Awards & Honors

Junlan Yang, a doctoral student in the ECE department at UIC, has been selected to receive the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) for her paper on "Robust Focused Image Estimation from Multiple Images in Video Sequences." The paper has been co-authored by Dan Schonfeld from UIC Electrical and Computer Engineering department and Magdi Mohamed from Motorola Research Labs. ICIP is the premier conference in image processing with over 1700 submissions received this year, of which about 765 were accepted.

ECE Faculty position opening.

The ECE Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position. Candidates with outstanding credentials will be considered in all areas of electri­cal and computer engineering, with particular interest in the areas of computer networks, communications, signal processing, medical imaging, power electronics, and nanotechnology. Exceptionally dis­tinguished candidates may be considered for a tenured position. A Ph.D. in Computer Engineering/Electrical Engineering or a closely related field is required.

UIC is a Carnegie Foundation Research-I university and the largest institution of higher education in the Chicago area with an annual operating budget in excess of $1 billion. It ranks in the top 50 of all research universities in the US in federal research funding received, with $335M received in the last year. The ECE Department has about 28 faculty members, among them 13 are IEEE Fellows, and offers B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees to approximately 450 undergraduate and 200 graduate students.

Applicants should send a resume with the names and addresses of at least three references to:

Chair, Faculty Search Committee
ECE Department (M/C 154)
University of Illinois at Chicago
851 South Morgan St.
Chicago, IL 60607-7053

For fullest consideration, applications must be received no later than December 31, 2007. However, applications will be considered until all positions are filled.

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Congratulations to Professor Sudip K. Mazumder on receiving a new US patent on Room Monitoring and Lighting System

Title of the patent: Room monitoring and lighting system

USPTO Patent #: 7268682

Abstract:

A system for improving the safety of a room occupied by a patient includes a sensor for monitoring when the patient is out of bed.
The sensor sends a signal that gives an alert to a care giver that the patient is out of bed. Lights in the room are slowly illuminated to provide light for the patient. A second sensor may sense when the patient has returned to bed and correspondingly dim the lights.
The history of the patient being in and out of bed, and of the care giver responding to alerts may be recorded in a log. A programmable micro controller is used to control the system.

USPTO Link: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=7268682&OS=7268682&RS=7268682

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Congratulations to Professor Sudip K. Mazumder on receiving the NSF Grant Award.

Project Summary:
The objective of this research is to design a novel high-power, “high-frequency”, energy-efficient fuel-cell inverter that is scalable and modular and supports bulk power generation and/or reactive and harmonic compensations. This radical high-frequency topology is based on i) a novel hybrid modulation scheme, ii) next-generation SiC power devices, and iii) high-frequency transformer with nanocrystalline core. The mechanism for validation is twofold: scaled experimental design for concept validation and analytical design using empirically-validated SiC device models for performance and reliability predictions at high power.

Conventional low-frequency high power inverter needs extremely bulky, expensive, and huge-footprint-space filters and transformer. The proposed modular and scalable inverter eliminates the need for dc link filters and line-frequency utility transformer. Further, due to the unique mechanism of the hybrid modulation scheme (which reduces switching loss) and due to the reduced on-state drop (implying lower conduction loss) and reduced output device capacitance (implying reduced switching loss) of SiC high voltage device, operation of high power inverter is feasible at high efficiency even at high frequency.

The proposed inverter has applications ranging from FutureGen, FACTs, solid-state power station, distributed generation, interconnection of two subgrids operating at different frequencies, electric ship, fuel-cell APU for aerospace, to high power UPS. Results of the research will be integrated into two power courses, which are taught by the PI and taken by several students. The project will support 1 Ph.D. student and will incorporate 6 Sr. Design and Undergraduate students (with primary focus on under-represented and minority candidates) and 1 middle school student.


Related Presentation:
S.K. Mazumder, “A high-power high-frequency and scalable multi-megawatt fuel-cell inverter for power quality and distributed generation”, Invited Presentation at the High Megawatt Converter Workshop, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Maryland, January 24, 2007. (Also published in IEEE Power Electronics Drives and Energy Systems Conference, New Delhi, December 2006)

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Congratulations to Professor Dan Schonfeld on receiving a grant of $232,496 awarded by the National Science Foundation.

The project, entitled "InteractiveVision:    Collaborative Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output Inverse Problems with Application in Image and Video Processing," is under the direction of Professor Dan Schonfeld.                                 
                                                                               
This award is effective September 1 , 2007 and expires August 31, 2010. 

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Congratulations to Professor David Yang on receiving a $70,000 Grant on “Metamaterial-Based Antennas for Minitiarized Multi-Band Wireless Systems,”

Bridge Wave Electronics, 07/01/07 - 06/30/09.

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Congratulations to Muhammad Tahir and Professor Sudip K. Mazumder on receiving the Outstanding Student Paper Award.

A paper authored by Muhammad Tahir and Professor Sudip K. Mazumder entitled
“Markov Chain Model for Performance Analysis of Transmitter Power Control
in Wireless MAC Protocol: Towards Delay Minimization in Power-network Control”
received the Outstanding Student Paper Award. It was presented at the IEEE 21st
International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications,
held at Niagara Falls, Canada between May 21-23, 2007.

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Congratulations to ECE Student Tirthajyoti Sarkar, a PhD student of Sudip Mazumder.

The 2007 Joseph J. Suozzi INTELEC Fellowship in Power Electronics was awarded to Tirthajyoti Sarkar, a PhD of Sudip Mazumder. The single $10,000 award is given for research activities applicable to power for communication systems; it is also an IEEE Power Electronics Society award.

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Professor Zhichun Zhu receives National Science Foundation grant.

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Professor Arye Nehorai and Professor Danilo Erricolo receive large DARPA grant

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Professor Sudip Mazumder receives the ONR Young Investigator awards

for FY-05.

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Professor Arye Nehorai and Professor Danilo Erricolo received a multimillion dollar MURI (Multi-University Research Initiative) award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for a synergistic, multi-disciplinary, multi-university research program that will substantially increase both radar resolution, detection, and accuracy, as well as communication systems capacity. This research investigation, entitled “Adaptive Waveform Diversity for Full Spectral Dominance,” will be led by the University of Illinois at Chicago in collaboration with five other funded institutions: Arizona State University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Purdue University, and the University of Maryland. Two independently funded collaborations are with Raytheon Missile Systems and the University of Melbourne, Australia.

The project involves enabling research and technology that will be carried out by a team of eleven leading scientists and divided into the four following tasks: (1) a unified approach to waveform design; (2) environment and channel modeling; (3) optimization of waveform design; and (4) applications and validations. Experimental validations will be conducted inside an anechoic chamber and a radar test tower. Recent developments in flexible digital waveform modulator hardware have hastened the day when it will be practical to adjust the transmit waveform on a periodic basis, as often as pulse-by-pulse if required, for the best overall system performance in a dynamically changing scenario.

Professor Nehorai competed with a total of 8 full proposals in his area of research, of which only his was funded.

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