Husband and wife graduate students have won honors from Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Mohsen Jamalabdollahi was named Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant, and his wife, Sakineh Yazdanparast, was recognized as the ECE Department’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant.
Backstage Jazz Celebrates “50 Years of Jazz” at Michigan Tech“Backstage at the Rozsa” again opens its doors to the groovin’ sounds of small-combo jazz to celebrate the 50th year of jazz studies at Michigan Tech.
There will be three student ensembles: Jaztec, Momentum with a combination of funk and fusion; AstroSax; and one special guest ensemble: The Dan Fuhrmann and Tim Havens Duo, here for their second guest appearance at Michigan Tech.
Join us in Club Rozsa and enjoy the intimate atmosphere reminiscent of the birthplace of jazz. Backstage at the Rozsa is at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday (Jan. 27/28, 2017).
Three Michigan Tech students are among 169 students from 49 higher education institutions worldwide to be named University Innovation Fellows. They are: Rachel Kolb (MEEM), Kyle Ludwig (ECE), and Adam Weber (CNSA).
The University Innovation Fellows program empowers students to become agents of change at their schools. Fellows work to ensure that their peers gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to compete in the economy of the future and make a positive impact on the world. To accomplish this, the Fellows advocate for lasting institutional change and create opportunities for students to engage with innovation, entrepreneurship, design thinking and creativity at their schools.
Fellows design innovation spaces, start entrepreneurship organizations, host experiential learning events and work with faculty to develop new courses.
The program is run by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. With the addition of the new Fellows, the program has trained 776 students at 164 institutions since its creation.
Ludwig, a computer engineering major from Traverse City, Michigan is involved in Michigan Tech’s Entrepreneurs Club, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Advisory Board, and the Pavlis Honor’s College. Ludwig would like to use his education in computer engineering, along with his passion for health and fitness, to improve health using technology.
“We believe that students can be so much more than just the customers of their education. They can be leaders of change and they can co-design the higher education experience,” said Humera Fasihuddin, co-director of the University Innovation Fellows program.
“This core belief has driven the program since its inception, and we’ve seen the results of this belief put to action at schools around the world. Fellows are collaborating with their peers, faculty and administrators to create more educational opportunities for students at their schools. They are making measurable gains, both in the number of resources and the students served by the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.”
Individual Fellows as well as institutional teams of Fellows are sponsored by faculty and administrators and selected through an application process twice annually.
Throughout the year, they take part in events and conferences and have opportunities to learn from one another, Stanford mentors and leaders in academia and industry.
Retired Michigan Tech Professor Theodore “Ted” Grzelak of Dollar Bay passed away Sunday at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids following a lengthy illness. He was 78.
He was born in Detroit and earned his bachelor’s of science in electrical engineering from the Michigan College of Mining and Technology in 1960. While at Tech, he was involved with Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. He received his master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He married the former Mildred Savalox in 1959 and in August the couple celebrated their 57th anniversary.
In 1965 he accepted a position with Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory near Buffalo, New York. According to his obituary, concern about heavy local pollution at the time convinced him to accept a position in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech.
He taught here from September of 1966 until his retirement in 2000. He was a coach for the Copper Country Junior Hockey Association, a member of the the Copper Country Ski Club and an official of the Central Division of the United States Ski Association. He was Dollar Bay’s Little League and Senior League baseball coach for several years.
He was an active member of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Hancock where he sang in the choir for nearly 40 years.
He is survived by his wife, Mildred, his three sons and eight grandchildren.
Funeral Services for Ted Grzelak will be held at 11 a.m. Friday (Nov. 18) at Gloria Dei in Hancock. Friends may call from 5 to 8 p.m. tomorrow at the Memorial Chapel Funeral Home in Hancock and Friday from 10 a.m. until the time of the service at the church.
A complete obituary can be found on the Memorial Chapel website.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has announced that it will award approximately $20.8 million in grants to 58 scientists and engineers through the Air Force’s Young Investigator Research Program (YIP). This year AFOSR received over 230 proposals in response to the AFOSR broad agency announcement solicitation.
Jeremy Bos (ECE) will receive a three-year YIP grant for his research in Imaging Theory and Mitigation in Extreme Turbulence-Induced Anisoplanatism.
The YIP is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the United States who received Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last five years and who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research.
The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering.
The ECE Department congratulates Dr. Bos on his continued accomplishments.
Recent ECE Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Yang Liu, who studied under Prof. Shiyan Hu, Director of the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, has joined Carnegie Mellon University as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Yang Liu joined the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan Tech as a Ph.D. student after he received his B.S. degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. Under the supervision of Prof. Shiyan Hu, his research focuses on smart home cyber-physical energy systems. The massive deployment of smart devices offers significant convenience on the remote and automatic control of the homes. Yet, it also makes the home vulnerable to cyberattacks. Yang has analyzed various cyberattacks to hack smart home systems for electricity pricing manipulation and energy theft. His work shows how these attacks could generate huge impacts to the power grid including the drastic increase of cost, interference of energy load and frequency, and even the large area blackout.
Cyber-physical systems include smart washing machines, self-driving cars, medical devices and smart grid meters. As our digital worlds become more than handheld, researchers seek to get a better understanding of the interface between cyberspace and tangible elements.
Shiyan Hu (ECE) is an expert in cyber-physical systems and cybersecurity, and is Director of Center for Cyber-Physical Systems at Michigan Tech Institute of Computer and Cybersystems. Recently, the Institute of Technology (IET) launched a new journal Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Application, [http://digital-library.theiet.org/content/journals/iet-cps] and appointed Hu as the founding editor-in-chief. IET is the largest engineering society in Europe with more than 180,000 members and Hu will lead a team of associate editors who are leading experts worldwide, including several from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, University of Illinois, National Taiwan University and University of Tokyo.
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) addresses the close interactions and feedback loop between the cyber components (such as embedded sensing systems) and the physical components (such as energy systems) in a system. The exemplary CPS research topics include smart energy systems, smart home/building/community/city, connected and autonomous vehicle system, smart health, etc. This IET journal is dedicated to all aspects of the fundamental and applied research in the design, implementation and operation of CPS systems, considering performance, energy, user experience, security, reliability, fault tolerance, flexibility and extensibility. Its scope also includes innovative big data analytics for cyber-physical systems such as large-scale analytical modeling, complex stochastic optimization, statistical machine learning, formal methods and verification, and real-time intelligent control which are all critical to the success of CPS developments.
As an elected Fellow of IET, Prof. Hu leads this journal and also chairs IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems (www.ieee-cps.org), an authoritative constituency overseeing all CPS related activities within IEEE. He has published more than 100 research papers (about 30 in the premier IEEE Transactions), received numerous awards recognizing his research impact to the field, and served as associate editor or guest editor for 7 IEEE/ACM Transactions. More information can be found at http://www.ece.mtu.edu/faculty/shiyan/
Last week was the week of alumni reunions at Michigan Tech. In the ECE Department we began Wednesday evening with our biennial induction ceremony for the ECE Academy, which is our “hall of fame” for ECE alumni who have distinguished themselves in their careers, whether through technical contributions, business and entrepreneurship, or professional service. We inducted three new members into the Academy this year. Shankar Mukherjee, MS ’86, is an entrepreneur who lives in Cupertino, California, and is currently very busy with his latest venture, Dhaani Systems. In fact, Shankar is so busy that he had to cancel his trip to Houghton at the last minute and attend to an emergency situation with potential buyers in India! Fortunately, we were able to Skype him in (at 5:30am his time) and the ceremony moved forward smoothly. Rich Ford, BS ’77, is a power engineer who spent his entire career with Consumers Power, now Consumers Energy, in downstate Michigan. Rich started out as an engineer and moved his way up through the ranks, finishing his career with stints at VP of Energy Delivery, VP of Generation Operations, and VP of Transmission. Charles Rogers, BS ’78, also spent his career with Consumers Energy. (They must take good care of their employees.) Charles’ many contributions were more in the areas of standards and compliance, and he spent a fair amount of time in service activity on task forces and committees on standards for system protection and maintenance. We are of course very proud of our new Academy members and will be very happy to see their smiling faces on the wall in the entryway to the EERC.
Thursday was a day with lots of university-wide activities for returning Huskies. This normally includes a pasty picnic in the late afternoon, on the grounds between the EERC and the ChemSci Building. For the first time in my memory the picnic was moved indoors based on the prediction of violent thunderstorms with almost 100% certainty, but in a cruel twist of fate, 4:00 p.m. rolled around and there was not a cloud in the sky. It’s been a while since I have seen a weather prediction that wrong. The irony is that, for the most part, this summer has been fabulously beautiful in the Copper Country. We all enjoyed our picnic in the MUB anyway. I got to wander around, eat too much (who eats a big meal at 4pm?) and make lots of new friends.
Friday afternoon we had an open house in the ECE Department for alumni interested in our educational and research activities. After some opening socializing in our 5th floor lounge, we took the group on a tour of our teaching labs and research facilities in the EERC, with the tour led by ECE undergraduate academic advisor Judy Donahue (thank you Judy!). I like to think that everyone came away with a good impression of what we are trying to do here.
Why do we go to all this effort? Obviously, like a lot of universities, we want to keep our alumni connected with Michigan Tech, socially and emotionally. It makes us all feel part of a larger community, a community with a sense of history and mission. We depend on our alumni in a lot of ways, not only for the generous charitable contributions that support our students and help us to grow our programs, but for the generous gift of their time and valuable advice. Showing off what we do for people who have been out in the world, for 20, 30, even 50 years or more, really helps us to focus our efforts. We are quick to remind our alumni that they carry the Husky brand with them wherever they go, so that our continued success is their success as well, just as their success is a positive reflection on the university. We like to brag to our alumni, of course, but at the same time we are inspired by them. Seeing all the wonderful things they have accomplished gives us a lot of motivation to get up in the morning and do it all over again, preparing the next generation of engineers. Having those same alumni come back to Houghton, and express their gratitude to us for the difference we have made in their lives, makes these events that much more special.
To all our Husky alumni – thank you for everything you have done to make us look good! Keep up the good work!
– Dan
Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University
ECE Assistant Professor Jeremy Bos and Associate Professor Christopher Middlebrook have been elected to the grade Senior Member of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Each year SPIE recognizes accomplishments and meritorious service in the optics, photonics, optoelectronics, and imaging communities. The ECE Department congratulates Bos and Middlebrook for this prestigious designation. For more information see SPIE.
Aurenice Oliveira (ECE) gave an invited talk at Federal University of Bahia-Brazil (UFBA) on June 13, 2016. Dr. Oliveira talked about possibilities for research collaborations in communications, signal processing, and international education. She also gave an overview of study opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students at Michigan Technological University. Dr. Oliveira had the opportunity to meet with several UFBA officials including the Vice President for Research and the International Office Director to discuss an international agreement between Michigan Tech and UFBA.