News: ECE

A Cornell team of researchers—Robert Shepherd and Hadas Kress-Gazit, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Amit Lal, Electrical and Computer Engineering—are advancing a new class of motors for soft robots. These motors are based on the electrically driven pumping of liquid. Called HASELs (hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic actuators), they have the potential to enable practical and useful soft robots for safe interactions with humans. HASELs represent the first electrostatic soft actuators that are stable and useful enough for broad adoption by experts and non-experts alike... Read more

Original article from The Art Newspaper , February 2019 By Nancy Kenney The Art Newspaper is the journal of record for the visual arts world, covering international news and events. The WIRE Project at Cornell uniting art history and engineering students was co-directed by C. Richard Johnson Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Andrew Weislogel, The Seymour R. Askin, Jr. '47 Curator, Earlier European and American Art at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum . Three and a half centuries after Rembrandt’s death, questions persist about his creative... Read more

Typically an animal needs to be sedated and shaved before a veterinarian can take its vital signs. Cornell professor Edwin Kan has designed a device that uses radio waves to measure heartbeat and respiration--all while the critter relaxes in its own environment. Read more

Using soil to fight climate change, saving the Amazon with wind and solar energy, boosting wildlife conservation through bioacoustics – these innovative approaches are the result of a new competitive grant program aimed at solving some of the world’s biggest sustainability challenges. The 2019-20 Collaborative Research Partnership grant program is the latest collaboration between the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Since 2013, the organizations have worked together on interdisciplinary initiatives including the NatureNet Science Fellows program, which... Read more

Christina Delimitrou, Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University recently received a U.S. National Science Foundation Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award from the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF). The award supports her research proposal, “Learning-Based Hardware and Software Techniques for Quality-of-Service-Aware Cloud Microservices” for a five-year period from 2019 through 2024 with a total amount of $500,000. According to the award’s abstract, datacenters support a large and ever-increasing fraction of the... Read more

For decades, electronics have become smaller and faster year by year. This size reduction and concurrent power increase have been dependent on the electronics industry consistently finding ways to increase the number of microcomponents carried by an average microchip. Lately the pace of optimization has slowed so much that some experts think we may have reached the limit of scaling down devices. This would mean the end of the hotly anticipated, ultra-expensive, new product iteration. “If you’re in the integrated circuit business and you don’t have a better technology in three years, then... Read more

Steve Dai from Professor Zhiru Zhang’s group has won the prestigious ECE Outstanding Thesis Research Award for 2019. The annual award is given to one graduating Ph.D. student from the Cornell University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, based on the significance of their doctoral research. Steve Dai and Professor Zhiru Zhang in the Computer Systems Laboratory's Hardware Lab Steve recently joined NVIDIA Research as a Research Scientist, after successfully defending his PhD thesis titled “Coordinated Static and Dynamic Scheduling for High-Quality High-Level Synthesis”. Steve's... Read more

Museum exhibitions have lives lasting well past their public display – in artistic inspiration, viewers’ memories, online portals and print catalogs. David O. Brown/Johnson Museum of Art One such catalog, produced by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in 2017, is now a multiple award winner. “ Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings ” most recently was honored with the College Art Association’s 2019 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Book Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections and Exhibitions. Award winners will be presented during the CAA’s 107th Annual Conference, Feb. 13-16 in New... Read more

Professor Charles Eugene Seyler has recently been appointed as Emeritus Professor. On the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer since 1981, Seyler has graduated more than 15 Ph.D. students, taught over 17 courses, developed six new courses, and supervised both Master of Engineering students and student project teams. He was Associate Director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2002 to 2007 and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs for the College of Engineering from 2011 to 2013. “Charlie is widely considered one of the best Associate Directors to have... Read more

Computer scientist Margaret Martonosi '86 , a leader in promoting and nurturing diversity in STEM fields, will be at Cornell Jan. 21-25 as an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large for a series of talks, seminars, classroom visits and informal events with students and faculty in Computing and Information Sciences and Cornell Engineering. Margaret Martonosi Martonosi is the Hugh Trumbull Adams ’35 Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and director of Princeton’s Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. An inventor with six U.S. patents, her work includes the... Read more