Northeastern University College of Engineering

UCSC Graduate & Professional School Fair: Multiple Program Schools 2020
2020-10-22 09:00 - 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | MA
Join the Graduate School of Engineering and Northeastern West Coast Admissions teams at UC Santa Cruz. They will be available to answer your admissions and program questions. This event will take place on October 22, 2020 from 9:00am-12:00pm PT virtually.

Tau Beta Pi 2020 Virtual Recruiting Fair
2020-10-22 10:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
Representatives from the Graduate School of Engineering will be in attendance at Tau Beta Pi’s virtual convention. The admissions team will be available on October 22 from 10:00-5:00pm and will be able to answer all of your questions the graduate school experience. More information: https://tbp.org/conv/careerFair.cfm

East Coast Masters Alumni Panel on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
2020-10-22 18:30 - 21:00 (America/New_York)
On October 22nd, from 6:30-9pm EST, Graduate Student Services is hosting a virtual Alumni Panel on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Engineering Field for East Coast Master’s students this time around. Panelists are all graduates of COE and have a diverse range of experiences in Engineering. From 6:30-7:30pm, the panelists will discuss with one another their experiences regarding these topics, and from 7:30-8pm, students can ask the panelists any questions they have. Finally, from 8-9pm, an optional networking event with the panelists is available for students. The link to register/RSVP will be sent out shortly.

Bioengineering Works in Progress Student Seminar Series
2020-10-23 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
This virtual seminar series is an opportunity for Bioengineering graduate students to present their research. The first presenter is Kirstie Belanger from the Koppes lab. Title: “Investigating Specific Autonomic Cardiac Innervation in Micro-Physiological Systems”. Jason Derks from the Slavov lab. Title: “Nuclear Relocalization of Proteins in Single Macrophages upon Immunological Challenge”. Please email Danielle at d.freshnock@northeastern.edu for the link to the seminar.

ECE PhD Proposal Review: Yulun Zhang
2020-10-23 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York)
PhD Proposal Review: Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Image Restoration and Synthesis
Yulun Zhang
Location: Zoom Link
Abstract: In this presentation, I will introduce how to design powerful deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for efficient image restoration and synthesis tasks. Recently, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved great success for image restoration (IR) and provided hierarchical features at the same time. However, most deep CNN based IR models neglect to make full use of the hierarchical features from the original low-quality images, thereby resulting in relatively-low performance. We propose a novel and efficient residual dense network (RDN) to address this problem in IR. Then, we can make a better tradeoff between efficiency and effectiveness in exploiting the hierarchical features from all the convolutional layers.
We also observe that deeper networks for image SR are more difficult to train. The low-resolution inputs and features contain abundant low-frequency information, which is often treated equally across channels. Such an equal treatment for channels hence hinders the representational ability of CNNs. Residual in residual structure was proposed to firstly train very deep networks (over 400 layers) for image super-resolution. Attention mechanism (e.g., channel attention) is further explored in image restoration.
Plus, we investigate the feature representation in deep CNN for image synthesis, like image style transfer. Most existing methods treat the semantic patterns of style image uniformly. This treatment is not suitable for the real-world case and results unpleasing results on complex styles. In this presentation, we introduce a more flexible and general universal style transfer technique: multimodal style transfer (MST). We find the multimodal style representation and formulate style matching problem as an energy minimization one. Consequently, MST explicitly considers the matching of semantic patterns in content and style images. We also generalize MST to improve some existing methods.

TEDxNortheasternU 2020: Fast Forward, A Different Future
2020-10-24 12:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York)
On Saturday, October 24th from 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM ET, TEDxNortheasternU will be holding their flagship event – Fast Forward: A Different Future.
This event invites participants to envision the future and to inspire innovation while instilling the significance of reflection and evaluation throughout your journey.
Fast Forward: A Different Future aspires to curate an interdisciplinary experience that encourages you to step out of your comfort zone while interacting with the Northeastern community.
This virtual conference is supported by Northeastern’s College of Engineering as well as other organizations at NU.
Use this link to access the event and to receive more information!
Event page: https://hopin.to/events/tedxnortheasternu2020
The speakers who are associated with COE are:

Shadi Emam (will be talking around 2:05)
Riddhi Samtani – Research Fellow for COE (will be talking around 4:00)
Vidhan Bhaiya (will be talking around 12:20)

ECE PhD Proposal Review: Kunpeng Li
2020-10-27 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
PhD Proposal Review: Attention Mechanism in Deep Learning for Visual Recognition
Kunpeng Li
Location: Zoom Link
Abstract: Deep learning models have achieved great success in various tasks for visual recognition such as image classification, semantic segmentation, visual semantic matching etc. Instead of just treating them as black boxes, recently, a tremendous of efforts have been put into the explanations of how these models work and bridging the gap between deep neural networks and human cognition systems. Visual attention is one of the efficient ways to explain the network’s decision by highlighting the regions of images that are responsible for it. It is inspired by the attention mechanism of the human vision system to selectively focus on the salient features in a visual scene.
This thesis is on the visual attention in deep learning for visual recognition. For the first time, we make gradient-based attention maps a natural and explicit component in the training pipeline, such that they are end-to-end trainable. Then, we can provide guidance on the attention maps and guide the network to focus on correct things when learning concepts. Under mild assumptions, our method can be understood as a plug-in to existing convolutional neural networks to improve their generalization performance. Besides, the improved attention maps also help to provide better localization cues for weakly-supervised semantic segmentation task.
Moving a step toward higher-level visual understanding with natural language, we study the effectives of building visual reasoning models on top of the bottom-up attention regions, so that the learnt visual representations can better capture semantic concepts as in its corresponding text caption. Specifically, we first build up connections between attention regions and perform reasoning with Graph Convolutional Networks to generate region features with semantic relationships. Then, we propose to use the gate and memory mechanism to perform global semantic reasoning on these relationship-enhanced region features, select the discriminative information and gradually generate the representation for the whole scene. Evaluations have been conducted on MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets for the image-text matching task.

Engineering targeted therapeutics for breast cancer
2020-10-28 12:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
ChE Seminar Series Presents:
Debra Auguste, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering
Northeastern University, Boston, MA
“Engineering targeted therapeutics for breast cancer”
Abstract: Cells sense changes in their environment and respond by altering their gene expression. My lab investigates how cells manipulate membrane proteins, which has profound effects on disease progression. Cells orchestrate the density of proteins and lipids to govern adhesion and migration. From this knowledge, one can engineer drug delivery vehicles that complement the molecular patterns observed on cells to achieve strong, cooperative binding. I have employed these strategies in a model system of endothelial inflammation and in breast cancer metastasis. My lab has identified a new target and biomarker for triple negative breast cancer, examined the role of ligand/receptor cell adhesion by atomic force microscopy, and synthesized targeted drug delivery vehicles that demonstrate that nanoparticle ligand surface density alters gene expression.
Biography: Debra Auguste, PhD is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University. She received her S.B. in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1999 and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 2005. She was trained as a Post-Doctoral Associate at MIT under Institute Professor Robert Langer. Her interests include drug and gene delivery, targeted drug delivery, stimuli sensitive materials. Dr. Auguste is the principal investigator on grants from the National Institute of Health (NIH), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). She is a recipient of various awards including: the Presidential Early Career in Science and Engineering- 2013, the NIH Innovator-2012, NSF CAREER Award-2011, and the DARPA Young Faculty Award-2009. Dr. Auguste was elected as a Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society (2018) and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (2020). Dr. Auguste sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of PATHS UP at Texas A&M University and Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston. Dr. Auguste is on the Board of Directors for BMES. Dr. Auguste is co-chair of the BMES national meeting (2020).
Please email Alyssa Ramsey at a.ramsey@northeastern.edu for the link to the seminar.

BioE Seminar Series Presents: Blanka Sharma
2020-10-28 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Blanka Sharma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
“Engineering Biomaterials to Study and Modulate Inflammatory Mechanisms During Tissue Injury and Tumor Progression”
ABSTRACT:
Exciting advances have been made in the discovery of therapeutic molecules and cells to more effectively treat numerous devastating medical conditions. However, their successful application in patients is curtailed by significant challenges in effectively delivering these therapeutics where an injury or disease is localized. Dr. Sharma’s research program aims to address these challenges by engineering biomaterials capable of presenting biological signals in a site specific manner within the body. The first part of this talk will focus on drug delivery challenges for the treatment of osteoarthritis. Dr. Sharma will describe her group’s work to overcome barriers to effective drug delivery within joint, by exploiting specific nanoparticle-extracellular matrix interactions to improve tissue targeting and retention of therapeutic molecules within OA joints. Dr. Sharma will highlight a nanoparticle system that was engineered to target oxidative stress pathways in damaged articular cartilage via scavenging of reactive oxygen species, resulting in the protection of cartilage viability and tissue structure. The second part of this talk will focus on cell delivery challenges in cancer immunotherapies, whereby solid tumors create a local immunosuppressive microenvironment that diminish immune cell surveillance and facilitate tumor progression. Dr. Sharma’s laboratory is applying biomaterials to understand how the tumor microenvironment impacts the homing and activation of natural killer (NK) cells, and developing RNA delivery strategies to harness their cancer killing functions. Mitigating dysfunctional inflammatory mechanisms is key to both tissue remodeling and cancer progression, and Dr. Sharma’s group works at the intersection of these fields.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Sharma is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Florida. Her research investigates fundamental biomaterial-cell interactions to develop targeted drug and cell delivery systems for applications ranging from tissue repair to cancer therapy. Dr. Blanka Sharma received her undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and her postdoctoral training at the Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland, OH). Dr. Sharma served as Director of Research for Cartilix Inc. from 2005-2009, a start-up company based on her doctoral research, where she worked towards clinical translation of a hydrogel technology for cartilage repair in the knee. After starting her faculty position in 2014 at the University of Florida, Dr. Sharma was featured by the American Society for Engineering Education as one of “20 Under 40” Outstanding Junior Faculty in the U.S. More recently, Dr. Sharma received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award (2019). In recognition of her teaching, mentorship, and research, Dr. Sharma received the Pramod P. Khargonekar Junior Faculty Award for Excellence in 2020 from the UF College of Engineering.
If interested in attending, please email Elizabeth Chesley at e.chesley@northeastern.edu for the Zoom link.

ChE Seminar Series Presents: Sara Hashmi
2020-10-28 12:30 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
ChE Seminar Series Presents:

Sara Hashmi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering
Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Abstract/Bio: Information not available at this time
Please email Alyssa Ramsey at a.ramsey@northeastern.edu for the link to the seminar.

Transforming an Engineering Idea into a Business: Idea, Learn, Execute, Risk, Persist
2020-10-29 18:00 - 19:30 (America/New_York)
Join the Galante Program and MassChallenge Winners, Reza Amin and Leila Daneshmandi, on October 29th from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM to learn about their entrepreneurial journey starting with an idea that then transformed into startups.
Reza Amin is the CEO and founder at Bastion and co-founder at Encapsulate. Since 2013 he was working on the design and development of Lab-on-a-chip platforms for medical diagnostics. During his entrepreneurial journey, he has won several competitions and fellowships.
Leila Daneshmandi is a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Connecticut and the co-founder and COO of Encapsulate. She is currently a General Electric Fellow for Innovation at UConn’s School of Engineering and was recently selected as a 2020 Women of Innovation Finalist by the Connecticut Technology Council and Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology. More recently and under her leadership, Encapsulate was awarded the prestigious “Technology in Space Prize,” valued at $653k, from The International Space Station (ISS) U.S. National Laboratory in partnership with Boeing. Through this award, Encapsulate will have the opportunity to deploy their technology onto the International Space Station.
Attend this virtual event to learn more about their inspiring story! Please RSVP.

Pumpkins with Graduate Women in Science and Engineering (GWiSE)
2020-10-29 18:00 - 20:00 (America/New_York)
Keep calm, carve a pumpkin, carry on!
Thursday 10/29 at 6:00 PM on MS Teams, join the GWiSE community on Teams for some virtual fall festivities! Costumes and custom backgrounds encouraged!
We will be carving, painting, and/or coloring pumpkins! Everything is BYO! If you want to color a pumpkin we will have pdfs that you can print or color in MS paint.
If you’d like to paint a pumpkin, be sure to have the following items prepared for painting: A small hard pumpkin that fits in your hand, some newspaper, Marker, Paint, brushes, paper towels, and a cup of water.
If you’d like to carve a pumpkin, be sure to have the following items prepared: A towel, marker, spoon, sharp knives (1 short, 1 long), a bowl big enough to fit pumpkin in, and a Pumpkin! It should be 7+ lbs. Your hands should not be able to wrap around more than ½ of the pumpkin.
The picture below is the MINIMUM size.

Halloween Themed Presentations with CEE GSC
2020-10-29 20:00 - 22:00 (America/New_York)
You’re invited to the Civil and Environmental Department Graduate Student Halloween Social
Thursday 10/29 @ 8 PM on Zoom
Costumes and custom zoom backgrounds are encouraged!! To accommodate for the virtual environment, we are going to do Presentation Karaoke with a winner’s prize.
Presentation Karaoke is where volunteers improvise some funny stories over a presentation as if they’d designed it. The theme for Presentation Karaoke will be ‘Halloween.’
Feel free to simply attend and listen to the fun presentations and stories if you don’t want to actively participate.

ECE PhD Dissertation Defense: Ran Liu
2020-10-30 11:00 - 12:00 (America/New_York)
PhD Dissertation Defense: Optimal Proactive Services with Uncertain Predictions
Ran Liu
Location: Zoom Link
Abstract: With the evolution of technologies such as machine learning and data science, proactive services with the aid of predictive information have been recognized as a promising method to exploit network bandwidth, storage, and computation resources to achieve improved user experiences, especially delay performance.
Specifically, services can be processed proactively when the system is lightly loaded, with the results stored to meet user demand in the future.
Our primary goal in the thesis is to investigate the fundamental performance improvement that can be achieved from proactive services under uncertain predictions. We aim to analyze the queueing behavior of proactive systems under certain proactive strategies and characterize the improvement in terms of the limiting fraction of proactive work and the limiting average delay.
In the first work, we analytically investigate the problem of how to efficiently utilize uncertain predictive information to design proactive caching strategies with provably good access-delay characteristics.
First, we derive an upper bound for the average amount of proactive service per request that the system can support.
Then we analyze the behavior of a family of threshold-based proactive strategies with a Markov chain, which shows that the average amount of proactive service per request can be maximized by properly selecting the threshold.
Finally, we propose the UNIFORM strategy, which is the threshold-based strategy with the optimal threshold, and show that it outperforms the commonly used Earliest-Deadline-First (EDF) type proactive strategies in terms of delay.
We perform extensive numerical experiments to demonstrate the influence of thresholds on delay performance under the threshold-based strategies, and specifically, compare the EDF strategy and the UNIFORM strategy to verify our results.
In the second work, we study a more generalized proactive service problem with a more generalized service model and derive explicit solutions on the limiting average fraction of proactive work and the limiting average delay in closed-form expressions.
In this work, we analytically investigate how to optimally take advantage of under-utilized network resources for proactive services with the aid of uncertain predictive information.
Specifically, we first derive an upper bound on the fraction of services that can be completed proactively by a single-server system.
Then we analyze a family of fixed-probability (FIXP) proactive strategies in two proactive systems, namely the Genie-Aided system and the Realistic Proactive system.
We analyze the asymptotic behaviors of the FIXP strategies by modeling a Markov process and the corresponding embedded Markov Chain.
We obtain optimal FIXP strategies in both systems and prove that the optimal FIXP strategies maximize the limiting fraction of proactive service among all proactive strategies and minimize average delay among FIXP strategies.
We perform extensive numerical experiments to demonstrate the influence of the parameter of FIXP on the performance of the limiting fraction of proactive service and the limiting average delay in both proactive systems and verify our theoretical results in multiple scenarios.

10 Advanced EndNote Features
2020-10-30 12:00 - 12:45 (America/New_York)
Start your fall 2020 research off on the right foot with Snell Library’s series of online workshops about citation management! In this session, learn how advanced features in EndNote can help you manage citations for yourself or your research group.
Register here: bit.ly/citationmgmtworkshops

Bioengineering Works in Progress Student Seminar Series
2020-10-30 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
This virtual seminar series is an opportunity for Bioengineering graduate students to present their research. The first presenter is Ronak Ansaripour from the Carrier lab, title: “Controlling extracellular matrix environment in guiding 3D Retinal Organoid formation”. The second presenter is Alexander Grath from the Dai lab, title: “Directly Reprogramming Fibroblasts into Functional Endothelial Cells”.
Please email Danielle at d.freshnock@northeastern.edu for the link to the seminar.

ECE PhD Proposal Review: Ya Guo
2020-11-02 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York)
PhD Proposal Review: Power Optimization and Management of PV Grid-Connected Microgrid in Energy Market
Ya Guo
Location: Zoom Link
Abstract: Microgrids can integrate renewable energy resources (RES), such as photovoltaics (PV) and wind energy generation, with the main power grid to provide reliable, secure and affordable energy. Fortunately, the electricity markets have evolved to facilitate RES participation. One major challenge lies in how to manage power and energy flow within grid-connected microgrid system, to optimize financial gains while maintaining high reliability. This becomes challenging since electricity trading policies and tariffs vary by utility companies from area to area. Furthermore, RES are mostly intermittent sources. Adding additional energy storage systems (ESS) into microgrids becomes a vital solution to mitigating the energy production intermittency, as well as providing energy backup in emergency. Battery ESS (BESS) are deployed on a large scale in grid-connected installations worldwide. Optimal operation of the energy storage system also becomes important for microgrid end-users to ensure that they will at least recover BESS operating cost. Moreover, there always exist uncertainties in RES power generation, load power consumption, and even dynamic electricity pricing. It is vital to deal with the forecasted errors in real-time. Developing proper uncertainty characterization can better facilitate the whole system power management to limit the negative influences of these uncertainties.
In this research, dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is proposed to forecast the global optimal solution to power flow dispatch of PV grid-connected microgrid. Various electricity pricing structures, including fixed pricing, time-of-use (TOU) pricing and real-time pricing (RTP) are explored for customers in different areas. The battery nonlinear charging/discharging degradation model is also exploited for system power optimization. The objective is to achieve the minimum microgrid system operation cost, in other words, the maximum economic benefits for end-users. Besides, this research proposes power control methods to implement forecasted optimal power schedule, as well as dealing with errors among forecast and real-time PV, load and RTP. Rule-based (RB) algorithm is also studied as a baseline for comparison. Moreover, uncertainty characterization for PV, load and dynamic pricing will be developed using Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS), and stochastic optimization approach will be explored in cooperation with these uncertainties.

Engineered Models of the Enteric-Gut-Axis
2020-11-04 12:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
ChE Seminar Series Presents:
Abigail N. Koppes, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering
Affiliate in Biology and Bioengineering
“Engineered Models of the Enteric-Gut-Axis”
Abstract: The gut-brain-axis is a complex bi-directional communication pathway between the gastrointestinal tract, the enteric nervous system (ENS), and the central nervous system (CNS) that is implicated in not only gastrointestinal function but also cognitive tasks like memory and decision making. Gastrointestinal flora has also been implicated in alterations of brain function and behavior, however, mechanisms behind the gut-to-brain communication remain poorly understood. To investigate the mechanisms for epithelial/neural interactions in the gastrointestinal tract and understand the impact of alterations in neural activity in response to intestinal contents, we are developing in vitro humanized culture models of the enteric-gut axis. These platforms, termed “Microphysiological Systems or Organ-Chips” have generated interest from academia and industry as these physiological models may augment drug and basic biological discoveries. However, the lack of rapid, scalable, and facile manufacturing techniques may limit the widespread use of organs-on-chips. Here I will discuss a novel laser-cut and assembly-based fabrication method for simple, and cost-effective thermoplastic organ-chips. It has also been proposed that seeding patient-derived cells will enable personalized medicine, but current intestine-on-a-chip models often utilize immortalized cells and rarely include support cells such as enteric neurons. Finally, I will discuss the culture and differentiation of a primary, human epithelial monolayer from patient-derived intestinal organoids for on-chip studies that recapitulate the heterogeneous gut population, and the impact of trophic cross-talk between the epithelium and enteric populations in static models.
Biography: Dr. Abigail Koppes joined the department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in 2014 where her group, the Advanced Biomaterials for Neuroengineering Laboratory (ABNEL), harnesses biochemical engineering methods to address challenges in nervous system disorders and dysfunction. She was the recipient of the NIH R21 Trailblazer in 2017, is a co-investigator on a 2019 AHA Innovative Project Award and is a co-investigator on a 2016 NIH Biomedical Research Partnership R01 between Northeastern, MIT, and Boston Children’s Hospital. She received the 2020 BMES Rita Shaffer Young Investigator and CMBE Young Innovator Award in 2020. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York in 2013. Her doctoral research with Dr. Deanna Thompson focused on using electrical stimulation to manipulate neural and supportive glial cell behavior for improved repair following peripheral nervous system injuries. In 2013, Dr. Koppes joined the Advanced Drug Delivery Research Laboratory with Dr. Rebecca Carrier as the Northeastern University NSF ADVANCE Future Faculty Fellow and held a joint appointment at Schepen’s Eye Research Institute and Harvard Medical School with Dr. Michael Young and as a visiting scientist in Dr. Douglas Lauffenburger’s Molecular Cell Bioengineering group at MIT. At Northeastern Dr. Koppes enjoys teaching Design 1 Lab (Unit Operations Transport I) for undergraduate engineers and Design of Experiments and Ethical Research for graduate students, where she is a member of the DEI and graduate committees, as well as has mentored over 40 undergraduates in the laboratory. She also currently serves on the BMES Diversity Committee.
Please email Alyssa Ramsey at a.ramsey@northeastern.edu for the link to the seminar.

BioE Seminar Series Presents: Leyla Esfandiari
2020-11-04 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
Leyla Esfandiari, Ph.D.
Assistant professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati OH
“Electrokinetically Driven Micro-pores for Minimally-Invasive Cancer Diagnosis”
Abstract:
Early detection of cancer is essential for improved long-term survival of patients. Traditionally, invasive and costly procedures, such as surgical tissue biopsies have been used for cancer screening. However, over the past few decades, advancements in microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip approaches have been made to develop minimally invasive and miniaturized platforms to detect the circulating cancer biomarkers from biofluids. Among circulating biomarkers, small extracellular vesicles (exosomes), have drawn a great deal of attention due to their high abundance in all biofluids and their enriched and highly stable gene regulatory content including micro-RNAs. Tumor-derived exosomes have also shown potential for early diagnosis and prognosis of cancer in difficult to access tumor sites. However, because of the complex nature of biofluids and the heterogeneous physicochemical properties of exosomes, their accurate isolation and characterization raises significant challenges in clinical settings. To address these challenges, we have developed a simple, yet powerful electrokinetically driven micro-pore device capable of rapid and label-free purification of exosomes from biofluids by applying a significantly low electric field. The device is also tailored with an impedance measurement module to further characterize exosomes based on their unique dielectric properties. We have further used the micro-pores for rapid detection of sequence-specific circulating micro-RNAs with high sensitivity and accuracy.
BIOGRAPHY:
Dr. Leyla Esfandiari is a tenure-track assistant professor with dual appointment in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at University of Cincinnati (UC). At UC, she is the principal investigator of the Integrative BioSensing Laboratory (IBL) with the main focus on development of nano/micro-scaled bioanalytical tools, organic bioelectronics, and microfluidics for medical and environmental applications. She has been the member of Cincinnati Cancer Center and the Center for Stem Cell and Organoid Medicine (CuSTOM) at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of Health/ National Cancer Institute, National Science Foundation, Department of Transportation (DOT) and Office of Research at UC.
Dr. Esfandiari completed her doctoral degree in bioengineering from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA); and earned her MSc in biomedical engineering from University of California Irvine. While at UCLA, she conducted research at the California Nano-System Institution (CNSI), the College of Medicine and the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Besides academic training, she has had three years of experience in industry.
Dr. Esfandiari has won numerous awards including UC College of Engineering and Applied Science Distinguished Research Award, the William E. Restemeyer Teaching Excellence Award, UC Faculty Development Award, UCLA Unrestricted Fellowship, UC Irvine Kleist Fellowship, NSF Fellowship, and Boeing Scholarship.
If interested, please email Elizabeth Chesley at e.chesley@northeastern.edu for the seminar link.

Magic or Magnetics? Novel Materials for Energy Transfer
2020-11-04 12:30 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
ChE Seminar Series Presents:
Laura H. Lewis, Ph.D.
Distinguished University and Cabot Professor, Chemical Engineering
Distinguished University and Cabot Professor, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
“Magic or Magnetics? Novel Materials for Energy Transfer”
Abstract: Magnetic materials permit the wireless interconversion of electrical, mechanical and, increasingly, thermal energies to benefit an enormous breadth of technologies including sustainable energy, e-mobility, data storage and biomedicine. Magnetic performance may be controlled through engineering at the atomic, nanoscopic and microstructural levels, providing a vast arena for realization of new types of magnetic materials. This presentation provides a brief overview of selected research activities, with focus on recent progress to realize a new material, tetrataenite, that holds promise as a new advanced permanent magnet free of critical, geopolitically constrained elements.
Biography: Laura H. Lewis is a Distinguished University and Cabot Professor of Chemical Engineering and Profes¬sor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, U.S.A. Prior to her faculty position at Northeastern University, she was a research group leader and Associate Department Chair in the Nanoscience Department of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), a U.S. Department of Energy Laboratory devoted to research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies. Concurrently, she was the Deputy Director of the BNL Center for Functional Nanomaterials, a DOE national user facility to provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate and study nanoscale materials. Laura received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin; she earned a M.S. degree in Electronic Materials from M.I.T. and a B.S. degree in Physics and Earth Sciences from the University of California at San Diego.
Laura’s research focuses on investigating the materials factors at the atomic level that provide functionality to magnetic materials, with a specialization in sustainable elements and rare earths. She has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and delivered over 100 invited presentations at national and international venues. She has participated on a number of advisory panels, most recently as am Advisory Board Member of the Critical Materials Institute, A DOE Energy Innovation Hub, the IEEE Magnetics Society AdCom and International Advisory Committee of the Joint European Magnetics Symposia. She has been appointed as a member of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to the ISO/TC 298 Standard for Rare Earth that will determine the U.S. position on standardization in the field of rare earth mining, concentration, extraction, separation and conversion to useful rare earth compounds/materials which are key inputs to manufacturing and technologies.
Laura is a Senior Member of the IEEE and served as Conference Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Magnetics (2008 – 2018) and Chair of the IEEE Magnetics Society Technical Committee (2017 – 2019). She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fulbright Fellow as well as a member of the Materials Research Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Society for Engineering Education.
Please email Alyssa Ramsey at a.ramsey@northeastern.edu for the link to the seminar.

ECE PhD Dissertation Defense: Aziz Kocanaogullari
2020-11-05 12:00 - 13:00 (America/New_York)
PhD Dissertation Defense: Active Recursive Bayesian Classification (Querying and Stopping) for Event Related Potential Driven Brain Computer Interface Systems
Aziz Kocanaogullari
Location: Remote (contact akocanaogullari@ece.neu.edu)
Abstract: Recursive Bayesian classification (RBC) requires optimal latent variable estimation in the presence of noisy observation to achieve real-time sequential decision making. Active RBC introduced in this dissertation attempts to effectively select queries that lead to more informative observations to rapidly reduce uncertainty until a confident decision is made. Accordingly, active RBC includes the following fundamental components:(S)A stopping criterion based on the posterior probability to stop evidence collection;(Q)a querying step to decide how to collect further evidence from relevant sources to benefit speed and accuracy objectives of RBC;(C)a classification objective based on the posterior distribution and loss values attributed to each true label and decision option pair to determine the optimal decision once the stopping criterion has been satisfied.
This dissertation specifically focuses on optimizing querying (Q) and stopping (S) for RBC. Conventional stopping criterion design methodologies lack insight of the RBC geometry and evolution of the posterior probability vector. Additionally, conventional active querying methods stagger due to misleading prior information. In this case, the system uses time inefficiently to overcome the provided belief by querying most likely candidates a number of iterations. Furthermore, in contrast to inference and querying being coactive, typically the optimality objectives are designed separately.
An electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain computer interface (BCI) system specifically de-signed for typing is used as a testbed for active RBC. BCI systems provide a communication pathway between the user and the environment both in medical and non-medical domains. EEG signals are widely used with promising performance to estimate user intent in BCI systems. BCI typing systems are epitomes of RBC driven systems as repeated evidence collection is mandated due to highly variable EEG signals given a particular user intent (latent variable hidden in the brain). However, in many cases, EEG-based communication staggers and lacks accuracy and speed due to inefficient RBC.
To increase the performance of RBC, motivated by information theoretic approaches to coding and active learning this dissertation contributes to the literature in three folds: (i) A complete analysis of stopping criterion and geometrical description of the RBC problem is provided. Motivated by the posterior motion a stopping criterion design is proposed. Moreover, an early stopping scheme with one step ahead prediction is shown to make a decision with marginal accuracy deficit. (ii)Influenced by the posterior motion, a new query selection objective is proposed. This querying mechanism is shown to result in rapid and accurate inference in scenarios in which the recursive inference starts with a misleading (or adversarial) prior probability distribution for the latent variable of interest (e.g. user attempting to type a letter/word that is unlikely according to the language model). (iii) Querying and stopping approaches are taken together into consideration and an experimental study specifically on BCI typing is presented. Additionally, the dissertation shows it is possible to reformulate RBC with Rényi entropy measures solidifying the connection between stopping and querying objective design. All contributions are verified using a BCI typing system “BCIPy” with simulations and human-in-the-loop experiments.

Welcome to Northeastern's College of Engineering with Dean Meleis + Director of Student Services, Allison Jacobs
2020-11-06 08:00 - 09:00 (America/New_York)
Admitted students are invited to meet Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, Waleed Meleis and Director of Graduate Student Services, Allison Jacobs in this live virtual session.
Join link: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DPRRVE-pT3qmak04VPRnLQ
Audience: All admits for Spring, 2021 including deferrals from a previous term

COE Study Abroad Info Session
2020-11-06 12:00 (America/New_York)
Learn about the exciting opportunities from COE students. Hear from a bioengineering student who studied in Ireland and a mechanical engineering student who studied in England.
Presented by Amanda Earley, GEO and Joy Erb, COE.
For more information please contact Joy Erb: j.erb@northeastern.edu
Study Abroad Info Session Link
Meeting ID: 957 9553 8214

Bioengineering Graduate School Webinar
2020-11-09 08:00 - 09:00 (America/New_York)
Join current faculty, staff and current students to learn more about graduate program options in Bioengineering
Monday, November 9
8:00 AM EST
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Acz1Ke3XSpGQ4zOVBzw-vA

Chemical Engineering Graduate School Webinar
2020-11-09 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York)
Join faculty staff and current students to learn more about graduate school options in Chemical Engineering
Monday, November 9
9:00 AM EST
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sYCnSrZWQq6L1mrkdLnWsg

ECE PhD Proposal Review: Carlos Bocanegra
2020-11-09 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York)
PhD Proposal Review: A Systems Approach to Spectrum Sharing and Multi-antenna Operation for Emerging Networks
Carlos Bocanegra
Location: TBD
Abstract: The demands on wireless connectivity and sensing are ever-increasing, fueled by both emerging applications and an exponential growth in the number of connected devices. Availability of new spectrum in the sub-6GHz bands is limited, which motivates research on innovative ways to utilize the current available spectrum and explore the use of additional spectrum beyond the 6GHz threshold.
This thesis explores three promising techniques with focus on the Physical (L1) and Link (L2) layers. Approach 1 concerns spectrum sharing in the sub-6GHz band, where wireless standards are granted opportunistic access within unlicensed spectrum to increase their usable bandwidth. Approach 2 concerns the design of massive multi-antenna systems, through which devices can benefit from beamforming gains at transmission and diversity gains at reception. Approach 3 concerns the use of very high frequency bands (VHFB), or so called millimeter-wave bands. Each of these approaches, however, has its own set of challenges, such as fairness in channel access, interference management, and optimal beamforming user-specified quality-of-service, respectively.
For spectrum sharing as described in Approach 1, this thesis presents E-Fi, an interference-evasion mechanism that allows Wi-Fi devices to survive opportunistic in-band LTE transmissions. The main contribution is to achieve this without any cooperation between these two, using Almost Blank Subframes (ABS). E-Fi ensures fair channel access while reusing existing Wi-Fi standards, i.e., Wi-Fi Direct, and thus incurring minimal deployment costs.
For Approach 2, this thesis introduces two multi-antenna frameworks, a decentralized one for cellular- and a centralized one for IoT-oriented applications, respectively. For the former, it presents NetBeam, a reconfigurable system of distributed 3D beamformers (3DBF). While NetBeam uses 3DBF to tackle multi-user interference in 3D multi-user deployments, it enforces Machine Learning and efficient antenna selection strategies to deliver the individual required SINR levels to users. As a centralized multi-antenna system, it presents RFGo, a privacy-preserving self-checkout system using passive Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags. RFGo achieves fast tag discovery using a custom-built RFID reader, which simultaneously decodes a tag’s response from multiple carrier-level synchronized antennas. RFGo achieves reliable tag detection by means of a neural network that accurately discriminates products within the checkout area from those laying outside of it.
In the proposed work that covers Approach 3, this thesis describes an outline of an algorithmic framework for millimeter-wave communications that efficiently allocates antenna elements from Base Stations (BS) to users for hybrid beamforming, while considering their individual traffic demands. We propose to trade-off flexible array geometries (that allows to limit interference to specific regions) versus the irregularity that results in the sidelobes.
In summary, this thesis tackles complex challenges in the future 5G and beyond wireless networks through a combination theory, algorithm design and experimental implementation.

Civil and Environmental Engineering Webinar
2020-11-10 08:00 - 09:00 (America/New_York)
Join faculty staff and current students to learn more about graduate school options in Civil + Environmental Engineering
Tuesday, November 10
8:00 AM EST
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Vv1zQp56T1aTOv2k9mlFKQ

GradTalk 101 - Masters Panel
2020-11-10 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York)
The Graduate Students of Color Collective (GSCC) and the Alliance for Diversity in Science and Engineering (ADSE) would like to invite you to join us for our GradTalk 101 – Masters Panel on Tuesday, November 10, 2020, from 12-1:30 pm. We have some amazing students that offered to share their experiences about their journey through Northeastern and pass off their wisdom to anyone looking to go and obtain a Masters degree.
Visit https://northeastern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJckcuuvrzIoH9NlwL7J8UOiVFJXtp0p2jAF to register and submit questions that you would like for our panelist to answer.
We look forward to your participation.

Chemical Engineering: Careers & Jobs Discussion with the Industrial Advisory Board Members
2020-11-10 19:00 - 20:30 (America/New_York)
This is an opportunity to virtually meet with ChemE Alumni currently working in or retired from industry jobs.
Topics for Discussion:

Suggestions for job searches in the current pandemic environment
Traditional Career Paths in Chemical Engineering
Graduate School
Non-Traditional Career Paths
Assessment of Current Industrial Job Opportunities
Considerations for Career/ Job Decisions
Social and Other Topics

Please email Alyssa Ramsey at a.ramsey@northeastern.edu for the link to the event.

Information Systems, Software Engineering Design, Data Architecture + Management Webinar
2020-11-11 09:00 - 10:00 (America/New_York)
Join faculty staff and current students to learn more about graduate school options in
Information Systems, Software Engineering Design, Data Architecture + Management
Wednesday, November 11
9:00 AM EST
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_uC78rYvSTqK54AVgMEGi4Q
