Chris Middlebrook (ECE) was recently hosted by the ECE SPIE Chapter at Georgia Tech. On March 12, Middlebrook provided a presentation entitled “Embedded and Integrated Passive Waveguides and Active Integrated Optical Devices.”
SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics. Details of Middlebrook’s presentation are available online.
Timothy Havens (ECE) is the principal investigator on a research and development project that has received $96,643 from the Naval Surface Warfare Center.
Andrew Barnard (ME-EM) is the Co-PI on the project “Localization, Tracking, and Classification of On-Ice and Underwater Noise Sources Using Machine Learning.”
This is the first year of a potential three-year project totaling $299,533.
By Sponsored Programs.
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE/IMP) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $20,000 research and development contract from Sandia National Laboratories.
The project is titled, “Snow Characteristics as a Factor in PV Performance and Reliability.”
This is a 10 month project totaling $40,000.
Wayne Weaver (ECE) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $200,000 research and development grant from the U.S. Department of Defense – Office of Naval Research. Gordon Parker (ME-EM) is Co-PI on the project, “Real-Time Simulator for Advanced Energy Network Planning Optimization.” This is a one-year project.
Timothy C. Havens (ECE), the William and Gloria Jackson Associate Professor of Computer Systems, has been named director of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC), effective immediately.
The ICC is the research arm of the Alliance for Computing, Information and Automation, and one of several research centers at Michigan Tech organized under the authority of the Office of the Vice President for Research. It brings together some 50 Michigan Tech faculty members from 12 different academic units on campus, collaborating in the areas of cyber-physical systems, cybersecurity, data sciences, human-centered computing and scalable architectures and systems. Since its inception in 2015, it has hosted 28 funded projects, and was responsible for approximately $1.8M in external research expenditures in FY18.
As the Jackson Associate Professor, Havens holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. He is also director of the interdisciplinary master of science program in data science. His technical areas of expertise are machine learning, computational intelligence, data science, and signal and image processing.
Havens was selected to lead the ICC by Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Jacqueline Huntoon and Vice President for Research David Reed, following an internal nomination and recommendation process organized by ICC Co-Director and ECE Department Chair Daniel R. Fuhrmann. Havens’ term as ICC director extends through Dec. 31, 2021.
Says Havens, “I am thrilled to be named the next director of the ICC and very much look forward to working with the entirety of the ICC membership and our connected communities to promote research and learning experiences in the areas of computing and cybersystems at Michigan Tech. I am enthused by the prospects of our ICC vision.”
By Daniel R. Fuhrmann.
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) was interviewed for the article “Michigan Tech Researchers Publish Paper on New Recyclebot 3D Printer,” published in 3D Print Pulse, Ichiban Electronic Blog and 3DPrint.com among other sites.
Dr. Pearce is a major proponent for sustainability, and has also studied filament recycling in the past. In the 2017 study, Dr. Pearce and the rest of his team discussed the development of a solar-powered version of the open source “recyclebot,” an extruder for waste plastic that he designed back in 2013.
In a new paper, titled “RepRapable Recyclebot: Open source 3-D printable extruder for converting plastic to 3-D printing filament,” Dr. Pearce and his team relay their continued development of the innovative recyclebot, including the full plans, list of parts, and assembly instructions for the device, which was designed for FFF 3D printer-based filament research.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ohx.2018.e00026
Co-authors of the paper include Michigan Tech’s Aubrey L. Woern, Joseph R. McCaslin, Adam M. Pringle, and Dr. Pearce.
Read more at 3D Print Pulse, by Sarah Saunders.
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) was featured in the article “Recyclebot an Open-Source 3D Printable Extruder for Converting Plastic to 3D Printing Filament.” in Inside 3D Printing.
Research by undergraduate Aubrey Woern (MEEM) and Joseph McCaslin (ECE), in collaboration with graduate student Adam Pringle (MSE) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) was featured in the article, “RepRapable Recyclebot: Open-Source-Extruder recycelt Filament,” in the German Make Magazine.
Undergraduate students Aubrey Woern (MEEM) and Joseph McCaslin (ECE) in collaboration with graduate student Adam Pringle (MSE) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) published “RepRapable Recyclebot: Open Source 3D Printable Extruder for Converting Plastic to 3-D Printing Filament” in HardwareX.
PhD student Khalid Khan (ECE) and Lucia Gauchia (ECE/ME) and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) published Self-sufficiency of 3-D printers: utilizing stand-alone solar photovoltaic power systems, in Renewables: Wind, Water, and Solar.
Jeremy Bos (ECE) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $5,000 research and development contract with the University of Michigan. Darrell Robinette (MEEM/ICC) is the Co-PI on the project “Robust Terrain Identification and Path Planning for Autonomous Ground Vehicles in Unstructured Environments.” The is the first year of a potential three-year project totaling $304,525.
By Sponsored Programs.
HOUGHTON — Autonomous vehicles will spell major changes for Americans, including those living in rural areas.
Using Houghton as an area for a case study, a team of Michigan Technological University students set out to investigate possible impacts within rural areas.
The class was tasked with determining environmental, social and economic impacts of Level 4 autonomous vehicles, part of a competition known as the AutoDrive Challenge. Level 4 refers to vehicles that are self-diving but unable to deal with every scenario.
Once the results came in, the team was surprised by the level of neutral responses, with 20-30 percent answering questions as neutral, said Cameron Burke, an electrical and computer engineering student.
Unexpected topics, such as land use and parking situations, were also raised by participants. The team determined there would need to be significant changes to infrastructure, Burke said.
“We found that for autonomous vehicles to be even desirable in a community like this, there would have to be a lot of infrastructure changes,” he said.
Read more at the Mining Gazette, by Kali Katerberg.
Related:
Take Me Home, Country Roads: The Future of Autonomous and Electric Vehicles in Rural Areas
Tony Pinar (ECE), Tim Havens (ECE/CS) and Joe Rice’s (CS) paper, titled “Efficient Multiple Kernel Classification Using Feature and Decision Level Fusion,” in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems was one of two papers from the transactions featured in IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine as a CIS Publication Spotlight.
DOI: 10.1109/TFUZZ.2016.2633372
Extract: Kernel methods for classification is a well-studied area in which data are implicitly mapped from a lower-dimensional space to a higher dimensional space to improve classification accuracy. However, for most kernel methods, one must still choose a kernel to use for the problem. Since there is, in general, no way of knowing which kernel is the best, multiple kernel learning (MKL) is a technique used to learn the aggregation of a set of valid kernels into a single (ideally) superior kernel.
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) gave an invited talk for the University of Lorraine entitled “Will you 3D print your next lab? : Leveraging Improvements in Distributed Manufacturing for Open Source Scientific Hardware” at the Lorraine Fab Living Lab in Nancy, France.
The visit was covered by the regional newspaper L’Est Republicain(circulation >123,000).
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) authored the chapter “Open-source 3D Printing” in “Managing Humanitarian Innovation: The cutting edge of aid.” Editors: Eric James and Abigail Taylor, 2018, Practical Action Publishing.
eISBN: 978-178044-953-1 | ISBN: 978-185339-953-4 doi:https://doi.org/10.3362/9781780449531.021
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) authored “Expanding the Consumer Bill of Rights for material ingredients,” in Materials Today.
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE), John Gershenson (MEEM), and alumni Tobias J. Mahan and Benjamin L. Savonen are mentioned in the article “Researchers Develop the Kijenzi 3D Printer to Respond to Humanitarian Crises,” in 3DPrint.com.
Research by Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE), was featured in the story “Solar Microgrids for National Security: Study Finds 17 GW Could Fortify US Military Bases,” originally posted in May, 2017. The story was referenced recently in Microgrid Knowledge.
Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) gave an invited talk, “Production for the People: How open source hardware design and 3D printing enable real distributed manufacturing,” at the 20th Finnish Rapid Prototyping Association Conference and Nordic3DExpo last Thursday (April 19) in Espoo, Finland.