News: ECE

Yingjie Bi Ph.D. '20 is the winner of the 2020 INFORMS Optimization Society Student Paper Prize. The paper, titled "Duality gap estimation via a refined Shapley-Folkman lemma," addresses an important question in optimization: estimating the duality gap for optimization problems with a nonconvex, separable objective. The paper was co-authored by Bi’s Cornell advisor, A. Kevin Tang, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and formed the first part of Bi's Ph.D. dissertation. It introduces new concepts, such as the k-th convex hull, which considerably refine the Shapley-Folkman lemma.... Read more

Professor Aaron Wagner and Assistant Professor Francesco Monticone were honored for their exceptional teaching at last month’s New Faculty Reception, held virtually for the first time. The teaching awards recognize outstanding individual efforts as well as work done to advance and modernize curricula within ECE. We are proud to share details of their awards, including comments from some of their students. Aaron Wagner received the Ralph S. Watts '72 Award. He led the charge to fundamentally change the ECE sophomore and junior level curricula, and developed a brand new course, Data Science for... Read more

The AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems, established in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, aims to meet growing food supply demands by using AI and bioinformatics to increase efficiencies across the entire food production system, from growing crops through consumption. Qing Zhao, the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering, is leading the Cornell team, with co-principal investigators Jayadev Acharya, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; Martin Wiedmann, professor in the Department of Food... Read more

Amal El-Ghazaly, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is among 20 faculty members named Engaged Faculty Fellows. She is developing a new course to assist new Ph.D. students in their transition to Cornell with the goal of strengthening the community and increasing retention for Ph.D. students from underrepresented minority groups. The course, titled Succeeding in the Graduate Environment, will introduce students to on-campus resources and equip them with the skills needed to succeed in research, academia and their future careers. El-Ghazaly, who joined the ECE faculty in... Read more

ECE faculty welcome new and returning students. Stay connected and reach out if you have questions, or if you need someone to talk to. And please wear your mask and follow social distancing guidelines! Special thanks to the faculty members who donated their time to help create this video: Alyssa Apsel, Jayadev Acharya, Chris Batten, Amal El-Ghazaly, Debdeep Jena, José Martínez, Al Molnar, Francesco Monticone, Kirstin Petersen, Edward Suh, Stephen Wicker and Grace Xing. ECE 2020 Welcome — A semester like no other {"preview_thumbnail":"/sites/default/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview... Read more

Zhiru Zhang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received a $50,000 award from Facebook Research for his proposal titled “Algorithm-Systems Co-Optimization for Near-Data Graph Learning.” Facebook launched the AI Systems Hardware/Software Co-Design request for proposals (RFP) at the Machine Learning and Systems conference last March. This research award program is aimed at strengthening ties with academics working in the wide range of AI hardware and algorithm co-design research. “We received 132 proposals from 74 universities, which was an increase from last year’s... Read more

Ziv Goldfeld, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, received an IBM 2020 University Award for the theoretical machine learning research he is doing jointly with collaborators from the IBM-MIT Watson AI Lab. Goldfeld was nominated by his IBM collaborators, and the award affirms IBM's interest and commitment to their work. “We are looking at several machine learning projects,” Goldfeld said. “All revolve around and work towards developing a comprehensive statistical learning theory that can explain and provide strong performance guarantees for modern machine learning... Read more

The paper, titled “A truly one-way lane for surface plasmon polaritons,” is published in Nature Photonics, the premiere journal of optoelectronics, laser science, imaging and communications in the field of photonics. While conventional photonic devices are typically made with dielectric materials such as glass, plasmonic devices take advantage of the optical properties of metals. The field of plasmonics is sometimes referred to as “metal optics.” “The advantage of plasmonic devices,” Monticone said, “is the possibility to squeeze and confine light to dimensions much smaller than its wavelength... Read more

The Bovay Program in the History and Ethics of Engineering seeks to be a catalyst for consideration of social and ethical issues in the Cornell College of Engineering. Dr. Park Doing, lecturer in electrical and computer engineering, guides the program to introduce ethical concepts to engineering students using real world case studies and current topics. “Usually these issues come up when things go wrong,” said Doing. Examples include the recent Boeing 737 Max disaster, along with historical catastrophes such as the Columbia and Challenger Space Shuttles and accidents at the Three Mile Island... Read more

Zygmunt Haas, emeritus professor in Cornell ECE, has been ranked 315 out of the top 1000 computer scientists in the United States (496th in the world) by Guide2Research. Four other ECE faculty members were ranked as well, including Hsiao-Dong Chiang, Vikram Krishnamurthy, Stephen Wicker, Christoph Studer, among a total of 37 scholars from Cornell. "This honor validates the important contributions of our faculty and the impact of their work," said Alyssa Apsel, ECE director. "I am amazed and impressed by the reach of Cornell ECE, but not at all surprised." Guide2Research is a leading research... Read more