UNLV Electrical & Computer Engineering Newsletter 8/16

AUGUST 2016 NEWSLETTER ]

MESSAGE FROM DEPARTMENT CHAIR To our ECE students, research and hands-on development experiences are a great way to build on, as well as branch out from, classroom learning. Thanks to the enthusiastic support of faculty, alumni and industry partners, the ECE department was able to provide a variety of opportunities for hands-on research and development experience to our undergraduate students.

This past May, 19 teams comprised of 41 sophomore and junior students participated in the Junior design competition sponsored by our corporate partners, Everi and Amazon. S. Mendoza and R. Dizon’s impressive project on Violin Motion Sensing won first prize!

Working in conjunction with several local companies, this past spring’s ECE 2016 Senior Design projects were some of the most advanced yet. Many of the projects were so unique that they will be implemented by the participating companies into their future model products.

Engaging undergraduates in the cutting edge faculty-guided research pays dividends, both personal and professional. Mr. Justin Le won the first annual Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar Award for his outstanding accomplishments in research. And Justin was not playing solo. In spring 2016 alone, more than 20 students took part in various ongoing research projects under the supervision of ECE faculty members. These projects ranged from optical sensing, intelligent transportation systems, smart grids, big data, image processing, microelectronics design and testing, and biomedical instrument development, just name a few. In addition to being more self-confident and independent, the undergraduate researchers gained valuable experiences and specific skills such as critical-thinking, communications, and making presentations. Working with undergraduates on research is also a rewarding experience to faculty to bridge the gap between teaching and scientific exploration.

Quite a number of our 2016 class students, including the award winning scholar, Justin Le, have chosen to attend our master and even Ph.D. programs this fall to advance their research careers. With quality students drawn from our own undergraduate programs and many quality domestic and international undergraduate programs, our graduate research is flourishing. In this issue, I feel so fortunate to highlight the research accomplishments of five graduate students who very recently completed their Ph.D. studies.

As mentioned previously, both EE and CpE programs are up for accreditation review by ABET. The EE and CpE self-study reports were submitted before the July 1, 2016 deadline, and the initial feedbacks provided were fairly positive. In the meantime, we are working around the clock to prepare and mobilize ourselves, the faculty, the students, and other stakeholders, for the upcoming on-site visit by the ABET reviewers that has been scheduled to early October.

(Yingtao Jiang, Professor and Chair)

GRADUTE STUDENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT Five Ph.D. students successfully completed their studies since the last issue of the ECE newsletter.

Their research is highlighted below.

Dr. Mohammad Shokrolah Shirazi completed his Ph.D. under supervsion of Dr. Brendan Morris in 2016.

His Ph.D. dissertation focuses specifically on vision-based analysis of behavior and safety at intersections through providing reliable trajectories of vehicles and pedestrians followed by machine learning and statistical techniques. Las Vegas transportation cameras are accessed through RTIS laboratory and this provides a great source for automated processing using computer vision techniques.

The foundational step of Shirazi’s dissertation is vehicle and pedestrian tracking in surveillance video and he has addressed different transportation applications regarding intersection scenarios. The primary step is to provide robust detection and tracking of vehicles and pedestrians since it is a challenging problem for intersection scenarios. When reliable tracking is provided, different applications can be addressed through investigation of vehicle and pedestrian trajectories. The visionbased pedestrian behavior analysis along with the proposed tracking framework addresses robust tracking of pedestrians through fusion of their motion and appearance cues. Other important applications that have been addressed are time to collision (TTC), Distance to Intersection (DTI), Time to Intersection (TTI), queue

AUGUST 2016 NEWSLETTER ] analysis, and pedestrians’ crossing speed, count and waiting time. His contributions in the fields of computer vision, computer engineering and intelligent transportation systems are shown through his publishing of numerous papers, including IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Journal of Electronic Imaging, IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, etc. He received 2nd place for the College of Engineering Best Dissertation Award for his work titled "VISION-BASED INTERSECTION MONITORING: BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS & SAFETY ISSUES".

Dr. Shirazi will start his new research career as a visiting assistant professor at Cleveland State University by the end of summer 2016.

Dr. Yiyan Li completed his Ph.D. study under Prof. R. Jacob Baker in May 2016.

Analyzing the patient fluidic samples such as blood, saliva, and urine has been an important method for modern clinical diagnostics.

When the volume of the liquid samples is below micro-liter level, the gravity no longer dominates the combinational forces but the surface tension does. Dr. Li’s Ph.D. research was related to handling these small volume liquids for the clinical diagnostic applications. Dr. Li incorporated an amazing liquid handling technology, electrowetting on dielectrics (EWOD), for his work. The liquid droplets in EWOD devices can be totally controlled by voltage signals with absolutely no manual intervention. This technology was referred to as digital microfluidics (DMF). Dr. Li started fabricating his DMF chips at the UNLV’s cleanroom facility back 2013, and subsequently developed a number of portable, highthroughput intelligent DMF chips for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics. These chips included digital control electronics and electrode arrangements of the DMF chip, operating on-chip assay reactions, and integrating capacitive sensing electronics.

Dr. Li has been pursuing his postdoctoral study at UCIrvine after defending his dissertation. His current work focuses on an NSF-funded project to develop a highly sensitive portable bacteria detection system which allows ultra-rapid bacteria detection in a large volume of clinical samples by measuring the fluorescent signals in a 3-dimensional container.

Dr. Ashok EM Sudhakar pursued and received two concurrent Ph.D.’s in two separate fields at UNLV. His ECE Ph.D. research was in synthesis and characterization of Graphene under the tutelage of Dr. Biswajit Das. Graphene is an important nanoscale material with unique electronic and optical properties. Due to its many potential applications, graphene was the subject of a Nobel Prize in physics in 2010. The objective of Dr. Sudhakar’s ECE research was the development of an anodized aluminabased platform for synthesis of graphene. The structure consists of an anodized alumina template created on a silicon substrate copper-filled pores. The advantage of this structure is that it provides a nanostructure platform for graphene synthesis, with the benefit of improved catalytic efficiency provided by nanostructures. This specific structure has many additional advantages such as lower cost, ease of fabrication, control of nanostructure size. In addition, this method can be used to grow graphene on sensitive substrates as the alumina layer acts as a protective barrier. This structure is also advantageous for heat sinking applications as the copper nanowires can help heat conduction from the substrate to the graphene layer.

After receiving both Ph.D.’s, Dr. Sudhakar is currently employed at UNLV as a Research Professor in the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, School of Public Policy and Leadership. He is leading the effort for two UNLV graduate certificate programs viz: (1) Cybersecurity Management and (2) Threat Assessment and Infrastructure Security. His profile can be accessed at https://www.unlv.edu/people/ashok-sudhakar.

Dr. Yacouba Moumouni completed his Ph.D. study under Prof. R. Jacob Baker in Dec. 2015. His Ph.D. research was on Solar Thermoelectric Generator (STEG) systems for energy delivery to remote residential areas in arid and developing regions. During the early stage of his work, the main purpose was to investigate ways STEG could be a cost-effective alternative to photovoltaics for a remote residential household power supply. A complete solar thermoelectric energy harvesting system was presented. In particular, an entire system was built, modeled, and then validated with LTspice simulator software via thermal-to-electrical analogy schemes.

Valuable data in conjunction with two novel LTspice circuits were obtained, showing the achievability of analyzing transient heat transfer with the Spice simulator. Additionally, real site direct normal insolation was fed into the Spice model to capture the true system’s thermal behavior. Interestingly, two distinct analogies

AUGUST 2016 NEWSLETTER ] resulted from his study: 1) an RC analogy and 2) another analogy similar to an N-type doped semiconductor material’s carrier density dependence with temperature.

In spring and summer 2016, Dr. Moumouni worked at UNLV as a post-doctoral Research Scientist to explore two interrelated concepts: 1) a deeper understanding and 2) a concise implication of the outcomes of the previous research works he did in the Center for Energy Research. He recently published a journal paper (May 2016) as an outcome of this deeper analysis of STEG energy harvesting systems in conjunction with LTspice electronic simulator modeling.

His future research (3-5 years) revolves around solar renewable and new alternatives of energy. He is now with Faculty of Engineering Technology and Science (Electrical and Electronics) at the Higher Colleges of Technology, Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Dr. Grzegorz Chmaj completed his Ph.D. study in Electrical Engineering under Prof.

Henry Selvaraj in June 2016. He has been serving as the ECE lab manager since 2013.

Distributed processing techniques are now in a demand, due to the development of Internet of Things (IoT), teamed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and other multiunit structures. The general purpose processors (e.g. CPUs) can be used for any types of these applications, but their flexibility often comes with a cost of operational efficiency. Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) are designed for certain types of application and have great operational efficiency, but they rarely can be used for applications other than what they are designed for. The reconfigurable chips – Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide high operational efficiency along with the application flexibility – as they can be reprogrammed with the functionality that is required at the given time. All the above listed aspects are combined in the distributed processing system that is expected to consume low amounts of electrical energy.

Grzegorz Chmaj works on a comprehensive solution for the problem of distributed processing equipped with reconfigurable units (based on FPGA chips). Specifically, his research touched the complete and detailed architecture design for all the elements, operational algorithms that together with the architecture constitute a complete solution for the stated problem. The design of the units is flexible enough that it allows any number and combination of CPUs, ASICs or FPGAs. Units in the proposed design are autonomous – the decisions are taken by individual units, instead of the central node, which is marginalized. The decentralized and autonomous approach provides more flexible and reliable design that is especially important for teamed UAV mission applications, where either the communication with a team is not available or is exposed for jamming.

The efficiency of the solutions is defined as electrical energy consumption and operation timespan, and is measured using dedicated experimentation system through numerous simulations.

Results of Dr. Chmaj's work have been presented in his Ph.D. dissertation entitled "A Distributed Processing Platform with Reconfigurable Autonomous Nodes" which he successfully defended in June 2016.

UNDERGRADUTE STUDENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT ECE student Mr. Justin Le won the 2016 UNLV Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar Award Award winner, Justin Le (center), with Office of Undergraduate Research-UNLV Director, Prof. Liam Frink (left), and CSUN Board Member, Jasmine Simone Jordan. (Photo courtesy of Sophia Phan). Justin Le’s Faculty Research Mentor was Dr. Emma Regentova (not shown in the picture).

Justin Le, a major in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics who is graduating this spring, is the 2016 recipient of the OUR-UNLV Outstanding Undergraduate Scholar Award. Justin has worked on an amazing number of diverse research projects in engineering subfields of electrical engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics. He has worked on projects focused on intelligent systems, vision-based technologies, and data analysis. He has presented his research at the NASA Annual Space Grant Consortium (2015) and was a speaker at the International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVP) in Las Vegas. He is the lead author on the 2015 paper “A Deep Belief Network for Classifying Remotely-Sensed Hyperspectral Data” in the proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Visual Computing (Springer International Publishing). Clearly Justin wants to positively impact lives with his research. One project demonstrated the application of one such technique to the analysis of enormous spectrometer images taken by aerial vehicles for the purpose of identifying routes where wildlife trafficking

AUGUST 2016 NEWSLETTER ] might occur and thereby aiding the prevention of animal poaching. His recent work focuses on developing adaptive technology to assist people who have developmental disorders in communicating non-verbally with others. He will draw from fields in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and computer systems engineering. Justin’s novel research is bound to continue to have broad impacts – and already has influenced and inspired undergraduate colleagues he collaborates with. As Dr. Jiang, chair of the ECE department, wrote in his nomination letter, Justin “has a deep understanding of the technical and philosophical questions raised by other researchers in his field, to the extent that he was able to heavily influence the direction of every project in which he participated.”

Justin is also significantly involved in UNLV service activities including currently serving as the President of Tau Beta Pi, an Honors Society that represents the College of Engineering. He also serves as the Vice Chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a student organization that represents the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

Justin will continue his research journey in Fall 2016 to pursue a Dual Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics at UNLV.

JUNIOR DESIGN COMPETITION: SPRING 2016 The Junior Design competition attracted interest not only from students, but also from industry, with sponsoring companies interacting with students and observing their design efforts. The competition is a great opportunity for ECE juniors to showcase their skills, innovation and knowledge. In spring 2016, the 1st prize went to S. Mendoza & R. Dizon for the project Violin Motion Sensing.Prizes were sponsored by industry supporters Everi and Amazon.

1st Prize: Saul Mendoza, Reiner Dizon Project Title: Violin Motion Sensing Rhythm game in the DE2 board. Nios II soft processor was utilized as the center of the entire operation. With the Nios II, it was possible to use the toggle switches, key buttons, and the VGA display in order to implement the game. In order to access these components, the program for the game was written in C programming language and assigned pointers for the addresses of each component based on the documentation for the Altera DE2 Media Computer.

(Saul Mendoza, Prof. Emma Regentova, Reiner Dizon, Everi’s VP Adam Fong, and Amazon’s Aaron Elman, picture from left to right)

2nd Prize: Eilat Avidan, Alfonso Contreras Project Title: Simon Says The modified version of the game ‘Simon Says’.

3rd Prize: Bryan Takemoto, Johny Nguyen Project Title: Enigma Puzzle An Enigma type of mechanism was designed into this puzzle. The Enigma machine theory is to have the machine rewire itself every time a user inputs a sequence.

Special prize for Interfacing: Brett Smith, Christopher Frogget Project Title: RC car User was able to control the Remote Control Car to all directions through DE2's buttons / switches.

Special Prize for Interfacing: Trace Stewart, Ryan Dunlap Project Title: Combination Electronic Solenoid Lock An electronic solenoid lock utilizing the DE2 board. Once three attempts have been made, an alarm would sound indicating some possible intrusion.

Honorable Mention: Zachary Soukup, Trevor Ensign Project Title: Rijandael S-box The purpose of this project was to create a Rijndael S-box using logic gate level design. The Rijndael S-box is used in the Rijndael cipher, which was used to develop the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

AUGUST 2016 NEWSLETTER ]

SENIOR DESIGN COMPETITION: SPRING 2016 The department’s spring 2016 Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition projects were recognized by faculty and industry partners as some of the most advanced and developed yet when compared to entries from previous years. The projects covered a wide area of Electrical and Computer Engineering concepts, (FPGA’s, sensors, power systems, feedback and control, digital logic, IC fabrication, digital signal processing, electrical safety, and circuit theory) highlighting unique solutions to improve current products and solve issues with existing products/hardware in the market place. Several of the solutions are so unique that participating loca companies will be implemented them into their future model products.

1st Prize: Nathan Hanson Project Title: Pulsed Radiation Measurement and Feedback Control System Instructor: Brandon Blackstone (ECE lab director) Faculty Advisor: Dr. Yingtao Jiang Community Advisors: Ignacio Aguilar, John Turner, Lawrence Miller, and John Stammetti The project measures X-ray radiation on a pulse-to-pulse basis and controls a variety of input parameters to compensate, in real time, for fluctuations of dose due to heating. The system is a FPGA controller, which controls the production and gating of the radiation pulses, duration and duty cycle. Automation of the X-ray system will allow universal, stable, flat radiation over time scanning without costly warm-up.

2nd Prize (tie): Steven Leung, Saied Samara and Shada Sharif Project Title: Smart Boot Instructor: Brandon Blackstone Faculty Advisor: Dr. R. Jacob Baker Technical Advisor: Dr. Paolo Ginobbi An orthopedic boot capable of tracking of the pressure applied to the ankle in the boot and the steps taken per day with a user interface that is easy to understand and use. All the information is logged in memory such that the patient or their doctor can monitor it. Benefits include, knowing the pressure level comfortable and safe, along with a repeatability in the pressure settings. This is believed, by the doctors consulted, to lead to a faster and more comfortable recovery time.

2nd Prize (tie): Jimmy Manone Project Title: Stereo Sound Extractor Instructor: Brandon Blackstone Faculty Advisor: Dr. Venkatesan Muthukumar This Sound Extractor allows the user to conduct conversations in a crowded room or instrument or voice in a band with a simple turn of a dial which also has the application to fine-tune a pair of stereo microphones in real time for surveillance or live sound reinforcement.

Interdisciplinary Award: Eduardo Hoyuela-Alcaraz and Jason Sikorski Project Title: Air Particulate P.O.D. Version 2 Instructor: Dr. Zhiyong Wang and Brandon Blackstone Faculty Advisor: Dr. David James Community Advisor: Dronesmith Technologies A mobile aerial platform used for air quality monitoring in conjunction with a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a low cost air particulate and gas sensors. A low cost robotics solution that can eliminate multiple high cost monitoring stations with the added benefit of being able to operate in extremely hazardous environments. The sensor module is designed to be a Plug and Operate Device (P.O.D.).

Commercial Potential (2nd Place): Corwin C. Grigg, Jonathan DeBoy, Jeremy Letkiewicz and Jeremy Nelson Project Title: H2 DrOne Instructor: Dr. Zhiyong Wang and Brandon Blackstone Faculty and Technical Advisors: Dr. Darryl Pepper and Dr. Venkatesan Muthukumar Community Advisor: Richard Williams A design that uses existing drone development platforms but adds the ability to traverse both air and water environments while using wireless control with a constant video feed. It contains a ballast system which allows for depth control while underwater compared to water-tight-only drones. Unlike other existing solutions, the drone can retransition to the air after reemerging from the water.

AUGUST 2016 NEWSLETTER ]

INTERNSHIP An ECE student turns study abroad experience into internship that taught him the value of improvising. (Reprinted courtesy of UNLV News Center) Mario Verduzco knew only a couple of things as he flew to Costa Rica in January 2016 for a four-month study-abroad/internship experience: He’d be working at a recycling center, and the owners had a project for him.

The project turned out to be one of the most challenging experiences of the Las Vegas native and electrical engineering junior’s life. It wasn’t so much the project itself — constructing an apparatus to help the center sort materials more efficiently — but the conditions under which he had to do it.

“At UNLV, I work in a lab setting, so whenever I get a project, I have the luxury of having all the right tools available, and I can order something if I don’t have it,” Verduzco said. When he arrived in Costa Rica, “I assumed everything I needed would be available.” It wasn’t. The 20-year-old son of Mexican immigrants had to make do with the materials and skills, both mechanical and linguistic, that he had. “It was hard,” he said.

Verduzco secured the three-credit-hour internship through UNLV’s University Studies Abroad Consortium (USAC), which arranged the project through the University of San José’s satellite campus in San Ramón. He funded the experience with the help of the International Programs, CSUN Study Abroad, and the Rebels R.I.S.E. Study Abroad scholarships. Simultaneously, he was taking 12 credits in intensive Spanish to help him obtain one of his two minors (the other is in math). That helped him somewhat, but he still had to learn the quirks of the Costa Rican dialect, which at times made communication difficult.

The recycling center was a family-owned enterprise outside the small city of San Ramón, about an hour’s drive northwest of the Costa Rican capital of San José. Verduzco quickly recognized the problem he was assigned to solve. A truck collected recyclable materials — glass, paper, plastic — from businesses in town and brought them in massive yard waste bags to the center, an open concrete-and-dirt floor underneath a roof, like a covered playground basketball court. Workers would dump the contents onto the floor and sort them into piles, also on the floor.

Initially, the owners wanted Verduzco to make a conveyor belt from spare materials on the site. But much of the metal he was told to use was too rusted to weld. So he salvaged a plastic water cistern from the property, then bought a roughly 5-by-8-foot tin sheet and aluminum rods at a hardware store.

He used the rods as a frame to support the tin sheet and tank. Then he attached the tin to the cistern at a 15 percent grade so that workers could dump the contents into the tank and sort them quickly as they slid down the sheet. “Instead of people having to bend down and dig in bags, they can see all the contents,” he said, “so they can just grab it, put it in place, grab it, put it in place.”

Verduzco finished the system in his final week of the internship in May. It helped the center cut the time a worker needed to sort through a bag’s worth of recyclables from about two hours to roughly 30 minutes. He said he’s still more interested in electrical than structural engineering, but the responsibility and difficulty of the internship gave him valuable experience in completing a project in the field when conditions aren’t the best. Plus, he said, “I learned something I don’t want to do: try to make something out of junk.”

TECHNOLOGY COMMERICIALIZATION ECE Professor, Dr. Venkatesan Muthukumar, and two other professors from Health Science and Mechanical Engineering team with Startup to Bring Advanced Wearable Health Tracker to Market.

Smartwatches that help you track daily steps and heart rate? That’s old hat, according to UNLV researchers who have recently licensed their latest patent for a fitness tracker that makes calorie-counting as easy as taking a picture.

Professors in engineering and nursing set out to up the ante in the wearable technology industry by creating a device that combines and exceeds the best of existing activity-tracking devices such as Fitbit. UNLV’s version will merge current fitness assessment functions with camera and scanning technology that allows users to photograph their food and find out its nutritional content, including the caloric value, based on the type of food, portion sizes and fat content.

The invention — set to enter the commercial development stage soon — represents the next step in making health management effortlessly quick and non-intrusive for everyone from diabetic patients to athletes or anyone interested in monitoring their fitness regimen, researchers said.

“The missing piece within the fitness tracking space is nutrition monitoring,” said

AUGUST 2016 NEWSLETTER ] Jason Pottinger, director of business strategy at MealCheck Technologies, Inc., the startup that, per a recently signed licensing agreement, will commercially develop, manufacture and sell UNLV’s device. “What can’t be accomplished through self-reporting and apps will be possible through this technology we’re producing.”

MealCheck — an offshoot of Academic Technology Ventures, Inc., which specializes in sponsoring and commercializing academic research — was founded specifically to bring this invention to market.

“MealCheck Technologies, Inc., offers commercialization expertise and a genuine enthusiasm for our technology,” said Zach Miles, UNLV’s associate vice president for economic development, “so we’re really excited to partner with them.”

The device is the brainchild of UNLV’s Jillian Inouye, professor and associate dean for research in the Schools of Nursing and Allied Health Sciences; Mohamed B. Trabia, mechanical engineering professor and associate dean for research, graduate studies and computing in the Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering; and Venkatesan Muthukumar, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

“This technology highlights the impactful nature of interdisciplinary research taking place at UNLV,” said Tom Piechota, UNLV’s vice president for research and economic development. “What our researchers achieve together on campus today can end up in the hands of consumers tomorrow.”

FACULTY ACTITIVES 

Professor Yahia Baghzouz attended the 23rd International Symposium on Power Electronics, Electric Drives, Automation and Motion (SPEEDAM) in Anacapri, Italy, where he chaired a session on "Power Electronics in PhotoVoltaic Applications", and presented a paper entitled "Experimental test on the islanding of an advanced PV inverter".

Along the way, Prof. Baghzouz also gave invited seminars on "The Impact of Renewable Resources on Power System Operations" at both the Polytechnic of Milan, Italy, and the University of Skikda, Algeria.

Prof. Baghzouz receiving a certificate of appreciation from the President of the University of Skikda. 

Prof. Baghzouz with graduate students at the Polytechnic of Milan, Italy.

Dr. Brendan Morris served as the Program Chair for the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV’16) meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden. IV is a premier forum sponsored by the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS). Researchers, engineers, practitioners, and students, from industry, universities and government agencies are invited to present their latest work and to discuss research and applications for Intelligent Vehicles and Vehicle-

Infrastructure Cooperation Presentation of Best Paper Award through technical sessions, workshops, poster sessions, exhibition, and technical visits.

IV’16 was hosted by Chalmers University of Technology and SAFER Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre. The record-setting conference had Bus ride with Program Chair over 412 contributions from 37 different countries resulting in 206 (Brendan Morris) and General papers (28 orals and 178 posters) from 742 authors. A total of 580 Chair (Jonas Sjöberg) to delegates attended the meeting, highlighting the worldwide focus and AstaZero Demo site. interest in autonomous driving and intelligent vehicles.  Professor Shahram Latifi along with a few engineering professors paid a two-day visit to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in early August 2016 for collaboration opportunities with JPL researchers on various research topics relevant to NASA missions.  Professor R. Jacob Baker received a $299,605 grant from U.S. Army/DoD for the project entitled “advanced printed circuit board design methods for compact optical transceiver.”

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ECE Professor Sahjendra Singh is collaborating with visiting professor Keum W. Lee from Kwandong Catholic University, Republic of Korea, and their graduate students to develop new solar control systems for the single- and multiple-axis attitude control using solar flaps suitably mounted on spacecraft. The uncertainties in the attitude dynamics pose considerable difficulty in the design of controllers to attain precise orientation of satellites. Their research has focused on the development of adaptive solar attitude control systems that automatically tune their control parameters to compensate for uncertainties and disturbance forces. In a nutshell, these controllers can self-organize so that the spacecraft attains the reference orientation intended for inertially-fixed, Earth-pointing, or solar-pointing missions, despite parameter uncertainties and unknown perturbing forces. This solar attitude control research has already appeared in aerospace journals and AIAA conferences.

Collaborating with Professor Schneider from the College of Health Science (center in the picture), ECE Professors Emma Regentova (right) and Mei Yang (left) are working on an interdisciplinary research project aiming to design a computational model that will predict white blood cell phenotypical features during the recovery process of injured skeletal muscles. This model shall serve as a new tool that can help predict how hormones and other biological substances, drugs, or environmental factors will affect the response of white blood cells during muscle recovery. In addition, this tool may well lead to a reduction in the use of animals for muscle recovery research. This research is being supported by a Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research Award they together received in Spring 2016.

Professor Peter Stubberud received a $30,000 charitable grant from Qualcomm Inc. The funding will be used to support graduate student research and professional development related to mixed signal CMOS circuit design. The general purpose of this funded research is to model and analyze the performance of both single and multi-bit, high order, continuous-time sigma delta modulators so that a modulator’s SNR, region of overload and stability can be determined without extensive time domain simulations.

The research will include the design and fabrication of several continuous-time CMOS sigma delta modulators. These designs will include both single and multi-bit, high and low order, high OSR, continuous-time sigma delta modulators as well as single and multi-bit, ultra-wideband low OSR, modulators.

ECE professor Henry Selvaraj, among 9 outstanding professors on campus, received a CSUN faculty award in 2016 UNLV Academic Achievement Awards ceremony.

ECE professor Brendan Morris received the 2016 distinguished ECE faculty award to recognize and honor him for excellence in teaching, research, and service.

ECE professor Mei Yang has been promoted to the rank of full professor, effective July 1, 2016.

COMMUNITY OUTREACH

In summer 2016, the ECE Department welcomed another cohort of students from the MSEA (Mathematics, Science, and Engineering Academy) program that started in 1993. These students in 9th grade to 12th grade spent a week in the ECE laboratories where they assembled and soldered electronic circuits.

They were guided and assisted by ECE faculty, staff and students.

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