News
ECSE faculty Manoj Shah was invited as part of an eight-member international panel to assess the Electrical Engineering Discipline in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan China. The charge to the team is to objectively review the education and academic programs in the discipline and to direct future improvement and investment. The school has over 1600 undergraduate and 1200 graduate students with almost 200 faculty members. Huazhong is one of the top five technical universities in China.
In a special episode of Why Not Change the World? The RPI Podcast, two prominent inventors — who also happen to be Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni of the ECSE Department — look to the future and offer their advice on how to prepare for it.
The episode features an excerpt of a conversation between Curtis R. Priem ’82 and Marcian “Ted” Hoff ’58 recorded earlier this year at The Village Pub in Woodside, California. It was moderated by Shekhar Garde, the dean of the Rensselaer School of Engineering.
Refueling Satellites in Space, With the Help of a Robot
TROY, N.Y. — Many technologies that are essential for daily life — from communications to GPS navigation to weather forecasting — rely on the thousands of satellites that are orbiting Earth. When those satellites run out of gas and stop working, there’s not much that can currently be done to fix them.
The IEEE Board of Directors, at its November 2019 meeting, elevated ECSE professor Tong Zhang to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2020. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation.
The Rensselaer School of Engineering Annual Faculty Award Dinner was held on November 21 in the Heffner Alumni House. ECSE Faculty Qiang Ji was recognized with the Research Excellence Award for his research contribution in computer vision, probabilistic machine learning, and affective computing. ECSE faculty Koushik Kar and affiliated faculty Sandipan Mishra were recognized with the Outstanding Team Award for their work in the Smart Building Environment.
ECSE Ph.D. student Muhammad Waleed Mansha took first place honors for a student paper at the 2019 IEEE Sensors conference in Montreal, Canada. His paper, "Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds Using a Single Transistor Terahertz Detector Implemented in Standard BiCMOS Technology," was presented October 30, 2019.
ECSE faculty, Associate Professor Meng Wang, has received the 2020 AFOSR Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) award for her proposal “Cyber-resilient High-dimensional Data Recovery and Information Extraction with Analytical Guarantees.” The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) is the basic research component of the Air Force Research Laboratory. The 2020 AFOSR Young Investigator Research Program will fund 40 scientists and engineers from 30 research institutions. Professor Wang's proposal is centered on data processing and information extraction from high-dimensional datasets obtained by Air Force networks and systems.
Rensselaer has been highly successful in winning projects funded by the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute, as described in https://news.rpi.edu/approach/2019/10/10-0. ECSE faculty, John Wen, Rich Radke, and Paul Schoch, together with research staff at the Center for Automation Technologies and Systems, Glenn Saunders and William Lawler, have been leading these efforts. The ARM-funded projects include:
Prof. Luigi Vanfretti, head of ALSETLab from the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnical Institute led a successful workshop hosted by the McMaster Institute for Energy Studies (MIES) at McMaster University. Dr.