News
Christoph Lackner, Jordan Grey, and Geoffrey Warne were the 2019 recipients of the prestigious Grainger Scholars Award.
Enhanced Robot “Vision” Enables More Natural Interaction With Humans
TROY, N.Y. — A wide-eyed, soft-spoken robot named Pepper motors around the Intelligent Systems Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. One of the researchers tests Pepper, making various gestures as the robot accurately describes what he’s doing. When he crosses his arms, the robot identifies from his body language that something is off.
ECSE Professor Partha Dutta has been elected to the Executive Committee of the American Association for Crystal Growth (AACG), an international non-profit scientific organization whose yearly conference and summer school bring together students and experts in crystal growth and epitaxy.
ECSE-4740 Applied Parallel Computing for Engineers, taught by ECSE Prof W. Randolph Franklin, now includes quantum computing, and how to use the IBM Q universal quantum computer. This complements the multicore Intel Xeon and manycore Nvidia GPU architectures already covered in the course. The goal is to prepare RPI students for what will be important in the future. Although still in its infancy, quantum computing has potentially revolutionary implications, such as the ability to crack public key ciphers.
On March 20, 2019 as part of the ECSE 4120 - Electromechanics course, Prof. Shah arranged a tour of the GE plant in Schenectady where large Wound-Field Synchronous Generators are manufactured. These large machines ranging in rating from several 10's of MVA all the way up to many 100's of MVA are designed and built there!
Luigi Vanfretti, associate professor of electrical engineering, was recently elected to the Modelica Association. The nonprofit organization “develops coordinated, open access standards and open source software in the area of cyber physical systems.”
Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Department
Reception for the Graduating Class of 2019
Graduate Engineering Programs at Rensselaer Rank Among the Best in the Country
TROY, N.Y. – The U.S. News & World Report released its annual graduate school rankings this week, and the engineering programs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute continue to be ranked among the nation’s best.
The graduate offerings at the Rensselaer School of Engineering received an overall ranking of 41st in the U.S., placing it among the top four in the state of New York.
The NY Tech Valley FIRST Robotics Regional was hosted by RPI on March 7-9, 2019. This is the 6th year of this high school roboticscompetition. 36 teams from NY and NJ plus 4 international times from Brazil and Canada competed over the for 3 days event. Winners of awards in categories that recognize outstanding performance for both on the field and off the field work received invites to the world championships. ECSE faculty Paul Schoch, Director of the Center for Innovation in Pre-College Education (CIPCE), co-chaired the planning committee.
The Grainger Scholars Award is given annually in Spring in the amount of $7,500 for junior undergraduates who are entering their senior year and $10,000 for current co-terminal students or students entering our Masters or PhD programs.