College of Engineering, Author at Electrical and Computer Engineering Newsblog

Christopher Middlebrook is a Co-recipient of the 2022 CTL Instructional Award for Curriculum Development and Assessment

Published November 2, 2022

The Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) will recognize Chris Middlebrook (ECE) and Josue Reynoso (COB) as co-recipients of the 2022 CTL Instructional Award for Curriculum Development and Assessment on Tuesday (Nov. 8) at 3:45 p.m. Middlebrook and Reynoso were selected for the award after being nominated via the Deans’ Teaching Showcase during the spring 2022 semester.

Please plan to join us in recognizing their accomplishments by registering for the event.

Middlebrook’s award presentation: “Curriculum Development: Creation of a Printed Circuit Board Manufacturing Laboratory Course.”

From the abstract:
Why Michigan Tech? Why go to school there? Why hire Michigan Tech engineering grads? What skills do they possess that are lacking in other engineering grads? A consistent answer to these questions is the hands-on laboratory experience students have throughout the engineering curriculum. The response is echoed with the hundreds of companies that continuously recruit Michigan Tech Engineering students. Laboratory experience increases student knowledge retention and fosters a deeper understanding through direct concept application. However, the creation of a new course with a laboratory component can often be a daunting task to faculty and staff given the amount of time and the number of resources that are often required. In this talk I will share my experience with the creation of a formal course and laboratory on Printed Circuit Manufacturing utilizing prior research equipment coupled with existing infrastructure and corporate participation and in-kind donations. The outcomes and ancillary activities associated with the course and lab, such as the building of the new Plexus Electronics Maker Space, will also be discussed.

By the Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning.

Nathir Rawashdeh Comments on Bad Weather Driving Project

Published September 13, 2022

By College of Engineering

Nathir Rawashdeh was quoted by Digital Engineering 24/7 in a story about artificial intelligence and simulation software helping engineers test autonomous vehicles’ driving in bad weather.

Rawashdeh is assistant professor in the Department of Applied Computing, an affiliated assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a member of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC).

Rainmakers for Autonomous Driving

Nature presents a major obstacle when engineers test autonomous driving in bad weather. You cannot invoke a snowy, rainy or sunny day on demand; nor can you summon up a thunderstorm at your engineering team’s convenience—at least you can’t in the real world. But you can in the virtual world where you control the pixels. This has now become a growing business segment for simulation software makers.

“Sensor and computing technologies are rapidly evolving and changing in an engineering sense, which requires continuous updating of noise simulation and sensor degradation models to serve the ADAS community of engineers and researchers,” Rawashdeh says.

Lucas and Whitaker Place in Computing[MTU] Showcase Poster Session

Published April 14, 2022

By College of Engineering

The Institute of Computing and Cybersystems has announced the winners of the first Computing[MTU] Showcase Poster Session. Among the winners were electrical and computer engineering graduate students Evan Lucas and Steven Whitaker for “Active learning with binary feedback on multiclass problems,” who were tied for second place with Suresh Pokharel of Computer Science.

Active learning with binary feedback on multiclass problems

An active learning approach is often used for multiclass classification problems, where predictions are made on new data and a human user is used to determine if the predictions are correct. Typical approaches may ask a human to select the correct class if the prediction is incorrect. This work attempts to use a binary feedback on the predicted classes to save time and allow maximal use of a negative prediction on a partly trained model.

Ranit Karmakar Wins Best Overall Venture Award

Published April 29, 2021

By College of Engineering

Husky Innovate Students Win Top Prizes in New Venture Online Competition

Pitch screenshot on eye banks from the Focus presentation.

For the 11th year running, Central Michigan University and Michigan Tech collaborated to offer Tech students a chance to compete at CMU’s New Venture Competition. 2021 marked the second year the pitch competition was held online as the New Venture Online Competition (NVOC).

Despite the challenges of a pandemic and a virtual platform, our students persevered, honed their pitches and won top prizes. This year’s NVOC winners were also winners at the 2021 Bob Mark Business Model Pitch Competition held at Tech in January. All of their hard work and effort paid off!

Congratulations to this year’s MTU winners:

In the 2020-track 10-minute pitch category, Team Focus with Ranit Karmakar won the Best Overall Venture Award for $25,000. Watch Karmakar’s pitch. Karmakar is a PhD student in Computer Engineering.
In the two-minute pitch category, Team The Fitting Room with Jordan Craven won third place for $1,000. Watch Craven’s pitch.
Team Recirculate with Hunter Malinowski won an honorable mention award for $750. Watch Malinowski’s pitch.

Anna Browne Wins President’s Award for Leadership

Published April 26, 2021

By College of Engineering

Outstanding students, staff, and a special alumni were honored Friday (April 16, 2021) during Michigan Tech’s 27th Annual Student Leadership Awards Virtual Ceremony.

Anna Browne was selected to receive the President’s Award for Leadership. Brown is pursuing a degree in electrical engineering with a concentration in electrical power. She has shown excellent success during her time as a student. Her involvement and contributions to Michigan Tech’s campus are numerous and cast such a wide net as shown in her 13 nominations.

Anna, who has had multiple internships at Black & Veatch and Westwood Professional Services, has served in project and team leader roles with the Alternative Energy Enterprise on projects like the Baraga Community solar and the on-campus mine water geothermal system. She’s been an active part of the residence education and housing services community as a senior student resident assistant and resident assistant for three years.

She’s also been a valuable contributing member to the Center for Diversity and Inclusion community. Anna has left a mark on Michigan Tech’s community. In her essay she writes how she strived to be a role model for others through community building.

She wrote, “Through my Michigan Tech Experience, my values of leadership, community, openness, and integrity have been demonstrated through every aspect of my involvement. In trying to create a supportive community, I have strived to give a sense of comfort and belonging to those without a place. Michigan Tech has helped me find my values and my identities, and I hope through my involvement that I have left a positive mark on Michigan Tech as it has left on me.”

By Student Leadership and Involvement.

27th Annual Student Leadership Awards

Kaitlyn Bunker is an Outstanding Young Alumna

Published April 26, 2021

By College of Engineering

Outstanding students, staff, and a special alumni were honored Friday (April 16) during Michigan Tech’s 27th Annual Student Leadership Awards Virtual Ceremony.

Keynote speaker Kaitlyn Bunker ’10 ’12 ’14 (BS, MS, PhD Electrical Engineering), won the Outstanding Young Alumni Award along with Megan Kreiger ’09 ’12 (Mathematics and Materials Science and Engineering).

By Student Leadership and Involvement.

27th Annual Student Leadership Awards

Anindya Ghoshroy Joins the Field of Compressed Ultrafast Photography

Published January 27, 2021

By College of Engineering

Dr. Anindya Ghoshroy (PhD ’20) begins the new year with a postdoctoral researcher position at California Institute of Technology. Ghoshroy will be working under the direction of Dr. Lihong Wang, a world-renowned researcher in the imaging field, and the inventor of the fastest optical technology in the world, called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), capable of 10 trillion frames per second.

Wang and Ghoshroy are interested in the next big step – investigating the near field implementations of ultrafast photography, and the resolution of nanoscale transient scenes. An integration of the CUP framework with “active convolved illumination” (ACI), an image-capturing technology that Ghoshroy and his PhD advisor Dr. Durdu Guney have been developing, and will potentially lead to a significant first step towards this direction.

ACI, being immune to “noise” will potentially enable imaging of live cells, virus, and bacteria with fine details, not accessible with the state-of-the-art imaging systems.

Set of ACI images. — Ground truth, Raw data, ACI futuristic illustration of SARS CoV2, ACI OFF, ACI ON with 3 nm scale bar, and ACI ON as a 3D model.

Chee-Wooi Ten Negotiates Two Book Contracts with CRC Press

Published October 19, 2020

By College of Engineering

News

Associate Professor Chee-Wooi Ten, Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently finalized contracts to write two books for CRC Press, a major publisher of humanities, social science, and STEM books and textbooks. Ten is a member of the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems’s Center for Cyber-Physical Systems.

The first book is titled, Electric Power Distribution System Engineering, 4th edition. Ten has been teaching EE5250 Distribution Engineering I at Michigan Tech for 10 years.

The second book, Modern Power System Analysis, 3rd Edition, is used to accompany a senior-level power engineering elective. Both books are tentatively scheduled to be published in January 2022.

Christopher Middlebrook Awarded Device from Gentec-EO Laser Lab

Published July 30, 2020

By College of Engineering

Device with laser beam and software display.

Chris Middlebook (ECE) was one of the winners of the Gentec-EO Laser Lab Awards. Middlebrook won a Beamage-4M laser beam profiler.

The Gentec-EO Laser Lab Awards contest aims to support optics laboratories in universities and colleges in the United States. Its goal is to ensure students have access to the same quality measurement instruments that are used today in the industry.

MTU Team Among Winners of TiM$10K Challenge

Published May 28, 2020

By College of Engineering

Group of five team members. — L-R: Brian Parvin, Paul Allen, David Brushaber, Alex Kirchner, and Kurtis Alessi

A Michigan Tech team is among the winners of the SICK Inc. TiM$10K Challenge. For the second year, students from universities around the country were invited to participate in the challenge, designed to support innovation and student achievement in automation and technology.

For the competition, teams were supplied with a 270-foot SICK LiDAR sensor and accessories, and challenged to solve a problem, create a solution or bring a new application to any industry that utilizes the SICK LiDAR.

The Tech team members — Brian Parvin, Kurtis Alessi, Alex Kirchner, David Brushaber and Paul Allen — earned Honorable Mention (fourth place overall) for their project, Evaluating Road Markings (the Road Stripe Evaluator). The innovative product aims to help resolve issues caused by poor road markings while reducing maintenance costs and improving motorist safety.

Each team was asked to submit a video and paper for judging upon completion of its project. A panel of judges decided the winning submissions based on creativity and innovation, ability to solve a customer problem, commercial potential, entrepreneurship of the team, and reporting.

“This was a unique project in that the team was required to identify a problem and develop a solution to it that is based on SICK’s TiM LiDAR — most teams are handed a problem and asked to create a solution,” said team advisor Tony Pinar, senior design coordinator in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “I think this format allowed the team to exercise even more innovation than a ‘typical’ project.”

Pinar said the team was well organized and demonstrated an excellent work ethic from day one. “It was exciting to watch them identify a salient problem and develop a functional proof-of-concept solution despite the setbacks that affected us all after spring break,” he said.

SICK is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sensors, safety systems, machine vision, encoders and automatic identification products for industrial applications.

Author: College of Engineering

Rainmakers for Autonomous Driving

Active learning with binary feedback on multiclass problems

Husky Innovate Students Win Top Prizes in New Venture Online Competition

27th Annual Student Leadership Awards

27th Annual Student Leadership Awards