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News and Announcements

Department News Items

Prof. Aylin Yener is part of a new interdisciplinary research center at Penn State. The Communication Networks Research Center, focusing on the science of communication networks, was awarded approximately $35.5 million over 10 years from the Army Research Laboratory. The center, part of the new Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance, will perform foundational research on network science. The research focuses on the interplay among the social/cognitive, information, and communication networks. The center is led by Penn State, with partners including the University of California at Davis, the University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Southern California and the City University of New York. Several institutions also will be collaborating with the center including the University of California at Riverside, North Carolina State University, Stanford University and BBN Technologies.
Keegan McCoy, an Electrical Engineering senior, received the Anita M. Todd Internship Student of the Year Award for the 2008-2009 Academic year. McCoy worked during the summer 2009 semester as a systems engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where he developed an optical test plan at the Integrated Science Instrument Module level for the James Webb Space Telescope's fine guidance sensor and tunable filter.
At the recent IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, held in Grenoble, France, the paper "Semisupervised Mixture Modeling with Fine-Grained Component-Conditional Class Labeling and Transductive Inference", presented by Prof. David Miller and authored by Prof. David Miller, Chu-Fang Lin (EE Ph.D. student), Prof. George Kesidis, and Prof. Christopher Collins (Penn State-Hershey Radiology), was selected for Best Paper award.
Prof. David J. Miller, jointly with his Ph.D. student Yanxin Zhang, and in collaboration with researchers from Virginia Tech and Wake Forest University, recently published the paper titled "An Algorithm for Learning Maximum Entropy Probability Models of Disease Risk That Efficiently Searches and Sparingly Encodes Multilocus Genomic Interactions" in the Oxford University Press journal Bioinformatics. This work was funded by a National Institute of Health grant in the area of Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS), and represents the culmination of a collaboration addressing the challenging problem of detecting multilocus (gene-gene and gene-gene-environment) interactions associated with disease, working from high-dimensional human study (case-control) data sets.
The "Greater than 10Gbps Copper Ethernet" workshop, co-sponsored by the Nexans Data Communications Competence Center and the Pennsylvania State University CICTR (Center for Information and Communication Technology Research) was held from August 10-12, 2009 at Penn State. The event brought together industry leaders from the cable, connector and semiconductor industries to voice support for a twisted-pair solution for Ethernet speeds beyond 10Gbps. For more information, click here.
EE graduate student Mr. Sebastien de Larquier was awarded the first prize in the student poster competition at the 2009 Coupling Energetics and Dynamics of Atmospheric Regions (CEDAR) Conference held from June 28 to July 2, 2009 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Mr. de Larquier's work is funded by NSF CEDAR program and is devoted to development of efficient finite-difference time-domain models of infrasound propagation in a realistic atmosphere. Sebastien is working on his M.S. degree in Prof. Victor Pasko's research group.
Prof. Aylin Yener (with Prof. Gerhard Kramer of USC) is the general chair for the Second Annual North American School of Information Theory, which will be held Monday, August 10, to Thursday, August 13, 2009, at Northwestern University. The school will build on the success of last year’s inaugural school, also chaired by Profs. Yener and Kramer and held at Penn State University, University Park Campus, to provide graduate students and postdoctoral researchers the opportunity to learn from leading experts in information theory through short courses and talks as well as the chance to present their own work.
An embedded microcontroller design project by EE Seniors Adam Neal, Patrick Hensel and John Mihalic was recently selected as one of three finalists in the Freescale FTF Design Challenge, a national competition in which students and researchers designed green-engineering applications for the Freescale microcontroller. The winning project will be determined at a showcase in Orlando, FL in July. This project was completed in the EE 403W Senior Design Course under the direction of Chris Rogan, an Engineer at Penn State's Applied Research Lab.
Congratulations to EE Senior Greg Ciccarelli for being selected as the electrical engineering undergraduate student marshal for the SP09 commencement. He is a member of the Schreyer Honors College and received numerous awards while at PSU. Upon graduation, he will work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Congratulations to Mohammad Ali Enteshari and Justin Dianhuan Liou for receiving the Melvin P. Bloom Memorial Outstanding Doctoral Research Award. Enteshari's advisor is Prof. Mohsen Kavehrad. Liou's advisor is Prof. Iam-Choon Khoo.
Congratulations to Prof. Douglas Werner for receiving the 2009 Penn State Engineering Society Premier Research Award and to Prof. Theresa Mayer for receiving the 2009 Penn State Engineering Society Outstanding Research Award.
EE graduate student Ali Enteshari and Prof. Mohsen Kavehrad received the Best Paper award for their paper entitled "40/100 Gbps Transmission over Copper: Myths and Realities", which was recently presented at DesignCon-2009 in Santa Clara.
Prof. David J. Miller recently completed his elected term (2007-2008) as Chair of the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee, one of thirteen focused technical committees within the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and one which holds an annual international workshop, the IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, held at venues in North America, Europe, and Asia.
The Penn State Smart Radio Team, under the direction of Prof. Sven Bilén and Julio Urbina, participated in the 2nd Annual Smart Radio Challenge, a world-wide competition in which student teams develop and test software-defined radio technologies. Penn State had 2 qualifying teams in the competition and one of them won the award for best paper.
EE graduate student Mr. Jeremy Riousset was awarded second prize in the student paper competition at the 2009 National Radio Science Meeting of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), held from January 5-8, 2008 in Boulder, Colorado. Mr. Riousset's work is devoted to numerical modeling of recently discovered energetic lightning events above thundercloud tops. Jeremy is working on his Ph.D. degree in Prof. Victor Pasko's research group.
Prof. Heath Hofmann was a key contributor in the development of Tesla Motors' all-electric vehicle. Read the full story here.
Prof. Raj Mittra was the O'Donovan Distinguished Speaker at the University of Waterloo, Canada on Nov.25. The title of his talk was "Square Kilometer Array -- A unique instrument for radio astronomy to explore the mysteries of cosmology." On November 26 he presented a talk at the local IEEE Section meeting on, “Review of Metamaterials -- separating the facts from fiction." The same day he visited RIM, the makers of Blackberry located in Waterloo, to give a talk on "A general-purpose electromagentic solver for designing antennas and solving EMI/EMC problems arising in electronic packages."
Prof. Kenji Uchino received the Outstanding Book Award from The Japan Society of Applied Electromagnetics and Mechanics in November 2008 for his publication of Micromechatronics from Morikita Publishing Company. This book was coauthored with Prof. Takaaki Ishii (Yamanashi University, Japan).
Prof. Raj Mittra was a keynote speaker at International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (ISAP), Taiwan, from October 27-30, 2008. His talk was entitled A Review of Radio Frequency Identification Systems--Present Status, Design Challenges and Future Outlook. He also lectured in a Short Course on EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) and EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) Modeling at the same symposium.
Prof. Raj Mittra was honored by the National Electronics Museum, located in Linthicum, Maryland on November 15, 2008, and was presented a plaque in honor of his scholarly work representing Indian American Engineers and Scientists who have made extensive contributions to Electronic Science. The occasion was a dinner meeting held at the museum to celebrate the 150th Birth Anniversary of Sir J.C. Bose, who was a pioneering physicist from India noted for many seminal contributions to Electromagnetics.
Prof. Aylin Yener is chairing the Communication Theory Symposium of the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), which will be held in Dresden Germany, on June 14-18, 2009. ICC is a flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society. She is also chairing the Communications Track of the 42nd Asilomar Conference on Signals Systems and Computers which will be held on Asilomar Grounds, Pacific Grove CA, on Oct 26-29, 2008.
Prof. Raj Mittra was an invited speaker at the Metamaterial 2008 conference held in Pamplona, Spain, from September 22 through 26, 2008. His paper was entitled Challenging the Popular Notions of Metamaterial characteristics in the Microwave Frequency Regime. He also visited Queen Mary College of the University of London in UK. on September 28, to serve on the Advisory Panel of the University of London.
EE Ph. D. students Michael Stinger and Justin Liou were two of four College of Engineering students who won awards at the 53rd annual SPIE Optics+Photonics Conference. More than 4,000 students attended the event, which was held from Aug. 10-14 in San Diego, Calif. SPIE, the Society of Optical Engineering, gave out 11 awards for excellence in research. Read the full story on Penn State Live .
Prof. Raj Mittra visited the Institute of High Performance Computing Group in Singapore during Sept 2-16, 2008, to collaborate with the scientists there on the problem of “Modeling Very Large Electromagnetic Systems." He also visited Harbin Institute of Technology in Harbin, China, during Sept 7-11, 2008, and presented an invited talk on “Metamaterials and Conformal Antennas. He also visited the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Sydney, Australia from Aug 20-23 to collaborate with the Radio Astronomy group engaged in the design of world’s largest Radio Astronomy Telescope called the SKA (Square Kilometer Array).
Prof. Raj Mittra was a U.S. delegate at the URSI (Union Radio Scientific International) General Assembly in Chicago, Illinois, during Aug 11-15, 2008. He gave the invited talks entitled: “Characteristic Basis Function Method¬A Novel approach to Incorporating Concepts of Asymptotic Techniques into Rigorous Numerical Methods”; “Assessing the Physical Limitations of Synthesized Metamaterials Through Rigorous Numerical Modeling”; and “FDTD Simulation Of Wave Propagation And Coupling For Body Area Networks.”
Prof. Iam-Choon Khoo, W. E. Leonhard Professor of Electrical Engineering, presented the keynote Plenary Paper at Cambridge University's International Workshop on Liquid Crystals in Photonics at Cambridge, UK July 21-23, 2008. The subject of his presentation was ‘Liquid Crystalline Optical Metamaterials’ which involved collaborative work with other PSU faculty members: T. Mallouk and D. Werner, post-docs: A. Diaz and J. Park, and graduate students: J. Liou, M. Stinger, J. Huang and Y. Ma. The projects conducted in Prof. Khoo’s laboratory have been supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, NSF (MRSEC), Army Research Office (MURI) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Prof. Mohsen Kavehrad, W. L. Weiss Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering, recently acquired an educational software donation from Agilent Technologies -- 30 seats of their industry-leading 89601 demodulation software. This software donation is valued at over $3 Million.
Prof. N. K. Bose, HRB-Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering, delivered the Plenary Invited Distinguished Lecture entitled "Wavelength Diversity Superresolution for Condition Based Maintenance," at the The Fifth International Conference on Condition Monitoring and Machinery Failure Prevention Technologies (CM 2008 and MFPT 2008) July 15-18, 2008 at the Edinburgh Conference Centre in Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. He was also selected to be in the International Scientific Advisory Committee of CM 2008 and MFPT 2008.
Prof. Aylin Yener, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, co-organized the first annual IEEE Information Theory Society's School of Information Theory at the University Park Penn State campus, June 1-5, 2008. The aim of the School of Information Theory was to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and senior researchers working on Information Theory in an interactive campus environment.
Prof. I.C. Khoo, W. E. Leonhard Professor of Electrical Engineering, was appointed Chair of the United States Advisory Committee/Int. Commission for Optics (USAC-ICO)– one of the National Committees of The National Academies for a three-year term starting January 2008. He was also reappointed the IEEE-LEOS Vice-President Representative to the International commission for Optics for the same 3 year term. Prof. Khoo will be leading the US delegation to the ICO Bureau meeting in Sydney, Australia in July 6-11, 2008.
Prof. I. C. Khoo recently presented an invited plenary presentation entitled “Liquid Crystal Nonlinear Optical Meta-materials” at the Italian Liquid Crystal Society Meeting held at Acitrezza, Sicily, Italy on June 4-7, 2008. Some of the interesting physics and applications of liquid crystal optics and nonlinear optics may be found in the book Liquid Crystals, 2nd Edition (Wiley, NJ 2007) authored by Prof. Khoo.
Prof. Kenji Uchino and co-translator, Prof. Takaaki Ishii from Yamanashi University in Japan, will be awarded the Book Publication Award in November, 2008 from The Japanese Society of Applied Electromagnetics and Mechanics for the translated book Micromechatronics (the original book authored by Uchino and Giniewicz) published from Morikita Publication Company, Japan.
The Penn State Board of Trustees recently approved the following promotions:
Prof. David Miller was promoted to the rank of Professor and Prof. Zhiwen Liu was granted tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor.
Research on reconfigurable optical metamaterials performed at the Penn State Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Laboratory (CEARL) under the direction of Prof. Doug Werner was featured in the April 2008 issue of Nature Photonics.
Research on tunable negative-index of refraction metamaterials performed at the Penn State Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Laboratory (CEARL) under the direction of Prof. Doug Werner was highlighed by the National Science Foundation's MRSEC program.
Prof. George Kesidis' text, An Introduction to Communication Network Analysis was recently selected as the IEEE Communications Society book-of-the-month.
EE Undergraduate student Erik Davidson, was recently featured in Penn State Live for business endeavors that he began while participating in Penn State's Engineering Entrepreneurship Minor. Read the full story here.

General Announcements

The students of Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), the electrical and computer engineering honor society, provide free tutoring every Monday night from 7-9 pm in 101 Electrical Engineering East. The tutoring service will run through the last week of classes. HKN members will be available to tutor the following courses:

- CSE 271
- EE 210
- EE 310
- EE 330
- EE 350

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