News
With the CHIPS and Science Act, the United States’ commitment to becoming a global leader in semiconductor manufacturing once again was formalized. After the recent global chips shortage, combined with the pervasiveness of chips in our everyday products from refrigerators, to cars, to watches, it is now a national priority to ensure that semiconductors are produced domestically for economic and security reasons.
Prof. Rich Radke was recognized by the IEEE Signal Processing Society with the Regional Distinguished Teacher Award. The citation of the award states that the award is "for bringing new technology and pedagogy into the classroom and tying academic concepts to real-world practice." Professor Radke's lecture videos on YouTube have garnered nearly a million views. His research in computer vision, camera network, lighting, etc.
The Dr. Vladimir Belsky Award for Computational Sciences and Engineering is named in memory of Dr. Vladimir Belsky who came to Rensselaer from Russia in the 1990's and performed research in computational mechanics as a Postdoctoral Fellow.
Among the six recipients of the 2023-2024 Belsky Award, four are from the ECSE Department:
Weiqin Chen. Research Topic: Developing a generalized safe reinforcement learning framework. Advisor: Santiago Paternain.
RPI students are provided with the opportunity to gain state-of-the-art real-world knowledge in the semiconductor chips area through two RPI-Industry workforce training courses. In the spring semester, ECSE faculty James Lu led the partnership with GlobalFoundries to offer a unique industry-focused course on microelectronics manufacturing. In the fall semester, James recruited 23 experts from 9 companies and a partnering university to deliver lectures on materials, metrology, and equipment in semiconductor manufacturing.
ECSE is keeping up with the rapid development on the AI front. In Fall 2023, Rich Radke delivered an amazing special topic course on Computational Creativity , introducing the frontier of Generative AI. The creativity the students demonstrated in their final project is truly impressive.
ECSE Professor Emeritus, Dr. J. Keith Nelson, was honored with the 2022 IEEE Thomas W. Dakin Award from the IEEE Dielectrics and Electrical Insulation Society (DEIS). He was presented with the award gave the Dakin Award Lecture in the 2023 IEEE Conference on Electrical Insulation and Dielectric Phenomena (CEIDP) held in East Rutherford, NJ, October 15-19, 2023.
ECSE and RPI welcome a new ECSE faculty member, Dr. Esen Yel. Dr. Yel will be an Assistant Professor in ECSE starting on January 1, 2024.
Dr. Yel received her Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia, and MS and BS degrees from the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. She has most recently been a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford working with Prof. Mykel Kochenderfer in the Stanford Intelligence Systems Lab.
On December 18, ECSE and RPI community gathered for a luncheon, and online WebEx, to celebrate Prof. Joe Chow's transition to Senior Research Scientist, starting in 2024, after a distinguished 37-year career at RPI. John Wen, Kurt Anderson, Paul Chow, Tetiana Bogodorova, Denis Osipov shared the impact that Joe had on the department, the school, the Institute, and their careers. Joining remotely, Murat Arcak, Aranya Chakrabortty, Kowk Cheung, Pengwei Du, Agung Julius, and Aparna Gupta shared their appreciation. John Wen read remarks by Dean Shekhar Garde, Koushik Kar, and Meng Wang.
The ECSE community came together on December 13 to decorate the empty white construction wall in the Mercer XLab renovation on the 6th floor of the Jonsson Engineering Center. Students, Staff, and Faculty let their creative sparks fly, and filled up the walls in every direction. Robots were on hand to cheer the crowd on. The Pepper Robot from Prof. Qiang Ji's lab chats up folks using chatGPT. The UR 5 robot from Prof.
The Department of Electrical,