News
Professor Meng Wang was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in the ECSE department starting July 1 2019. Prof. Wang's work has been recognized by the Army Research Office Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award and the Rensselaer School of Engineering Faculty Research Excellence Award. Prof. Wang has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Army Research Office (ARO), New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), Global Energy Interconnection Research Institute, Energy Power Research Institute (EPRI), NSF/DoE Engineering Research Center for Ultra-Wide- Area Resilient Energy Transmission Networks (CURENT), Center for Future Energy Systems (CFES), and RPI-IBM Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration (AIRC).
ECSE Professor Emeritus Michael I. Savic, age 89, died in Atlanta, Georgia on June 24, 2019. He was born in Belgrade, Serbia, and immigrated to the United States in 1967.
The Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) featured the LESA Center as part of its Education Faculty Showcase. This 7 videos series highlights the main research areas of LESA and illustrates the dedication of the Center's researchers (Overview, Cognition, Efficient Buildings, Plant Science 1 and 2, Healthcare, and Visual Light Communication).
Advanced manufacturing—rapidly applying the newest technologies of science to produce goods—encompasses dozens of Rensselaer departments, programs, and research centers. The goals are just as broad: help companies become more competitive, extend our reach into space, fight disease at home, and make life easier for individuals with disabilities.
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.”