Wayne Weaver (ECE/AIM) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $46,000 research and development contract from Sandia National Laboratories.
The title of the project is “Meta-Stability of Pulsed Load Microgrids.” This is a six and a half month project.
By Sponsored Programs.
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.
ECE’s Robotic Systems Enterprise (RSE) was host to the first annual Controlathon sponsored by Ford Motor Company on Saturday, November 12. Ten teams competed in the inaugural one-day event held on the Michigan Tech campus, Memorial Union Building.
Ford’s purpose of the event was to raise the interest of controls engineers in the automotive industry. The students competed against each other as individuals or teams to see who could program an Arduino-based robot to complete pre-assigned tasks, such as solving a maze and following an object. The goal of the Controlathon was to create a unique solution to the presented problems in a limited amount of time. The teams were tasked to complete three separate events, scores were assigned for each event.
At the end of the day, Sirius Cybernetics came away with first place; 2nd Desert, 3rd 2CS & an EE, 4th C Dogs, and 5th place was Team Mine.
RSE is advised by Dr. Glen Archer.
Check out @mtuECE for more highlights from the event.
Elizabeth (Cloos) Dreyer, BSEE 2012, was selected SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member by the Society of Women Engineers for outstanding contribution to SWE, the engineering community and their campus. Dreyer was honored at the WE16 conference held in Philadelphia, PA this past week.
Elizabeth is an electrical engineering PhD candidate at University of Michigan.
The ECE Department at Michigan Tech congratulates Elizabeth for this well-deserved recognition!
Lucia Gauchia (ECE, ME-EM) discusses graphene batteries in a Business Insider post about Henrik Fisker’s new electric car model. A number of other business, tech and science news media picked up the story including Yahoo! News, the San Francisco Chronicle, seattlePI.com and Latest Nigerian News.
We took a closer look at the battery technology Fisker is promising to use, which he refers to as “the major leap, the next big step.”
Rather than working with conventional lithium-ion batteries, Fisker is turning to graphene supercapacitors.
Graphene is both the thinnest and strongest material discovered so far.
“Graphene shows a higher electron mobility, meaning that electrons can move faster through it. This will, e.g. charge a battery much faster,” Lucia Gauchia, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and energy storage systems at Michigan Technological University, told Business Insider. “Graphene is also lighter and it can present a higher active surface, so that more charge can be stored.”
Shiyan Hu (ECE) is delivering a keynote talk at the Ninth IEEE International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom 2016). CPSCom, sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, is a major CPS technical conference in IEEE and is a premier forum to bring together researchers to present the state-of-the-art research results and exchange ideas in the area of CPS. In the ninth year of the successful CPSCom conference series, the organizing committee invited three world-leading CPS experts to deliver the keynote speeches. The conference takes place December 15-18, 2016, in Chengdu, China.
Timothy Havens, along with co-authors from University of Melbourne, Australia, published an article entitled “A Hybrid Approach to Clustering in Big Data,” in the October 2016 issue of IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics.
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/
Conway Fellow Aishwarya Mundada (ECE) co-authored a paper with ECE PhD candidate Yuenyong Nilsiam and Joshua Pearce (MSE/ECE) entitled “A review of technical requirements for plug-and-play solar photovoltaic microinverter systems in the United States” in the journal Solar Energy.