UNLV Electrical & Computer Engineering Newsletter 1/17

JANUARY 2017 NEWSLETTER

MESSAGE FROM DEPARTMENT CHAIR In early October, 2016, the department welcomed another ABET team in six years to conduct on-site accreditation review of our Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering programs. Both programs came out strong, and the exit reports from the ABET team, delivered verbally on the day when they wrapped up their business on UNLV campus, cited quite a number of positive aspects of the programs. The capstone Senior Design projects were specifically mentioned and credited for their role in promoting student innovation and enhancing students’ overall learning experiences and outcomes. I personally cannot agree more with their findings, and the most recent Senior Design Competition that took place in December, 2016, exactly two months after the ABET visit, once again proved to be another big success.

This fall’s 2016 Senior Design class completed a number of interesting and competitive projects, ranging from 3D rendering and scanning, optoelectronics platform for data acquisition, smart home technologies, smart grid, to cardiac wireless sensor, and to name a few. In addition to their technical competence, a few projects were identified as having substantial commercial value. The smart microwave which was a direct product from a Senior Design team of three students made its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2017. As its name suggests, this so-called smart microwave is “smart” enough to know all the instructions on pre-packaged, microwavable food simply by scanning a QR code on the package.

Our sophomore and junior students did not let those seniors steal all the limelight by giving their best shot in our third ECE Junior Design Competition. For the first time, we had freshman and junior electrical engineering students compete together with their computer engineering peers for prizes and awards provided by our industry sponsors. I cannot be more proud to introduce a few winning projects in this issue.

Not only do our students excel in academics, they often throw themselves into an array of extracurricular activities that complement their educational experiences. This issue features one ECE Ph.D. student, a gifted marathon runner with a high goal to pursue research excellence.

Speaking of academic research, we are happily seeing that it is no longer a domain just reserved for faculty and their graduate students. Rather, each semester, the pool of undergraduate researchers is getting bigger and better. In this issue, research done by Mr. Carlos Lemus, a Computer Engineering major, is highlighted.

Supervised by two ECE faculty members, Carlos participated in the University Fall 2016 Undergraduate Student Research Showcase and won the first prize in Health, Science and Engineering category.

Let me finish up this message by expressing my deep gratitude to all our constituents, our students, faculty, alumni, and members of the advisory board. Everybody has contributed in his/her unique way in the ABET exercises, and help the department to excel in its education, research, and service missions.

(Yingtao Jiang, Professor and Chair)

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT: TAMING THE DATA EXPLOSION PROBLEM ECE Professor, Dr. Latifi, and his graduate students are trying to keep the explosive data volume in check.

As the key members of the Nexus program supported by a five-year NSF grant, ECE professor, Dr. Shahram Latifi, and his students are working to help enhance Nevada’s Cyberinfrastructure (CI) capabilities for data communication, processing, and management, while establishing a new archetype for CI research and development.

Each day hundreds, if not thousands, of NEXUS sensors record climate and environmental data at various points in Nevada. It is information that will help NEXUS researchers in their goal to maximize the efficiency of solar energy while minimizing the impact on the environment, but this vast amount of data needs to be transported, stored and represented in a way that will help the scientists interpret it.

"Nexus research is based on the observations we make in the data that we see, and the conclusions that we draw," says Dr. Latifi. "So by being able to process data efficiently, we, as scientists, begin to get a better idea of what works and what doesn't."

The mission of NEXUS cyberinfrastructure (CI) is to support scientific discovery by providing data management, communication and processing. The challenge CI faces is that the volume of data is large, and continues to grow.

Dr. Latifi

JANUARY 2017 NEWSLETTER ] "Considering the fact that most of these data are picked up on a 24/7 basis constantly, year around, you can imagine that there's going to be a lot of data that is collected," says Latifi. "So taming this explosion of data calls for efficient mechanisms to transfer this voluminous data and store it."

Predicting the Future Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of data management is communicating and banking the recorded observations so that they can be accessed, analyzed and interpreted by scientists. But to do this for every recorded variable would be computationally unsustainable.

To address this challenge, Latifi and his team have investigated data compression techniques: algorithms to reduce the amount of data Shahab Tayeb, Dr. Latifi’s Ph.D. student that needs to be transferred and stored. standing in front of their poster "Taming the In particular the team has used neural network models, which, if Network to Support Environmental Research Data" they are fed large quantities of data, begin to recognize inherent patterns and trends in the information. These models effectively accumulate knowledge about how a particular system behaves. Using that stored knowledge, the model can then make accurate predictions about what type of data it might see in the future in certain circumstances. "It is like the adage that says the past is a good indication of the future," Latifi says.

To "train" the model, Latifi and his team fed it large amounts of climate data, variables such as humidity and temperature observed at specific locations in Nevada. Then, after the network was fully trained, instead of transferring the new observations, the scientists simply programmed the model to predict what it believed those variables would be, based on past experience.

"The way the compression works is you guess what the data is going to be and then you send only the difference between the predicted and actual values," Latifi says. "If you're right on, the difference would be zero and you have nothing to send." If the prediction doesn't match the observations all that needs to be stored is the difference between the predicted and observed result, not the entire new recorded data set. "So by making a sophisticated network model, we tried to come to what the next sequence of data is, you know, as closely as possible, and then encode the error that we made," Latifi says.

Using such a technique no information is lost in the compression. For such "lossless compression" typically the amount of data transferred is only reduced by a factor of two or three. But using the neural network model, the team has been able to achieve compression factors of eight or nine. "These compression ratios are phenomenal and should be able to save us lots of space in terms of storing the data and a lot of bandwidth in terms of communicating the data," Latifi says.

Speedy and Secure Solutions The team also focuses on facilitating quick data transmission from the field and between scientists.

"Because these sensors pick up the data constantly you want to be able to transmit them on the fly," Latifi says. "And you don't want scientist A to wait forever to analyze the data sent by scientist B on another campus."

To facilitate such speedy data transfer requires better network protocols, a focus of Latifi's research. But Latifi's research also ensures that such high-speed communication would be as secure as possible. To achieve this aim the team uses algorithms to identify security breaches and block potential threats and improved network protocols that allow different layers of security for data transmission.

Investigating such techniques for fast and secure data transmission proves a passion for Latifi. "When you can send gigabytes of information in a blink of an eye or when you can compress data by a factor of two or three better than it is supposed to be it's exciting," Latifi says. "The fact that you can save so much storage and communication time."

Ultimately, however, he derives great satisfaction from being able to serve the mission of the NEXUS project. "It's just so exciting how we are able to connect different projects and bring people together and facilitate communication," Latifi says. (story adopted from the Nexus Note)

JANUARY 2017 NEWSLETTER ]

GROUP PROFILE: UNLV-NSTEC LABORATORY FOR SECURITY SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING The UNLV-NSTec Laboratory for Security Science and Engineering is dedicated to strategic research for security science and engineering. The lab is export-controlled, and it is led by Professor Ke-Xun (Kevin) Sun. The lab has an interdisciplinary team with diverse backgrounds in Aero-Astro Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Nuclear Engineering. The laboratory has grown into the most-funded group at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

The group has been actively recruiting undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs. Graduates typically work at the DOE Nevada National Security Site, national labs, and defense industry. (US citizenship is required.) Interested students are encouraged to contract Dr. Sun directly. Below is a list of research projects that are being conducted in the lab.  Radiation hardness of wide bandgap GaN & SiC material and devices  GaN and SiC wide bandgap semiconductor based electronics  GaN imagers for optical and ionizing radiation detection Dr. Sun  Thinfilm and GaN process  Lasers and optics  Fiber Acoustic Optics Sensors (FOAS)  Photonic Doppler Velocimetry (PDV)  Velocity Interferometer System for Any Reflector (VISAR)  Optical Frequency Combs (OFC)  Diffractive optics sensors  Hyperspectral imaging  Space and astrophysical scientific instruments  CubeSats, and satellite constellations  Scientific computing for image analysis and physical processes modeling The lab is well equipped and has access to the best research facilities in the world.  Lasers and Optics Laboratory: Femtosecond lasers and widely tunable (190 – 20,000 nm) traveling wave optical parametric amplifier (TOPAS) system. High energy pulsed lasers (1064 and 532 nm).

Many semiconductor lasers. Fiber optics systems. PDV and VISAR.  Solid State, Thin Film and GaN Process Laboratory: Multiple sputtering machines, Semiconductor analyzer, Ellipsometer, Hall measurements, access to SEM, XRD, TEM …  Electronics Laboratory: High voltage, high frequency (40GHz) capability  Access to Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) neutron beam time  Access to National Ignition Facility (NIF) shot time at Lawrence Livermore National Lab  Access to Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab  Access to UNLV Supercomputers

SENIOR DESIGN COMPETITION: FALL 2016 Funded by an endowment established by Fred and Harriet Cox, the Senior Design Competition has been an integral part of every ECE student’s academic experience. A capstone to his/her educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in his/her program to create a practical, realworld solution to an engineering or computer science challenge. Each student chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this program designed to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Fall 2016 semester once again was concluded with the Senior Design competition. The ECE department was represented by eight teams, and there were two teams blended with ME and ECE students to tackle interdisciplinary problems. Two projects (Cardiac Stress Test Wireless Medical Sensors and Rapid Intravenous Anesthesia) were done in close cooperation with doctors from the Nevada Heart And Vascular Center in Henderson, Nevada. The former project is now in continuation for its potential commercial values. All the other projects addressed a wide range of needs of the current world in terms of entertainment (Smart Home Speaker System), dining industry (Temperature Image Data Logging System, Smart Microwave), defense (Tactical Smart MagZ), amenities (Automatic Pool Balancer), multimedia (3-D Room Scanner, VR-Gear Controlled Camera) and research (Automated Optoelectronics Platform).

ECE students spent long evenings in the laboratory building their projects and solving engineering problems. All the projects were mature and many of them ready for commercialization. The Smart Microwave project gained high attention during the competition and was later showcased in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2017) held in early January 2017.

JANUARY 2017 NEWSLETTER ] The results of the Senior Design class included not only fully functioning prototypes, reports and presentations, but also short movies about projects. These movies can be found at the UNLV ECE YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/UNLVECE) in the playlist "Senior Design Fall 2016". To spread the information about Senior Design competition and ECE projects, the Department has dedicated a website to house all the Senior Design related information: http://ece.unlv.edu/index.html?navi=senior_design.

The ECE Department teams won the following awards: 1st Prize: Octavio L. Gonzalez and Travis L. Taylor Project Title: Advanced Micro-Grid Interconnection Scheme Instructor: Brandon Blackstone (ECE lab director) Faculty Advisor: Dr. Yahia Baghzouz The project developed a method of “best source” selection in combination with closed-transition techniques to provide a greater degree of voltage-frequency support during prolonged disturbances. In specific, they demonstrated the protection and controls for the autonomous functionality of an advanced microgrid interconnection schemes consisting of a 12 kW inverter, PV array, local utility supply, and a 13kW diesel-powered generator set. The system they developed can make real-time decisions on the micro-grid’s optimal configuration, as well as place itself fin any particular islanding or parallel operation mode for stability, reliability and economy. The utility company, home/business owners, students, and the university will all benefit from their development work.

2nd Prize & 1st Place Commercial Potential: Jorge Caballero, Alvaro Orduna-Dominguez, and Samuel Villanueva Project Title: Cardiac Wireless Sensor Instructor: Dr. Grzegorz Chmaj Faculty Advisor: Dr. R. Jacob Baker During medical exams, patients are required to run on treadmills with a cardiac sensor. However, this process both uncomfortable and dangerous due to the attached sensor wires. This team’s solution is to provide a wireless, transportable device for the patient receiving the cardiac stress test. Their solution consists of radio frequency chips and several micro controllers. Their design will benefit multiple agencies, particularly the medical field. It is a unique device that augments the current ability of the already existing test. This wireless test will be used within a medical clinic as well as out in the field. RF chips do not require direct line of sign; their solution allows for the patient to be inside or outside the testing area with multiple obstructions.

Interdisciplinary Award: Nicole Manglicmot (CPE), Rachel Suito Acuna (EE), Richard Garness (EE), Alexander Smith (EE) Project Title: Tactical Smart Magz Instructor: Dr. Zhiyong Wang Faculty Advisor: Dr. William Culbreth and Jeff Markle In combat the number of rounds remaining in a rifle's magazine is crucial to the firefight. Tactical Smart MagZ is an innovative way to help the user know the amount of rounds left in a rifle magazine. Hall Effect sensors are sensors that are triggered by magnets. Using a combination of Hall Effect sensors and an OLED display, the number of remaining rounds will be displayed. Using a magnet that is embedded into the spring-loaded follower, triggering each Hall Effect sensor as it passes parallel to it. As the rounds are being fired, the spring will naturally rise triggering each sensor. A microcontroller will be used to relay the information from the sensors and then displaying the remaining amount of rounds.

Popular Choice Award: Ulises Diaz Jr., Dane Gentry, and Brandon Thomas Project Title: Smart Home Speaker System Instructor: Dr. Grzegorz Chmaj Faculty Advisor: Dr. Jake Baker The Smart Home Speaker System consists of wirelessly-connected speakers which "follow" a user from room to room. The user wirelessly streams music from an app on their phone to each room's designated speaker which only outputs the streamed music if the user is in that room. As the user enters a room, a RFID (radio-frequency identification) reader in the room's doorway detects the user's RFID tag which prompts the room's designated speaker to stream the music. The speaker then stops streaming the music when the user exits the room.

JANUARY 2017 NEWSLETTER ]

JUNIOR DESIGN COMPETITION: FALL 2016 In the Fall 2016 Junior Design, students from the Electrical Engineering program for the first time were participating along with their computer engineering peers.

The winner of the 1st prize was the team of Dylan Wallace and Alex Cater with the DoF Robotic Arm with Joystick Control project. This project strives to interface analog control (joysticks) with an FPGA in order to control a 4 degree-of-freedom robotic arm for manipulation.

2nd prize was awarded to Aaron Escobedo, who presented the Throttle Position Pulse Width Modulator project. It implements dual input pulse width modulator that will be controlled by a throttle position sensor attached to the mechanical pedal of the car. MOSFETSs for H-Bridge presented by Mario Verduzco and Georgi Zenov won them the 3rd prize. A system of Super MOSFETS that is placed in an H-Bridge configuration in order to drive enough current to operate a DC motor in forward, reverse, Winners of the competition: Dylan Wallace and Alex Cater, with the Judges (the center). and break, also including temperature control.

UNDERGRDUATE RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTED Mr. Carlos Lemus, an undergraduate student of Computer Engineering major participated in the Fall 2016 Undergraduate Student Research Showcase and presented his independent study “Potential of Hyperspectral imaging for food quality assessment” supervised by ECE faculty Drs. Emma Regentova and Venkatesan Muthukumar. The showcase exhibited the work of 62 student presenters, representing 9 colleges at UNLV and Nevada State College. Judges were very impressed by the caliber of research being conducted by Carlos and highly scored the presentation content, organization of the poster, and delivery of research findings. As a result Carlos won the first prize in Health, Science and Engineering. It is remarkable that Carlos who works full-time and maintains an excellent academic record, has committed also to studying a complex technology, set the experiment and conducted research that involved understanding of electromagnetics, signal processing, imaging, pattern recognition and visualization. He has analyzed how storage conditions of bacon can be differentiated based on the hyperspectral response. Many slices of bacon underwent scanning and specific wavelengths indicating differences were singled out. This research will lead to further inquiry of how hyperspectral imaging can be utilized for food quality assessment and nutrition analyses.

Guided by enthusiastic faculty who invested their time and passion to train and involve ECE undergraduate students into research activities such achievements are made possible.

Photo: Carlos Lemus is conducting experiment on hyperspectral imaging

PH.D DISSERTATION WON INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION Mohammad Shokrolah Shiarzi, Ph.D. (2016) is a visiting faculty member at Cleveland State University and his dissertation received 2nd prize in the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society’s Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award. This is a competitive international award given annually.

Dr. Shiarzi’s dissertation work was supervised by the ECE faculty, Dr. Brendan Morris, and it was featured in the August issue of the ECE newsletter along with a few other scholars who also received their doctoral degrees from the ECE. Dr. Shiarzi

JANUARY 2017 NEWSLETTER ]

STUDENT PROJECT SHOWCASED IN CES2017 Youssef Abdallah, Michelle Mata and Alyson Weber spent 10 months putting together a microwave for the Fall 2016 Engineering Senior Design Competition. It uses a QR code to get its settings and times right from the food placed inside — no more guesswork, and no more burnt kernels. It could single-handedly signal an unprecedented reign of interoffice peace from that alone.

This January marked the first time UNLV exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association. Students and faculty had the opportunity to show off exactly how the Rebel spirit drives innovation.

Michelle Mata explained and demonstrated the smart microwave project she and her peers developed to several attendees, including UNLV administrators, faculty, and fellow students. The microwave works through technology the young engineers designed that reads a special QR code on food packaging, which in turn instructs the microwave on how to prepare what’s inside. (Photo by Josh Hawkins / UNLV Photo Services)

Alyson Weber put their smart microwave on display with a big smile. She and her classmates were trying to bring the humble microwave into a connected system, so people can nuke food the 21st century way. (Photo by Dr. Shengjie Zhai/ECE alumni)

FACULTY ACTIVITIES 

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ECE faculty, Dr. Brendan Morris will continue his collaboration with Dr. David Aha at the Naval Research Laboratory to better understand maritime activity with the award "Tracking Object Parts and Learning Interaction Rules Phase III".

ECE faculty, Drs. Mei Yang and Yingtao Jiang, together with their former student and collaborators published their recent research concerning the power budgeting issue in highly integrated many-core chips.

The paper published in IEEE Transactions on Computers (vol. 65, no. 9, Sept. 2016, pp. 2780-2793), presented a fine-grained solution using an agile algorithm to tackle the problem.

Dr. Yahia Baghzouz took his sabbatical leave in fall 2016. While in town, he worked with a couple of graduate students on the controls and protection of a microgrid, a mini-power system that can work in either stand-alone mode, or in parallel with the local grid. While abroad, he spent time networking with his colleagues at Center for Excellence of Electrical Power Network at the Federal University of Itajuba, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Dr. Baghzouz has resumed his teaching and research routine at UNLV in spring 2017.

Dr. Jake Baker has been elected to the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.

EXCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES Not only do our students excel in their academic endeavor, they often engage in an array of extracurricular activities that make them proud and complement their school life. Ms. Jiong Si, an ECE Ph.D. student, completed the annual Rock ‘n’ Roll Las Vegas Marathon that took place mostly along the famed Las Vegas Strip on Nov. 13, 2016. This run for 26 miles was Jiong’s fourth successful marathon attempt, her second in a row since she joined UNLV two years ago, and she now can proudly wear the jacket that is awarded only to the race finishers (see picture). Besides keeping herself fit for the physical challenges as a determined marathon runner, she holds a great passion to run her Ph.D. research to develop engineering tools and methods to solve pressing biomedicine related problems. We are ready to cheer for her in her next marathon run as well as the delivery of her Ph.D. prospectus (preliminary exam).

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