Contents of the CURIE Academy project kits

Professor Christopher Batten prepares for a new kind of CURIE Academy

CURIE Academy is a one-week summer program for high school students who excel in math and science and are curious about careers in engineering. CURIE Academy scholars are young women of all backgrounds from all over the country who will be high school juniors or seniors. This year’s project, designed by ECE Professor Christopher Batten, is focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and titled Computing at the Edge. The work is organized around several themes including early disaster warning, the smart home, a wearable health monitor and digital agriculture. Project kits including a variety of... Read more

2021 Cornell ECE Video Time Capsule

Congratulations to the Cornell ECE Class of '21!

This video time capsule captures just a small slice of life in ECE during a particularly challenging year, including some of the projects you worked on, teams you collaborated with, and friends who shared this experience. Thank you for all your hard... Read more

Environmental Concerns Arise Over Energy Needed To Mine Bitcoin

Eilyan Bitar, ECE associate professor and David Croll Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, weighs in on how a Bitcoin mining operation is drawing criticism from people who say the natural gas burned to make the cryptocurrency is causing too much pollution. According to Bitar, "Inevitably, that would drive an increase in the supply of generation or electricity from more dispatchable generators, like natural gas, which produces greenhouse gas emissions." Listen to the full NPR episode. Read more

Prepare the grid now for electric vehicles

Eilyan Bitar, ECE associate professor and David Croll Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow, has published an op-ed in the Albany Times Union arguing that "the transition to an all-electric car future won't be possible without careful planning and coordination with the power grid and the companies that manage its operation." In response to Volvo and GM's recent announcements to completely phase out all gasoline-powered cars by 2030 and 2035 respectively, he describes some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities that the increased adoption of electric vehicles will present to the power grid... Read more

Kirstin Petersen

Petersen Receives NSF CAREER Award

Kirstin Petersen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received a U.S. National Science Foundation Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award from the Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS). The award supports her research proposal “Environmentally-Mediated Coordination in Natural and Robot Swarms” for a five-year period from 2021 through 2026 with a total amount of $520,490. “Our project looks beyond robots working in parallel and towards actual swarm intelligence leveraging both explicit and implicit computation through software, morphology and embodiment into... Read more

depiction of energy band gap

Ultrawide bandgap gives material high-power potential

By: David Nutt

A Cornell collaboration has found a way to grow a single crystalline layer of alpha-aluminum gallium oxide that has the widest energy bandgap to date – a discovery that clears the way for new semiconductors that will handle higher voltages, higher power densities and higher frequencies than previously seen. The collaboration was led by co-senior authors Debdeep Jena and Huili Grace Xing, both professors in electrical and computer engineering and in materials science and engineering. The team also included David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor in Applied and Engineering Physics, who... Read more

Ziv Goldfeld

Goldfeld receives NSF CAREER Award

Ziv Goldfeld, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, 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 his research proposal “ Smooth statistical distances for a scalable learning theory” for a five-year period from 2021 through 2026 with a total amount of $641,761. “The smooth statistical distances framework, around which the proposal was written, is something I have been developing for the past year and a half since joining Cornell,”... Read more