Dean's Speaker: What Society Must Require from AI
2022-10-28 11:30 - 12:30 (America/New_York) | Fenway Center, 77 St. Stephen Street, Boston, MA, 02115, United States
WHAT SOCIETY MUST REQUIRE FROM AI
A lecture with Dr. Ronald M. Baecker, Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Bell Chair in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Toronto
Dr. Baecker will discuss the dangers of premature use of AI, and what society must require of algorithms affecting human welfare, health, life, and death. The talk will be of interest to researchers in prioritizing problems for AI guided by human-computer interaction, as well as policy makers and citizens considering when and how AI technology should be deployed.
Please RSVP to attend
Lunch will be served following the lecture.
Ronald M. Baecker received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from MIT. He researched interactive computing at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health, Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, and the MIT Media Lab. At the University of Toronto, he founded its Knowledge Media Design Institute and its Technologies for Aging Gracefully Lab, and co-founded its Dynamic Graphics Project. He has started five software companies, leading three as founding CEO, and has taught principles of software entrepreneurship for over three decades.
Fenway Center or via Zoom
View Flyer

Systems Thinking, Community Engagement, and Collaborative Change Within and Beyond Engineering Education
2022-10-28 12:00 - 13:00
Friday, October 28th at 12pm (VIRTUAL)

Please Register:
https://bit.ly/3BPSSOu
All attendees receive a FREE BOOK!
Abstract: This seminar explores intersections between systems thinking, community engagement, and collaborative change within and beyond engineering education by discussing three big questions:
What skills do we (and our students) need to address some of the complex, intractable, systemic challenges that we care about? How would we know what learning looks like?
What are some of the central values, imperatives, or habits of mind that comprise community engagement? Where do we fit in to address issues we care about?
What factors influence our capacity to collaboratively enact change?
The seminar will be grounded in brief findings from research projects engaged with these core questions and will invite discussion about how we can prioritize these activities within engineering education and the opportunities for broader impacts.
Bio: Dr. Jake Grohs is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Education and an affiliate faculty member to both Learning Science and Technologies and Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics. Grohs currently serves as PI of two and co-PI of two NSF-funded education focused grants which involve partnering with different stakeholder groups on continuous improvement or collaborative change (e.g., K12 teachers and administrators, university engineering faculty). His primary research interests focus on systems thinking, including how individuals reason through complex ill-structured problems, how educational environments develop systems thinking skills, and how collaborative groups might apply systems thinking to enact positive change.

Guillem Reus Muns' PhD Proposal Review
2022-10-28 13:00 - 14:00
Location: ISEC 332
“AI for communications and sensing in RF environments”
Abstract:
The recent growth of Internet of Things (IoT), as well as other new revolutionary applications utilizing wireless spectrum are leading the way towards realization of next generation wireless systems that jointly utilize communications and sensing. However, such systems offer many degrees of freedom, and optimizing them for a specific task is difficult to accomplish with deterministic and classical approaches. For this reason, data-driven and AI-based methods have been pursued actively by the research community, as they are able to find solutions that often come close to or exceed the performance of the deterministic counterparts with a fractional execution complexity. This thesis presents, through real systems and with experimental validation, our progressive efforts in three broad areas, where AI enables the operation of aerial and terrestrial systems that combine sensing and communications. This dissertation explores the following key use cases with distinct contributions made in each:
i) Sensing-aided communications for air and ground systems. First, we present a UAV communication method that defines constellation points in space that map to transmitter frequency bands and are detected at the Base Station using millimeter wave sensors. Second, we explore alternative vehicle-to-infrastructure mmWave beamforming methods, leveraging a) vehicle position and velocity estimation using in-band standard compliant 802.11ad radar and b) camera images and GPS location information.
ii) Signal classification using communication signals, where we propose a) a UAV classification method using uniquely UAV-transmitted signals and b) an RF fingerprinting technique that improves class separation by combining triplet loss with regular classification techniques.
iii) ‘AirFC’, an over-the-air computation method that implements fully connected neural networks inference leveraging multi-antenna systems.
Finally, the proposed work will address challenges in the CBRS band, where a tiered structure is implemented to access the spectrum. Hence, continuous sensing is needed to make sure that radar (tier 1) is not interfered by cellular systems (tier 2). Here, we propose reusing the already existing cellular infrastructure to act as a radar detector, which enhances their functionality to go beyond that of regular wireless communications.
Committee:
Prof. Kaushik Chowdhury (Advisor)
Prof. Hanumant Singh
Prof. Stratis Ioannidis

Introducing the MS in Computational Medicine
2022-10-31 10:00 - 11:00
Learn about the College of Engineering’s newest program offering at Northeastern’s Roux Institute, the MS in Computational Medicine on Monday, October 31 at 10:00am. Registration is required.

KRI Research Networking
2022-10-31 15:00 - 17:00 | 440 Egan, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, United States
Please join us for all or part of a poster session/reception at which the NU Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security research teams will present KRI research capabilities (facilities and staff expertise) in:

Geospatial data analysis
RF materials & devices
Unmanned autonomous systems
Additive manufacturing
Formulation chemistry
And beyond (e.g. meeting space/support, venture-stage facilities/equipment)

Open to the entire university.

SHPE 2022 NATIONAL CONVENTION
2022-11-02 - 2022-11-06
Join Northeastern University in Charlotte, NC for the annual SHPE (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers) National Convention!
Northeastern University and the Graduate School of Engineering will be in attendance at the Career Fair & Graduate School Expo from 10am-4pm on Friday and Saturday. We will also be hosting a Diversity and Inclusion Hospitality Suite on Thursday night from 7:30-9:30pm.

Engineered cellular models to explore human disease heterogeneity
2022-11-02 12:00 - 13:00 | 236 Richards, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, United States
ChE Seminar Series Presents:
Alison McGuigan, PhD
Professor, Chemical Engineering & Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto
Abstract:
Ex vivo culture models provide powerful tools to interrogate the role of tumour heterogeneity in human cancers. Patient-derived organoids (PDOs) are emerging as powerful models to capture the genetic heterogeneity of human tumors. However, extrinsic factors present in the tumor microenvironment (TME) of a tumour, such as the presence of stromal cells and gradients of small molecules such as oxygen, also affect cancer phenotype and response to therapy. This talk will describe tissue-engineered platforms we have developed 1) to enable controlled assembly and disassembly of organoid structures to study the impact of both genetic and microenvironmental heterogeneity on tumor cell behavior and 2) to explore tumour microenvironment remodelling, heterogeneity in response to therapy, and potential to re-grow after therapy.
Bio:
Dr. Alison McGuigan is a Professor in Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry and the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at University of Toronto. She obtained her undergraduate degree from University of Oxford, her PhD from University of Toronto working, and completed Post Doctoral Fellowships at Harvard University and Stanford School of Medicine. Dr. McGuigan research group is focused on the engineering of tissue models to explore mechanisms of disease and regeneration. Dr. McGuigan has established strategies to generate multi-component tissue systems with specified organization. Furthermore, she has pioneered the design of tissue platforms for smart data acquisition, with a focus on stratifying heterogeneous bulk data by cell population, by spatial location, or by time. In recognition of Dr. McGuigan’s work she has received numerous awards including the 2013 TERMIS-AM Young Investigator Award, and the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering Hatch Innovation Award. In 2018 was elected to the Royal Society of Canada-College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists and in 2022 she was elected a Fellow of TERM by the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society. She serves on the executive leadership team of CFREF Medicine by Design program and on the Centre for Commercialization of Regenerative Medicine (CCRM) incubation and outreach committee.

Yuexi Zhang's PhD Proposal Review
2022-11-02 12:00 - 13:00
“Human Body and Activity Analysis”
Abstract:
Human-related applications such as person detection, human pose estimations and human activity recognition, that always draw a lot of attentions in computer vision community. In this proposal, we discuss several related topics that we are interested in, and demonstrate how we improve the existing methods. The first problem we consider is video-based human pose estimation. For most general approaches, researchers focus on collecting human poses from each frame independently and then associate them based on matching or tracking methods. However, such the pipeline usually relies on complex computations and also consumes running time. To overcome such shortages, we propose a light weighted network with the unsupervised training strategy, that aims to reduce running time but remaining the performance. The next problem we explore is about cross-view action recognition (CVAR). The goal of CVAR is to recognize a human action when observed from a previously unseen viewpoint. This is important for some applications such as surveillance systems where is not practical or feasible to collect large amounts of training data when adding a new camera. In this case, it requires methods that are able to generate reliable view-invariant information trained with given viewpoints and recognize the action from an unseen viewpoint. In general, most approaches rely on 3D data, but using 2D data is still under-discovered. Besides, the performance of those approaches using only 2D data is far worse than 3D approaches. Therefore, we propose a simple yet efficient CVAR framework that takes 2D data as input and close the performance gap between 3D and 2D input. The last problem we investigate is online action detection and we are interested in detecting action start at current stage. Online action start detection problem is to detect an action startpoint as soon as it occurs with its action category in untrimmed, streaming videos, and it has potential applications such as early alert generation in surveillance systems. The typical approaches usually heavily rely on frame-level annotations and also they are limited to pre-defined action categories. Therefore, we propose a novel yet simple design, 3D MLP-mxier based architecture that aims to detect the taxonomy-free action start without using frame-level annotations.

Committee:
Dr. Octavia Camps(Advisor)
Dr. Mario Sznaier
Dr. Sarah Ostadabbas

Kai Huang's PhD Dissertation Defense
2022-11-02 14:00 - 15:00
“Partitioning Data Across Multiple, Network Connected FPGAs with High Bandwidth Memory to Accelerate Non-streaming Applications”
Abstract:
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly used in cloud computing to increase the run time of various applications. Flexibility, efficiency and lower power enable FPGAs to be important components in modern data centers. Applications such as Secure Function Evaluation (SFE), graph processing, and machine learning are increasingly mapped to FPGA-based adaptable cloud computing platforms. However, due to resource limitations, it is difficult to map applications to only one FPGA. Applications with a streaming data processing pattern can be mapped to a multiple-FPGA platform where the FPGAs are connected in a 1-D or ring topology, thus communications overhead can be pipelined with computations. The communication, merely passing data from boards to boards, will not significantly affect the system performance if the bandwidth is sufficient. In a more general processing pattern involving non-streaming applications, each FPGA is responsible for only a portion of the computation and the FPGAs must keep exchanging data during the run time of the application. The communication cost can be the bottleneck of such a system. The challenge is how to map and parallelize these applications to a multi-FPGA cloud computing platform in such a way that communication is minimized and speedup is maximized.
In this research, we build a framework to map garbled circuit applications, an implementation of SFE, to a cloud computing platform that has FPGA cards attached to computing nodes. The FPGAs on the node are able to communicate directly through the network. The framework consists of two parts: hardware design and software preprocessing. The hardware design integrates with the Xilinx UDP network stack enabling the capability to exchange data through the network and thus bypassing the processor and its software stack. The framework also takes advantage of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for high off-chip memory throughput. The levels of memory hierarchy available on the FPGA are used for caching both local data and incoming and outgoing network data. Preprocessing will generate the reordered batches of each layer needed for processing, efficient memory allocation and final memory layout. We also applied an effective partitioning algorithm to schedule executions to different FPGAs to minimize the communication between FPGAs. By generating different size of problems from the EMP-toolkit, we can demonstrate that this hardware-software co-design framework achieves nearly optimal two times speedup on a two-FPGA setup compared to a one-FPGA implementation. We explore extremely large examples that cannot be mapped to one-FPGA, proving that it is achievable to map large examples of billions of operations to this distributed heterogeneous system.
Committee:
Prof. Miriam Leeser(advisor)
Prof. Stratis Ioannidis(co-advisor)
Prof. Mieczyslaw Kokar

Lin Deng's PhD Proposal Review
2022-11-03 13:30 - 14:30
“On-chip and multiplexed metasurfaces for light manipulation”
Abstract:
Metasurfaces, which consist of two-dimensional subwavelength nanostructures that can locally manipulate the proprieties of light including amplitude, phase, and polarization, provide an unprecedented means to control optical waves in a prescribed manner. Different functionalities, such as structured light, holograms, and flat lenses, have been realized by metasurfaces. It is a pressing need to develop on-chip and multiplexed metasurfaces to further advance the practical applications of metasurfaces.
In this proposal review, I will discuss two metasurfaces designed with compact size and the ability to multiplex various information channels. The first one can realize mode conversion and wavefront shaping by integrating a C-shape metallic metasurface on top of a planar waveguide. By controlling the orientation of each C-shape nanoantenna, we can achieve mode conversion and focusing effect for the cross-polarized electric fields inside the waveguide. We demonstrated the design and simulation results of 16 scenarios of wideband transverse magnetic (TM) to transverse electric (TE) modes conversion with mode purity up to 98% as well as on-chip lenses at the wavelength of 1550 nm. The second device is to realize the precise control of the amplitude and phase at multiple channels in response to different incident angles and output polarization states by a single planar metasurface. With the help of the genetic algorithm, we designed and demonstrated all-dielectric metasurfaces composed of silicon nano-blocks that can produce multiple complex structured light beams when taking the angle of incidence and the polarization states into consideration. Our research is expected to substantially benefit the development of mode division multiplexing (MDM) as well as polarization-division multiplexing (PDM).
Committee:
Prof. Yongmin Liu (Advisor)

IISE Six Sigma Green Belt Certification
2022-11-04 - 2022-11-06
Six Sigma Green Belt Certification 6σ Six Sigma Green Belt Certification
Register to Learn methods and tools for increasing quality by reducing variability – applicable to all fields! All years and majors are welcome!
Make your resume stand out for co-ops and job searches.
Taught by Dr. Brian J Galli
Friday 11/4 from 4 – 8pm
Saturday and Sunday 11/6-7 from 9am – 5pm
(must attend all sessions)

Rising Tides Conference
2022-11-04 08:30 - 13:30 | Curry Student Center, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA, 02115, United States
This conference explores issues of racial and social justice in the context of environmental action to address climate change.
The event will be held Friday, November 4th from 8:30am-1:30pm in the Curry Ballroom on the second floor of Curry Student center, but please feel free to come in and out of the event at your convenience.
This conference is linked to Northeastern’s Myra Kraft Open Classroom, and to an environmental justice map exhibition at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. Engaging with civic community action toward emerging environmental policies brings forward issues of justice and social equality. This conference will address how citizens engage with environmental governance and how policymakers engage with equitable green development.
Our Noon keynote speaker is Senator Edward Markey, whose new Federal climate legislation includes $60 billion out of $370 billion to address issues of climate justice brought on by decades of racial, economic, and social discrimination. Morning presentations and discussions are linked to policy actions and community engagement by public officials, faculty, community activists, planners, and advocates addressing racial and social justice to address climate change.
RSVP

NanoSI Workshop
2022-11-04 13:00 - 16:00
The NSF sponsored Nano Systems Innovation (NanoSI) workshop will conduct a deep dive into infrastructure requirements to enable a unique national infrastructure for piezoelectric and hetero-integrated nano systems. The virtual workshop will bring together researchers, government, industry and foundry partners to identify the emerging needs for adaptable infrastructure that can address national research priorities in advanced hetero integration to post-CMOS and more than Moore devices. The workshop will concentrate on planning for infrastructure that can close the gap between the local research and prototyping capabilities of the universities with advanced semiconductor manufacturing activities with the ultimate goal of reducing the time for innovation and transition of the new foundational nano-system technologies that are going to be the at root of our nation’s economic strength, national security and technological standing in the years to come. The workshop will explore the community’s preferred pathways for accessing and engagement with the future infrastructure, management plans, and ideas to strengthen the community by extending access to underrepresented groups. Furthermore, the workshop will identify strategies to leverage the national facility to educate an experienced future workforce for semiconductor and advanced nanomanufacturing industries in the United States.
The NanoSI virtual workshop will include pre-recorded 8-minute presentations given by multiple stakeholders from academia, industry and government highlighting technological areas of interest and providing multiple perspectives on the value proposition of a national infrastructure for piezoelectric and hetero-integrated nano systems. These short presentations will be made available to the workshop attendees through the password-protected event web page by Friday October 28th, 2022. Taking inputs from this asynchronous session of the workshop, the organizers will prepare a report and present it to the attendees during a three-hours synchronous virtual session that will take place on Friday November 4th, 2022 at 1 – 4 pm EST. The report presentation will be followed by breakout discussion sessions focused on providing feedback and addressing outstanding questions.
Register Now

Tianyu Dai's PhD Dissertation Defense
2022-11-07 12:30 - 14:00
“Robust Data-Driven Control”
Abstract:
During the last two decades, data-driven control (DDC) has attracted growing attention in the control community. Unlike model-based control (MBC), which first uses the collected data to identify the system, then designs the controller according to the certainty equivalence principle, DDC skips the system identification (SYSID) step and leads to a control law directly from data. One crucial feature of DDC is that some fundamental limitations of MBC, such as uncertainty versus robustness, inevitable modeling error, and possible expensive cost of SYSID, are avoided in the DDC framework. These benefits enable the researcher to design controllers with better performance and accuracy.
Robust data-driven control (RDDC) as a branch of DDC has developed rapidly in recent years, focusing on the data-driven controller design for the state space model. It aims to solve the following problem: given a single trajectory of noisy data and a few priors of the model structure, how to design a robust state feedback controller to stabilize the system with unknown dynamics, and in addition, to meet some performance criteria. By robust, we mean the learned controller can stabilize all possible systems residing in the set compatible with the noisy data.
This dissertation aims to summarize our contributions to the RDDC field. We focus on the L_infinity bounded noise, and the main idea hinges on duality theory to establish the connection between two sets, one compatible with the noisy data and the second satisfying some design properties such as stability or optimality. Our main results show that for all possible systems compatible with the data, the data-driven control law can be obtained by solving a convex optimization problem. In the dissertation, we propose RDDC algorithms for linear, switched, and nonlinear systems with process noise, extend results for error-in-variables (a more general case), and discuss a worst-case optimal estimation of the trajectory of a switched linear system.
Committee:
Prof. Mario Sznaier (Advisor)
Prof. Octavia Camps
Prof. Bahram Shafai
Prof. Eduardo Sontag

Giuseppe Michetti's PhD Dissertation Defense
2022-11-08 15:30 - 16:30 | 432 ISEC, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, United States
“RF Front-End Components based on Linear-Time-Variant Modulation of Piezoelectric MEMS Resonators”
Abstract:
Throughout the last decade, radio frequency (RF) components for over-the-air communication and sensing have been subject to sustained market pressure to adapt to the novel trends such as spectrum sharing, programmability, and low-power operation. When these features are required in chip-scale RF hardware, innovative solutions are necessary as conventional materials and techniques become bottlenecks for next-generation radios. In this work, we explore advanced wave manipulation circuital techniques such as Linear-Time-Variant (LTV) networks in conjunction with high-performance RF passives based on Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) to address some of these challenges. Leveraging the unique spectral characteristic of RF MEMS resonators, we show some components based on LTV concepts, for novel RF systems with advanced spectral efficiency and real-time reconfigurability.
Using AlN and ScAlN thin film MEMS resonators as building blocks, we propose a design technique for MEMS-based LTV Circulators and Self Interference Cancelers, enabling chip-scaled RF full-duplex systems to enable efficient use of the RF spectrum with up to 47.5 dB cancellation in an 8 % bandwidth (BW) at 450 MHz. We introduce and validate experimentally MEMS-based LTV BW-tunable filters with high linearity (>30 dBm), and 5:1 BW tunability, designed for several bands from 100 MHz to 2.7 GHz for emerging paradigms such as software-defined-radios and cooperative networks. We also introduce MEMS-based near-zero energy RF front-end for the Internet-of-Things (IoT), implementing RF energy harvesting to power up a resonant Wake-Up Receiver circuit, with an experimental demonstration at (800 MHz) for deployment in remote sensor networks and emerging IoT wearable applications.
Along with the experimental validation of the proposed components, analytical and numerical tools are also discussed for future development and research.
Committee:
Prof. Matteo Rinaldi (Advisor)
Prof. Cristian Cassella
Prof. Andrea Alù

Leveraging the Natural Cellular and Biomolecular Interactions in Blood for the Design of Targeted, Anti-Inflammatory Particle Therapeutics
2022-11-09 12:00 - 13:00 | 236 Richards, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, United States
ChE Seminar Series Presents:
Dr. Omolola (Lola) Eniola-Adefeso
Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Education in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
Abstract:
Vascular-targeted particle therapeutics offer the possibility of increased drug effectiveness while minimizing side effects often associated with systemic drug administration. Factors that influence the likelihood of targeted particle therapeutics to reach the vascular wall are the ability to identify: 1) a disease-specific target, 2) the appropriate drug carrier type and geometry for efficient interaction with the vascular wall, and 3) a drug-carrier combination that allows for the desired release of the targeted therapeutics. Our work focuses on probing the role of particle geometry, material chemistry, and blood rheology/dynamics on the ability of vascular-targeted drug carriers to interact with the blood vessel wall – an important consideration that will control the effectiveness of drug targeting regardless of the targeted disease or delivered therapeutically. This presentation will highlight the carrier-blood cell interactions that affect drug carrier binding to the vascular wall and alter critical neutrophil functions in disease. The talk will present the material design parameters for optimal drug carriers’ design for active and passive use in treating acute lung injury and other inflammatory diseases.
Bio:
Dr. Omolola (Lola) Eniola-Adefeso is the University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering and the Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Education in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She received a doctoral degree (2004) in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. She was a postdoctoral associate in the Pediatrics/Leukocyte Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Eniola-Adefeso joined the faculty of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in 2006, where she runs the Cell Adhesion and Drug Delivery Laboratory. Since she arrived at Michigan, Dr. Eniola-Adefeso has received several honors and awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, American Heart Association Innovator Award, and most recently, the BMES MIDCAREER Award. She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the Biomedical Engineering Society and serves as Deputy Editor for Science Advances. Her research is currently funded by multiple grants from the NIH NHLBI, American Heart Association, and the National Science Foundation.

Bernard Herrera-Soukup PhD Dissertation Defense
2022-11-09 12:00 - 13:00 | 432 ISEC, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, 02115, United States
“Ferroelectric Micro-machined Ultrasonic Transducers for Biomedical and Processing In-Sensor Applications”
Abstract:
Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (PMUTs) are Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) devices that have become an established technology in applications such as range-finding, fingerprint sensing and imaging due to their capability of ultrasonic transduction in a miniaturized footprint, easily amenable to create large arrays. However, their application space still remains quite open. PMUTs are well fitted to applications in liquid media, such as implantable and underwater devices, due to their inherent acoustic matching and wide bandwidth. Thus, in the first part of the dissertationl, we explore novel applications such as PMUT-based intra-body and underwater networking, power transfer, source localization, wide-band matching and duplexing.
Aluminum Nitride (AlN) has been the material of choice for our PMUTs due to its biocompatibility and possibility of single-chip integration with supporting CMOS circuitry. Scandium doping of AlN thin films has recently been demonstrated to increase piezoelectric coupling coefficients while introducing ferroelectric properties in the material. However, a simultaneous use of both capabilities has not been demonstrated in the state-of-the-art. The ability of having distinct ferroelectric states, that alter the mechanical performance of the devices, allows for Processing-In-Sensor features and provides the building blocks for neuromorphic signal processing capabilities. The second part of the dissertation explores the AlScN material integration into novel Ferroelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (FMUTs) and their emerging application space.

Committee:
Prof. Matteo Rinaldi (Advisor)
Prof. Tommaso Melodia
Prof. Cristian Cassella

MS Electrical and Computer Engineering Programs at the Roux Institute
2022-11-10 08:00 - 09:00
Join Roux Institute ECE faculty as they present a webinar on ECE offerings in Portland, Maine. This webinar will take place on November 10 from 8:00 to 9:00 am. Registration is required.

Using NVivo for Literature Reviews Webinar
2022-11-10 12:00 - 13:00
CEE GSC & QSR Internation Presents:Scholarly Writing Webinar:Using NViVo for Literature Reviews
When: November 10, 2022 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) QSR International, the developers of NVivo are presenting a complimentary webinar on Scholarly Writing focused on how NVivo and reference management software, like Citavi can assist you throughout the writing process from literature review, outline, and first draft to publishing. They (QSR International) promise you will never have writer’s block again!The webinar will cover how you can use the power of NVivo & Citavi together to assist with your writing in the following ways:

Review of Literature: Easily search databases and websites for references to include in your project
Pre-Writing: Efficiently organize and annotate literature, and highlight critical quotes, comments, and ideas across many articles while developing a detailed outline
Writing: Export your outline with the content you highlighted into a Word document in seconds, taking you from the first draft to final publication
Revise & Edit: With Word integration, organize content and manage citations, plus references seamlessly
Publish: Speed up the writing process to help you publish faster and more often
Collaborate: Enable research groups of any size to work together – worldwide in the cloud.

NViVo is available for download by following these instructions.
REGISTER HERE FOR ZOOM WEBINAR

Guanying Sun's PhD Proposal Review
2022-11-11 10:30 - 11:30
“Optimizing Reconstruction for Mm-Wave Body Scanner Imaging”

Abstract:
In the past decades, due to evolving threats, passenger screening has become an important secure measure at airport and other secure locations. Numerous passenger screening techniques have been developed by researchers in both academia and industry to detect threats from explosives and weapons. Among these developments, the multistatic mm-wave radar Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) system was developed at Northeastern University. A problem with this system is the sidelobes from its physical limitations, such as the finite aperture extent and the violation of the Nyquist sampling criterion by the sparse array. Therefore, it is important to suppress the sidelobes so that to improve the quality of the reconstruction image. In this proposal, we investigate two categories of methods, one is based on post-processing, and the other is based on system configuration optimization. In the former category four methods are developed, while in the latter two methods are proposed.
In the first category, the first method is the phase coherence method which is designed to weight the coherent sum based on the phase diversity of the reconstructed solutions for different transmitters. In this method, two ways are considered to construct the Phase Coherence Factor (PCF). The first way is to use the information of wrapped phase, and the second way is to use the information of unwrapped phase, which is more intuitive than the first way. The second method is the coherence factor related method. Three coherence-factor based methods are analyzed and then incorporated into the imaging procedure of our nearfield millimeter-wave radar security scanning system. The third method is SNR-dependent coherence factor method, which takes SNR into consideration when forming the coherence factor. This method can generate better results than the pure coherence-factor based methods by choosing a proper set of parameters. The fourth method is the block-weighting algorithm where the neighbor weight amplifies bright areas and attenuates dark areas, while the block keeps the influence to local. The effectiveness of these methods has been verified with both simulation and measurement data.
In the second category, the first method is optimizing receiver positions via PSF-based multi-objective optimization. Two metrics for measuring image quality of the PSF are proposed and defined as the objective functions. The solution-selection metric is introduced to select the desired solution from the numerous Pareto-optimal solutions. Simulation shows that the optimized receiver design generates images with lower sidelobe level than the uniform receiver design. The second method is the dual-frequency radar design, where a dual frequency, wideband antenna array is designed by combining a high frequency subarray with a low frequency subarray. The image of the dual frequency array is obtained by multiplying the images of the two subarrays. The PSF analysis and the system imaging simulation show that the grating lobes are significantly reduced for the dual frequency array with fewer radar modules/elements than the conventional array. This design will make the new generation system superior to the conventional scanning system.

Committee:
Prof. Carey Rappaport (Advisor)
Prof. Edwin Marengo
Prof. Jose Martinez-Lorenzo

Funding for Commercialization
2022-11-14 11:00 - 12:00
Commercialization of grant-funded research provides additional opportunities for Northeastern inventors to increase the impact of their work. Financial support is available to help you move your research out of the lab and into the hands of the people who will benefit. Join the College of Engineering and Center for Research Innovation (CRI) for a virtual panel discussion on procuring funding for commercialization. Our panel will include perspectives from faculty who have succeeded (and struggled) to secure commercialization-oriented funding. In addition, the panel will highlight financial support available at Northeastern to advance technologies towards commercialization including the CRI’s Spark Fund.
Moderator and panelists include:

Katie Hemphill – Director of Technology Ventures & Talent Network at the CRI
Sara Rouhanifard – Assistant Professor of Bioengineering, Co-Founder of ViralNPQ
Yi Zheng – Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Founder and President of Planck Energies
Randall Erb – Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Co-Founder of Boston Materials, Fortify, and Fourier

Register for the event

Crypto Event ZCash Researchers and Development Talk
2022-11-14 18:00 - 19:00
Location in Shillman Hall, Rm. 420 and Hybrid. Scan QR code in attached flyer to join via Zoom.
Ian Sagstetler is the communications and community manager at Electric Coin Company, the creator of Zcash. He is also founder of ZecHub, an education channel focused on the Zcash protocol. His focus is on amplifying those working to ensure humanity has access to censor-resistant money.
Creative Workshop Questions? Contact Parth Gargava, Parthgargava22@gmail.com

Raana Sabri Khiavi's PhD Proposal Review
2022-11-15 14:00 - 15:00
“Theory and design of spatiotemporally-modulated metasurfaces for comprehensive control of light”
Abstract:
Photonic metasurfaces are key platforms for manipulating almost all properties of light such as amplitude, phase, polarization, wave vector, pulse shape, and orbital angular momentum in a sub-wavelength dimension. They are capable of providing unprecedented modulation of wavefront through imparting spatial or temporal variation on the incoming wave. Recently, considerable efforts have been devoted to design active metasurfaces that enable real-time tuning and post-fabrication control of the optical response. Toward achieving this goal, electro-optically tunable materials such as doped semiconductors, multiple-quantum-wells (MQWs), and atomically thin sheets are incorporated into the building blocks of the geometrically-fixed metasurfaces. Despite the significant progress in this field, there has been several limitations imparted to the optical response of such so-called quasi-static metasurfaces. Remarkably, the strong resonant dispersion in such metasurfaces leads to narrow spectral and angular bandwidths. In addition, the co-varying amplitude and phase response as well as the limited phase modulation give rise to undesired artefacts manifested on their output profiles. The slow response time to the external stimuli is another drawback that restricts the performance of the metasurfaces. Introducing time into the external stimulus of the metasurfaces, as an additional degree of freedom, offers a way out to surmount the obstacles facing the quasi-static metasurfaces. Modulation in time enables myriad of exotic space-time scattering phenomena, where possibility to break the reciprocity and generation/manipulation of the sideband scattered signals offer the most appealing functionalities. The objective of this work is to investigate the less explored mechanisms for yielding reconfigurable plasmonic metasurfaces in both space and time. Several realizations of quasi-static and time-modulated devices integrated with the electro-optical materials such as indium-tin-oxide (ITO) with the potential wide phase modulation is presented. It has been shown that time-modulated metasurfaces are superior to their quasi-static counterparts in terms of providing access to the dispersionless modulation-induced phase shift spanning over 2π as well as the constant amplitude at the sidebands. Novel and unique applications of space-time photonic metasurfaces by spatiotemporal manipulation of light for all-angle, broadband beam steering, suppressing the undesired sidelobes, high speed continuous beam scanning, and dispersionless dynamic wavefront engineering are studied.
Committee:
Prof. Hossein Mosallaei (Advisor)
Prof. Charles DiMarzio
Prof. Siddhartha Ghosh

BioE Seminar Series Presents: Ryan Flynn
2022-11-16 12:00 - 13:00
Department of Bioengineering Seminar Series presents
Ryan Flynn, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Boston Children’s Hospital’s Stem Cell Program and Harvard University’s Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology Department, Boston MA
“GlycoRNAs: bridging the gap between glycobiology and RNA biology”
Wednesday, November 16th, 2022
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST
105 Shillman Hall
ABSTRACT:
Glycans modify lipids and proteins to mediate inter- and intramolecular interactions across all domains of life. RNA is not thought to be a major target of glycosylation. Here, we challenge this view with evidence that mammals use RNA as a third scaffold for glycosylation. Using chemical and biochemical approaches, we found that conserved small noncoding RNAs bear sialylated glycans. These ‘‘glycoRNAs’’ were present in multiple cell types and mammalian species, in cultured cells, and in vivo. GlycoRNA assembly depends on canonical N-glycan biosynthetic machinery and results in structures enriched in sialic acid and fucose. Analysis of living cells revealed that the majority of glycoRNAs were present on the cell surface and can interact with anti-dsRNA antibodies and members of the Siglec receptor family. New insights into the molecular nature of glycoRNAs will be presented, which help to solidify the existence of a direct interface between RNA biology and glycobiology, and an expanded role for RNA in extracellular biology.
BIO:
Ryan is a New Jersey native who completed his undergraduate training at MIT, where he worked in the lab of Phillip Sharp on small noncoding RNA biology. Subsequently, he moved to Stanford where he completed his M.D. and Ph.D. with Howard Chang developing methods to study RNA-protein interactions. From this work, he won the Weintraub Graduate Student Award. As a post-doc, he changed fields to learn both chemistry and glycobiology with Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford as a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Postdoctoral Fellow. At the beginning of 2021, the Flynn Lab opened at Boston Children’s Hospital in the Stem Cell Program and the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard University. The Flynn Lab is currently focused on advancing methods and mechanisms surrounding the glycoRNA molecule, which operates at the interface of RNA biology and the secretory pathway.

Distinguished Seminar - David Horsley
2022-11-17 13:30 - 14:40 | 136 ISEC, 360 Huntington Ave, 136 ISEC, Boston, MA, 02115, United States
“Systems Based on Ultrasonic MEMS: Commercialization and Future Directions “
David Horsley
Professor, University of California, Davis Adjunct Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Abstract
The increasing maturity of thin-film piezoelectric materials and the MEMS manufacturing ecosystem has enabled the rapid development of sensor systems based on piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs). In this talk, I will describe work by my research group over the last decade to develop and commercialize PMUT-based systems for consumer electronics applications, starting with air-coupled PMUTs used for time-of-flight (ToF) range-finding and human presence sensing. These ToF sensors were commercialized by my startup, Chirp Microsystems (now part of TDK), and are used today in various products such as smart-locks, robot vacuum cleaners, and laptops. We subsequently developed an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor based on the monolithic integration of PMUTs with CMOS that is used for biometric authentication in consumer products today. A common feature of the ToF sensor and the fingerprint sensor is that they are systems that combine MEMS, integrated circuits, and algorithms. The ability to realize a complete ultrasonic system on chip (SoC) opens new research opportunities in areas such as portable medical imaging systems for point-of care ultrasound (POCUS) as well as wearable ultrasonic devices.
Biography
David A. Horsley received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998. He is a Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Davis, and an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is co-director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC). He is also co-founder and CTO of Chirp Microsystems Inc. (a TDK Group Company), a manufacturer of ultrasonic sensors using MEMS technology. Dr. Horsley was Co-Chair of the 2016 IEEE Sensors Conference, Co-Chair of the 2017 Transducers Research Foundation Napa Microsystems Workshop, and Co-Chair of the 2020 IEEE MEMS Conference. Dr. Horsley is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the UC Davis Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, the 2016 NSF I/UCRC Association’s Schwarzkopf Award for Technological Innovation, and the 2018 East Bay Innovation Award. He has authored or co-authored over 200 scientific papers and holds over 30 patents.

PhD Dissertation Defense Shivang Aggarwal
2022-11-18 11:00 - 12:00
Location: ISEC 332
“Towards Reliable, High Capacity mmWave Wireless LANs for Mobile Devices”
Abstract:
The IEEE 802.11ad standard, with its 14 GHz of unlicensed spectrum around 60 GHz, is touted as one of the key technologies for building the next generation of WLANs that will enable high throughput demanding mobile applications. However, there have been serious concerns regarding the susceptibility of mmWave links to mobility and blockage as well as smartphone energy consumption at Gigabit scale data rates.
In this dissertation, first, through extensive measurement campaigns with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices as well as a highly configurable software-defined radio (SDR) based testbed, we characterize the performance and energy efficiency of mobile devices operating in 60 GHz WLANs and identify problems that prevent wide adoption of the mmWave technology in such devices. Then, using the insights from these measurement campaigns, we design solutions to tackle these problems and prototype them for real-world evaluation.
This dissertation makes the following contributions:
(i) We extensively study the performance and power consumption of 802.11ad on commercial smartphones. We focus on the specific aspects affected by unique smartphone features, e.g., antenna placement or user mobility patterns, and compare the performance against that achieved by 802.11ad laptops in previous studies. We also compare 802.11ad against its main competitors 802.11ac and 802.11ax. Overall, our results show that 802.11ad is better able to address the needs of emerging bandwidth-intensive applications in smartphones than its 5 GHz counterparts. At the same time, we identify several key research directions towards realizing its full potential.
(ii) We extensively study the two main link adaptation mechanisms in 802.11ad, rate adaptation (RA) and beamforming. We undertake a large measurement campaign using an SDR-based testbed giving us complete access to the PHY and MAC layers. We look at the two link adaptation mechanisms separately and study the effectiveness of a few RA and beamforming heuristics. Further, look at the interaction between the two link adaptation mechanisms, specifically, which mechanism should be triggered when and in what order. We design a practical, standard-compliant link adaptation framework that leverages ML and PHY layer information to determine when to trigger link adaptation and which adaptation mechanism to use.
(iii) To address the issues with mmWave link reliability, we explore the use of multiple frequency bands to couple the performance of 802.11ad with the reliability of legacy WiFi. To accomplish this, we develop a Multipath TCP (MPTCP) scheduler to efficiently use both interfaces simultaneously in order to achieve a higher overall throughput as well as seamlessly switch to a single interface when the other one fails. Further, we port MPTCP to a dual-band (5 GHz/60 GHz) smartphone, evaluate its power consumption, and provide recommendations towards the design of an energy-aware MPTCP scheduler.
(iv) To enable high user QoE, and maintain that in the face of ever-changing network conditions, applications such as virtual reality (VR) and video streaming perform quality adaptation. A key component of quality adaptation is throughput prediction. Thus, we extensively study the predictability of the network throughput of an 802.11ad WLAN in downloading data to an 802.11ad- enabled mobile device under varying mobility patterns and orientations of the mobile device.
(v) With a dramatic increase in throughput requirements of applications and AP-user density in the near future, multi-user multi-stream communication in the 60 GHz band is required. To this end, the IEEE 802.11ay standard, successor to the current 802.11ad standard, includes support for simultaneous transmission over multiple data streams. Using an SDR-based testbed, we extensively study the performance of SU- and MU-MIMO in 60 GHz WLANs in multiple environments, analyze the performance in each environment, identify the factors that affect it, and compare it against the performance of SISO. Finally, we propose two heuristics that perform both beam and user selection with low overhead while outperforming previously proposed approaches
Committee:
Prof. Dimitrios Koutsonikolas (Advisor)
Prof. Kaushik Chowdhury
Prof. Tommaso Melodia

COE FacDev Friday: Managing Your Finances and How COE can Help
2022-11-18 13:00 - 14:00

Interdisciplinary Women's Collaborative Hackathon
2022-11-19 08:00 - 22:00 | Curry Student Center, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA, 02115, United States
The IWC will be hosting our first annual Hackathon! This event will take place on November 19th from 8am-10pm in the Curry Student Center. It is open to women and non-binary undergraduate and graduate students and we welcome all experience levels. There will be corporate sponsors, free swag, and food is provided. All members from a team must sign up, even if the team is tentative. Please sign up if this is of interest, and we will be in touch with teams in early November.
Sign up here

Research Initiation: Analyzing inequities in undergraduate workforce opportunities between biomedical and other engineering disciplines
2022-11-21 12:00 - 13:00
Monday, November 21st at 12pm (VIRTUAL)

Please Register:
https://bit.ly/3MxqA0u
All attendees receive a FREE BOOK!
Abstract: Biomedical Engineering majors have been shown to exhibit higher rates of transfer to different engineering majors, lower rates of internship and career employment offers, and lower average starting salary compared to other engineering majors. These inequities in undergraduate workforce opportunities are having adverse effects on the professional formation of Biomedical Engineers. This NSF study seeks to initiate a characterization of the challenges in the university-to-industry pipeline through investigating workforce opportunity between biomedical engineers and three other engineering majors at a large Midwestern University.
Speaker 1: Tanya Nocera
Clinical Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering, The Ohio State University
Speaker 2: David Delaine
Assistant Professor, Engineering Education, The Ohio State University

Info Session: Dialogue in Turkey
2022-11-21 14:00 - 14:30
If you are interested in joining the Dialogue of Civilization program in Turkey (summer 1 2023), you can attend the Info Session which takes place on Mon 21st, from 2:00 pm – 2:30 pm. This event is hybrid and you can RSVP using this link.
Also, please visit the program brochure page for more information.
