Author: College of Engineering

Sue Hill is the Digital Content Manager for the College of Engineering.

NSF CAREER Award for Sumit Paudyal

Sumit Paudyal
Sumit Paudyal

Sumit Paudyal (ECE) is the principal investigator on a project that has received $500,000 from the National Science Foundation. The project is entitled “CAREER: Operation of Distribution Grids in the Context of High-Penetration Distributed Energy Resources and Flexible Loads.”

This is a five-year project.

Abstract

The number of distributed energy resources (DERs) and flexible loads such as photovoltaic (PV) panels, electric vehicles (EVs), and energy storage systems (ESSs) are rapidly growing at the consumer end. These small distributed devices connect to low voltage power distribution grids via power electronic interfaces that can support bi-directional power flows. Despite being small in size, if aggregated, these devices a provide significant portion of the energy and ancillary services (e.g., reactive power support, frequency regulation, load following) necessary for reliable and secure operation of electric power grids. In future distribution grids, with numerous such small active devices, real-time control and aggregation will entail computational challenges. The computational challenges further increase when the aggregation requires coordination with legacy grid control actions which involve integer decision variables, such as load tap changers, capacitor banks, and network switches. This CAREER project concentrates around solving operational and computational issues for distribution grids with large penetration of DERs and flexible loads.

Read more at the National Science Foundation.

Havens and Pinar Publish and Present on Fuzzy Systems

Tim Havens (ECE/CS) and Tony Pinar (ECE) published “Measures of the Shapley Index for Learning Lower Complexity Fuzzy Integrals” in Granular Computing and “Efficient Multiple Kernel Classification Using Feature and Decision Level Fusion” in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, December 2017.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41066-017-0045-6

Havens presented a paper co-authored by Pinar entitled “Generating Random Fuzzy (Capacity) Measures for Data Fusion Simulations” at the IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (IEEE SSCI 2017) in Honolulu, HI, from Nov. 27 to Dec 1, 2017.

Timothy Havens
Timothy Havens
Tony Pinar
Tony Pinar

Glen Archer Demonstrates Excellence in Large Class Teaching

Glen Archer
Glen Archer

For many students and instructors, the upcoming weeks are the most motivationally challenging of the academic year. Days are getting shorter, colder and darker with six solid weeks of class behind us and four more weeks ahead before a break.

But Michigan Tech’s terrific faculty routinely provide me with inspiration to keep me focused. I want to share a story I play back in my head on tougher days in hopes that it will inspire you too.

When I first became the CTL director, Glen Archer, principal lecturer and associate chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, used to do me the favor of speaking near the end of Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) orientation each fall. Glen would remind the GTAs that they were going to be the “maximum in the room.”

What he meant was that any students would almost certainly reflect and rise only to the level of enthusiasm and motivation set by their instructor. Glen was challenging them to set that bar high.

Glen’s advice helps me focus on bringing my best self into the classroom, even on days when I’m distracted by non-teaching or personal business, teaching material I don’t find that interesting myself, or just plain tired. It helps me see that if I’m not leading the way with interest and enthusiasm, it’s pretty hard to expect that my students will follow.

On Nov. 30, Glen will be recognized with the final 2017 CTL Teaching Award for Excellence in Large Class Teaching.  He’ll share other stories as part of this event; I encourage you to mark your calendar now so that you can attend and hear more words of wisdom from this terrific teacher.

If you’d like to talk more about ways to keep yourself and students motivated, stop into the William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning.

From Terrific Teaching at Tech, by Mike Meyer, William G. Jackson CTL.

Collaborative NSF Research Funding for Saeid Nooshabadi

Saeid Nooshabadi
Saeid Nooshabadi

Saeid Nooshabadi (ECE/ICC) is the principal investigator on a project that has received $349,988 from the National Science Foundation for the project, “Collaborative Research: ACI-CDS&E: Highly Parallel Algorithms and Architectures for Convex Optimization for Realtime Embedded Systems (CORES).” This is a three-year project.

By Sponsored Programs.

Abstract

Embedded processors are ubiquitous, from toasters and microwave ovens, to automobiles, planes, drones and robots and are typically very small processors that are compute and memory constrained. Real-time embedded systems have the additional requirement of completing tasks within a certain time period to accurately and safely control appliances and devices like automobiles, planes, robots, etc. Convex optimization has emerged as an important mathematical tool for automatic control and robotics and other areas of science and engineering disciplines including machine learning and statistical information processing. In many fields, convex optimization is used by the human designers as optimization tool where it is nearly always constrained to problems solved in a few hours, minutes or seconds. Highly Parallel Algorithms and Architectures for Convex Optimization for Realtime Embedded Systems (CORES) project takes advantage of the recent advances in embedded hardware and optimization techniques to explore opportunities for real-time convex optimization on the low-cost embedded systems in these disciplines in milli- and micro-seconds.

Read more at the National Science Foundation.

NSF Funding on Cyber Risk Management for Power Grids

Chee-Wooi Ten
Chee-Wooi Ten

Chee-Wooi Ten (ECE) is the lead principal investigator on a project that has received a $348,866 research and development grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Yeonwoo Rho (Math/ICC) is the Co-PI on the project “CPS:Medium: Collaborative Research: An Actuarial Framework of Cyber Risk Management for Power Grids.” This is a three-year project.

There are two investigators from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The total for both universities is $700,975.

Abstract

As evidenced by the recent cyberattacks against Ukrainian power grids, attack strategies have advanced and new malware agents will continue to emerge. The current measures to audit the critical cyber assets of the electric power infrastructure do not provide a quantitative guidance that can be used to address security protection improvement. Investing in cybersecurity protection is often limited to compliance enforcement based on reliability standards. Auditors and investors must understand the implications of hypothetical worst case scenarios due to cyberattacks and how they could affect the power grids. This project aims to establish an actuarial framework for strategizing technological improvements of countermeasures against emerging cyberattacks on wide-area power networks.

Read more at the National Science Foundation.

NSF Funding for Semouchkina on Transformation Optics

Elena Semouchkina
Elena Semouchkina

Elena Semouchkina (ECE/ICC), is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $337,217 research and development grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project is “Developing Anisotropic Media for Transformation Optics by Using Dielectric Photonic Crystals.” This is a three-year project.

Abstract

Transformation optics (TO) is based on coordinate transformations, which require proper spatial dispersions of the media parameters. Such media force electromagnetic (EM) waves, moving in the original coordinate system, to behave as if they propagate in a transformed coordinate system. Thus TO introduces a new powerful technique for designing advanced EM devices with superior functionalities. Coordinate transformations can be derived for compressing, expanding, bending, or twisting space, enabling designs of invisibility cloaks, field concentrators, perfect lenses, beam shifters, etc., that may bring advances to various areas of human life. Realization of these devices depends on the possibility of creating media with prescribed EM properties, in particular, directional refractive indices to provide wave propagation with superluminal phase velocities and high refractive indices in the normal direction to cause wave movement along curvilinear paths. Originally, artificial metamaterials (MMs) composed of tiny metallic resonators were chosen for building transformation media. However, a number of serious challenges were encountered, such as extremely narrow frequency band of operation and the high losses in metal elements. The proposed approach is to use dielectric photonic crystals to overcome these major limitations of MM media. This project will allow graduate and undergraduate students, especially women in engineering, to participate in theoretical and experimental EM research. Outreach activities include lectures and hands-on projects in several youth programs to K-12 students.

Read more at the National Science Foundation.

Former UPPCO CEO, Distinguished Tech Almunus, Elio Argentati Dies

Elio Argentati
Elio Argentati

Funeral services were held over the weekend for the former CEO of the Upper Peninsula Power Company and a distinguished Michigan Tech Alumnus, Elio Argentati.

Argentati, of Iron River, passed away Tuesday (Aug. 22, 2017) at Aspirus Hospital in Iron River, he was 89.

According to his obituary on the Jacobs Funeral Home website, Argentati was a 1950 graduate of the Michigan College of Mining and Technology (now Michigan Technological University) with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

He joined the Upper Peninsula Power Company in 1960 as an applications engineer and rose up through the ranks eventually becoming president, chairman of the board and CEO in the corporate office in Houghton, retiring in 1994.

He was active in the Michigan Tech Alumni Association and a member of the Golden M Club. In 2012 he was awarded the Board of Control Silver Medal.

Funeral services were held Saturday at St. Agnes Catholic Church in Iron River, with interment in the Resthaven Cemetery in Iron River.

Havens and Pinar Present in Naples and Attend Invited Workshop in UK

fuzz ieee 2017Tim Havens (ECE/CS) and Tony Pinar (ECE) presented several papers at the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems in Naples, Italy. Havens also chaired a session on Innovations in Fuzzy Inference.

The conference took place July 9-12, 2017.

Havens and Pinar also attend the Invited Workshop on the Future of Fuzzy Sets and Systems in Rothley, UK. This event invited leading researchers from around the globe for a two-day workshop to discuss future directions and strategies, in particular, to cybersecurity. The event was hosted by the University of Nottingham, UK, and sponsored by the National Cyber Security Centre, part of UK’s GCHQ.

SYP Students Visit MFF

MFF SYPMichigan Tech’s Microfabrication Core Facility (MFF) was host to 15 students, ages 12-14, from the Summer Youth Program (SYP) Tuesday (July 18, 2017).

The students learned about the fabrication of silicon-based devices and how silicon wafers are produced. Additionally, they had hands-on experience in the cleanroom and used the photolithography process to transfer a pattern on a photomask to a silicon wafer. The pattern had a scale on it from 100 um (diameter of a human hair) to 1 um (diameter of bacteria) to allow the students to understand the scale that MFF users work at.

The students also hand cleaved silicon wafers to produce dies of gold Michigan Tech logos as a keepsake for their time in the MFF. A similar event is planned for another SYP group this Tuesday (July 25).

By Electrical and Computer Engineering. Read more at the Microfabrication Core Facility, by Chito Kendrick.

Students experience day in Microfabrication Facility

HOUGHTON — Michigan Tech’s Microfabrication Core Facility provided students with a glimpse of the microfabrication process.

The students suited up and worked in the cleanroom to learn about fabricating silicon-based products. At the end, silicon wafers were transformed into dies of gold Michigan Tech logos through the process of photolithography.

Read more and watch the video at ABC 10 News, by Rick Allen.

Summer Youth at Microfabrication Facility
Summer Youth at Microfabrication Facility
Chito Kendrick
Chito Kendrick

Fridays with Fuhrmann: Why Do We Teach?

Why Do We Teach?
Why Do We Teach?

In my last post, I raised the question of why we do research in a university setting.  My main point, which I hope I made clear enough, is that we should have research programs because we are passionate about the work itself, and not for some other reason such as supporting a PhD program.  While PhD programs are an important part of what we do, I believe strongly that we cannot be effective advisors and mentors for PhD students—training our replacements, essentially—unless we are good at research in the first place, in our own right.

Having addressed that question, an obvious companion question came to mind—why do we teach?  At first, my motivation for addressing this was only out of symmetry.  Normally, when I realize I am about to do something for that reason, I remember the old adage “foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and then go ahead and do it anyway.  In this case, however, raising the question itself was an opportunity for me to explore some of my own life choices.  This was one of those cases where, having decided on a topic, I was not entirely clear on the points I was going to make until I was done writing! Hopefully you will find a little more clarity below, and if not I hope this might stir any readers who are teachers to ask the same question of himself or herself.

By way of context, I should mention that I come from a long line of teachers, including several math teachers.  My grandfather on my father’s side was a farmer in Oklahoma and Kansas, and in the 1910s and 1920s his primary income came from teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in western Oklahoma.  The handbell he used to call students to class after lunch and recess still sits on the piano in my home.  My grandmother on my mother’s side taught grade school in a white community adjacent to an Indian reservation in eastern Washington, during World War I, before she married my grandfather and moved to Oklahoma.  My mother took up teaching as a second career in the 1970s, and was a math teacher in the Tulsa public school system and later at Tulsa Junior College.  I have one cousin who teaches high-school math in a suburban Tulsa school district, and another who recently retired from teaching high-school math in Fremont, California.  I have a nephew who is a faculty member in math at Glendale Community College, in Los Angeles, a niece who taught high-school math in Niwot, Colorado, a niece who teaches middle-school English in Norman, Oklahoma, and is married to the high school debate coach, and the wife of a nephew who taught elementary school in another Tulsa suburb.  I guess it’s in my DNA.

This is as good a place as any to mention that my father was an electrical engineer and my mother was a math teacher, and for the past five years I have put a lot of effort into teaching a large freshman class called “Essential Mathematics for Electrical Engineering.”  Sometimes the universe does offer up beautiful symmetries, if we are paying attention.

But back to the question of why we teach in the first place. Here is my top 10 list.

1. We are good at it.  Some people just have a knack for communication and connecting with others, for organizing and presenting their ideas clearly and concisely, for showing that what they are trying to do really matters.  I have heard it said that “before someone cares what you know, they have to know that you care.”  Teachers who can pull this off have found the right line of work.

2. Someone pays us to do it.  This often goes along with #1 above.  If there is something that we do reasonably well, and others are willing to pay us for it, chances are it is something that we find enjoyable and rewarding.  At the very least it gives us a reason to get out of bed and put one foot in front of the other.  A paycheck might not be world’s best motivation, but it is not the worst one either.

3. It keeps us young.  This was something I noticed when I first entered graduate school—all of my professors seemed younger than their counterparts at the same chronological age in industry.  There has to be something about the constant contact with those from an earlier generation that allows us to continue seeing the world with fresh eyes.  This doesn’t really address the problem of the ever-widening gap between my generation and that of our students, but I don’t think anyone is going to solve that one.  Time’s arrow moves in one direction.

4. Benefits to the individual students. At a place like Michigan Tech, our teaching programs are built around improving the lives of our individual students, giving them the skills and the knowledge that they need to be successful, personally, professionally, and financially.  Of course we have to hold our students to a high standard; otherwise our efforts are meaningless.  At the end of the day, however, our placement rates and starting salaries speak for themselves.  We aim as well to provide students with the means for lifelong learning and an ability for critical thinking that will serve them well in all aspects of life.

5.Workforce training and economic development.  Going hand-in-hand with the benefits to our own graduates, as individuals, is the benefit that those graduates bring as newly trained engineers to our state, our region, and the nation as a whole.  As I have pointed out before, Michigan Tech is unique in Michigan in that our obligation to the welfare of the various industries in the state is called out in our founding legislation. Placing properly educated engineers in positions of responsibility is a big part of what we do. The economic situation in Michigan has had its ups and downs, but right now things are looking up, and we need to do our part to continue moving in the right direction.

6. Benefits to society at large.  The benefits of a college education to society have long been recognized. Thomas Jefferson noted that democracy and self-government could not function without an educated populace capable of making well-reasoned decisions, and he used that as an argument for education reform in our new nation.  Benefits that go beyond economics in modern society are well-documented, see e.g. the recent report by the College Board entitled “Education Pays 2016.” A college degree is associated with a healthier lifestyles, regular exercise, reduced healthcare costs, greater engagement with family members, community volunteer activity, and higher voting rates. It’s hard not to want to be a part of that.

7. It’s the best way to learn a new topic. This is one of those academic truisms that gets played out all the time.  If a faculty member wants to steer his or her research or scholarship in a new direction, the first thing we try to do is teach a new course in that area.  This forces us to learn the subject thoroughly, in an organized way, and we are put on a schedule with a weekly deadline where we have to stand up in front of a classroom and defend what have learned.  One does not understand a subject until one can explain it clearly to someone else.

8. Fundamentals are important.  Just like teaching a new course is good way to learn a new topic, it is also true that teaching a familiar topic is a good way to maintain a healthy intellectual discipline.  This is an important message to carry to those outside of academia with whom we work, as well as our graduates about to enter the workforce.  We sometimes hear this narrative that material taught in the classroom is irrelevant, and that the “real” technical knowledge is what one learns on the job.  I emphatically reject that notion.  While an industrial perspective can be quite valuable for our educational programs, I have also seen situations in which technical projects go awry when engineers lose sight of the very foundations of their field.  In engineering, just like in baseball, the fundamentals never go out of style, and the most successful companies and organizations know that.

9. We have nothing better to do.  It goes without saying that this is the absolute worst reason to teach. Unfortunately, it can happen that faculty members who are unproductive in other areas find themselves with increased teaching responsibilities. In the worst-case scenario these responsibilities are assigned as a form of punishment. (I do not subscribe to this management philosophy!)  It is as if teaching is the fallback position, our “day job” as it were, like waiting tables or driving for Uber. (I hasten to add that here is absolutely nothing wrong with waiting tables or driver for Uber if that is what brings satisfaction or what one needs to do to make ends meet.)  In a future post I hope to take up the relationship between teaching and research, but for now I will just say that this assumption—that we can always teach—does not help to counter the myth that research is more important than teaching.  Our academic workload models tend to be built around the notion that we do as much research as we can find support for, and whatever time is left over is then devoted to teaching.  Part of me wishes that faculty had to compete for the right to teach courses (and get paid for it), the same way we have to compete to do research through writing grant proposals and the like.  The good news, at least in the ECE department at Michigan Tech, is that this sort of default teaching is pretty rare.  It is true that we have a few faculty members who are not research active, but most are outstanding teachers and would win hands-down any competition that would earn them the right to teach as much as they do.

10. We want to make the world a better place.  This is my half serious, half glib, reason that encompasses a lot of the other good reasons I give above, and I add it here because I really did not want to end with #9.  It is the same reason that I gave in my last post about why we do research.  In teaching we make the world a better place through leverage, by giving large numbers of young people the tools that they need to go out and improve life for themselves and for everyone around them.  I will admit, this is the viewpoint of the eternal optimist, but that is a criticism I can live with.

Although not utilized very often, this blog post does have a comment feature.  Teachers out there, I would love to hear from you.  Why do you teach?

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University