News
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.
ECSE Professor Emeritus John Woods was honored with the IEEE ICIP Pioneer Award in Taipei, Taiwan, 9/22-9/25, at the 25th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP). The award is bestowed on Prof. Woods "for unparalleled leadership and contributions to the image processing community."
We learn things by doing them. By getting our hands dirty. From solving differential equations to mastering an instrument, your best bet is to practice, practice, practice. But what if practicing what you want to learn is difficult or impossible? What if you want to understand how different structures respond during an earthquake? Or how to maintain the electronics on top of a wind turbine? Or how to deal with a nuclear meltdown in a power plant?
Development of Real-Time Analysis of Power Grid Data Receives NSF Support
Troy, N.Y. — It often takes time for power system malfunctions to be found and fixed, at times leading to larger system failures. If operators could identify system disturbances as they happen and take action before they lead to large outages, the power grid would be substantially more reliable and resilient.
With recent support from the National Science Foundation, Meng Wang, an associate professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is developing software to make that real-time analysis possible.
On the morning of Saturday, September 7, 2019, ECSE held its annual open house for recipients of the Rensselaer Medal, a prestigious and generous scholarship offered to selected high school students. Department faculty, students, and staff welcomed visiting medalists and their families to the newly renovate