eagleman says he expects the vest to be on the market for between $1,000 and $2,000 next year. “The only other alternative is a cochlear implant device, which can cost $40,000,” he said. Read more: http://bit.ly/2e8iyyr
ASSEFZADEH WINS SECOND AT AP-S STUDENT PAPER AWARDS BY JENNIFER HUNTER Mahdi Assefzadeh, graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, won second place in the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) Student Paper Competition. Assefzadeh is a Ph.D. student in Dr. Aydin Babakhani’s Rice Integrated Systems and Circuits (RISC) Laboratory, and his paper was selected as one of the three finalists out of 158 submissions.
“The paper focuses on a radiating array, a generic radiator that can be used in multiple applications – wireless communication, hyperspectral 3D imaging and THz spectroscopy,” Assefzadeh said. In his paper, Assefzadeh introduces a trigger-based beamforming technique, the first time the method has been used. By using this technique, the distortive effects of the conventional narrowband method are eliminated by separating the
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delay path from the information path. “What is really interesting to me, is that our group is about circuits and systems, and this paper was selected as a finalist at an antenna conference,” Assefzadeh said. “This shows that the boundaries between areas in engineering are eroding,” he noted. “Everything in engineering is integrated and there is a lot of overlap in these different communities.” Read more: bit.ly/29HcGtX
AGGRAWAL WINS 2016 MTT-S FELLOWSHIP BY JENNIFER HUNTER ECE Ph.D. student Himanshu Aggrawal has received a prestigious IEEE MTT-S Graduate Fellowship for 2016. Aggrawal, a member of ECE assistant professor Aydin Babakhani’s Rice Integrated Systems and Circuits (RISC) laboratory, was recognized for his work in next generation Terahertz (THz) millimeter wave technology. “THz waves, which occupy the band from 0.1 mm to 1 mm, are unique in the spectrum because of their potential
applications in secure communications, automotive radar, and medical imaging. Despite the interest in using terahertz waves, we currently lack the underlying hardware platform to build upon,” Aggrawal explained. “Himanshu is pushing the limits of high-speed samplers and receivers in the mm-wave regime with signal frequencies exceeding 60GHz. He is working on a novel nonlinear sampling idea that can reduce the sampling window to few picoseconds,” Babakhani noted. An airport’s full body scanner operates at a low RF frequency. Aggrawal and the RISC lab are working to take the technology and make it work at a higher frequency to make it more efficient. “Imagine a scenario where you don’t
have to go through checkpoints. You would just walk past multiple sensors in the wall that will scan you and detect dangerous substances without causing delay and inconvenience,” Aggrawal added. “The ultimate goal is to build fast and accurate THz hyper-spectral imaging systems that can produce a complete absorption spectrum at every pixel of an image. This is very important for security applications such as detection of explosives and hidden objects. There are also many interesting medical applications such as 3D radar imaging of cancerous tumors,” Babakhani noted. Read more: bit. ly/2cW2ujd
RAMIREZ RECEIVES ROBERT LOWRY PATTON AWARD
David Ramirez
BY PATRICK KURP David Ramirez, a sixth-year graduate student in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice
University, has received the 2016 Robert Lowry Patten Award from the Graduate Student Association for “service and achievements on behalf of graduate students.” Ramirez received his B.S. from Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in engineering physics in 2009, and his M.S. in ECE in 2012 from Rice. From 2011 to 2015, Ramirez served as an ECE Graduate Mentoring Program Committee Member, and since 2012 he has been a member of the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership Graduate Committee. From 2012 to 2014 he served as a resident assistant and
housing representative to the Graduate Student Association. In March, Ramirez received the Distinguished Service Award and the Best Presenter Award, both from his department. His current research focuses on resource allocation for millimeter wave wireless networks in collaboration with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. Ramirez’s adviser is Behnaam Aazhang, the J.S. Abercrombie Professor in ECE. The Patten Award, funded by an endowment and named after the GSA’s former faculty adviser, includes $400 and a plaque. Up to four awards are given annually.
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Image generated by ECE graduate student Tan Nguyen.