2010-2011 Fiscal Year
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Boston University Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Annual Report 2010– 2011 © 2011, Boston University Production: Rachel Harrington Content: Rachel Harrington, ECE staff, and ECE faculty Cover: Top photo- Team members of The Shipless Skippers, Nathaniel Wilkie, Abigail Bonnice, and Joseph Beckenbach (pictured from left), show their research during ECE Day ’11. Bottom photo - Associate Professor Siddharth Ramachandran works in a photonics laboratory with Roman Barankov (left) and Dr. Damian N. Schimpf. This report provides a description of the instructional and research activities of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Boston University during the 2010 – 2011 academic year. Instructional activities are reported from the Fall 2010 through Summer 2011 semesters while scholarly activities and budget information are reported from July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2011. Boston University’s policies provide for equal opportunity and affirmative action in employment and admission to all programs of the University. For more information or to download this report as a PDF, please visit our website at www.bu.edu/ece. Message From the Chair This was another suc- computing, from programming languages to scripting languages cessful year for Boston Uni- and embedded computing. We also added a freshman course versity’s ECE Department – a on Electronic Control of Robots as part of our Introduction to year that saw many changes Engineering series within the College of Engineering. For more while the Department main- advanced students, we introduced two new courses, Electric En- tained its focus on steady ergy Systems: Adapting to Renewable Resources and Sensors in improvement for its research Space, that leverage renewed interest in electric energy systems and education missions. The and our collaborations with Space Physics researchers. We add- year began with the addition ed a new course in Cybersecurity, accessible to both undergrad- of promising young tenure- uates and graduates, and revised the content of our capstone track faculty, Bobak Nazer and senior design course to exploit the added industrial experience Doug Densmore, who have of Professor Pisano. Under the leadership of Mark Horenstein, added depth and breadth to our expertise in Information Sci- we continued our outreach program to increase the visibility of ences and Systems and Computer Engineering, respectively. We ECE within our prospective applicants and Boston University and also added our first Professor of the Practice, Alan Pisano, who held a very successful ECE undergraduate research and labora- joined us after many years at General Electric. Midway through tory job fair. the year, our colleague David Campbell retired as Boston Univer- Our faculty had another excellent year in acquiring research sity’s provost to rejoin the physics faculty. We also bid farewell to funding and earned new grants totaling approximately $11.7 M two of our colleagues, Tom Skinner and Mike Ruane, who retired in addition to a sizeable pool of continuing grants. Our faculty but will continue to participate in the Department in reduced also received major recognition for their excellence in research. roles. Ted Moustakas received the College of Engineering’s Distin- In our undergraduate programs, we introduced several ex- guished Scholar Award and the Molecular Beam Epitaxy Inno- citing changes in our curriculum, through our ongoing effort to vator Award. Hatice Altug was named a future recipient of the increase the flexibility of our programs while providing a rigor- Popular Science Magazine Brilliant 10 Award and received the ous foundation of relevant engineering science. We created a IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award and the Boston new freshman course on Engineering Computation that is avail- University College of Engineering’s Early Career Research Excel- able to all majors and introduces students to various aspects of lence Award. Irving Bigio and Mal Teich were elected as fellows 2 Boston University College of Engineering Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering of SPIE. Christos Cassandras was chosen as winner of the 2011 add strength to our materials science effort through his research IEEE Control Systems Technology Award in recognition of his in low temperature physics and superconductivity. Tannenbaum design and commercial development of SimEvents, a discrete is a world leader in computer vision, biomedical imaging and event and hybrid system simulator he developed with Michael robust control. His research efforts will overlap with Biomedi- Clune from Mathworks. This award will be presented in Decem- cal Engineering and the Boston University Medical Campus and ber 2011. In terms of professional service, Clem Karl was elected will add new research and teaching dimensions in our Informa- to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, tion Sciences and Systems group. Tsui, a Nobel Prize winner in and Christos Cassandras was elected President of the IEEE Con- physics, will collaborate with our researchers in photonics and trol Systems Society. materials science. Our graduate programs received increased attention and In conclusion, this year the ECE Department was successful saw over 1000 applicants as well as significant interest in our in maintaining its traditional strengths in research and education new Masters of Engineering (MEng) program. Our incoming while also improving upon undergraduate outreach, enhancing class of 80 MS and MEng students and 22 new PhD students the curriculum, and recruiting some excellent senior faculty. I will add support to our research mission. Our graduate students look forward to seeing our Department’s continued growth and received six best student paper awards and one of our graduate working with our faculty, students, and staff to build on our mo- student teams, RayVio, finished first in the Institute for Technol- mentum. ogy Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC) 11th An- nual $50K New Venture Competition. As mentioned earlier, we integrated three new faculty members into the department: Doug Densmore, Bobak Nazer and Alan Pisano. We also continued our aggressive recruitment and added three senior faculty: David Bishop, former Chief Tech- David Castañón nology Officer of LGS Bell Labs Innovations at Alcatel Lucent; Department Chair ad interim Allen Tannenbaum, previously a Professor at Georgia Tech who September 2011 joined the Department this fall; and Daniel Tsui, former Profes- sor, now Professor Emeritus at Princeton. Bishop will lead the Materials Science Division in the College of Engineering and will 20109 – 2011 Annual Report 3 Highlights ECE Welcomes New Faculty Members The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) was pleased to welcome two new faculty members to its ranks this year. Assistant Professor Douglas Densmore (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2007) came to the depart- ment after working as a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow both at UC Berkeley and the Joint BioEnergy Institute. His research interests include high level languages for synthetic biology; data exchange standards for biological parts and devices; system level design of embedded systems; computer architecture; and design for test. He is Densmore currently working with a BU-led team to engineer robot-assisted, bacteria-based sensors. He also runs the Center for Integrating Design Automation Research (CIDAR), which looks at ways to integrate automation techniques into disciplines not traditionally defined by rigorous design automation methodologies. Another UC Berkeley graduate, Assistant Professor Bobak Nazer (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2009), also joined our department this year after working as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Wiscon- sin. His research areas include information theory and communications; reliable computation over networks; and distributed signal processing. This year, he was awarded a Dean’s Catalyst Award from Boston University’s College Nazer of Engineering. Previously, he received the Eli Jury Award for Outstanding Achievement in Systems, Communica- tions, Control, or Signal Processing for his dissertation research. Faculty Awards and Honors national Conference on Pattern Recognition. Ajay Joshi, Bobak Nazer, Roberto Paiella, Ioannis Hatice Altug received the Boston University College of Engi- paschalidis and ANNA SWan received Dean’s Catalyst Awards neering’s Early Career Research Excellence Award. She was also from Boston University. These prizes encourage early-stage, in- the recipient of the Young Investigator Award given by the IEEE novative, interdisciplinary projects that could spark new advanc- Photonics Society. es in a variety of engineering fields. Irving Bigio and Malvin Teich were elected fellows of W. Clem karl was elected to the IEEE Signal Processing SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Society Board of Governors. Christos Cassandras was named the president-elect of janusz konrad was named Boston University’s ECE Pro- the IEEE Control Systems Society. fessor of the Year at ECE Day 2011. Ayse Coskun and Jie Meng (PhD ’13) received the A. Rich- theodore moustakas received the Molecular Beam Epi- ard Newton Graduate Scholarship from the Design Automation taxy (MBE) Innovator Award and the Boston University College Conference. of Engineering’s Distinguished Scholar Award. Douglas Densmore was selected as a Richard and Minda Siddharth Ramachandran was appointed the chair for Reidy Family Career