The Data Deluge Top of Mind Resonance
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GROWING NEURONS ECE BUILDINGS VIRTUAL REALITY BECOMES REAL REMEMBERING A MENTOR AND TEACHER RAPID DNA SEQUENCING 10 ANSWERS RESONANCETHE MAGAZINE OF ECE ILLINOIS SPRING 2014 THE DATA DELUGE TOP OF MIND RESONANCE Spring 2014 EDITORIAL BOARD Jeanette Beck Assistant to the Department Head Jennifer Carlson Academic Programs Coordinator Meg Dickinson At ECE ILLINOIS, when we think of Big Data, we think about how to acquire it, Communications Specialist store it, understand the forms it takes, use the right tools to analyze it and make decisions based on the knowledge that’s revealed. For us, Big Data is a Breanne Ertmer fundamental approach to solving problems, rather than a single technology or Corporate Relations Coordinator tool. It’s a new way of doing things, in which our search for solutions is heavily Steve Franke driven by data. Associate Head for Graduate Affairs We are uniquely qualified as a department to be a leader in the Big Data revolu- Steve George tion. It’s an effort already underway, and one that will continue to guide us as Senior Director of Advancement we collaborate within our department, across campus, and with other institu- Sarah Heier tions to use Big Data to improve the quality of life for others. Alumni and Student Relations Coordinator Every area of study in ECE is contributing to this process. Remote sensing is Jamie Hutchinson all about gathering data to better understand our atmosphere. Micro- and Publications Office Editor nano-electronics provide special-purpose hardware to acquire it. In particular, bio-applications of microelectronics can do so by sensing functions related to Erhan Kudeki health. Associate Head for Undergraduate Affairs W. Brad Petersen Computer engineering will provide the infrastructure. Communications and sig- Director of Communications and Editor nal processing allow us to gain understanding, and decision and control will give us the understanding to draw inferences. We are using these areas of ex- William H. Sanders pertise to make science-based, credible decisions that will have a high impact Interim Department Head on the world around us. Winter Agency Our efforts are not confined to the laboratory. We’re taking this expertise and Design combining it into a new class for undergraduates this spring. They’re learning from professors—experts in a variety of fields—about how to conduct data-driv- en research. The class will use data to visualize weather patterns and predict earthquakes and tsunamis, and learn how it can be applied to genomic sequenc- ing. They’ll learn to filter through enormous amounts of audio and video to ex- tract useful information. ECE.ILLINOIS.EDU Resonance is published twice a year by Our multi-faceted approach to analyzing complex information will continue to the Department of Electrical and put ECE ILLINOIS at the forefront of changing the world through engineering. Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Contact the editor at the address below. William H. Sanders Interim Department Head Electrical and Computer Engineering Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 53 Everitt Laboratory, MC-702 1406 W. Green Street SHARE YOUR OPINION AT ECE.ILLINOIS.EDU/LINKEDIN Urbana, IL 61801 [email protected] RESONANCE CONTENTS FEATURES Neural Regeneration Stents could guide the growth of 16 neurons in the cerebral cortex. ECE’s Home Buildings Looking back at the facilities 20 we’ve called home. Tiny Laser Gives Big Boost Laser transmits error-free data 22 over fiber optic networks. THE Making Reality of Virtual Reality 10 26 Making virtual reality a consumer-ready reality. DATA DNA Sensing DELUGE 28 Blood test provides the key to your genetic code. Remembering Shun Lien Chuang 30 Professor Chuang made an immeasurable impact. DEPARTMENTS 2 Top of Mind: William H. Sanders 4 Across the Spectrum 18 Focal Point: Heat Sensor 24 Field Report: Darnell Smith 31 The List: Donors 34 Ten Answers: Sharon Hwang 35 Around Campus “If we want to keep doing great things, we have to think 10 years from now.” Robert Pilawa-Podgurski Speaking about Big Data, page 11 SPRING 2014 3 ACROSS THE SPECTRUM STEM EDUCATION REFORM A new study at Illinois will seek to provide U.S. in- stitutions of higher education with evidence-based reforms for gateway STEM courses. Within ECE, the team will explore ways to better engage students in high-enrollment introductory courses (initially ECE 110 and ECE 120). As part of the study, departmen- tal faculty groups will develop strategies for moving away from traditional lecture-based models of in- struction and promote the organic emergence of the most appropriate reforms. The research is funded by a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s WIDER Program. (WIDER stands for Widening Implementation & Dem- onstration of Evidence-Based Reforms.) SOLAR DECATHLON At the beginning of August, a team of Illinois stu- dents participated in the first-ever Solar Decath- lon China, a competition held in the city of Datong, Photo courtesy of eBay where teams from 35 universities (and 13 countries) constructed and exhibited solar-powered residential NEW EBAY DATA CENTER structures. The Illinois team’s house—named Etho— EBay launched a new data center September 26—an was the culmination of a two-year collaboration with important historical event because this facility, lo- students at Peking University. With 42 solar panels on cated near Salt Lake City, is the first data center in the the roof, power production exceeded the consump- world to adopt fuel cells as its primary power source. tion requirements of the home, making it more than To ensure the efficiency and reliability of the system, net-zero. The design also featured a custom automa- three ECE professors—Alejandro Domínguez-García, tion system, which allowed monitoring and control of George Gross, and Philip Krein—were asked to com- household utilities on an iPad. pare the system to the power supply systems at exist- ing eBay data centers, which rely on a predominantly Because Peking University organized the competi- coal-powered electricity grid. tion, the Illinois-Peking team built a showcase home that was not officially judged in the competition. The professors’ white paper, which was released on the date of the launch, announced that the fuel-cell system outperformed the existing systems on ev- ery metric. The average time that the supply system would be unable to serve the load is 6 minutes each year, compared to 10 hours at another data center. Also, the new system leaves nearly half the carbon footprint of the other systems. The fuel cells were designed by Bloom Energy, a com- pany founded by Engineering at Illinois alumnus K.R. Sridhar in 2001. RESONANCE NEWS + EVENTS A NEW BOOK Professor Tamer BaŞar and alumnus Serdar Yüksel (MSEE ‘03, PhD ‘06) have written a new book—Stochastic Networked Control Systems— which addresses both the stabilization and op- timization of networked control systems. Due to communication constraints, these systems have inherent stochasticity, and throughout the book, the authors introduce a conceptual framework for approaching and mitigating these performance limitations. Research for the book began when Yüksel was an ECE graduate student working with BaŞar. Yüksel is now a professor of mathematics and engineering at Queen’s University at Kingston, NEW VON FOERSTER TITLE Ontario. A dozen years after his death, the reputation of Heinz von Foerster, an ECE ILLINOIS faculty member from 1949 to 1976, continues to grow. NEW FACULTY Fordham University Press recently published Three new faculty joined ECE prior to the fall The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: semester. Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics, a vol- ume drawn from wide-ranging conversations Associate Professor Romit Roy Choudhury (MSEE that von Foerster had with two Austrian schol- ‘03, PhD CS ‘06) conducts wireless networking ars, coeditors Albert Müller and Karl Müller, and mobile computing research at the nexus of near the end of his life. Originally published in electrical engineering and computer science. German in 2008, the book provides an acces- His recent work includes a project, funded by sible introduction to von Foerster’s unconven- a Google Faculty Research Award, to design a tional philosophy, complementing the more Google Glass application that would recognize technically oriented overview of Understanding humans without employing facial recognition. Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cogni- tion (Springer, 2003). Associate Professor Pavan Kumar Hanumolu is an expert on mixed-signal circuits and is partic- ularly interested in resolving power constraints SWE WINS SECOND PLACE in the circuits. “People know already how to The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at Illi- make computers faster. They won’t make it nois won second place at the Team Tech Compe- faster because they are constrained by power,” tition, held at the SWE Annual Conference last he said. This involves research on clocking cir- October. Their design—consisting of two solar cuits for high-speed, low-power I/O interfaces, panels and four batteries—could accommodate time-based signal processing, and power man- all of the cooking and lighting demands for four agement circuits. He is already an established neighboring houses in rural Mozambique or member of the Illinois-led SONIC Center. Tanzania, where electricity is scarce. The team was sponsored by S&C Electric Company, a glob- Assistant Professor Songbin Gong studies and al provider of electric power systems equipment develops chip-scale components for radio- and services, based in Chicago. frequency communications, particularly micro- electromechanical systems (MEMS). A compo- nent he recently demonstrated—a monolithic wideband radio-frequency filter with laterally vibrating MEMS resonators using lithium nio- bate, the first of its kind—could provide a new framework for implementing adaptive radio fre- quency systems.