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When most people pay it forward, they do something helpful for someone else – because of a good deed someone did on their behalf.
Then there’s John Paserba.
He has been paying it forward to thousands of engineering students and professionals since shortly after entering the working world more than 30 years ago. But he’s also quick to acknowledge that – starting with his sixth-grade science teacher – many people have done good deeds for him along the way.
The kickoff event, which is open to reporters, will take place in Room 308 of the Darrin Communications Center starting at 9:15 a.m. on Saturday, January 4. Simultaneous kickoff events will be held across the world. The celebration broadcast, which will be shown at all of them, begins at 10 a.m.
A New Way to Optimize Sleep and Light Exposure Can Reduce Jet Lag and Improve Alertness
TROY, N.Y. — Whether you’re traveling for work or for fun, nothing ruins the start of a trip quite like jet lag. Engineers affiliated with the Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a way to deliver personalized advice using smart wearable technology that would help travelers adjust more quickly.
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.