News: ECE

Rick Johnson, an engineering professor on the Hill—and, at the risk of a mixed metaphor, something of a Renaissance man. At Cornell since 1981, Johnson has spent decades teaching and doing research in electrical engineering, particularly in the fields of control systems and signal processing. But over the past twelve years, his interests have entailed as much art as science. A pioneer in the field of computational art history, Johnson leverages both his engineering acumen and his abiding passion for art to study the physical materials with which works are made. Read more

Datacenters support a large and ever-increasing fraction of the world's digital computation power, including search engines, social networks, and machine learning analytics. As modern cloud services grow in popularity, their design shifts from supporting complex monolithic applications to supporting collections of specialized, loosely-coupled microservices. These microservices impact resource requirements and complicate computer cluster management, hurting availability and service reliability. Guaranteeing the responsiveness expected from cloud services while using datacenters efficiently... Read more

Around 80 faculty and instructors joined Provost Michael Kotlikoff and the vice provost for academic innovation April 18 for lunch and conversation about innovation in teaching at Cornell. Read more

The Kent Active Management System (KASM) project with United Kingdom Power Networks (UKPN) has won the 2019 “Innovation Project of the Year” at the Networks Awards in Birmingham, UK. As technical lead of the project, ECE Professor Hsiao-Dong Chiang developed the high-performance, integrated system along with his company, Bigwood Systems. The KASM project trialed new contingency analysis software (developed by Bigwood Systems) to demonstrate improved operation and planning of the East Kent 132 kV distribution network. The project demonstrated that the network can be run closer to its design... Read more

Sometimes individuals transform when they work together. Kirstin Petersen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, right, with artist Rachel Rose, April 27 at the New Museum in New York City, presenting art inspired by Petersen’s research on swarm robots. One example is single-celled slime mold, which takes on entirely new behaviors as a collective. Another example is a scientist and an artist collaborating on a museum event, combining their respective tendencies toward the fundamental and the abstract. “I have trained my brain to think a certain way. I work in a very goal... Read more

Alexander Ruyack and Robin Ying have both been selected to receive the 2019 Electrical and Computer Engineering Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. Read more

Can a digital platform of women’s stories inspire and advise the next generation? Are there low-cost ways to reduce the stigma of menstruation in rural India? How do you balance an autonomous bicycle? Can a video game player build a city on a folklore-inspired turtle’s back? Lindsay France/Cornell University A student explaining PSYAFE, a platform to match students with mental health professionals. These were among the challenges met by a diverse array of student research projects, on display April 24 at the annual BOOM (Bits on Our Minds) showcase in Duffield Hall. More than 200 students, the... Read more

Engineer, entrepreneur, innovator and philanthropist Irwin Jacobs ’54, BEE ’56, will speak at Cornell and be presented with the second Cornell Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award on Monday, April 22, at 4 p.m. in 101 Phillips Hall Auditorium. President Martha E. Pollack will introduce the event, and Lance Collins, the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering, will serve as moderator. The event is open to the Cornell community. Considered one of the world’s foremost communications scientists, Jacobs is the founding chairman and CEO emeritus of Qualcomm Inc. He is the undisputed father of code... Read more

Nick Comly, a senior double-majoring in ECE and CS, has been named a Merrill Presidential Scholar – one of the highest honors for undergraduates at Cornell. Nominated by their department, recipients are then selected by the dean of each of the University’s seven undergraduate colleges. Only 1% of each year’s graduating class receives the award. Each Merrill scholar is given the opportunity to recognize the high school teacher who most inspired his or her scholastic development as well as the Cornell faculty member who most significantly contributed to his or her college experience. Comly is a... Read more

Francesco Monticone, assistant professor, ECE was recently awarded the 2019 Leopold B. Felsen Award for Excellence in Electrodynamics by the European Association of Antennas and Propagation. This career award is issued, by nomination only, to an early stage researcher under 40 years of age to keep the memory and scientific legacy of Prof. Leopold B. Felsen alive, as well as to foster academic excellence in the electromagnetics community, by giving recognition to outstanding fundamental contributions from early stage researchers in electrodynamics. The Award was officially presented at the... Read more