Dr. Timothy Kurzweg wins IEEE-HKN C. Holmes MacDonald Award

Dr. Timothy Kurzweg, Associate Professor in Drexel's ECE Department, was selected as the recipient of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu’s 2011 C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineering Educator Award.

This is a very prestigious recognition by the profession.  The award is known as an early "detector" of future leaders.  Past recipients include Peter S. Maybeck,  A. Richard Newton and Denice Dee Denton. Drexel University recipients include our Vice Dean, Bruce Eisenstein.

"The Award is intended to recognize the central and crucial role of college professors in training and motivating future electrical and computer engineers. The program attempts to identify and give national recognition to electrical engineering professors who have demonstrated, early in their careers, special dedication and creativity in their teaching responsibilities. Thus it is...a re-affirmation of the basic and essential need of excellence in teaching."

In describing Dr. Kurzweg's contributions, one of the recommenders wrote: "I believe that through his contributions to programs at Drexel University and at the IEEE level worldwide, Dr. Kurzweg had made a potentially transformative contribution to engineering education. As we seek new models for future engineering programs, experiments such as the ones he has introduced and led may prove pivotal to define the changes we need to make in traditional programs over the next 10-15 years."

More information about this award can be found on the HKN award webpage .

Posted February 13, 2012.

Dr. Bruce Eisenstein honored with 2012 IEEE Richard M. Emberson Award

Drexel’s Dr. Bruce Eisenstein, Arthur J. Rowland professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and interim dean of the College of Engineering, was named the 2012 recipient of the Richard M. Emberson Award. The award is one of the highest recognitions presented by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the largest technical/professional society in the world with nearly 400,000 members.

Eisenstein will be presented with the award, which includes a bronze medal, an illuminated certificate and an honorarium, at the 2012 IEEE Honors Ceremony in Boston, Mass. with more than 600 people expected to attend. It is given out for distinguished service to the development, viability, advancement and pursuit of the technical objectives of the IEEE.

Eisenstein received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT, a master’s in electrical engineering from Drexel and a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a NASA/ASEE fellow at Stanford University and the NASA Ames Research Center and a visiting research fellow in electrical engineering at Princeton University under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. At Drexel, he has served as the head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and associate dean of Engineering. He currently serves as interim dean of the College of Engineering.

He has published more than 50 papers in the areas of digital signal processing, pattern recognition, deconvolution, and biomedical engineering. Eisenstein was the recipient of the C. Holmes MacDonald Award of Eta Kappa Nu given to the “Outstanding Young Electrical Engineering Educator.” He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu, and served on the National Board of Directors and as president. He is also a member of Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, ASEE and is a registered professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Eisenstein was elected Delaware Valley Engineer of the Year for 2000. He served as president of the IEEE in 2000 and has held several other IEEE positions, including chairman of the Philadelphia section, treasurer, vice president for technical activities, member of the Board of Directors, and president of the Education Society.

In 1986 the Board of Directors established the IEEE Richard M. Emberson Award. The Award is named in honor of Dr. Richard M. Emberson, whose 23-year association with the Institute at both the staff and volunteer levels, including Director of Technical Services, Executive Director and General Manager, and Member of the Board of Directors, exemplified loyal and dedicated service to the Institute, especially its Technical Activities. Past recipients of this award include Bruno Weinschel and Robert Lucky.  Additional information about the award can be foun on the IEEE website .

Posted December 12, 2011.

Five ECE students win 2011 IEEE PES Scholarships

ECE is pleased to announce that five of our electrical engineering undergraduate students have been selected to receive scholarships as part of the inaugural IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Scholarship Plus Initiative. PES Scholarship recipients were selected from 51 U.S. universities for the 2011-2012 academic year.  These undergraduate students were selected by industry and academic representatives based primarily upon: academic preparation; extra-curricular activities and leadership; interest in engineering in general, and power and energy engineering in particular; and overall assessment of the student's potential for a successful power and energy engineering career.

2011 PES Scholarship recipients from the ECE department include:

• Calvin Au - Electrical Engineering Senior 
• Nicholas Coleman - BS/MS Electrical Engineering Junior
• Joshua Edelman - Electrical Engineering Senior
• Khaula Rashid - Electrical Engineering Sophomore
• Vincent Zaccone - Electrical Engineering Senior

For more information about this program, please visit the PES Scholarship Plus Initiative homepage .

Posted December 2, 2011.

Department Head presents IEEE/Royal Society of Edinburgh Award

Dr. Moshe Kam, ECE Department Head, met with HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, on Friday, August 15th  for the purpose of presenting the IEEE/Royal Society of Edinburgh Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award to Dr. Marcian E. Hoff. The Maxwell award recognizes ground breaking contributions by those who follow in Maxwell’s footsteps. The award this year was presented by Dr. Kam to Dr. Hoff for developments in programmable integrated circuitry for a wide range of applications.

Dr. Hoff’s determination that there ‘must be a better way’ to use integrated circuits for computing led him to design the world’s first microprocessor – the Intel 4004 – in 1968, paving the way for a large number of applications, including the personal computer and embedded systems.

Additional information about this event is available from the Royal Society of Edinburgh website .

More information about the award can be found on the IEEE website .

Photographs reproduced by permission of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; photographs by Gary Doak.
Posted August 24, 2011.

Department Head comments on the future of robotics

On June 24, President Obama announced a $70 million National Robotics Initiative. The stated goal of this new initiative is "to accelerate the development and use of robots in the United States that work beside, or cooperatively with, people." Dr. Moshe Kam, ECE Department Head, was asked by the Philadelphia Inquirer to comment on the impact of this initiative on research and economics as well as the place of robots in human life.

When asked about the practical implications of the president's recently announced initiatives, Dr. Kam stated that it "represents a step up in the way we work with robots." He feels that the initiative makes explicit a commitment to an objective that has been motivating research for years, namely "to have robots that are out in the human environment, cooperative with humans, becoming partners of humans in their activities, trying to understand their intentions." Dr. Kam continues the interview by enumerating a vision of the future in which robots assist in tasks ranging from food production to search and rescue to communications. To read the entire interview, please visit the Philadelphia Inquirer story .

Three ECE faculty members granted tenure and promotion

The Board of Trustees of the University accepted the recommendation of President Fry to grant academic tenure to Drs.  Youngmoo Kim and Baris Taskin of the ECE Department.  Drs. Kim and Taskin will both be elevated to the Associate Professor rank in the Fall Quarter of 2011.  In addition, Dr. Karen Miu will be promoted to the rank of Professor.

Dr. Miu (pictured left) joined the department in 1998.  She has focused on the analysis of power distribution systems and the development of analytically-based power distribution application functions such as service restoration, VAR/Voltage control and load estimation.  These functions become increasingly important as power distribution systems grow to be more stressed and new operating scenarios arise.  In addtion, Dr. Miu has developed several new courses in power, energy and control systems incorporating active and hands-on learning within the classroom and laboratories. 

Dr. Kim (pictured right) joined the department in 2005.  He directs the Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab), which pursues research at the intersection of engineering, design and creative expression and performance.  Areas of active research at the MET-lab include music information retrieval, robotics and new interfaces for expressive interaction as well as K-12 outreach for engineering education.  In addition, Dr. Kim is the newly appointed Assistant Dean of Media Technologies and Principal Investigator on projects totalling over $7 million in funding from NSF. 

Dr. Taskin (pictured left) joined the ECE department during the Fall Quarter of 2005.  He specializes in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) of VLSI circuits, circuit timing, high performance integrated circuits and nanoarchitectures.  In 2009, he received an NSF CAREER award for his project, "Rotary Clock Technology Integration."  Dr. Taskin's research is expected to have impact on a large number of microelectronic systems, from field-deployable low power sensors to the world's fastest supercomputers.

Posted June 13, 2011.

ECE hosts first Advisory Council meeting of the year

The ECE department hosted a face-to-face meeting of the ECE Advisory Council on Tuesday, April 12, 2011, in the Bossone Research Enterprise Center.  Six of the seven council members spent the day with the department learning about our undergraduate and graduate programs through presentations, touring the ECE laboratory facilities and meeting with ECE faculty and students.  The final council member, Dr. Xiaoxun Zhu, participated via teleconference from Shanghai, China.  The 2011 ECE Advisory Council members, representing academia, industry and public sector, include: Holly Cyrus, Federal Aviation Administration; Boris Gelfand, Lockheed Martin; Mark Karol, Telcordia Technologies, Inc.; John Reagan, Prof. Emeritus of ECE at University of Arizona; Lewis Terman, IEEE 2008 President and IBM Research Emeritus; William P. Walsh, Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren and Drexel BS; and Xiaoxun Zhu, Honeywell Technology Solutions and Drexel BS and Ph.D..

Posted April 25, 2011.

Senior Design team takes home award in Shell Eco-marathon Americas

The Green Dragon, a solar car designed by a Drexel University engineering senior design team, took to the track between April 14 and April 17 in Houston, Texas to compete in the Shell Eco-marathon Americas 2011.  The Shell Eco-marathon aims to challenge both high school and college students to design, build and test energy efficient vehicles in competions held around the world.  This year 30 university and 18 high school teams from the United States and Canada competed in the Americas competion.  This is the first year that Drexel has participated in the competion.

Advised by Drs. Adam Fontecchio (ECE) and Bradley Layton (MEM), the senior design team, comprised of eleven ECE and MEM students, constructed one of a small minority of solar powered vehicles to enter this year's competion.  While many of the teams, including the winning team from Université Laval of Québec City, aimed to produce lighter cars to increase the efficiency of the more traditional internal combustion engine vehicles, Drexel's team decided to tackle the complexities of designing and building a solar car, reusing as many parts as possible from last year's Automotive X-Prize vehicle to produce as green a product as possible.

ECE student and team member Asaf Erlich noted before the competion that "building a solar vehicle has special merits, especially for a school such as Drexel University, who holds itself as a pioneer of technology and a leader in sustainability.  The Shell Eco-Marathon Competition is a great way to meld the two themes together."  Ultimately, it seems that this commitment to cutting edge technology and sustainability paid off, as the Green Dragon won first place in the Solar Power division.  To learn more about the competion and the conception and creation of the Green Dragon, check out National Geographic's coverage.

Posted April 25, 2011.

ECE student receives prestigious Goldwater Scholarship

ECE student Magdalena Bielinski is one of the 2011 recipients of the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship.  The Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by the United States Congress in 1986 in honor of former United States Senator and 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.  Its goal is to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue careers in these fields.  Competition for the annual merit-based scholarship awarded by this program is exceptionally intense, with each university alloted four nomination slots for 300 possible scholarships nationwide.

Magda is currently in the BS/Ph.D. program, conducting research in wireless networks under the guidance of Dr. Kapil Dandekar.   A member of Drexel's Pennoni Honors College, she also participates in the Honors Students Tackling Advance Research (STAR) program, is the co-inventor of a U.S. patent application and is the author or co-author on several conference papers.  Magda's long term plans are to conduct research on wireless communications and digital signal processing in health care settings. 

Posted April 5, 2011.

ECE student publishes paper on low power clocking technologies

ECE Ph.D. stduent Ying Teng and Assistant Professor Baris Taskin have been featured on the cover of the December 2010 issue of the Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE), published by the American Scientific Publishers, for their work on low power clocking technologies.  The cover image shows the ratio of the power consumption of the transmission line and the inverter pairs of a rotary travelling wave oscillator (RTWO).  In this article, a new power analysis and optimization model is proposed for the RTWOs, which are being investigated as a clocking system leading to low power, high-frequency integrated circuits by Dr. Taskin's VLSI design group.  This work could lead to advancements for micorelectronics in areas such as sensing, consumer electronics, health sciences and microprocessors.

Posted January 12, 2011.  

ECE professor elected to prestigious awards committee

ECE Professor Afshin Daryoush was elected to the Committee of Science and the Arts (CS&A) of the Franklin Institute.  The CS&A selects winners of the prestigious awards that the Franklin Institute bestows on scientists, industrialists and humanitarians.  The Franklin Institute has maintained this award program since 1833, making it the longest continuously active science and technology awards program in the United States and one of the oldest in the world.  Past recipients include Henry Ford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Marie Curie, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Paul Baran.

Other members of the CS&A that are currently affiliated with Drexel University are Frank Ferrone (Physics), Ary Rosen (Biomed), Jeremy Johnson (CS), Dario Salvucci (CS), Tom Hewett (Psychology) and Peter Lewin (Biomed).

Posted September 28, 2010.

ECE awarded curriculum development grant

Dr. Christopher Peters (PI) and Dr. Moshe Kam (Co-PI) have been awarded a curriculum development grant from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for the intial development of the Drexel University Nuclear Engineering Education Laboratory (DUNEEL).  The funding, $150,000 over two years, will assist in establishing a nuclear engineering minor via course development - including courses such as Introduction to Nuclear Reactor Theory, Nuclear Power Plant Operation and Design and Radiation Transport and Simulation Design - and acquiring software for secondary stream plant design and analysis and for transport of fundamental particles through matter.

The nuclear renaissance is expected to require the hiring of highly educated engineers in nuclear engineering, replacing an aging workforce while expanding for the future.  The establishment of DUNEEL will position Drexel University to become a strong contributor to the field of nuclear engineering

Posted September 28, 2010.

ECE professor receives NSF MRI-R2 for humanoids research

ECE Professor Youngmoo Kim (PI) and co-investigators Yury Gogotsi (Professor of Materials Science and Engineering), William Regli (Professor of Computer Science), Dennis Hong (Virginia Tech, Department of Mechanical Engineering) and Stefan Schaal (University of Southern California, Department of Computer Science) have been awarded a $6 million Major Research Infrastructure - Recovery & Reinvestment (MRI-R2) grant from the National Science Foundation entitled "Development of a Common Platform for Unifying Humanoids Research".  Drexel University is the lead institution for this ambitious 5-year effort, partnering with leading robotics researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University, University of Southern California and Virginia Tech.

This project builds upon Drexel's existing partnership with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), developers of the Hubo humanoid robot.  Based upon Drexel and KAIST's Hubo, the new effort will develop the world's first adult-sized humogenous humanoid robot team, enabling a critical mass of robotics researchers across the country to work with a common instrument to compare, benchmark and validate methods and results.  The goal of this project is to advance the United States to the forefront of humanoids research.

Posted August 23, 2010.

The Drexel Music & Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab) presents DrexelCast: a live HD broadcast of the Philadelphia Orchestra's concert program "Dutoit Conducts Strauss" the afternoon of Tuesday, June 8th in the Mitchell Auditorium (Bossone Research Center). The DrexelCast events are part of an ECE senior design project to advance music education and audience engagement, which was just awarded second place overall in the College of Engineering's design competition.

This event will kick-off at 1:30 p.m. with a pre-concert presentation entitled "The Technology of DrexelCast" by Prof. Youngmoo Kim, MET-lab director and Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  This is the final DrexelCast presentation for the 2009-2010 concert season and is free and open to the Drexel community through the generous sponsorship of the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, Pennoni Honors College, and the College of Engineering.

A pair of off-the-hook noblemen and a Turkish rondo mark Maestro Dutoit's penultimate concert set of the season, as electric Munich-born violinist Arabella Steinbacher makes her Philadelphia Orchestra subscription debut. She'll play Mozart's Fifth Concerto, known for its torchy Turkish finale, and Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Viola Choong-Jin Chang will join cellist Arto Noras for Strauss's heart-on-the-sleeve musical retelling of Cervantes's Don Quixote-with Chang "playing" Sancho Panza to Noras's Quixote. Strauss's high-octane but ultimately tragic Don Juan opens the program with orchestral fireworks and virtuosic panache.

More information about DrexelCast is available at: http://music.ece.drexel.edu/drexelcast

Posted June 3, 2010.

ECE professor receives Department of Energy Award

Professor Gail Rosen has recieved an award from the Department of Engery (DOE), entitled "Tracking Down Cheaters: Molecular Analysis of Carbon Consumption by Organisms That Do Not Contribute to the Extracellular Enzyme Pools."  The start date of the award is June 1, 2010.

The project, led by Christopher Blackwood, a soil biologist from Kent State University, aims to study the role of microbial communities in litter decomposition and the carbon cycle.  Current models only incorporate "investor" microbes, those that make extracellular enzymes in order to break down plant matter for digestion, but "cheaters" have recently been discovered that free-ride off of the existing enzyme pool and are hypothesized to affect decomposition rates.  In fact, it has been found that some "cheaters" have the capacity to be "investors" but are opportunisitic.  The aim of the proposal is to find out which microbes belong to each category: "investors", "obligate cheaters" and "opportunistic cheaters".  Dr. Rosen's role will be to develop new bioinformatic techniques to integrate metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data to discover new microbes and genes and their role.

The total amount of the aware is $1.07 million, with Drexel's portion being $180,000.

Posted May 26, 2010.

ECE Professor awarded US Patent

US Patent 7,705,415 was issued to Bahram Nabet, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Affiliated Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, on "Optical and Electronic Devices Based on Nano-Plasma" on April 27, 2010.  Assigned to Drexel University, the patent covers devices in which a plasma of mobile charge that is confined to nano scales is used to detect or sense perturbations with very high sensitivity.  Radiation in the Terahertz range, charged particles such as electrons and optical photo detector devices are described in the patent.  Applications range in security, such as explosives detection, to biomedical and optical communication devices.

Posted May 26 2010.   

ECE students earn NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Two ECE students were awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRF), which "recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines."

David K. Grunberg, who is advised by Dr. Youngmoo Kim (ECE), earned the fellowship for work combining audio signal processing and robotics research to develop technologies for analyzing and understanding human creativity and expression.  His current project is the development of a dancing humanoid, offering a unique platform for advancing the fields of robot movement and human-robot interaction.

Robert Sherbert is advised by Dr. Paul Oh (MEM).  The goal of his project is to develop a generalized control system framework that will couple robotics hardware with its representation in software.  This technology is expected to reduce robot development time and increase the capabilities available in the end product.

Alyssa Batula, advised by Dr. Youngmoo Kim, and Ben Pelleg, advised by Dr. Adam Fontecchio (ECE), received NSF GRF honorable mentions.

In related news, Magda Bielinski, advised by Dr. Kapil Dandekar (ECE) earned an honorable mention in the Goldwater Fellowship Competition, "an educational sholarship program designed to provide opportunities for outstanding U.S. students with excellent academic records and demonstrated interest in, and potential for, careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering."

Posted April 14, 2010.

ECE professor spotlighted in ASEE online magazine eGFI

On April 12, 2010 the American Society for Engineering Education's (ASEE) online magazine eGFI published "Breaking the Sound Barrier," highlighting research conducted by ECE professor Dr. Youngmoo Kim and his students in the Music & Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab).  Research in the MET-lab centers on digital media technologies that will shape the future of entertainment, especially in the areas of music production, music information retrieval and new interfaces for musical expression.  The eGFI article specifically focuses on one of Dr. Kim's recent projects: an iPhone application that allows a user to adjust the mood and tempo of music to personal taste, providing a unique interactive musical experience.

You can view the full article on the eGFI website.  The article is a follow-up to a piece originally appearing in the Summer 2009 publication of ASEE's Prism.

Posted April 14, 2010.

ECE Professor to speak at Energy Leadership Conference

Dr. Chika Nwankpa, director of the Center for Electric Power Engineering in the ECE department, will be speaking on the topic of Smart Grid Campuses at 1pm on April 8 in the Mitchell Auditorium, located in the Bossone Research Enterprise Center, as part of the Advanced Energy Leadership Conference held at Drexel University from April 8-9, 2010.  In this seminal conference, regional thought leaders from both the private and public sectors will discuss the evolving future of energy for Greater Philadelphia and the Mid-Atlantic states.  Experts with unique commercial experience will also examine and discuss advanced energy and grid technologies.

This conference is designed for regional stakeholders and employees of large universities, hospitals, commercial and industrial companies and government organizations whose responsibilities include energy and facility management, sustainability, demand response, energy research, financial investment and technology innovation.  This conference is also well-suited for employees of power companies and independent systems operators and members of regional transmission organizations.

Information, including registration, can be accessed here.

For more information, please contact Vanessa Vardon at 215-895-6601 or by email.

Posted April 7, 2010. 

ECE research highlighted in The Philadelphia Inquirer

On March 29, The Philadelphia Inquirer published "Someday, a way to 'see' nuclear, chemical threats," highlighting the research conducted by ECE Professor Dr. Adam Fontecchio and his graduate and undergraduate student researchers in the Nanophotonics Laboratory.  The article specifically focuses on Dr. Fontecchio's recent Department of Energy STTR Phase 2 grant entitled "H-PDLC Tunable Filter for Hyperspectral Imaging", awarded as a collaboration between Drexel University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Optra, Inc. to develop an extremely fast spectrally tunable filter for remote surveillance applications such as airborne detection of activities associated with the production of weapons of mass destruction.

You can view the article on the The Philadelphia Inquirer website.

The Philadelphia Inquirer article describing Dr. Fontecchio's research was also published on March 30 by First Bell, the American Society of Engineering Education daily news briefing, tailored to the needs of the engineering and technology education community and summarizing key reporting from the preceding 24 hours.  Additionally, it was published on physorg.com on April 1.

Posted April 7, 2010.

ECE faculty members featured in Lifelong Learning workshops

Drexel University's LeBow College of Business, Corporate and Executive Education and the College of Engineering present their Lifelong Learning workshop series.  Join the faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department as they discuss recent advances in wireless technology, energy infrastructures and the financial impact of engineering processes.  All workshops are held from 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at LeBow College's Malvern, PA campus.

The following workshops will feature ECE faculty members:

• June 9, 2010: Smart Grid and Energy Management Systems (Click here to register)
• June 23, 2010: Recent Advances in Wireless Technology (Click here to register)
• June 30, 2010: Financial Engineering (Click here to register)

Please refer to the ECE upcoming events calendar or the event registration page for further workshop details.

Posted March 22, 2010.

Faculty member receives IEEE 2010 Microwave Career Award

Dr. Arye Rosen, Academy Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, has been selected as the recipient of the 2010 Microwave Career Award of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S).  This award honors an individual for a career of meritorious achievement and outstanding technical contribution in the field of microwaves.  MTT-S is one of the oldest, largest and highly respected societies of IEEE.

Dr. Rosen has been interacting with Drexel faculty and students for the past thirty-five years; he is a proud alumnus of the Electrical Engineering doctoral program and has been a member of the Electrical Engineering faculty as an Academic Professor for the past ten years.  He has been involved with the Center for Microwave-Lightwave Engineering (CMLE) for nearly three decades.  Including the current award, Dr. Rosen and his colleagues in the CMLE together have earned and received every honor possible in the field of microwaves in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

The 2010 Microwave Career Award will be conferred at the annual Society Awards Banquet to be held during the International Microwave Symposium the week of May 23 to 28, 2010 in Anaheim, California.

Posted March 9, 2010.

Drexel awarded new NSF GK-12 Award worth $2.9M

Drs. Adam Fontecchio (PI), Eli Fromm (Co-PI) and Youngmoo Kim (Co-PI) of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department along wih Dr. Anthony Lowman (Co-PI), Assistant Dean of Engineering, and Mary Jo Grdina (Co-PI) of the School of Education have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant entitled "Catalyzing STEM Education via the NAE Engineering Grand Challenges."  The budget for this five-year project, funded through the NSF Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12) Program, is $2,915,695.

The GK-12 grant will support the pairing of Drexel University graduate students with local high school teachers through academic fellowship to enhance the math and science education of high school students through the context of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges while concurrently illustrating the global nature of these societal issues.  The high school students and K-12 teachers will gain an appreciation for the science and mathematics concepts in an applied, real world context.  Concurrently, K-12 Fellows will become knowledgeable in pedagogy through direct application of their technical/scientific expertise in the context of the classroom setting, interaction with the teacher and mentoring students.

Posted March 5, 2010.

ECE Alumni Panel February 19

In celebration of National Engineers Week, the Electrical and Computer Engineering department will host two distinguished alumni on Friday, February 19 from 2:00-3:00pm for a panel discussion about their journey from Drexel University to their current leadership positions in industry.  The event will be held in room 302 of the Bossone Research Enterprise Center located at 3120-40 Market Street.

Melvin Garner (pictured right) graduated from Drexel in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He went on to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering from New York University as well as a law degree from Brooklyn Law School.  Mr. Garner is currently a Principal Lawyer at Darby & Darby.

Dennis Link (pictured below) graduated in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and earned his MBA in 1970 from Drexel University.  He is the President of Karden Construction Services, Inc. and serves as a member on the Drexel College of Engineering Advisory Council and as an adjunct professor in Drexel’s Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics department.

Please, join us for refreshments and this engaging talk with graduates of the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. 

For more information, please contact Jessica Ward, ECE Program Manager, at jward@ece.drexel.edu or 215-895-6918.

Posted February 15, 2010.  

ECE faculty member receives Department of Energy grant

Dr. Adam Fontecchio has received a new Department of Energy STTR Phase 2 grant for $750,000 entitled "H-PDLC Tunable Filter for Hyperspectral Imaging.".  The Drexel portion of the 2 year project budget is $375,000.

Working with an industrial collaborator, Optra Inc. of Topsfield, Massachusetts, this project will develop an extremely fast spectrally tunable filter for remote surveillance applications such as airborne detection of activities associated with the production of weapons of mass destruction.  When such a tunable filter is used in concert with imaging optics and a focal plane array, the result is a high speed hyperspectral imager that enables advanced detection and identification capabilities over basic imaging systems.  A key attribute for this project is the ability to rapidly tune between the visible spectal bands to support hyperspectral imaging from a moving platform such as an aircraft.

Posted December 8, 2009.

ECE Department Head elected President of IEEE

Dr. Moshe Kam, Robert Quinn Professor and Department Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University, was elected by the membership of IEEE to serve as President-Elect in 2010.  He will serve as the 49th President and CEO of IEEE in 2011, and as Past President in 2012.  These positions make him also a voting member of the IEEE Board of Directors and the IEEE Assembly and a Corporate Officer.  All positions are, however, unpaid volunteer positions.

Kam, 54, leads Drexel's Center for Excellence in Information Assurance Education, and directs the Data Fusion Laboratory - a research laboratory founded 20 years ago to investigate radar target classification.  His professional interests are in wireless communications, dynamic systems, robotics and navigation, detection and estimation, and engineering education.  His research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), The National Institute for Justice (NIJ), DARPA, ONR, NSWC, US Army - CERDEC, Lockheed Martin and GlaxoSmithKline.

Kam received his B.Sc. degree in 1977 (Tel Aviv University), and his M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1987) degrees from Drexel University, all in electrical engineering.  He is an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to the theory of decision fusion and distributed detection" (2001) and a recipient of an IEEE Third Millennium Medal.  He served as an NSF Presidential Young Investigator (1990-1995) and is a Professional Engineer licensed in Pennsylvania.  His IEEE volunteer positions included Chair of the IEEE Philadelphia Section (1998), Director of Region 2 (Eastern USA, 2003-2004) and Vice President for Edcuational Activities (2005-2007).

Incorporated in New York State, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an international organization with more than 380,000 professional and student members from over 160 countries.  IEEE maintains 38 technical societies dedicated to specific technical topics, such as signal processing and consumer electronics.  The IEEE has also developed over 900 industrial standards, and is responsible for 30% of the world's technical documentation on electrical engineering, computers, and control systems.  IEEE manages more than 900 technical and scientific conferences every year.

IEEE was established in 1963 from a merger between the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, established 1884) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, established 1912).  Among Presidents of these organizations were Alexander Graham Bell (1891-2), Charles P. Steinmetz (1901-2), Lee de Forest (1930) and Frederick E. Terman (1942).  There was only one other IEEE President who served on Drexel University faculty, Bruce A. Eisenstein (2000).

Posted October 8, 2009.

DrexelCast: Orchestra Concert Event on November 21

The Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory, in partnership with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Specticast, will host five orchestra concert broadcast presentations on the Drexel campus throughout the 2009-2010 performance season.  These internet-based broadcasts will be presented in high definition in the Mitchell Auditorium in the Bossone Research Enterprise Center located at 3120 Market Street and are free and open to the public.

The next DrexelCast will take place on Saturday, November 21 at 8 p.m. and is Mahler's Seventh Symphony, conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.  For more information about this and the other presentations, please visit the DrexelCast website. 

These DrexelCast presentations are sponsored by the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, the Penoni Honors College and the College of Engineering.

Posted November 18, 2009.

Drexel's Formula Hybrid Team to compete in Italy

Drexel's Formula Hybrid Team is taking green racing to a new level in Rome, Italy, October 7-9 at the Formula Electric and Hybrid 2009 competition organized by the Associazione Technica dell'Automobile.  Currently, the Drexel team is the only team representing the United States at the competition.  The team will be competing with over fifteen teams from around the world for the first place title and the opportunity to raise awareness of the developments of technology in the ecological mobility field.  The Drexel team will be racing their award-winning vehicle that placed third at the New Hampshire Speedway International Formula Hybrid Competition in May 2009.  Since the New Hampshire competition, the team has upgraded the vehicle, which has taken the last year to develop through a joint Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics senior design project.

"In preparation for Italy, we've upgraded the car even further, eliminating extra weight, improving handling and cooling and nearly doubling the performance of the car with a rear gear change and higher amperage controllers," says Joshua Verdieck ('09).

Teams will compete in Rome's Fiat facility and their cars will be judged in a series of static and dynamic events that include technical inspection, presentation and engineering design, solo performance trials and high performance track endurance.  The events will be scored to determine how well the car performs.  In each event, manufacturing firms will use specified minimum acceptable performance levels that are reflected in scoring equations for judging.

"We couldn't be more excited to participate in this event and demonstrate the developments in sustainable mobility," says Dr. Kevin Scoles, faculty advisor for the team and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs in Drexel University's College of Engineering.

For more information on Drexel's Formula Hybrid Team, please visit the team's website.  For more information on the competition in Italy, please visit the competition's website.

Posted September 29, 2009.

DrexelCast: Orchestra Concert Event on October 4

The Music and Entertainment Technology Laboratory, in partnership with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Specticast, will host five orchestra concert broadcast presentations on the Drexel campus throughout the 2009-2010 performance season.  These internet-based broadcasts will be presented in high definition in the Mitchell Auditorium in the Bossone Research Enterprise Center located at 3120 Market Street and are free and open to the public.

The next DrexelCast will take place on Sunday, October 4 at 2 p.m. and is entitled Bronfman, Bartók and Brahms.  For more information about this and the other presentations, please visit the DrexelCast website. 

These DrexelCast presentations are sponsored by the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design, the Penoni Honors College and the College of Engineering.

Posted September 29, 2009.

ECE faculty members receive NSF-MRI grant

Drs. Kapil Dandekar (PI), Adam Fontecchio (co-PI), Youngmoo Kim (co-PI) and Timothy Kurzweg (co-PI) of the ECE Department along with Dr. Jeremy Johnson (co-PI) of the Computer Science Department and an interdisciplinary team of senior investigators have recived a new NSF-MRI grant for $888,500 entitled "Development of Software Defined Communications Testbed for Radio and Optical Wireless Networking."

Working with indvidual collaborators, this team will develop a testbed for prototyping ultrawideband software defined radio and optical wireless communications systems.  This testbed will be made available to academic and industrial researchers around the world.  The intent is to create an online user community with software archives, transceiver designs, data repositories and user-support groups that will allow researchers working in radio and optical communication modalities to be able to prototype systems within common modular hardware and software framework.

Posted September 3, 2009.

ECE faculty members receive NSF grant

Drs. Kapil Dandekar (PI), Jaudelice de Oliveira (co-PI) and Moshe Kam (co-PI) of the ECE Department have received a new NSF grant entitled "Cognitive Antennas for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks."  The budget for this three year project is $480,000.

Cognitive radios have the ability to adjust technical parameters such as bandwidth, modulation scheme, transmitted power and error coding schemes.  These abilities provide significant flexibility, and let these radios adapt quickly to changes in communication channels and environmental conditions.  In this project the antennas used by the radios will be configured electronically to allow adjustments to their shape in order to control radiation pattern, polarization and frequency.  Addition of reconfigurable antennas to cognitive radios will give network nodes the additional capability to increase link robustness, enhance interference suppression and increase capacity.  The antennas developed through this grant will be tested in Drexel University's anechoic chamber.

Posted August 31, 2009.

ECE faculty member receives NSF-CAREER award

ECE professor Gail Rosen has just received a prestigious NSF-CAREER award for her project entitled "CAREER: A Machine Learning Framework for Metagenomic Relationships."  Gail is the only PI for this three year project with a budge of $680,000, which is much more than a usual CAREER award.

In this project, Dr. Rosen will be developing a computational framework which will enable identification and comparison of microorganisms to the environmental factors in their habitats.  With recent technologies, DNA can be extracted directly from the millions of cells in any environment and vast amounts of this DNA can now be sequenced, a technology known as metagenomics.  The ability to analyze these datasets will be acheived through machine learning methods to identify the content of this fragmented mixture.  This research will also address fundamental biological questions about global genomic features and theif effect on taxonomical and functional relationships.

As part of her CAREER plan, Dr. Rosen is developing an interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate Bioinformatics curricula (in collaboration with a molecular ecologist) and K-12 modules to incorporate an innovative NSF-funded K-12 program.

Posted August 27, 2009.

Computing Innovation Fellows Project post-doc joins ECE

The Music Entertainment Technology Laboratory (Director: Prof. Youngmoo Kim, ECE, pictured at left) will be hosting a new postdoctoral fellow, Andrew McPherson, sponsored by the Computing Innovation Fellows Project beginning in Fall 2009.  This is a highly competitive program administered by the Computing Research Association (CRA) and sponsored by the National Science Foundation.  Sixty fellows were selected from 526 applications (with more than 1200 potential mentors).  The budget for this 1-year award is $140,000 and may be renewed for an additional year of support.

Andrew McPherson's research explores the role of computing in creative expression, creating hybrid acoustic-electronic instruments offering new musical possibilities to performers and composers.  He received undergraduate degrees in music and electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and subsequently complete a Master's in electrical engineering, pursuing his thesis work at the MIT Media Lab.

He will receive his Ph.D. in music composition at the University of Pennsylvania in Summer 2009.  As a composer, he has attended the Tanglewood and Aspen music festivals and received honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Composers Forum, Aspen, University of Pennsylvania and MIT.

More information about the Computing Innovation Fellows Project is available on their website.

Posted August 6, 2009.

ECE faculty members receive ONR grant

ECE professors Moshe Kam (PI) and Kapil Dandekar (co-PI) have received an ONR grant entitled "A Platform for Analyzing the Radio Frequency Environment of Naval Vessels."

This project is based on measurements taken in January 2008 by the ECE Data Fusion Laboratory aboard the USS Ticoderoga (CG 47).  The objective is to design and deploy a physical analysis platform for  characterization of the radio frequency environment found on naval vessels, with applications to wireless communications and SIGNIT techniques.  The budget for this one year project is $280,000.

Posted August 4, 2009.

ECE faculty members receive NSF grant

Drs. Kapil Dandekar (PI), Adam Fontecchio (co-PI), Nagarajan Kandasamy (co-PI), Youngmoo Kim (co-PI) and Timothy Kurzweg (co-PI) of the ECE Department have received a new NSF grant entitled "MIMO Software Defined Communication Testbed for UWB Radio and Free Space Optics."

As the ubiquity of wireless networking leads to an increasing reliance on high-speed data communications, there is clearly a need for new high-bandwidth, inexpensive, flexible and upgradable wireless communications technologies to meet the growing demands of future applications.  To address this need, this project generalizes the notion of "software defined radio" to include ultrawideband radio and optical communication modalities.  The main result is expected to be a modular testbed for rapidly prototyping high bandwidth networks for a variety of next-generation applications.  These applications include wireless HD-TV distribution, localization and broadband "last-mile" data access.  The budget for this three-year project is $609,646.

Posted August 4, 2009.

ECE student receives IEEE MTTS Undergraduate Scholarship

The IEEE Microwaves Theory and Techniques Society announced six winners of its Undergraduate Scholarships for fall 2009.  The purpose of these scholarships is to attract undergraduate students to the microwave and RF disciplines and to encourage them to pursue graduate degrees in these fields.

ECE BS/MS student Milad Alemohammad is among the awardess and the only awardee from a U.S. institution.  Advised by Dr. Peter Herczfeld, his project investigates the optical generation of rapidly tunable millimeter wave subcarriers where the tuning range exceeds 100 GHz.

Mr. Alemohammad also serves IEEE as a policy intern in Washington.  His research supports policies which encourage penetration of broadband technologies to rural America.  The outcome of these studies will be submitted to the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) and will be published in WISE Journal of Engineering & Public Policy.

Posted July 2, 2009.