1ECEIMPACT REPORT 2014/2015

2MessageChair

FROM THE

I am pleased to share with you the first ever Impact Report for Rice Universitys Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. You will read about the continued impact of our department on industry, government and academia through our research, innovation and educational initiatives. The past few years have been strong for the department, with research expenditures per faculty member at an all-time high, two new society fellows, several prestigious faculty awards, and many honors bestowed on our senior design teams at the Engineering Design Showcase this past April. I am very happy to share with you that Professor Joseph Cavallaro was elected an IEEE Fellow earlier this year, for his contributions to

VLSI architectures and algorithms for signal processing and wireless communications. Professor Junichiro Kono was elected this year, the year of light, as an Optical Society of America Fellow, for his pioneering contributions to fundamental optical studies of nanostructures, and their optoelectric device applications. Our Corporate Affiliates Day was held this past April, and we welcomed over 200 attendees to campus to hear talks from industry and learn about our student research. We were happy to welcome back Wanda Gass 78, who spoke on the importance of encouraging high school women to pursue careers in STEM, and Aamir Virani 01, co-founder, COO and SVP Product of Dropcam, who encouraged students to pursue their start-up dreams. Ph.D. student Jason Holloway received the Best Ph.D. Presenter Award and delivered a fantastic talk titled, Computational Photography and the Future of Social Imaging. This fall we introduced a new specialization area, Data Science. This is a field in which many of our faculty and students are already strong, and it is only natural that we made it an

official focused research initiative. This will allow our faculty, students and research staff to continue their research in this field and pursue new avenues of collaboration. Our Data Science faculty and students will get at the heart of complex problems and devise creative approaches to tell the stories hidden in data. To all of our collaborators, alumni and friends, thank you for your continued support. I look forward to sharing our impact with you again next year.

Sincerely,

Edward W. KnightlyProfessor and Chair, Electrical and Computer EngineeringProfessor, Computer Science

Edward Knightly is a professor and the department chair of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research group, the Rice Networks Group, manages the deployment and operation of a large-scale urban wireless network in a Houston under-resourced community, called Technology for All (TFA). TFA currently serves over 4,000 users. Knightly is an IEEE Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received best paper awards from ACM MobiCom and IEEE SECON and

serves on the IMDEA Networks Scientific Council.

Edward W. Knightly

IN THIS ISSUE Faculty News 3-5 By the Numbers 4-5 Resarch News 6-9 Student News 9-11 Stay Connected 12

PHO

TO: R

ICE

UNIV

ERSI

TY

3BY JENNIFER HUNTER

Lin Zhong, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the 2014 recipient of the ACM SIGMOBILE RockStar Award. ACM SIGMOBILE is the international professional organization for scientists, engineers, executives, educators, and students dedicated to all things mobile. The award recognizes an individual who has made recent outstanding research or product contributions to the field of mobile computing during the early part of his or her career. Selection is based on the impact of the candidates work in creating promising new ideas, paradigms and tools related to mobile computing. Depth, impact and novelty of the individuals contributions are key criteria. Lin exemplifies what all researchers should emulate restless, relentless and brimming with ideas, but at the same time disciplined, methodical and rigorous, said nominator and colleague Ashutosh Sabharwal. His acomplishments are remarkable for their breadth and depth, and span multiple broad areas: HCI and energy efficiency, mobile platform design, wireless networks, and

longitudinal studies of mobile users, Sabharwal continued. Zhong leads the Rice Efficient Computing Group (RECG); their goal is to make computing, communication and interfacing more efficient and effective. The groups mission is to provide enabling technologies for mobile systems, within another decade, beyond form factors like smartphone and tablet. RECGs current research projects include system software, wireless subsystems and human factors. Zhong recieved the award at the 12th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys). In addition, his team, which includes Ph.D. students Kevin Boos, Min Hong Yun, and recent graduate Ardalan Amiri Sani, won best paper from the conference for their paper, titled, Rio: A System Solution for Sharing I/O between Mobile Systems. MobiSys is the flagship, premier event for mobile computing research. Lin was already receiving the SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award at the conference. Moreover, Lin has now received the best paper award from MobiSys in three of the last four years, said Edward Knightly, department chair.

Zhong was MobiSys Technical Program Co-Chair in 2012 and was ineligible to submit in this role. Users these days own a variety of computer systems, such as a smartphone, a tablet, a smart watch, a laptop, and even a pair of smart glasses. Currently, each of these systems comes with their own separate operating system and applications, Amiri Sani said. We imagine that all the different systems are a part of a bigger computer. We envision a single system image operating system and application running on all the users different devices. Read more: bit.ly/VFXn8Q.

BY MIKE WILLIAMS

A security initiative by Rice electrical and computer engineer Farinaz Koushanfar and her colleague at Cornell University is among four winners of this years Cisco Security Grand Challenge. The global competition addresses security-related problems and opportunities presented by the Internet of Things, an expansion of Internet services expected to incorporate wearable devices, kitchen appliances, vehicles, health care and more in the coming decades.

Koushanfar, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is co-principal investigator on the project led by Cornell Tech Professor Ari Juels to develop physical proof-of-presence protocols for transient connections. Their solution incorporates a rigorous cryptographic protocol that allows for trust relationships between devices that may only have momentary proximity, like passing cars or radio-frequency identification tags passing in and out of reader fields. The Rice-Cornell team won one of four $75,000 prizes and competed with more than 100 other teams.

LIN ZHONG WINS 2014 SIGMOBILE ROCKSTAR AWARD

KOUSHANFAR TEAM WINS 2014 INTERNET OF THINGS CHALLENGE

Lin Zhong

Farinaz Koushanfar

PHO

TO: R

ICE

UNIV

ERSI

TY

PHOTO

: RICE UNIVERSITY

410 IEEE Fellows8 NSF CAREER Awards*

4 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows4 American Physical Society Fellows

3 Optical Society of America Fellows3 DARPA Young Faculty Awards

3 NSF Young Investigator Awards2 International Society for Optics and Photonics Members

1 American Academy of Arts & Sciences Member1 National Academy of Engineering Member

1 Sloan Fellow1 National Academy of Sciences Member

1 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers1 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award

1 Materials Research Society Fellow

ComputingSuccessProfessor Joseph C. Cavallaro was

elected an IEEE fellow in

2015.

Professor Junichiro

Kono was elected an

OSA fellow in 2015.

$688,637Average Research Expenditures Per Faculty Member

HALAS, NORDLANDER AWARDED OSA R.W. WOOD PRIZEBY JADE BOYD

The Optical Society has awarded Rice University researchers Naomi Halas of ECE and Peter Nordlander of Physics the prestigious 2015 R.W. Wood Prize for their groundbreaking work in nanophotonics. Halas and Nordlanders research has addressed a wide range of plasmonic topics from electromagnetic theory to nanofabrication and engineering applications. By examining how light interacts with engineered metallic nanoparticles and designing devices that capitalize on those interactions, the two have explored the use of photonic materials for the treatment of cancer, molecular sensing, biomimetic photodetection, self-camouflaging metamaterials, off-grid solar-powered sterilization and more. The R.W. Wood Prize is given for an outstanding discovery, scientific or technological achievement or invention that opens a new era of optics research or significantly

expands an established one. Halas and Nordlander will receive the prize Oct. 18 at the societys annual meeting, Frontiers in Optics 2015. Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander are tremendous scientists, and Rice takes great pride in their achievements, said Yousif Shamoo, Rices vice provost for research.

Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander

PHOTO

S: RICE UNIVERSITY

a 77% increase since 2010

*3 NSF Research Initiation Awards

5Success

BARANIUK AWARDED IEEE EDUCATION MEDALBY MIKE WILLIAMS

Richard Baraniuk, the founder and director of OpenStax College and Rices Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named recipient of the 2015 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal. The medal, named for a former president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), has been presented annually since 1956 and is given for outstanding contributions to education in the fields of interest to the worlds largest professional association for the advancement of technology. Baraniuk was specifically cited for his fundamental contributions to open educational resources for electrical engineering and beyond. The medal was presented at the institutes Honors Ceremony June 20 in New York City. Baraniuk founded Rice-based Connexions in 1999 to bring textbooks and other learning materials to the Internet.

OpenStax grew from that effort as a way to provide high-quality, peer-reviewed, college-level textbooks to students worldwide. The books are free to download and can be printed at low cost. Since OpenStaxs launch in 2012, its books have been selected for use by more than 1,000 college courses and downloaded nearly a million times, saving students more than $30 million. Baraniuk is currently developing a software platform for personalized learning to optimize the experience for individual students.

GRADUATE STUDENTS BY AREA OF STUDY

Photonics, Electronics and Nano-devices

Computer Engineering

Systems

Data Science

Neuroengineering

Richard Baraniuk

PHOTO

: RICE UNIVERSITY

$69,000median starting salary

TotalUndergraduate16% MS/PhD 2015 Matriculants25%

23 patents issued since Jan. 2014for Rice ECE undergraduates

BREADTH OF RESEARCH

percentage of interinstitutional, interdisciplinary research

performed since Fall 2013.

33%

MEE 2015 Matriculants17%

PERCENTAGE OF FEMALE STUDENTS

6RICE TESTS WIRELESS DATA DELIVERY OVER ACTIVE TV CHANNELS

BY JADE BOYD

Rice University engineers have demonstrated the first system that allows wireless data transmissions over UHF channels during active TV broadcasts. If the technology were incorporated into next-generation TVs or smart remotes, it could significantly expand the reach of so-called super Wi-Fi networks in urban areas. Due to the popularity of cable, satellite and Internet TV, the UHF spectrum is one of the most underutilized portions of the wireless spectrum in the United States, said lead researcher Edward Knightly. Thats a bitter irony because the demand for mobile data services is expected to grow tenfold in the next five years, and the UHF band is perfectly suited for wireless data. Knightly, professor and department chair of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Rice Wireless Network Group, said the UHF spectrum, which ranges from 400 to 700 megahertz, is often called the beachfront property of the wireless spectrum. Unlike the higher frequency signals used for existing Wi-Fi hotspots, UHF signals carry for miles and are not blocked by walls or trees. Because of these advantages, wireless data hotspots that use UHF are often referred to as super Wi-Fi. In the U.S., TV broadcasters have been given preferential access to the UHF spectrum for more than 50 years. If no TV broadcaster has laid claim to a UHF channel, the Federal Communications Commission allows secondary users to transmit wireless data on that channel, provided that the transmissions do not interfere with TV broadcasts in any part of the UHF spectrum. The rules governing this secondary access are often referred to as TV white space rules in reference to the industry term for unused or blank

portions of the TV spectrum. Unfortunately, in the most densely populated areas of the country, where the need for additional wireless data services is the greatest, the amount of available white space is extremely limited, Knightly said. In our most recent tests in Houston, one channel is open in parts of the city and none are available in others. This is fairly typical

of a large U.S. urban area. Though most of the UHF band is already taken in U.S. cities, it is largely underutilized. According to a 2014 report by the TV rating company Nielsen, fewer than 10 percent of U.S. households rely on over-the-air broadcasts for TV programming. To demonstrate that wireless service providers could make use of the UHF spectrum without interfering with TV broadcasters, Knightly and Rice graduate student Xu Zhang developed a technology called Wi-Fi in Active TV Channels, or WATCH, and received FCC approval to test it at the Rice campus in 2014. WATCH requires no coordination with or changes to legacy TV transmitters. Instead, TV signals are broadcast as normal and the WATCH system actively monitors whenever

a nearby TV is tuned to a channel to avoid interfering with reception. The technology to allow this comes in two parts. One aspect of WATCH monitors TV broadcasts on a channel and uses sophisticated signal-canceling techniques to insert wireless data transmissions into the same channel; that eliminates TV broadcasts from interfering with the super Wi-Fi data

signals being sent to computer users, Knightly said. The other aspect of WATCH is dedicated to making certain that data transmissions do not interfere with TV reception; this part of the technology would require TVs to report when they are being tuned to a UHF channel, Knightly said. In practice, this could be accomplished with either smart TV remotes or next-generation TV sets. Zhang constructed a smart-remote app that reported whenever a test television in the lab was tuned to a UHF channel. When that happened, the WATCH system automatically shifted its data transmissions to another part of the UHF spectrum that wasnt being used. Our tests showed that WATCH could provide at least six times more wireless data compared with situations

WATCH transmits data over UHF without interfering with TV broadcasts

WATCH continued on page 9

Broadcast Tower.

7VEST HELPS DEAF FEEL, UNDERSTAND SPEECH

BY MIKE WILLIAMS

A vest that allows the profoundly deaf to feel and understand speech has been developed by engineering students and their mentors at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. Under the direction of neuroscientist and best-selling author David Eagleman, Rice students refined a vest with dozens of embedded actuators that vibrate in specific patterns to represent words. The vest responds to input from a phone or tablet app that isolates speech from ambient sound. Eagleman introduced VEST Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer to the world at a TED Conference talk in March. He is director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine and an adjunct assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Rice, of which he is also an alumnus. His lab studies the complex mechanisms of perception through psychophysical, behavioral and computational approaches as well as neuroscience and the law. The Rice students who worked on VEST, all electrical and computer engineering majors, call themselves the Eagleman Substitution Project (ESP) team. They include recent graduates

Zihe Huang, Evan Dougal, Eric Kang and Edward Luckett and curent seniors Abhipray Sahoo and John Yan. They aided Scott Novich, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Rice who works in Eaglemans lab. Novich devised the algorithm that enables the VEST to hear only the human voice and screen out distracting sounds. The low-cost, noninvasive vest collects sounds from a mobile app and converts them into tactile vibration patterns on the users torso. Haptic feedback supplants auditory input. The first VEST prototype put together by the team has 24 actuators sewn into the back. A second version, already in production, will include 40 of the actuators Eagleman calls vibratory motors. He described the experience, at least for a hearing person, as feeling the sonic world around me. Along with all the actuators, the system includes a controller board and two batteries, said Gary Woods, the teams adviser and a professor in the practice of computer technology in ECE. The actuators vibrate in a very complicated pattern based on audio fed through a smartphone. The patterns are too complicated to translate consciously. With training, the brains of deaf

people adapt to the translation process, Eagleman said. Test subjects, some of them deaf from birth, listened to spoken words and wrote them on a white board. They can start understanding the language of the vest, he said. Weve already run some simple experiments with both hearing and deaf people, Novich said. As they use the vest more, they get feedback and know whether they are right or wrong and start to memorize patterns. People are able to identify words they have never encountered before. The project has also prompted students to learn skills they wouldnt necessarily acquire in engineering classrooms. Huang became the teams tailor when he learned to sew via YouTube. Im an electrical engineer, he said. I didnt know anything about sewing. But the teammates quick-study abilities have paid dividends already. Last November, ESP placed second in the sixth-annual Undergraduate Elevator Pitch Competition sponsored by the Oshman Engineering Design

VEST continued on page 9

Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine project allows subconscious translation

PHOTO

: JEFF FITLOW

PHO

TO: J

EFF

FITL

OW

Scott Novich

The Eagleman Substitution Project (ESP) Team.

8HOW DO YOU FEEL? VIDEO OF YOUR FACE MAY TELL ALL.

BY MIKE WILLIAMS

Rice University researchers are developing a highly accurate, touch-free system that uses a video camera to monitor patients vital signs just by looking at their faces. The technique isnt new, but engineering researchers in Rices Scalable Health Initiative are making it work under conditions that have so far stumped earlier systems. The Rice version, DistancePPG, can measure a patients pulse and breathing just by analyzing the changes in ones skin color over time. Where other camera-based systems have been challenged by low-light conditions, dark skin tones and movement, DistancePPG relies on algorithms that correct for those variables. The team of Rice graduate student Mayank Kumar and professors Ashok Veeraraghavan and Ashutosh Sabharwal created the system that will let doctors diagnose patients from a distance with special attention paid to those in low-resource settings. The labs research appeared in the Optical Society journal Biomedical Optics Express. Kumar, the projects lead graduate researcher, said DistancePPG will

be particularly helpful to monitor premature infants for whom blood pressure cuffs or wired probes can pose a threat. In fact, they were his inspiration. This story began in 2013 when we visited Texas Childrens Hospital to talk to doctors and get ideas, Kumar said. That was when we saw the newborn babies in the neonatal ICU. We saw multiple wires attached to them and asked, Why? The wires monitored the babies pulses, heart rate and this and that, he recalled. And the wires werent a problem. The problem was that the babies would roll, or their mothers needed to take care of them, and the wires would be taken off and put back on. That, Kumar said, could potentially damage the infants delicate skin. Kumar and his colleagues were aware of an emerging technique that used a video camera to detect nearly imperceptible changes in a persons skin color due to changes in blood volume underneath the skin. Pulse and breathing rates can be determined from these minute changes. That worked just fine for monitoring Caucasians in bright rooms, he said. But there were three challenges. The first was the techniques difficulty in detecting color change in darker skin tones. Second, the light was not always bright enough. The third and perhaps

hardest problem was that patients sometimes move. The Rice team solved these challenges by adding a method to average skin-color change signals from different areas of the face and an algorithm to track a subjects nose, eyes, mouth and whole face. Our key finding was that the strength of the skin-color change signal is different in different regions of the face, so we developed a weighted-averaging algorithm, Kumar said. It improved the accuracy of derived vital signs, rapidly expanding the scope, viability, reach and utility of camera-based vital-sign monitoring. By incorporating tracking to compensate for movement even a smile DistancePPG perceived a pulse rate to within one beat per minute, even for diverse skin tones under varied lighting conditions. Kumar said he expects the software to find its way to mobile phones, tablets and computers so people can reliably measure their own vital signs whenever and wherever they choose. Veeraraghavan is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Sabharwal is a professor of electrical and computer engineering. The National Science Foundation, the Texas Instruments Fellowship, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and a Rice University Graduate Fellowship supported the research.

Rice technique compensates for skin tone, light, movement to monitor vital signs

PHOTO

: JEFF FITLOW

Ashok Veeraraghavan demonstrating DistancePPG.

PHO

TO: M

AYAN

K KU

MAR

DistancePPG in action.

9where we were limited only to the traditionally available white-space spectrum, Knightly said. With WATCH in use, Knightly said it took a fraction of a second longer than normal to tune in a UHF TV broadcast on the test television. While the increment could be measured it was less than a 5 percent increase it was almost imperceptible to the person switching channels, he said. Zhang and Knightlys report on the research, titled WATCH: Wi-Fi in Active TV Channels, won best-paper honors at Association of Computing Machinerys MobiHoc 2015 conference in Hangzhou, China. Knightly said technology like WATCH will become increasingly important as the demand for wireless data services increases and the number of broadcast TV viewers decreases. A 2014 Cisco report found that nearly a half-billion mobile devices with data connections had been added to the global supply within the previous year, bringing the global total to 7.4 billion a bit more than the number of

people on Earth, according to the U.S. Census bureau. Of the 7.4 billion data-connected devices, Cisco found that more than a quarter were smartphones, which used an estimated 22 times more data than nonsmart devices. Allowing the UHF spectrum to be inefficiently used makes little sense today and will make even less sense in the future, Knightly said. There

are already more people in the United States who require mobile data services than there are people using broadcast-only TV. By showing that these two communities can coexist, we hope to spur innovation and a public debate about how this valuable resource could be used. The research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems and the Keck Foundation.

WATCH continued from page 6

Kitchen at Rice. In February, the team placed third in the third-annual Owl Open, the Rice student startup competition sponsored by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship. The team also presented its work this past April at the annual Design of Medical Devices conference in Minnesota. We see other applications for what were calling tactile sensory substitution, Sahoo said. Information can be sent through the human body. Its not just an augmentative device for the deaf. The VEST could be a general neural input device. You could receive any form of information.

VEST continued from page 7

WI-FI WINNER: ECE STUDENT WINS BEST PAPER AT CRAB 2014ECE graduate student Adriana Flores-Miranda wants your Wi-Fi to be faster and more reliable. In November 2014, she won Best Paper for her work on that topic at the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Cognitive Radio Architectures for Broadband (CRAB). The project, Virtual Duplex: Scaling Dense WLANs and Eliminating Contention Asymmetry, which was also her masters thesis, is a new way to balance Wi-Fi traffic. It is fantastic work and a well-deserved award, said ECE chair Edward Knightly, Flores advisor. Adrianas work addresses a key reason that hot spots can slow to a crawl: access points cannot efficiently stream content to clients because of excessive contention. Her split-channel solution is elegant and very practical. Flores created a medium access protocol that provides independent resources to download and upload traffic, which

typically fight for the same resources. Her protocol removes contention asymmetry and traffic asymmetry, by dividing the single medium into two, one for upload and one for download. This provides upload and download with independent performance and operation. We are using the same resources, but we are doing it more efficiently. In very congested scenarios or hotspots like stadiums this would be a perfect solution, she said. Read more: bit.ly/1JiM1sx

Xu Zhang, center, with Professors Sherman Chen from the University of Waterloo and Junshan Shen from Arizona State University.

PHOTO

COURTESY O

F XU ZHANG

Adriana Flores-Miranda

PHOTO

: JENNIFER HUNTER

10

ECE graduate student Hossein Robatjazi, Physics and Astronomy graduate student Shah Mohammad Bahauddin, Applied Physics graduate student Chloe Doiron, and their advisor, ECE assistant professor Isabell Thomann, had a paper accepted to Nano Letters, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Chemistry Society. The study, titled Direct Plasmon-

Driven Photoelectrocatalysis, explores a novel concept for the efficient conversion of solar energy to hot charge carriers, which may in the future be used to drive photochemical reactions more efficiently. The paper demonstrates that the energetic (hot) charge carriers that are generated when a metal nanoparticle is illuminated with visible light, can be transferred directly to adsorbed water molecules, where they may drive chemical reactions such as the splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen. Previously, it had been believed that more complicated schemes were required, in which the hot carriers were first injected into an adjacent semiconductor that would then help maintain the carriers energy until they could be transferred further to water molecules. In the present work, the researchers

presented a clever design that maximizes the efficiencies of light harvesting, charge carrier separation, and hot carrier injection, and reported photoconversion efficiencies that are on par with those of considerably more sophisticated and expensive structures that have employed rare and expensive platinum catalysts to boost efficiency. Read more on their work: http://bit.ly/1Osrb1d.

40 ECE STUDENTS TO ATTEND GRACE HOPPER CONFERENCEBY JENNIFER HUNTER

Thanks to the generosity of alumni and friends, 40 women from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, to be held this October in Houston. I have never attended Grace Hopper, so I am thrilled to have this experience. Specifically, the opportunity to network with successful women and leaders in my area. I am sure this conference will inspire me and open new opportunities for my career, said Ph.D. student Adriana Flores-Miranda. Flores-Miranda and fellow Ph.D. student Aida Vosoughi are also presenting posters at the Hopper

conference. I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration in 2012 and 2014 and they both were excellent experiences, Vosoughi said. Participating in the discussions and the networking sessions at the worlds largest gathering of women in computing played an important role in inspiring me and in boosting my self-confidence. The

talks and panels by successful female leaders in academia and industry were inspirational and encouraging. Each year the conference features an amazing job fair. That was where I secured my first internship in industry. The women will be joined by students from Computer Science and Computational and Applied Mathematics departments.

THOMANN STUDENTS PUBLISHED IN NANOLETTERS

Please consider a gift to the ECE Women in Engineering Fund, for the purposes of supporting women in STEM, including, but not limited to, sending students to the Hopper conference, as well as other conferences and activities, and supporting student outreach and research opportunities. For more information on giving to this or any other ECE fund, visit: ece.rice.edu/supportece/

PHO

TO: D

ONI

SO

WAR

D

PHOTO

: DONI SO

WARD

Chloe Doiron sets up the solar simulator.

Hossein Robatjazi, Chloe Doiron, Shah Mohammad Bahauddin.

11

BY PATRICK KURP

The newly organized Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program at Rice University aims at encouraging long-term undergraduate research projects in collaboration with faculty and graduate students.

Undergrads can earn academic credits, and faculty and graduate students will benefit from the design and discovery efforts of their teams. The students will learn how to work collaboratively in large multi-disciplinary, multi-cohort groups, said the coordinator of VIP at Rice, Gary L. Woods, a professor in the practice of computer technology in electrical and computer engineering (ECE).

VIP complements the roles already played by the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership and the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, Woods said. We want to extend the academic design experience beyond a single semester. We want to create an environment of mentorship, with faculty

and graduate students mentoring teams, experienced students mentoring new members, and students moving into leadership roles as others graduate, he said. Any Rice student, regardless of class or major, is eligible to join a VIP team, with members chosen by participating faculty members. In addition to Woods, they include Behnaam Aazhang, Joseph

Cavallaro, Ashutosh Sabharwal and Ray Simar, all faculty in ECE. Students get the experience of working in a team environment with mentors. They get research experience. We feel theyll have a better grasp of their course material because it will be learned hands-on, Woods said. Rice is one of 15 universities that make up the VIP Consortium based at the Georgia Institute of Technology.The VIP program is funded by a $5 million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, which seeks to drive systemic reform of STEM education. Learn more: vip.rice.edu.

VIP PROGRAM ENABLES LONG-TERM DESIGN PROJECTS

TEAM DRADIS TAKES HOME TOP PRIZE AT DESIGN SHOWCASEBY MIKE WILLIAMS

Team D.R.A.D.I.S. was a double winner at the annual George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase at Rice University for its development of a dynamic radar and digital imaging system to help drivers avoid accidents.

The competition held at Rices Tudor Fieldhouse April 16 featured the designs of 88 teams of engineering students who competed for nearly $20,000 in prizes. The D.R.A.D.I.S. team of then-seniors Galen Schmidt, Spencer Kent and Jeremy Hunt, all electrical engineering majors (though Schmidt has a second major in computer science), took the top prize of $5,000 for Excellence in Engineering as well as one of two Willy Revolution Awards for Innovation in Engineering Design. The second prize brought them an additional $3,000. Its unreal! Really cool, Hunt said. Im glad we put all the work in that we did. Galen said when we won the first award (the Willy Revolution), OK, thats it! Thats great! We won a major award, Kent added. We did everything we hoped to achieve. The project was sponsored by the Rice Integrated Systems and Circuits Laboratory directed by Aydin Babakhani, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Video: bit.ly/1bsYxMb.

PHO

TO: A

N LE

/LUX

E ST

UDIO

PRO

DUCT

IONS

PHOTO

: COURTESY O

F DISSECT TEAM

The Jedi Putter team with advisors Gary Woods and Ray Simar.

The Digital Cure for Epilepsy team meets.

PHO

TO: A

N LE

/LUX

E ST

UDIO

PRO

DUCT

IONS

Team DRADIS: Galen Schmidt, Jeremy Hunt, faculty adviser Gary Woods, and Spencer Kent, with their showcase awards.

12

CONNECT

Rice UniversityDepartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering6100 Main Street, MS 366Houston, TX 77005(713) 348-4020 (p)(713) 348-5686 (f)ece.rice.eduelec@rice.edu

Facebook.com/RiceECE bit.ly/RiceECEin @RiceU_ECE

PHOTO

: JEFF FITLOW