Category: News

Former Professor Theodore Grzelak Passes Away

Ted Grzelak
Dr. Theodore Alan ‘Ted’ Grzelak
1938-2016

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.

Robotic Systems Enterprise hosts first annual Ford Controlathon

RSE-controlathonECE’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.

Ford representatives Jeffrey DuClos and Matt Alessi look on with team Sig-Cont-Rho-lers team members Libby Held, Dan Hannah, and Alex Miltenberger
Ford representatives Jeffrey DuClos and Matt Alessi look on with team Sig-Cont-Rho-lers team members Libby Held, Dan Hannah, and Alex Miltenberger

RSE is advised by Dr. Glen Archer.

Check out @mtuECE for more highlights from the event.

Elizabeth (Cloos) Dreyer ’12 receives SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member

Elizabeth Dreyer (l) receives award from Britta Jost '05
Elizabeth Dreyer (l) receives award from Britta Jost ’05

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 Quoted on Graphene Batteries

Lucia Gauchia
Lucia Gauchia

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.

Henrik Fisker is using a revolutionary new battery to power his Tesla killer

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.”

Read more at the Business Insider, by Danielle Muoio.

Shiyan Hu to Deliver CPSCom 2016 Keynote

Shiyan Hu
Shiyan Hu

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.

Hu will deliver the talk of “Smart Energy Cyber-Physical System Security: Threat Analysis and Defense Technologies.” In addition to directing the Center for Cyber-Physical Systems on campus, he is an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor, an invited participant for U.S. National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, and a recipient of National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. He is a Fellow of IET and the Editor-In-Chief of IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications. More information about his keynote speech can be found online.

Shiyan Hu Named Editor-In-Chief for IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory and Application

Shiyan Hu, ECE Associate Professor and Center for Cyber-Physical Systems Director
Shiyan Hu, ECE Associate Professor and Center for Cyber-Physical Systems Director
by Allison Mills
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/

New Funding for Detection of Buried and Obscured Targets

Timothy Havens (ECE/ICC), is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $99,779 research and development grant from the U.S. Department of Defense-Army Research Office.

Joseph Burns (MTRI) and Timothy Schulz (ECE) are co-PIs on the project “Multisensor Analysis and Algorithm Development for Detection and Classification of Buried and Obscured Targets.”

This is the first year of a potential three-year project totaling $1,066,799.

From Tech Today, by Sponsored Programs.