Chris Middlebrook (ECE) was an invited keynote speaker for “Light Night,” sponsored by the SPIE Student Chapter at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free University of Brussels) on May 10, 2016. The event contained “LIGHTtalks” and was partially funded by the European LIGHT2015 project. For more information see Light Night 2016.
On Tuesday, June 14, faculty and staff members, along with their guests, gathered at the Rozsa Center lobby for the annual Staff Council Service Recognition Luncheon. Awards were presented for five-year increments of service to more than 150 staff members. A dinner for those reaching 25 years or more was held on May 11. The following ECE staff member was recognized:
25 Years
Michele Kamppinen, Staff Assistant, Electrical and Computer Engineering
On April 7, Michigan Tech’s new Lean facilitators were recognized. These new facilitators completed a six-month training program with classroom learning and work-related projects.
Among the graduates was Lisa Hitch- Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
Happy Tax Day everyone! Actually the real Tax Day this year isn’t until Monday, and that’s a good thing considering how busy things have been in the ECE Department this week. Here’s a little factoid I just learned this week: April 15 is the birthday of Swiss mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Leonhard Euler (1707). Everyone knows Euler’s Formula, right?
This is the time when all our seniors are wrapping up their Senior Design and Enterprise projects, and we have a lot of visitors in town to see what we are doing and to help us out with the evaluation of the projects.
The ECE External Advisory Committee, or EAC, is here for the Spring 2016 meeting. This is a group of about a dozen industry representatives, most of them Tech alumni, who visit us twice a year to help us in our quest for continuous improvement. A lot of their time in the spring meeting is devoted to judging Senior Design and Enterprise projects, which happened yesterday (Thursday April 14). We had a total of 24 projects this year, and each project team is required to present their results and field questions in a 45-minute session. All of the ECE faculty and the graduate student TAs also participated in the judging. This is a great day in the life of the ECE Department, when we get to see all the hard work of the students over four years brought to fruition. My thanks to everyone, especially the EAC, that helped make the day a success.
We concluded the day with the Senior Awards Banquet at the Memorial Union Ballroom. Here we recognize both individuals and teams for their outstanding contributions to the ECE Department.
The individual student award winners are:
ECE Woman of Promise / Martha Sloan Scholarship: Alexis Dani (pictured above)
ECE Departmental Scholar: Derek Gheller
Carl S. Schjonberg Outstanding Senior: Ian Cummings
The Larry Kennedy Industry Innovation Award, the award given by the EAC to the top design project in the department, went to Senior Design Team 8, Traveling Wave Fault Location, sponsored by American Transmission Company (ATC) with faculty advisor John Lukowski.
Finally, the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) Professor of the Year award was given to Senior Lecture Kit Cischke. Kit teaches many of the core courses in our computer engineering program, and is the faculty advisor for the Wireless Communications Enterprise. He does a fabulous job and all the students love him. Congratulations Kit, and thanks for all you do!
Earlier in the week we had a visit from another “unofficial” advisory group – a group of 5 industry leaders and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, led by Brocade CEO Dave House. Dave has been a very good friend of the ECE Department for many years, and in fact you may recognize his name from the professorship that I hold. Dave and company were here to advise and encourage the entire university, not just the ECE Department, on matters of innovation, entrepreneurship, and where technology is headed from their point of view. Dave has been very influential on my thinking about the importance of building closer ties among the ECE Department, the Department of Computer Science, and the School of Technology. On Tuesday I was very pleased to be able to report to the group that the performance results in the new Institute of Computing and Cybersystems, measured in new research awards, research expenditures, publications, and student support, was much higher than expected. The ICC is the most significant effort arising from the joint activity of the three units mentioned above, and so it is gratifying to see things coming together as they are.
On top of all that, we had some fantastic news from the ECE faculty this week. Assistant Professors Durdu Guney, Timothy Havens, and Chee-Wooi Ten have all been recommended by the Provost for promotion to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure. The final vote will be taken at a meeting of the Board of Trustees in two weeks’ time. My congratulations to Durdu, Tim, and Chee-Wooi on reaching this major milestone – we expect many great things from them in the years to come.
All for now. Get those taxes in!
– Dan
Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University
This Thursday, April 14, 2016, will be a huge day for students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Senior Design and Enterprise programs. Not only will they participate in Michigan Tech’s Design Expo, but they will also make their final presentations for the year to ECE faculty, staff, students, and the department’s External Advisory Committee. To see a complete list of teams, including a description of the projects, see: presentation schedule.
Please feel free to attend any or all presentations and good luck to our teams!
There was electricity in the air last night at the MasterpiECE Mania student design competition hosted by the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and IEEE. 16 teams competed in the annual event with prizes going to the top three teams. Actually four, as the judges concluded a tie for third.
This year’s event was sponsored by Whirlpool Corporation with a generous gift of $2,000 to help support cash prizes, partial project supply reimbursal, event promotion, and a pasta buffet prior to the evening’s demonstrations to thank all the team members for their time and effort in their creative innovations.
Here are the results:
A few details regarding the winning project: A spectrum analyzer is a device for analyzing a system of oscillations, especially sound, into its separate components. The “Winter Spectrum” uses small polystyrene particles and powerful fans to visualize an audio signal. Using a microprocessor (TI Tiva C Launchpad) the team was able to run a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm on an incoming line level audio signal. This separated the audio frequencies into “bins” which integer value represents the intensity of the certain frequency. Pulse width modulated (PWM) signals are fed to the fans under the acrylic enclosure. The beads then rise to the level that best represents the FFT frequency bin average.
MasterpiECE Mania began in 2009 with the goal of inciting creativity throughout the Michigan Tech community and fostering an appreciation for the ‘DIY’ aspect of modern electronics. Although the yearly MasterpiECE Mania competition is hosted by the Michigan Tech ECE department, it is open to all Michigan Tech Students regardless of major. This intra-disciplinary hack-a-thon competition challenges student to develop and build an electrical-based project that displays their skill and ingenuity.
Michigan Technological University’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), along with Departments Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Physics were well represented at the annual SPIE Photonics West conference held in San Francisco, CA, on February 13-18, 2016.
Arash Hosseinzadeh, PhD candidate in electrical engineering, Derek Burrell, BSEE senior and SPIE/OSA MTU chapter president, and Mitch Kirby, BSBE (EE minor) presented papers and research findings on topics: Design and optimization of polymer ring resonator modulators for analog microwave photonic applications, Comparison of self-written waveguide techniques and bulk index matching for low-loss polymer waveguide interconnects, and Effects of incident intensity on laser speckle contrast imaging.
BME Chair Sean Kirkpatrick was session chair and moderator and ECE Prof. Chris Middlebrook co-authored two papers presented. Also attended were Nima Taherkhani, MSEE candidate, and ECE alumna Liz (Cloos) Dreyer ’12, currently a PhD pre-candidate in electrical engineering (optics) at the University of Michigan, Abhinav Madhavachandran, MSBE candidate, and Anindya Majumdar, PhD candidate Physics.
Student travel was partially funded by Michigan Tech’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) and Graduate Student Government (GSG).
See more information on the SPIE/OSA MTU Chapter see mtu.osahost.org.
This week Michigan Tech made an announcement of a gift from ECE alumnus David Brule, Sr., in support of scholarships in the ECE Department. You can read all about it on the university daily news source “Tech Today“.
Dave Brule is a very good friend of Michigan Tech and of the ECE Department. He has supported a number of initiatives at the university, and while this is not done secretly or anonymously, to my knowledge none of the activities or facilities he has supported carry his name. For example, he was a major contributor to the Dennis Wiitanen Endowed Professorship in Electric Power Engineering, named in honor of a long-time and much-loved faculty member in the ECE Department. He recently funded the renovation of a plaza outside the library, named in honor of retired facilities manager John Rovano.
There are several reasons this is good news for the ECE Department. The first is of course the financial support that it provides for some of our most promising students. Beyond that, however, it serves as a good recruiting tool for the ECE Department, and it raises our visibility as a Department with a long history of excellence in undergraduate education in electrical power transmission and distribution. This is an area where there are significant workforce needs, now and anticipated in the near future. Indeed this is part of Dave’s motivation: to get more students interested in the utility power industry in general, and for Systems Control in particular. In order to attract students into the field, the ECE Department and its partners and friends need to do everything possible to raise awareness of the career opportunities, and to train students to be ready for those opportunities. Finally, I have to commend Dave for really raising the bar in terms of the philanthropic response to this workforce need. A lot of recruiters talk to me about tapping into our ECE talent pipeline, which is gratifying of course and along with Career Services I do everything I can to help them. Now we have a first-rate example of what it really takes to get the attention of students in today’s job market, and it is much more than anything I could ever do by myself.
Michigan Tech is very grateful to all its alumni, friends, and other donors for their philanthropic support of the university mission. It means the world to us. I encourage anyone with a possible interest in doing the same to get in touch – I’d love to talk to you.
– Dan
Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University
This week we learned that Michigan Tech, along with the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, has been selected for a grant from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Pacesetters program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Google and Qualcomm. The aim is to develop aggressive goals and plans to increase the participation of women in computing and information technology. Michigan Tech is pleased to be recognized for its efforts to bring more women into the field. I congratulate Linda Ott from the Department of Computer Science on her leadership in bringing the grant proposal process to a successful conclusion.
This is a good opportunity for me to offer a few informal thoughts about the issue of women in electrical and computer engineering and what we can do, and need to be doing better, to bring more women into the field. This has been a conundrum for the ECE Department for a long time. We are not alone in that struggle; it is a nationwide issue. The female undergraduate enrollment in the ECE Department has hovered below 10% for many years, although there has been a very slow rise and this past fall we were at 10.8%, a minor victory of sorts I suppose. Many of us in electrical engineering are left wondering why this has to be the case. We can jump up and down and stand on our heads and say what a great field this is, and talk about all the career opportunities in EE (and I believe that with all my heart) but still that message doesn’t seem to be getting across, or at least isn’t making an impact. I will be the first to admit that I say all those things as a 58-year-old male who has had a reasonably successful and rewarding career, and that it is hard for me to see things from the perspective of a young woman about to graduate from high school.
You hear a lot of things about where the disconnect might be. It could be our culture, especially our youth culture, in which girls form opinions about themselves in middle school and high school about ability in math and science, which have little basis in truth but which they carry for the rest of their lives. It could be the professional environmental in high-tech areas like Silicon Valley, notorious for its “brogramming” culture in certain parts of the start-up world. It could be the lack of role models, in colleges and universities where electrical engineering and computer science is taught, and in industrial settings that come after. It could be that women look into the working world and just don’t see a path forward in an environment that is so dominated by men. All of these arguments have merit, and we need to be vigilant and aggressive in removing the barriers that are implied in each of them.
One often hears the argument that women are not attracted to electrical engineering because it is not a field that is “helping” or “nurturing”. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that this is complete hogwash and I reject it completely. First of all, saying that all women want to be caregivers is just buying into the stereotypes that have kept them out of the field in the first place. Second, and more importantly, the idea that electrical engineering is not a “helping” field is flat-out ridiculous. I would argue that electrical engineers have done more to help humankind in the 20th century than any other professional group you can name. What is more “helping” than bringing electrical power to every home and office in the United States? What is more “helping” than creating a communication network that allows people to connect via voice, text, or video, halfway around the world, at the touch of a button? What is more “helping” than designing the technology and the systems that provide for our common defense, protecting the nation and keeping us all safe in our homes? What is more “helping” than creating the technology that brings us the aesthetic joy and pleasure of music, video, and cinema? If someone wants to make an argument in support of the medical profession, I suppose we could sit down and have a good debate, but the first thing I would point out, as I did in this column three weeks ago, is that EEs were major players in that arena too!
Now that I got that off my chest, I’ll conclude by mentioning some of the things we are doing in the ECE Department at Michigan Tech to attract more women into our ranks. The ECE Department participates in Michigan Tech’s ADVANCE initiative, an NSF-supported program designed to the hiring and retention of women faculty, thereby creating a professional environment that our students can view as a model for the industrial world. We have wonderful and creative outreach programs for middle and high school age girls, in our summer camps and during the academic year; this is led enthusiastically by our Associate Chair Glen Archer, with help from a great group of students in the Blue Marble Security Enterprise. Dr. Archer was also the ECE point of contact for the successful NCWIT proposal. We have created an ECE Women’s Center in the EERC, a space on the 7th floor where our female students can meet for academic and social interactions. We have instituted two new concentrations within the BSEE degree, in Biomedical Applications and in Environmental Applications, that have a secondary but explicit aim of attracting more women to the field. I can’t say that we have found the magic bullet yet that is going to boost our female enrollment to 20% or 30% or more, but we are giving it our best shot.
This is an issue for which there are probably as many opinions as people who think about it. On this, and any other issue for that matter, I am always open to hearing from others and having a discussion. If you have read this far and want to take it further, please feel free to get in touch.
– Dan
Dan Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University
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