The awards are presented each year to outstanding seniors who are nominated by their academic departments. Among the award recipients was Scott Moore, a senior in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The 2012 winners, with category and nominating department:

• Citizenship and Service - Scott Moore, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Leadership - Adam Newton, Industrial and Systems Engineering
• Scholarly Achievement - Krystian Kozek, Materials Science and Engineering
• Humanities - Matthew Ostrowski, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

The awards were announced April 23 at the "Celebration of an Engaged University" event at the McKimmon Center on the NC State campus. The club was among nine individuals and groups collecting Moore awards.

Open Hardware Makerspace is a student group that encourages and empowers makers' interests in technical, collaborative, and creative projects. It welcomes all technical interests and seeks to provide access to the knowledge, tools, and community to students on campus. Through exposing the local community to creative projects and new technologies, the group hopes to bring an excitement for learning into local schools. Among the officers of the group are Luther Blackwood and Christopher Freeze, two students from the ECE department.

The Deborah S. Moore Service Awards are given annually by NC State's Center for Student Leadership, Ethics and Public Service to students and clubs that demonstrate exemplary service and outstanding volunteerism. Deborah S. Moore, an NC State graduate, served as the first volunteer coordinator of the NC State Student Center. The memorial awards were created in her honor in 1977.  View the original article - Wang]]> http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/news/20843/engineering-student-group-wins-campus-service-award http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/news/20843/engineering-student-group-wins-campus-service-award Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 EST Town Crier v2

NC State's Beta Eta Chapter of the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) Honor Society was officially presented with the Outstanding Chapter Award on April 26, 2012. The award was presented by the ECE department head Dr. Daniel Stancil during the chapter's induction ceremony.  The chapter was recognized alongside those of other top universities such as Purdue, Berkeley, and Auburn. Less than 25 of the 179 existing chapters were chosen to receive this prestigious award.

The purpose of the Outstanding Chapter Award is to recognize excellence in college chapters for their activities. In bestowing the award, the standing committee attaches less importance to the number of a chapter's activities than to their nature and quality. Chapters that are given the award offer many activities to improve professional development, to raise instructional and institutional standards, to encourage scholarship and creativity, and to provide a public service.

Eta Kappa Nu is the national Electrical and Computer Engineering honor society established in 1904. The society focuses on encouraging and recognizing excellence, and specifically seeks to support the qualities of scholarship, professionalism, and community. The local Beta Eta chapter has been established since 1938, and last received the Outstanding Chapter Award for the 2004-2005 academic year.

This donation of Relion Family protection and control devices, MicroSCADA Pro substation automation control and small SCADA systems and remote terminal units, as well as support and training of various power hardware and software for FREEDM researchers, will allow engineering students and researchers at the FREEDM Systems Center to step up testing and feasibility of new, "smart grid" compliant solutions based on the IEC 61850 communication standards, and to integrate new functionality into existing power grid equipment.

"We are grateful to ABB for their generous donation of substation relays and power electronics equipment," said Dr. Alex Huang, Director, FREEDM Systems Center. "This equipment will allow our students and our researchers to take our Green Energy Hub research and technology demonstration laboratory to a higher level as we continue to help shape America's power grid for the needs of the 21st century."

The donation, valued at around $130,000, strengthens what is already a solid, long-term partnership between ABB and NC State University. ABB's Power Products and Power Systems division North American headquarters, along with the ABB US Corporate Research Center and the new ABB Smart Grid Center of Excellence, are all located on NC State's Centennial Campus. ABB was the original anchor tenant on Centennial Campus, going back to 1990.

Additionally, ABB last year made a gift creating $1.2 million in initiatives that helped create a new Endowed Professorship with NC State's College of Engineering, as well as an ABB Power Engineering Scholarship program, offering five awards annually to students taking power engineering classes.

"We are pleased to provide the advanced substation automation solutions to NC State's FREEDM Center as they continue their world-class research initiatives in modernizing the power grid," said Steven Kunsman, Vice President and General Manager for ABB's Substation Automation Products in North America. "Today's substation automation products supporting high speed standardized communication architectures will allow research of advanced automation schemes supporting the FREEDM Center's Smart Grid and MicroGrid development of new innovations related to renewable energy sources, electric vehicles and other forward-thinking 21st century technologies."

ABB is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 135,000 people. The company's North American operations, headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, employ about 20,000 people in multiple manufacturing, service and other major facilities. View the original article]]> http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/news/20740/abb-donates-substation-automation-equipment-to-freedm-center http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/news/20740/abb-donates-substation-automation-equipment-to-freedm-center Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EST Town Crier v2 A team of North Carolina State University researchers are one step closer to creating a workable, affordable full-screen Braille computer display that would allow the blind to scan Web pages in much the same way that sighted people do.

The team, composed of textile, electrical and computer engineers, had previously introduced a design that could translate both words and images into tactile displays. They wanted to test different materials for use in the actuators, which move the pins that create the Braille dots, to ensure that the raised dots would support the weight of readers' fingers and enable them to scroll through the material quickly.

Textile engineer Dr. Tushar Ghosh developed an actuator based on silicone tubes, and found that this material resulted in lighter-weight, less expensive devices that still performed as expected.

"Conventional refreshable Braille displays usually incorporate ceramics, or hard materials, in order to do the work of moving the pins up and down to create letters," says Ghosh. "But they are heavy, difficult to work with and expensive. Electroactive polymer-based silicone tubes are lightweight, flexible, can be processed easily and are inexpensive to manufacture."

"The result is a device that brings us closer to durable, lightweight and affordable full-screen refreshable Braille displays," Ghosh says.

The research, which was funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education, appears in Sensors and Actuators A. The paper was co-authored by NC State electrical and computer engineers Dr. Paul Franzon, Dr. Neil Di Spigna, Dr. Peichun Yang and graduate students P. Chakraborti, and H.A. Karahan Toprakci.

The Department of Textile Engineering, Chemistry and Science is part of NC State's College of Textiles. The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is part of NC State's College of Engineering.

View the original article - Tracey Peake

The research project presented by Babak and Nima at the symposium was titled "Design Considerations in Development of Active Mobile Substations" and proposed a new kind of mobile power system substation that can significantly improve the efficiency and lifetime of current power systems. The complete abstract for their presentation can be found at the Graduate Research Symposium website.

A group of scientists led by researchers from the University of  Rochester as well as Dr. Dan Stancil and Dr. Brian Hughes of the  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina  State University, have for the first time sent a message using a beam of  neutrinos - nearly massless particles that travel at almost the speed  of light. The message was sent through 240 meters of stone and said  simply, "Neutrino." 

"Using neutrinos, it would be possible to communicate between any two points on Earth without using satellites or cables," said Dr. Stancil, professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research. "Neutrino communication systems would be much more complicated than today's systems, but may have important strategic uses."

Many have theorized about the possible uses of neutrinos in communication because of one particularly valuable property: they can penetrate almost anything they encounter. If this technology could be applied to submarines, for instance, then they could conceivably communicate over long distances through water, which is difficult, if not impossible, with present technology. And if we wanted to communicate with something in outer space that was on the far side of a moon or a planet, our message could travel straight through without impediment.

"Of course, our current technology takes massive amounts of high-tech equipment to communicate a message using neutrinos, so this isn't practical now," said Kevin McFarland, a University of Rochester physics professor who was involved in the experiment. "But the first step toward someday using neutrinos for communication in a practical application is a demonstration using today's technology."

The team of scientists that demonstrated that it was possible performed their test at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab (or Fermilab, for short), outside of Chicago. The group has submitted its findings to the journal Modern Physics Letters A.

At Fermilab the researchers had access to two crucial components. The first is one of the world's most powerful particle accelerators, which creates high-intensity beams of neutrinos by accelerating protons around a 2.5-mile-circumference track and then colliding them with a carbon target. The second is a multi-ton detector called MINERvA, located in a cavern 100 meters underground.

The fact that such a substantial setup is necessary to communicate using neutrinos means that much work will need to be done before the technology can be incorporated into a readily usable form.

The communication test was done during a two-hour period when the accelerator was running at half its full intensity due to an upcoming scheduled downtime. Regular MINERvA interaction data was collected at the same time the communication test was being carried out.

Today, most communication is carried out by sending and receiving electromagnetic waves. That is how our radios, cell phones, and televisions operate. But electromagnetic waves don't pass easily through most types of matter. They get blocked by water and mountains and many other liquids and solids. Neutrinos, on the other hand, regularly pass through entire planets without being disturbed. Because of their neutral electric charge and almost non-existent mass, neutrinos are not subject to magnetic attractions and are not significantly altered by gravity, so they are virtually free of impediments to their motion.

The message that the scientists sent using neutrinos was translated into binary code. In other words, the word "neutrino" was represented by a series of 1's and 0's, with the 1's corresponding to a group of neutrinos being fired and the 0's corresponding to no neutrinos being fired. The neutrinos were fired in large groups because they are so evasive that even with a multi-ton detector, only about one in ten billion neutrinos are detected. After the neutrinos were detected, a computer on the other end translated the binary code back into English, and the word "neutrino" was successfully received.

"Neutrinos have been an amazing tool to help us learn about the workings of both the nucleus and the universe," said Deborah Harris, Minerva project manager, "but neutrino communication has a long way to go before it will be as effective."

Minerva is an international collaboration of nuclear and particle physicists from 21 institutions that study neutrino behavior using a detector located at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. This is the first neutrino experiment in the world to use a high-intensity beam to study neutrino reactions with nuclei of five different target materials, creating the first side-by-side comparison of interactions. This will help complete the picture of neutrinos and allow data to be more clearly interpreted in current and future experiments.

Dr. Byrd was given the Outstanding Teacher Award by the College of Engineering. This award is given to faculty who demonstrate excellence at all levels of teaching. His research focuses on high-performance parallel systems and servers as well as computer architecture and networking. Dr. Byrd has taught undergraduate courses that introduce students to concepts behind computer architecture and programming.

Dr. Townsend has been awarded the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award. The award is one of the most prestigious and sought-after awards given to undergraduate professors throughout the University. His research is in digital and wireless communication. Dr. Townsend teaches undergraduate courses on electric circuit analysis as well as those on communications.

Both recipients will be honored at a university-wide luncheon on April 4. Dr. Townsend will also be recognized at this spring's commencement program for his Alumni Award.

"These oscillatory systems are found in everything from mechanisms in cells that allow a cell to replicate itself to the sleep-wake cycle in mammals," says Dr. Cranos Williams, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work. "The method we've developed should expedite the development of more accurate parameters, which can be used to create more precise and predictable models of oscillatory biological systems."  Understanding such oscillatory systems is important for research into cancer, cardiac health, fertility and many other fields, he adds.

Oscillatory systems transform the "bowl" into something that looks like a mountain range, making it more difficult to find accurate parameters.

Modeling a biological system relies, in part, on defining parameters for that system, which correspond to how the system functions under normal conditions. Once those parameters are established, they can be used to create a model to predict the system's response under different conditions.

To estimate parameters in simpler systems, researchers measure the concentration of the system's components. In a cell, for example, researchers would measure the concentration of its proteins, among other things. Researchers then try to identify the parameters that would result in the closest 'fit' to those concentrations when plugged into the model.

A measure known as an objective function is used to quantify the quality of the 'fit' to the measured concentrations. Simple systems often result in an objective function that looks like a bowl, with the lowest point of the bowl corresponding to the parameters that provide the best or "optimal" fit.  All other parameter values correspond to higher points that arc up from the bottom of the bowl. These points correspond to increasingly poor matches to the measured component concentrations as you move further away from the bottom. Robust optimization routines are well adapted to sliding down the sides of these mathematical bowls to identify a functional set of parameters corresponding to the best fit. It can be virtually impossible to identify the optimal set of parameters, but you can often get very close.

By factoring frequency into the objective function, researchers made it easier to find accurate parameters.

But the cyclical nature of oscillatory systems makes it difficult to identify this functional set of parameters, even when using the most robust optimization routines. This is because the repetitive nature of these systems transforms the bowl into something that looks more like a mountain range, with many hills and valleys. This makes it more complicated and time-consuming to work your way toward accurate parameters.

Since these oscillatory systems present a problem for most optimization algorithms, Williams and NC State Ph.D. student Seyedbehzad Nabavi focused on developing methods that would manipulate the surface characteristics of the objective function itself. This new approach factors in the frequency of the concentrations within the system - or how often each concentration is repeated - to generate a new objective function that mitigates the impact of system oscillations.

"By generating a new objective function that factors in the frequency of the system oscillations, we are able to eliminate many of the hills and valleys, resulting in a surface with the same optimal point, but that is easier to search," Williams says. "This makes it easier for optimization routines to identify a functional working set of parameters that can then be used to predict the activity of the modeled system."

The paper, "A Novel Cost Function for Parameters Estimation in Oscillatory Biochemical Systems," will be presented at the IEEE SoutheastCon in Orlando, Fla., March 15-18. Nabavi is lead author on the paper. 

View the original article - Matt Shipman

"Chip manufacturers are now creating processors that have a 'fused architecture,' meaning that they include CPUs and GPUs on a single chip," says Dr. Huiyang Zhou, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering who co-authored a paper on the research. "This approach decreases manufacturing costs and makes computers more energy efficient. However, the CPU cores and GPU cores still work almost exclusively on separate functions. They rarely collaborate to execute any given program, so they aren't as efficient as they could be. That's the issue we're trying to resolve."

GPUs were initially designed to execute graphics programs, and they are capable of executing many individual functions very quickly. CPUs, or the "brains" of a computer, have less computational power - but are better able to perform more complex tasks.

"Our approach is to allow the GPU cores to execute computational functions, and have CPU cores pre-fetch the data the GPUs will need from off-chip main memory," Zhou says.

"This is more efficient because it allows CPUs and GPUs to do what they are good at. GPUs are good at performing computations. CPUs are good at making decisions and flexible data retrieval."

In other words, CPUs and GPUs fetch data from off-chip main memory at approximately the same speed, but GPUs can execute the functions that use that data more quickly. So, if a CPU determines what data a GPU will need in advance, and fetches it from off-chip main memory, that allows the GPU to focus on executing the functions themselves - and the overall process takes less time.

In preliminary testing, Zhou's team found that its new approach improved fused processor performance by an average of 21.4 percent.

This approach has not been possible in the past, Zhou adds, because CPUs and GPUs were located on separate chips.

The paper, "CPU-Assisted GPGPU on Fused CPU-GPU Architectures," will be presented Feb. 27 at the 18th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, in New Orleans. The paper was co-authored by NC State Ph.D. students Yi Yang and Ping Xiang, and by Mike Mantor of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and AMD.

View the original article - Matt Shipman

The awards were presented by Dr. Louis A. Martin-Vega, dean of the College of Engineering, at a banquet held Jan. 26 at the Park Alumni Center on NC State's Centennial Campus. The award honors alumni whose accomplishments further their field and reflect favorably on the university.

Dean received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from NC State in 1988. Since 1997 he has been president and CEO of M.C. Dean, Inc., a company founded in 1949 by Dean's grandfather, Marion Caleb Dean. The firm has become a diversified leader in power engineering, applied electronics, information technology, controls systems, software, and systems integration for complex, mission-critical organizations.

Under Dean's leadership, M.C. Dean has not only increased and diversified its engineering competencies, but also increased its total annual revenues thirtyfold and grown from a company of 100 employees in 1997 to 3,300 employees today. The company has offices throughout the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In 2009, Dean created the M.C. Dean Foundation, which supports nonprofit organizations in their efforts to improve the communities they serve.

Dean and his company have been great allies of the College. M.C. Dean is an active recruiter of NC State engineering graduates, a consistent participant in the NC State Engineering Career Fair and an industry member of the FREEDM Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center headquartered at NC State that is dedicated to smart grid technology and distributed energy.

Dean is also a member of the College's Dean's Circle and the NC State Engineering Foundation Board of Directors. He delivered the 2009 winter commencement address for the graduates of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

More information about the other award recipients for 2011 can be found in the article here.

Eta Kappa Nu is the national Electrical and Computer Engineering honor society established in 1904. The society focuses on encouraging and recognizing excellence, and specifically seeks to support the qualities of scholarship, professionalism, and community. The local Beta Eta chapter has been established since 1938, and last received the Outstanding Chapter Award for the 2004-2005 academic year.

NC State's Dr. Jayant Baliga has recently been recognized by India Today as one of the top 35 thinkers produced by India since 1975. Baliga was named among several influential activists and scientists, including former president of India Abdul Kalam, famed novelist Salman Rushdie, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, Time Editor Fareed Zacharia, and founder of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla.

India Today is the leading news magazine in India, founded in 1975. It sells 1.1 million copies a week and has a readership of over 15 million. The magazine published the article in a special issue celebrating it's 36th anniversary.

Baliga invented, developed, and commercialized the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) while working at GE. This transistor is used heavily throughout the lighting, transportation, medical, and renewable energy sectors. He has also authored and edited 18 books and over 500 scientific articles, and holds more than 100 U.S. patents.

On October 21, 2011 President Barack Obama awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Prof. Baliga. This award is the highest form of recognition given to an engineer by the United States Government. In the past Baliga has also received the IEEE Newell Award in 1991, the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award in 1993, the IEEE J. J. Ebers Award in 1998, and the IEEE Lamme Medal in 1999.

The partnership includes a monetary gift from Siemens that will establish a power engineering term professorship and two graduate student fellowships in NC State's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Earlier this year, Siemens, a global supplier of products, services and solutions for the generation, transmission and distribution of energy, also committed to a full industrial partnership with the FREEDM Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center headquartered at NC State. The center is developing key power technologies to transform the nation's power grid and speed renewable energy technologies into millions of homes and businesses.

"NC State continues to develop leading technologies and curricula that break new ground in power engineering research and education," said Dr. Louis A. Martin-Vega, dean of the College of Engineering. "This partnership with Siemens will boost our power engineering efforts and help bring some of the most talented people in the field to NC State."

The Siemens Term Professorship in Power Engineering will be awarded to a faculty member who is a rising star in the field. The professorship funds will support lab and course development, equipment purchases and other teaching and research activities over three years.

The Siemens Graduate Student Fellowship in Electric Power Systems Engineering will be awarded to students enrolled in NC State's professional master's-degree program in electric power systems engineering. The award, to be received annually by two students for three years, covers in-state tuition and fees and provides a stipend for student living expenses. The professional master's program is the first of its kind in the nation.

On Sept. 28, through a separate agreement, Siemens also joined the FREEDM Systems Center as a full industry partner. Partner benefits include access to not-yet-published FREEDM research, direct contact with the center's faculty and students and other industrial partners, and early access to intellectual property developed at the center. Siemens will also be invited to serve on the FREEDM Industry Advisory Board, which guides the center's strategic project selection process.

"We believe that our continued support for NC State's efforts to cultivate cutting edge education for both professors and students will accelerate innovation in the field of power engineering," said Dave Pacyna, senior vice president of Siemens Energy's Transmission Division in North America.

Siemens AG is an electronics and electrical engineering company that operates in the industry, energy and healthcare sectors. Siemens employs 405,000 employees in 190 countries, including approximately 62,000 people throughout all 50 US states and Puerto Rico. More information on Siemens in the United States is available at www.usa.siemens.com.

View the original article - Nate DeGraff

The award will be presented at the Awards Ceremony at ICASSP 2012 in Kyoto, Japan which runs through March 25-30. The award will be presented by the president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, K.J. Ray Liu.  The Awards Ceremony is part of the Opening Ceremony at ICASSP 2012 on the first full day of the conference.

The ICASSP meeting is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications.

Sheng Yi's paper, "A Shearlet Approach to Edge Analysis and Detection," is available on IEEE Explore.

So far the smart grid research community in the United States has seen promising, yet isolated, research and development in power systems, power electronics, material science, communication engineering and economics. But in order to move forward, all these efforts need to be put together to address the overarching challenges facing smart-grid development. The two most natural and compelling tools that bind all these varied aspects of a smart grid together are control and optimization.

Marija Ilic, from Carnegie Mellon University, and I are serving as the co-editors of a new book titled "Control and Optimization Methods for Electric Smart Grids," to help coordinate these research challenges. The book contains 18 chapters written by almost 50 leading researchers in power, control and communication systems, and captures in a holistic way how tomorrow's grid will need to be an enormously complex system in order to solve the problems that we are facing today. Literally, with every passing day, our national grid is becoming integrated with new technologies in the form of renewable energy resources, new loads in the form of smart vehicles, new sensors such as smart meters and Phasor Measurement Units, and newer mechanisms of decision-making guided by complex power market dynamics. The book aims to capture the spectrum of this exponential transformation, and at the same time present the plethora of open problems that this transformation poses for smart-grid researchers on the way ahead.

For example, a well-known yet grand challenge for the smart grid is to determine how consumers and power utilities can interact with each other in a secure way to optimize energy consumption. This is not something that power engineers can do by themselves. Applied mathematicians and statisticians will need to develop models to capture how these interactions between multiple producers and consumers can happen in real time, and whether they can lead to chaos or not. Communication engineers will need to ensure the time constraints and the security of these interactions over wireless media. Economists will be needed too - to determine the market dynamics involved in this process.

The multi-disciplinarity of smart grid research problems that need to be tackled is one of the key challenges for us. This book consolidates some of the most promising and transformative recent research done in this area so far in hopes of laying the foundation for future advances.

View the original article - Dr. Aranya Chakrabortty

This was an especially competitive year with 569 paper submissions where there was one best paper selected for each track.

IPDPS is an international forum for engineers and scientists from around the world to present their latest research findings in all aspects of parallel computation. In addition to technical sessions of submitted paper presentations, the meeting offers workshops, tutorials, and commercial presentations & exhibits.

IPDPS represents a unique international gathering of computer scientists from around the world. Now, more than ever, we prize this annual meeting as a testament to the strength of international cooperation in seeking to apply computer science technology to the betterment of our global village.

Dr. Zhou and his students will present their paper at IPDPS '12, which will take place on May 23, 2012.

Dr. Byrd has received the award for his leadership in the computer engineering curriculum by teaching Advanced Parallel Computer Architecture, Introduction to Computer Organization, Introduction to Computer Systems, and Computer Systems Programming.  He has also received great feedback from students.

One student said, "He has undoubtedly been the most influential professor in my college career."

The William F. Lane Outstanding Teacher Award is presented annually by the ECE department along with a plaque and a $500 cash award.  Winners of this award are automatically considered by ECE for the NC State Outstanding Teacher Award.

In order to be considered to the award, a faculty member of the ECE department must have taught at least 15 student credit hours at NC State; have not received the Lane Award, NC State Outstanding Teacher Award, or the Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor Award in the previous 3 academic years; and who are currently teaching during the academic year of nomination.

The paper was co-authored by Xi Chen, Dr. Rhett Davis, and Dr. Paul Franzon. The topic of the paper was "Adaptive Clock Distribution for 3D Integrated Circuits." In it, the authors present new techniques to realize highly adaptive and reliable clock distribution with good variation tolerance for 3D ICs.

EPEPS is the premier international conference for advanced and emerging issues in electrical modeling, analysis and design of electronic interconnections, packages and systems. It also focuses on new methodologies and design techniques for evaluating and ensuring signal, power and thermal integrity in high-speed designs. EPEPS is jointly sponsored by the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society and IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.

Centennial Campus Apartments, scheduled to open in fall 2013, will provide housing for upper-division students and loft-style apartments for graduate students.

The $129 million, 550,446 square-foot facility across from the Hunt Library will feature an on-site bookstore and dining options, a state-of-the-art fitness room and Entrepreneurial Village, a university living and learning community.

"When I think about this project, it brings to life the true vision of Centennial Campus-to be a true living and learning community, and a community of scholars," said Chancellor Randy Woodson. "We're very, very excited about the scope of this project, and when you combine it with the Hunt Library, we've invested over $240 million in space that will truly be transformative in the lives of our students."

The project grew out of a 2002 task force on living and learning, which recommended student housing on Centennial Campus.

"We've been waiting for this day a long time," said Tim Luckadoo, associate vice chancellor of Student Affairs. "This is a project that has taken years to develop and come up with a concept that would create a hub of activity for this campus."

About $9 million of the project is devoted to dining facilities that will serve students, staff, partners and visitors, Luckadoo said.

Once completed, the project, which adds about 1,200 beds, will bring the total number of students living on campus to more than 10,000.

View the original article - News Staff

The IEEEXtreme Programming Competition 5.0, hosted by IEEE, is an innovative global online competition in which you and a team of up to two other IEEE Student Branch members can collectively code to compete in a 24-hour time span against other student programmers around the world to solve a set of programming problems. All of the given problems could be answered in any of the supported languages (Java, C, and C++).

Since the competition, the official IEEExtreme results were announced and the teams from NC State did quite well. There were a total of 1,448 teams competing globally and one of our teams finished 9th in the region. In additon, 9 out of 10 of our teams finished in the top 50 percent, with 6 out of 10 in the top 25 percent and 4 out of 10 in the top 10 percent. A total of 30 students made up the 10 NC State teams participating this year.

The IEEE Student Branch at NC State was responsible for organizing the event on campus.  The student branch provided food, including full meals, throughout the competition and a faculty and/or a professional IEEE member was constantly present to proctor during the entire event. 

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

"This is an outstanding recognition of significant accomplishment by international peers," said Dr. Daniel Stancil, "we are delighted and proud to have them as colleagues!"

The IEEE is the world's leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 385,000 members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.

Dedicated to the advancement of technology, the IEEE publishes 30 percent of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 900 active industry standards. The association also sponsors or co-sponsors nearly 400 international technical conferences each year. If you would like to learn more about IEEE or the IEEE Fellow Program, please visit www.ieee.org.]]> http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/news/19836/devetsikiotis-duelhallen-misra-elevated-to-ieee-fellow http://www.ece.ncsu.edu/news/19836/devetsikiotis-duelhallen-misra-elevated-to-ieee-fellow Wed, 23 Nov 2011 00:00:00 EST Town Crier v2 Researchers from North Carolina State University are developing a three-dimensional (3D) central processing unit (CPU) - the brains of the computer - with the goal of boosting energy efficiency by 15 to 25 percent. The work is being done under a $1.5 million grant from the Intel Corporation.

The computer industry has a great deal of interest in 3D integrated circuits, which are vertically integrated chips that are connected by vertical electronic connections - called "through silicon vias" - that pass through silicon wafers. These 3D circuits would represent an advance over conventional computer chips, which operate in only two dimensions.

"Under this grant, we are building a 3D CPU chip stack and will be solving some of the problems currently facing the development of 3D CPUs," says Dr. Paul Franzon, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and lead researcher on the project.

One problem the researchers plan to address is how to reconcile chips that are designed and manufactured in different places to different specifications so that they can work together in three dimensions. They will also address questions concerning heat dissipation, since the 3D nature of the design would otherwise lead to much higher temperatures within the machine.

"Our goal is to achieve at least a 15 percent improvement in performance per unit of power, through architectural and circuit advances," Franzon says.

The researchers plan to have a complete prototype developed in 2014, and will also be addressing "test and yield" challenges - such as how manufacturers can test individual CPU components to ensure they are functional. These challenges are key to facilitating the manufacture of 3D CPUs.

In addition to Franzon, the research team includes Drs. Eric Rotenberg and Rhett Davis, a professor and associate professor, respectively, of electrical and computer engineering at NC State; and Dr. Krishnendu Chakrabarty of Duke University.

NC State's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is part of the university's College of Engineering.

Traditional Wi-Fi networks rely on "access points" (APs) that have landline access to the Internet. In other words, the APs have wires running out of them. These APs then communicate wirelessly to individual laptop users.

Wireless mesh networks also use multiple APs, but they communicate with each other as well as with computer users. One or more of the mesh APs are "root nodes" that have a landline connection to the Internet. Other APs have access to the Internet through these root nodes. This gives a mesh system greater flexibility, because not all of the APs have to have a landline connection to the Internet.

This allows network designers to put APs in places where it is difficult or impossible to give every AP landline access - such as some outdoor settings or military situations.

Now researchers are creating a wireless mesh network, called CentMesh, on NC State's Centennial Campus. More technical details on CentMesh are available here.

"CentMesh will help us explore some of the outstanding questions on mesh network design," says Dr. Rudra Dutta, an NC State computer science researcher who is the technical leader on the project. "For example, service continuity. How can we design a system to maximize performance when parts of the system fail, when wireless signals are disrupted, or when users and APs are mobile?" The project will also help researchers address security questions for both systems and users, Dutta says.

But CentMesh will have utility for other research fields as well, from public health to the social sciences. "For example, this could be used for environmental monitoring or to study human behavior and mobility," explains Dr. Mihail Sichitiu, an NC State electrical and computer engineering researcher who is also a technical lead on the project.

One reason CentMesh should be particularly good at enabling multiple research efforts is because the system utilizes a system design and software created by the NC State researchers themselves. "As such," Dutta explains, "we can control every aspect of network operation and performance. We can make the system do whatever you need it to do."

Another benefit for researchers is that Centennial Campus is home to companies, homes and recreational facilities as well as academic buildings. "It's a living laboratory with real-world users," Sichitiu adds. "Not solely faculty and students."

CentMesh is also expected to be a useful tool for teaching students about networks and programming. "This lets students learn about something real, not abstract concepts we are explaining to them in the classroom alone," Dutta says. "Hands-on experience helps bring our class work to life, which gets students more excited about the subject."

Researchers are close to completing a 14-node version of CentMesh, including four root nodes, that they hope to have up and running in early 2012. This version will cover a small, but heavily populated, section of Centennial Campus - though the long-term goal of the project is to cover all 1,334 acres of the campus.

The CentMesh team has already developed an eight-node mobile "pushcart" network that can be rolled out for temporary deployment. The pushcart was used to pilot the software for CentMesh. In addition, the pushcart can be integrated into the 14-node CentMesh system to temporarily create an expanded 22-node system for experimental use.

CentMesh is being developed and implemented with funding from the U.S. Army Research Office, and collaboration and logistics support from NC State's Institute for Next Generation IT Systems, and NC State's Communication Technologies unit.

View the original article - Matt Shipman

Grainger, who still teaches periodically at NC State, has fond memories of Abdurrahim El-Keib, who earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from NC State in 1984 before going on to teach at the University of Alabama. He said that El-Keib came to NC State with several other students from the Middle East after getting a master's degree at the University of Southern California.

Grainger said some of the other students were flashy and drove expensive cars, but that El-Keib was soft-spoken, refined and reverent. "He was a very mature person," Grainger recalled. "He carried himself very well."

A Devout Muslim

Grainger said that El-Keib, whom he knows as "Rahim," was a devout Muslim who was troubled about not being able to return to his home country because of the turmoil there. Grainger said El-Keib would meet family members in Morocco rather than risk returning to Libya, where he had earlier done his undergraduate studies at the University of Tripoli.

"He clearly felt a great loss at not being able to go home," Grainger said. "He was quite nervous and afraid of being in Libya and being caught. He took a job as a professor, but he probably still had yearnings to be back where he belonged."

In his doctoral thesis, a copy of which sits on a bookshelf in Grainger's office on Centennial Campus, El-Keib thanked his family for their support: "My parents Abdulhafiz and Fatima for their precious love and unforgetable (sic) sacrifices; my wife, Mawia, for her patience, understanding and encouragement. To them I dedicate this work." El-Keib also thanked Grainger for his "encouragement, patience, and enthusiasm."

Most news reports this week have spelled the new prime minister's last name as El-Keib, but the thesis lists his last name as El-Kib. The title of the thesis is "Capacitive Compensation Planning and Operation for Primary Distribution Feeders."

A Strong Student

Grainger said El-Keib was already married when he arrived at NC State, and that he was a strong student. Grainger periodically ran into El-Keib after he became a professor at the University of Alabama at academic conferences. El-Keib would greet his former professor with warm and robust laughter.""He had a strong sense of humor," Grainger said.

Grainger said he never discussed politics or the situation in Libya with El-Keib, who was named Libya's interim prime minister after Mahmoud Jibril resigned following Libya's liberation on Oct. 23, three days after the death of Muammar Qaddafi.

But Grainger is encouraged that the Libyans on the National Transitional Council chose El-Keib to lead them as they try to establish a more stable government in Libya.

"If a guy like him, as an outsider from politics or military things, if he was chosen for that job, then that's a wonderful, wonderful tribute to the Libyans who are now in charge that they are that open that they would bring a guy like him in," Grainger said.

View the original article - Alumni Association - Bill Krueger

As part of the Obama administration's campaign to inspire and promote entrepreneurship, the DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy awarded a total of $2 million to six regions in the US, including the Southeast region, to create a nationwide network of student-focused clean energy business plan competitions over the next three years. The Southeast region, which will begin an "ACC Clean Energy Challenge" led by the University of Maryland, was awarded $360,000.

The ACC Clean Energy Challenge is open to all schools in the Southeast region in addition to ACC universities. The challenge will use the competitive nature of a collegiate sports conference as a model to build off an existing foundation of clean energy research and entrepreneurship programs to catalyze student innovation across the Southeast region.

NC State, Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University will co-host the ACC Clean Energy Challenge finals event in the Research Triangle in the second year of the grant. A national grand prize competition will be held in Washington, DC, in summer 2012.

NC State participants will include representatives from the FREEDM Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center that's developing "smart grid" technology, and the NC State Entrepreneurship Initiative, a campus-wide effort to promote entrepreneurship at NC State.

Additional regional grant winners include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Northeast Region; the California Institute of Technology in the Western Region; Rice University in the Western Southwest Region; Chicago-based Clean Energy Trust in the Eastern Midwest Region; and the University of Colorado in the Western Midwest Region.

The DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy invests in clean energy technologies that aim to strengthen the economy, protect the environment and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

The six categories of projects announced include Extreme Balance of System Hardware Cost Reductions, Foundational Program to Advance Cell Efficiency, Solar Energy Grid Integration Systems, Transformational PV Science and Technology, Reducing Market Barriers and Non-Hardware Balance of System Costs and SunShot Incubator.

NC State is the sole recipient within the state of North Carolina to be receiving funding for any of the project categories.

NC State's award is part of the SunShot Incubator category which will fund two different tiers of transformational projects. The first accelerates development of new technologies from concept to commercial viability. The second level of funding supports efforts that shorten the overall timeline from laboratory scale development to pilot line manufacture. The SunShot Incubator Program is an expansion of DOE's successful PV Technology Incubator Program, launched in 2007, which to date has funded $60 million in projects that have been leveraged into $1.3 billion in private investment.

"America is in a world race to produce cost-competitive renewable energy that can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, create manufacturing jobs across the nation, and improve our energy security," said Secretary Chu. "The projects announced today under DOE's SunShot Initiative will spur American innovation to help reduce the costs of clean, renewable solar energy and re-establish U.S. global leadership in this fast growing industry."  The SunShot Initiative seeks to make solar energy systems more cost-competitive, without long-term subsidies, by reducing the cost of these systems about 75% by the end of the decade. The achievement of the SunShot Initiative goals will encourage rapid, widespread adoption of solar energy systems across the United States.

SunShot is driving innovation in the way solar energy systems are conceived, designed, manufactured, and installed. The awards announced today will target improvements across the research, development, and demonstration pipeline, from next generation technologies 7-10 years away from commercial readiness, to scientific and technological improvements which can be rapidly implemented within 5 years. The programs will create entirely new and more economical approaches to collecting solar energy and tackle fundamental challenges to ramp up use of these renewable energy technologies.

DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy invests in clean energy technologies that strengthen the economy, protect the environment, and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. Learn more about the SunShot Initiative and DOE's efforts to expand safe, readily available, and inexpensive solar energy across the nation by the end of the decade.

Ryan Benjamin has a plan.

He wants to earn a master's degree in the white-hot field of electric power systems engineering, add valuable technical and professional skills to his resume, and balance an internship - at the same time.

And he'd like to finish all that in less than a year.

Now, thanks to a $3.4 million US Department of Energy grant to NC State's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Benjamin's plan isn't just possible, it's happening.

Starting this past summer, a group of NC State engineering students began taking courses toward a professional science master's degree in electric power systems engineering - the first degree program of its kind in the nation.

"When I heard that NC State developed its own power systems master's degree program, I was very intrigued," said Benjamin, an electrical engineering intern at Eaton Energy Solutions. "The fact that it's so focused and can be completed in a year's time added to the list of positives."

The program has formed as researchers with the FREEDM Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, are leading efforts to develop technologies that transform the nation's century-old electric power grid into a "smart grid" that can handle large amounts of renewable energy generated from businesses and homes. Making this happen will require a highly skilled, smart-grid-ready workforce.

NC State's new program will groom recent graduates and new company recruits while rebooting professionals already working in the field. Professional skills, interdisciplinary learning and industry exposure are the key features behind the program, which by fall 2012 should also be available over the Internet as a distance education program. 

"There's an urgent need for a much larger workforce in the power systems area," said Dr. Mesut Baran, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the program. "This program gives students an opportunity to get training quickly and affordably."

FREEDM provides lab space to students working on the program's capstone power systems project undertaken during the second semester. The unique facilities at the Keystone Science Center on NC State's Centennial Campus also expose students to real world issues related to smart grid, solar and wind generation, and energy storage technologies.

"It was nice to see all of the courses the program offers," said Yigitcan Unludag, another member of the program's first class. "There's a smart grid class that we're going to take, and there's also a capstone project in which we'll work with one of the leading companies in the industry and get solid hands-on experience."

The program is designed to give students advanced training in the electric power systems engineering field, while developing highly valued professional skills, all of which will help the program's graduates land jobs.

"Everyone knows that for a program to be successful, graduates need to be placed in jobs," Baran said. "There's a big need for power engineers, so we're hoping that we'll attract students because of the demand. We want a globally recognized program."

That's where industry support plays a major role.

Companies like ABB, Quanta Technology, Green Energy Corp., Progress Energy, Siemens and Duke Energy are among the program's many supporters. Many of these companies have provided experts who teach courses alongside the program's faculty members.

"It's very important to bring in industry members," said Dr. Pam Carpenter, education program manager of the program. "They know what's going on out there, and they help drive the market transformation, policy and technology."

View the original article - Jessica Wilson

Throughout a summer odyssey that took them inside the revolutionary movements shaking the Middle East, they tried to make sense of it all.

Now back in the safety and routine of campus life, NC State students Mohammad Moussa and Sameer Abdel-Khalek are just beginning to reflect on their life-changing journey. The two traveled to Cairo in June with poets Kane Smego and Will McInerney for a multimedia project called "Poetic Portraits of a Revolution."

For two months, the team traveled throughout Egypt and Tunisia, meeting the ordinary people who toppled two dictators and collecting their stories through photographs, video and audio recordings. During the summer, their poetic reflections aired weekly on WUNC and twice on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

Moments in Time

"It was amazing capturing these moments in time," said Abdel-Khalek, an environmental technology major who served as the team's photographer. "It's an experience I'm never going to forget."

Moussa, an electrical and computer engineering major, was the team's interpreter and one of its three poets. He found inspiration in the stories of sacrifice and courage recounted by people who brought down repressive regimes with nothing more than their voices.

"They'll talk to you about a personal revolution that took place inside themselves," he said. "Each person said, this is enough, we can't take this anymore. And when they came together, they found that there's power in a group of people who hold the same ideals and are working toward the same cause."

Along the way, the students braved tear gas, dodged rubber bullets and barely escaped arrest as spies. Despite the danger, they gave voice to a revolution and created what could become a new form of journalism.

Journey With No Road Map

"We didn't have any road map for this," Moussa said. "We hadn't really seen anything like it beforehand. But there's a lot of power in art. Poetry can add another layer to the news. It can take you beyond the facts, to the emotions, to the heart."

Poetic Portraits of a Revolution, a production of the Academy Award-winning organization, the Empowerment Project, will create a documentary film, photo installation and theatrical production in the coming months. The team is also working with Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill to publish a book. Learn more about upcoming events at the team's Facebook page.

Dr. Michael Escuti, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers later this fall, the White House announced Monday. The awards program, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, honors researchers for working at the frontiers of science and technology and serving the community through scientific leadership, public education or outreach.

Winners receive research grants of up to five years to support their work.

Escuti was honored for his pioneering development of liquid crystal "polarization gratings," which consist of a thin layer of liquid crystal material on a glass plate. The White House also recognized him for educating students through collaborations with international academic teams and industries, as well as for outreach work in underserved communities.

Escuti's research has shown how polarization gratings, as well as devices and applications based on them, can solve problems in optics that had been previously thought unsolvable.  One result of the work is a very energy-efficient way of steering laser beams that is precise and relatively inexpensive. The research has potential applications in laser radar and free space communication, which uses lasers to transfer data between platforms - such as between satellites or between aircraft and soldiers on the battlefield. Escuti's team, consisting of NC State students along with partner Boulder Nonlinear Systems Inc., has already delivered prototypes of the technology to the U.S. Air Force and is working on other applications.

Another result is a low-loss light switch, which inherently acts on all components of light rather than just the correctly polarized half, meaning that it is very transparent when it is open and very dark when closed.  Other results include high-resolution spectral/polarization cameras, which enable compact and low-cost imaging beyond what our eyes can see for platforms such as aerial vehicles, satellites and biomedical imaging.

Escuti is commercializing his research through several industrial partnerships, including his own start-up company, ImagineOptix Corp., that has already prototyped a tiny, highly efficient projection display that could revolutionize displays on hand-held and mobile devices.

His work has resulted in a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, three awarded patents and nine pending patents. He has also received $4.3 million in external research funding from NSF, and many other federal, state, and private sources.

Escuti received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Brown University in 2002 and joined the NC State faculty in 2004.

View the original article - Matt Shipman

Baliga, a Distinguished University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founding director of the Power Semiconductor Research Center, was honored for inventing, developing, and commercializing the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT). The energy-saving semiconductor switch controls the flow of power from an electrical energy source to any application that needs energy.

The IGBT improves energy efficiency by more than 40 percent in an array of products, from cars and refrigerators to light bulbs, and it is a critical component enabling modern compact cardiac defibrillators. The impact of the improved efficiency of IGBT-enabled applications has been a cumulative cost savings of $2.7 trillion for U.S. consumers and $15.8 trillion for worldwide consumers over the last 20 years. At the same time, the improved efficiency produced by IGBT-enabled applications has produced a cumulative reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 35 trillion pounds in the U. S. and 78 trillion pounds worldwide over the last 20 years. In addition, IGBT-based compact portable defibrillators are projected to have saved nearly 100,000 lives in the United States.

"It is a great honor to be recognized by the nation for my work over the last 35 years," Baliga says. "It's wonderful to see power semiconductor technology recognized for its enormous contribution to improving the quality of life for society, while mitigating our impact on the environment. And while much has been accomplished, I am continuing my work in the area of renewable energy systems."

The medal, which is awarded annually, recognizes outstanding contributions to America's economic, environmental and social well-being. Established by the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980, the medal was first awarded in 1985.

Baliga is currently working with the FREEDM Systems Center, a National Science Foundation-sponsored Engineering Research Center led by NC State that seeks to improve the nation's distribution and management of power. Baliga, who has been a faculty member at NC State since 1988, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE.

Additionally, Dr. Michael Escuti, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, will receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers later this fall, the White House announced Monday. The awards program, established by President Bill Clinton in 1996, honors researchers for working at the frontiers of science and technology and serving the community through scientific leadership, public education or outreach.

View the original article - Matt Shipman

"This information can be used to help us design more effective security systems, because it tells us which attacks - and which circumstances - are most harmful to Wi-Fi systems," says Dr. Wenye Wang, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

Wi-Fi networks, which allow computer users to access the Internet via radio signals, are commonplace - found everywhere from offices to coffee shops. And, increasingly, Wi-Fi networks are important channels for business communication. As a result, attacks that jam Wi-Fi networks, blocking user access, are not only inconvenient but have significant economic consequences.

Wang and her team examined two generic Wi-Fi attack models. One model represented persistent attacks, where the attack continues non-stop until it can be identified and disabled. The second model represented an intermittent attack, which blocks access on a periodic basis, making it harder to identify and stop. The researchers compared how these attack strategies performed under varying conditions, such as with different numbers of users.

After assessing the performance of the models, the researchers created a metric called an "order gain" to measure the impact of the attack strategies in various scenarios. Order gain compares the probability of an attacker having access to the Wi-Fi network to the probability of a legitimate user having access to the network. For example, if an attacker has an 80 percent chance of accessing the network, and other users have the other 20 percent, the order gain would be 4 - because the attackers odds of having access are 4 to 1.

This metric is important because a Wi-Fi network can only serve once computer at a time, and normally functions by rapidly cycling through multiple requests. Attacks work by giving the attacker greater access to the network, which effectively blocks other users.

"If we want to design effective countermeasures," Wang says, "we have to target the attacks that can cause the most disruption. It's impossible to prevent every conceivable attack." So, one suggestion the researchers have is for countermeasures to focus on continuous attacks that target networks with large numbers of users - because that scenario has the largest order gain. Beyond that, network security professionals can use the new approach to assess a complicated range of potential impacts that vary according to type of attack and number of users.

The paper, "Modeling and Evaluation of Backoff Misbehaving Nodes in CSMA/CA-based Wireless Networks," is forthcoming from IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and was co-authored by NC State Ph.D. student Zhuo Lu and Dr. Cliff Wang of the U.S. Army Research Office (ARO). The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and ARO.

View the original article - Matt Shipman

According to the North Carolina Energy Office, "the smart grid is a long-term, long-lead strategy to mitigate and reduce the impact of electrical power disruptions."  Modernizing the electrical grid is, therefore, as much about energy efficiency and renewable energy as it is about homeland security.

The forum emphasized the need for 1) communication regarding the benefits of smart grid to the consumer, 2) workforce training on new technologies, 3) cyber security management, 4) consideration of distributed generation and storage.  Speakers included Dr. Ewan Pritchard from the FREEDM Systems Center at NC State, Brewster McCracken from Pecan Project, Inc., Steven Root from SAIC Energy Environment and Infrastructure, LLC, Patty Duran from Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative and Ivan Urlab from the NC Sustainable Energy Association.

"We wanted to bring together industry leaders, public policy makers and utility representatives to focus on the smart grid issues facing North Carolina," said Ward Lenz, director of the N.C. Energy Office.  "If the leaders across the industry, policy arena and utilities can talk to each other and build a foundation of cooperation, it will likely result in more efficient and effective smart grid deployment ."

Dr. Ewan Pritchard adds, ""While there are already a number of clear benefits to a smarter utility grid, the greatest ones are likely to be unfathomable today, much like someone in the late nineteen eighties would have been unable to fathom the key benefits and business models of the Internet then."

Members of the University Sustainability Office and  Energy Management from NC State attended the Forum to learn more about how to "futureproof" the university's electrical grid.

Paul McConocha, energy manager with Energy Management, said, "One of Energy Management's key roles is to ensure that NC State achieves energy reductions in accordance with the University Sustainability Strategic Plan.  Deploying smart grid technologies will enable Utilities and Engineering Services to create a system of connections that will help us achieve our goals."

Several speakers mentioned the opportunity for private-public partnerships on one or more large scale pilot projects in the Triangle.  Raleigh has been named the #2 Top City for Smart Grid U.S. Headquarters and #2 Top City for Smart Grid Software Development according to the Wake County Economic Development Office.  Raleigh was also named "Most Sustainable Mid Sized City" by the US Chamber of Commerce in 2011.

In March 2012 the Department of Energy will sponsor a Smart Grid Technical Forum in Charlotte, NC as a more in-depth look at smart grid technologies and implementation strategies.  For more information about the Smart Grid Technical Forum, visit the North Carolina State Energy Office website at www.energync.net.

View the original article - Liz Bowen

Ferris and his colleague David Emory worked with the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Portland to develop a multi-modal trip planner. The open-source planner is continually being enhanced by transit agencies around the globe.

The Champions of Change series profiles the lives of Americans who are playing a role in helping the United States rise to the challenges of the 21st century. "The White House is proud to feature these stories of Americans who are doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world," says Valerie Jarrett, senior advisor to President Barack Obama.

Ferris recently completed his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. As a doctoral student, he worked with civil engineering graduate student Kari Watkins to develop OneBusAway, a tool to provide schedules and real-time arrival information for buses and trains. OneBusAway was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and Nokia Research.

While at NC State, Ferris majored in computer engineering and computer science. He was a member of Phi Kappa Phi, Phi Beta Kappa, and the Golden Chain Society. Ferris served as editor-in-chief for Americana, a university online magazine, and created and taught a new course in the computer science department. He volunteered in the community by tutoring home-schooled children in mathematics. Ferris was raised in New Hill, North Carolina and attended Apex High School.

View the original article - Bill Krueger

"But that is what keeps us on our feet - we have once again brought the team closer to victory than any year in the club's history. If we gain too much ground, what will be our motivator for the next year? What keeps us from getting too comfortable? Too complacent?" a team member said of their finals run.

With a lot of hard work on vision tracking, calibrating, debugging, and begging the robot to do what the team wanted, they were able to get Seawolf IV was ranked 7th out of the 28 teams in the qualifying heats.  This is the first year that the team has made it into finals and the team was ecstatic.

In the end, the team was very pleased with their finish and looks forward to getting into the competition next year.

Co-sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR), the goal of the RoboSub competition is to advance the development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) by challenging a new generation of engineers to perform realistic missions in an underwater environment. This event also serves to foster ties between young engineers and the organizations developing AUV technologies.

Perennial favorites Team Sonia of ETS in Canada and Cornell University captured the top two spots.  The international competition had 28 teams entered including teams from the US, China, India, Canada, Japan and Iceland.

You can find more info about the Underwater Robotics Club at www.ncsurobotics.com.

"Students by day, hopeful imagineers by night," says Patrick Carroll.

But dreams turned to reality when Carroll and his colleagues traveled to Southern California two weeks ago as finalists in the Disney ImagiNations competition. The team's project, a Disney attraction called "Fantasia: The Lost Symphony," scored second place in the prestigious competition.

Teamwork Pays Off

Team members, who say they haven't gotten a lot of sleep since they started the project last spring, brought diverse skills to the demanding endeavor. Carroll is a senior in electrical and computer engineering, Adam Newton is majoring in industrial and systems engineering with a minor in creative writing and Jay Brown and Michael Delaney just graduated with undergraduate degrees in art and design.

That's par for the course at Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative division that sponsors the annual competition for college students. Its workforce-called imagineers-is made up of creative professionals in 140 disciplines, from artists and writers to architects and engineers. Together, they create all Disney theme parks, resorts, attractions, cruise ships, real estate developments and regional entertainment venues worldwide.

In addition to pitching their concept to a panel of imagineers, the students got to spend a week at Imagineering's headquarters, meeting some of Disney's brightest minds and taking a peek at the technology behind Disney magic.

"It was a jam-packed week," says Brown. "It was incredible."

Newton says he enjoyed going behind the scenes at the Disney attraction, Soarin' Over California.

"Going back stage allowed us to really appreciate the magic on the screen," he says. "It's this gigantic contraption that I heard was inspired by a child's erector set."

Wind Beneath Their Wings

That brought a smile to the face of Elena Page, known to her friends as E. As an undergraduate in engineering at NC State in 1995, Page took first place in the ImagiNations competition and went on to work at Imagineering for nearly a decade. Her work on Soarin' Over California earned her the theme park equivalent of an Oscar.

Back in North Carolina with a Master of Fine Arts in media design and a job as an animator and senior designer at SMT in Durham, Page was happy to volunteer as a mentor for the team. It's a difficult contest, she says, and a challenging field.

"It's getting harder and harder to deliver an experience that is truly unique," she says.

Disney Inspiration

The students' project was inspired by Fantasia, Disney's 1940 film that featured classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski as the score for a series of animated scenes. They proposed creating a theme park attraction that would allow guests to conduct a new musical score and control various magical effects using their hands.

For the contest, they developed an exhaustive array of materials, including concept art, a storyboard, posters, a PowerPoint presentation, a scale model and an animation. To top it off, they even developed their own software program, called Camera Manager, and a working prototype of a device, a sorcerer's hand, that could be sold in Disney gift shops to promote the ride.

With the competition behind them, the students have a new sense of excitement about the future, even in a tough economy.

"I've  gotten this taste of creative innovation," says Newton. "Now  I want to have a job like that, a job that makes people ask, 'You get paid to do that?'"

View the original article - David Hunt

And now that relationship has grown even stronger.

ABB, which has had facilities on NC State's Centennial Campus for two decades, announced in September plans to establish a smart grid research center at the campus. A few months later, the company's North American headquarters in Cary made a gift that helped to create a $1.2 million initiative supporting power engineering research and education efforts in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The gift augments the more than $300,000 the company is investing in NC State software, fellowships and power and power electronics research this year.

ABB, which is based in Switzerland, is also an industry partner of the FREEDM Systems Center, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center headquartered at NC State that is developing key technologies to reshape the nation's energy grid.

"Since becoming the first corporate tenants on Centennial Campus in 1991, ABB's regional power products and power systems divisions have made their homes on campus. It's a longstanding and welcome relationship," said Dr. Louis Martin-Vega, dean of the College of Engineering. "A prime motivation of ABB in North America is to establish a greater presence in the US. We are very pleased that this new endowment will help grow our research relationship and help ABB develop its domestic capability."

ABB is making the investments at NC State as society's demands for energy efficiency and reliable, high-volume power from clean energy sources have fueled tremendous growth in power engineering, which deals with the generation, transmission and distribution of electric power, as well as the electrical devices connected tovthose systems. As more alternative-energy technologies enter the marketplace and the industry amps up energy efficiency and smart grid applications, researchers from universities and industry are working to reshape the power grid to handle the demand.

The recent $1.2 million initiative includes a five-year commitment of $632,000 from ABB plus anticipated matching grants. It will establish an endowed professorship, a faculty support fund, annual scholarships and a lecture series, all focused on power engineering.

The ABB Distinguished Professorship in Electrical Engineering will enable the College of Engineering to retain or recruit a top power engineering faculty member and support groundbreaking research in the field. In addition to ABB's contribution, it is anticipated that the professorship will be supplemented by matching grants that NC State has requested from the UNC Distinguished Professors Endowment Trust Fund and the C.D. Spangler Foundation.

The ABB Power Engineering Scholarship program will offer five awards annually to students taking power engineering classes. The $6,000 scholarships are roughly equal to in-state tuition and fees at NC State and will help attract talented students to the field.

The lecture series will feature prominent experts on topics related to recent developments in power technology and the smart grid. The gift also includes funds for faculty development in power engineering.

The ABB gift is important because engineering schools everywhere are investing heavily in their power engineering programs.

"It's a very competitive environment for attracting and keeping top faculty and students," said Dr. Daniel Stancil, head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "This ability to offer professorships and scholarships will help bring the brightest minds in power engineering to NC State."

NC State students have long been attracted to ABB's power systems work. The company typically takes on five to eight interns from NC State each year and has hired three NC State PhD graduates as full-time employees over the past two years.

"One of our biggest challenges is finding skilled engineers who are well-trained in the technical principles of this dynamic field," said Enrique Santacana, president and CEO of ABB Inc. and region manager of ABB in North America. "Not only will this initiative establish a pipeline of talented people for ABB, it combines NC State's top academic thinking and our practical business know-how for advancing this exciting and rapidly changing industry."

ABB and NC State have a long-established relationship, and the company currently employs about 300 people on Centennial at a corporate research center and the North America headquarters of its power products and power systems divisions.

The company's Smart Grid Center of Excellence, which will open on Centennial this year, will employ about 50 people and include a testing and development laboratory and a demonstration center that will showcase ABB's smart grid technologies and partnerships.

After the FREEDM Systems Center was announced in 2008, ABB became one of the center's formal industry partners and has worked closely with FREEDM researchers. The FREEDM Center's industry advisory board is chaired by Le Tang, vice president and head of the US corporate research center for ABB. Anders Sjoelin, region division manager for power systems with ABB, said ABB's smart grid work dovetailed well with FREEDM's research in the area.

"Locating our Smart Grid Center of Excellence in Raleigh will fuel even more collaboration with the FREEDM Systems Center," Sjoelin said. "FREEDM's focus on next-generation semiconductors and other smart grid technologies ties into our plans perfectly. We look forward to deepening our relationship with FREEDM."

View the original article - Engineering Magazine

Researchers at NC State's FREEDM Systems Center are developing what can be called the "smarts" of the smart electrical grid - devices and networks that will one day seamlessly connect rooftop solar panels with batteries that store energy in the basements below. At the same time, electric cars will charge in millions of garages, and consumers will sell extra electricity they generate back to the power company.

NC State's groundbreaking smart grid work helped prompt the White House to choose the university to be the host for a roundtable discussion on the smart grid and energy with members of President Barack Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The session will be led by Jeffrey Immelt, chair of the council and chairman and CEO of GE. Executives from Southwest Airlines, Comcast Corp., NextEra Energy and many of the region's leading smart grid companies are also scheduled to attend.

Session participants, including local energy experts and business leaders, will discuss ways to create jobs in the energy and smart grid industries through partnerships with academia and state and federal government agencies. The information gathered during the meeting will be shared with President Obama during the council's Monday afternoon session in Durham.

The council meeting is another high-profile success for NC State's smart grid research efforts. In April, a new type of transformer under development at the FREEDM Systems Center was named to MIT Technology Review's 2011 list of the world's 10 most important emerging technologies.

The devices, called smart solid-state transformers, represent a big step forward toward developing the smart energy grid of the future. Today's grid, which has changed little since the days of Thomas Edison, only lets power flow in one direction - from the power company to the consumer. But as the cost of renewable energy technologies comes down and plug-in electric vehicles become more widespread, the grid will need an upgrade to handle the flood of devices that will not only consume energy, but push it back onto the grid.

The FREEDM Center's smart transformers are built to manage power more effectively than today's transformers. They will precisely control voltage, frequency and other electrical properties as they communicate with the rest of the grid. The devices will also help utilities incorporate lots of renewable energy into the grid with fewer blackouts or power surges.

Stephen Cass, special projects editor for the Technology Review, called the devices "a major advance for smart grids, allowing the flow of electricity to be controlled and rerouted in a manner similar to how data is routed around the Internet."

FREEDM, which stands for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management, was formed in 2008 by a five-year, $18.5 million Engineering Research Center grant from the National Science Foundation.
The center benefits from its location in the Triangle, one of the nation's top smart grid hubs. A recent Duke University study counted nearly 60 smart grid companies in the region. They include the power systems giant ABB, which is developing a Smart Grid Center of Excellence just down the road from FREEDM on NC State's Centennial Campus.

View the original article - University Communications

Computer models of biological systems have many uses, from predicting potential side-effects of new drugs to understanding the ability of plants to adjust to climate change. But developing models for living things is challenging because, unlike machines, biological systems can have  a significant amount of uncertainty and variation.

"When developing a model of a biological system, you have to use techniques that account for that uncertainty, and those techniques require a lot of computational power," says Dr. Cranos Williams, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. "That means using powerful computers. Those computers are expensive, and access to them can be limited.

"Our goal was to develop software that enables scientists to run biological models on conventional computers by utilizing their multi-core chips more efficiently."

The brain of a computer chip is its central processing unit, or "core." Most personal computers now use chips that have between four and eight cores. However, most programs only operate in one core at a time. For a program to utilize all of these cores, it has to be broken down into separate "threads" - so that each core can execute a different part of the program simultaneously. The process of breaking down a program into threads is called parallelization, and allows computers to run programs very quickly.

In order to "parallelize" algorithms for building models of biological systems, Williams' research team created a way for information to pass back and forth between the cores on a single chip. Specifically, Williams explains, "we used threads to create 'locks' that control access to shared data. This allows all of the cores on the chip to work together to solve a unified problem."

The researchers tested the approach by running three models through chips that utilized one core, as well as chips that used the new technique to utilize two, four and eight cores. In all three models, the chip that utilized eight cores ran at least 7.5 times faster than the chip that utilized only one core.

"This approach allows us to build complex models that better reflect the true characteristics of the biological process, and do it in a more computationally efficient way," says Williams. "This is important. In order to understand biological systems, we will need to use increasingly complex models to address the uncertainty and variation inherent in those systems."

Ultimately, Williams and his team hope to see if this approach can be scaled up for use on supercomputers, and whether it can be modified to take advantage of the many cores that are available on graphics processing units used in many machines.

The paper, "Parameter Estimation In Biological Systems Using Interval Methods With Parallel Processing," was co-authored by NC State master's student Skylar Marvel and NC State Ph.D. student Maria de Luis Balaguer. The paper was presented at the Workshop on Computational Systems Biology in Zurich, Switzerland, June 6-8.

The award recognizes the accomplishments and achievements of permanent NC State employees.

This isn't the first time Andrew has received recognition for his achievements.  In 2007 and 2011, he received the Pride of the Wolfpack award.  The Pride of the Wolfpack award is an "on the spot" award designed to recognize NC State employees for a special or unique contribution to their college/unit or the University.

Among Andrew's qualifying accomplishments include development of and the maintenance of GradWatch. GradWatch is a web application that tracks an entire graduate student's lifecycle -- annually tracking an average of 600 students.  The tool consolidates numerous campus sources of graduate student data that alleviates the need for spreadsheets and automates internal processes and reports.  The scripts created by Andrew for have been adopted by the Graduate School to replace other software, saving an estimated $10,000.

"In short, Andrew is not only capable and hardworking but clever and innovative.  These talents have made him extremely valuable, if not irreplaceable in ECE," said Dr. Joel Trussell, former Director of Graduate Programs, ECE.

Andrew is also responsible for the web application called ADToolKit.  ADToolKit assists in managing the campus's Active Directory computer network of about 10,000 computers.  His tool takes care of provisioning and updating user accounts for anyone that logs into a campus computer.  Andrew continues to develop the tool in order to address every support solution the campus support community asks for.

Have you taken a moment to stop and read an announcement on a digital sign in a campus building?  One hundred and fifty of these screens across campus (including every screen in D. H. Hill Library) are powered by the WolfTech application "Billboard v3" written and maintained by Andrew.  The system currently serves out over 1650 unique slides to the campus community and more screens are installed every week.

"I also deeply appreciated Andrew's commitment to improving the Billboard system to make it an ever better method of communicating with the campus community.  I have made many suggestions for improvements over the years and Andrew has responded to all with speed and elegance.  He is, in the best sense, the ideal colleague," said Keith Morgan, NCSU Libraries.

Andrew's role among the WolfTech Support Group is to create web-based applications that serve the department -- with a focus on GradWatch.

To do this, the new techniques allow multi-core chips to deal with two things more efficiently: allocating bandwidth and "prefetching" data.

Multi-core chips are supposed to make our computers run faster. Each core on a chip is its own central processing unit, or computer brain. However, there are things that can slow these cores. For example, each core needs to retrieve data from memory that is not stored on its chip. There is a limited pathway - or bandwidth - these cores can use to retrieve that off-chip data. As chips have incorporated more and more cores, the bandwidth has become increasingly congested - slowing down system performance.

One of the ways to expedite core performance is called prefetching. Each chip has its own small memory component, called a cache. In prefetching, the cache predicts what data a core will need in the future and retrieves that data from off-chip memory before the core needs it. Ideally, this improves the core's performance. But, if the cache's prediction is inaccurate, it unnecessarily clogs the bandwidth while retrieving the wrong data. This actually slows the chip's overall performance.

"The first technique relies on criteria we developed to determine how much bandwidth should be allotted to each core on a chip," says Dr. Yan Solihin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Some cores require more off-chip data than others. The researchers use easily-collected data from the hardware counters on each chip to determine which cores need more bandwidth. "By better distributing the bandwidth to the appropriate cores, the criteria are able to maximize system performance," Solihin says.

"The second technique relies on a set of criteria we developed for determining when prefetching will boost performance and should be utilized," Solihin says, "as well as when prefetching would slow things down and should be avoided." These criteria also use data from each chip's hardware counters. The prefetching criteria would allow manufacturers to make multi-core chips that operate more efficiently, because each of the individual cores would automatically turn prefetching on or off as needed.

Utilizing both sets of criteria, the researchers were able to boost multi-core chip performance by 40 percent, compared to multi-core chips that do not prefetch data, and by 10 percent over multi-core chips that always prefetch data.

The paper, "Studying the Impact of Hardware Prefetching and Bandwidth Partitioning in Chip-Multiprocessors," will be presented June 9 at the International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS) in San Jose, Calif. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Fang Liu, a former Ph.D. student at NC State. The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

NC State's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is part of the university's College of Engineering.

The award recognizes a distinguished educator in the field of microwave engineering and science who best exemplifies the special human qualities of Fred Rosenbaum, who considered teaching a high calling and demonstrated his dedication to the Society through tireless service.

Dr. Steer was cited "For outstanding contributions as a teacher, mentor, and role model for students in the microwave profession."

The award will be conferred at the annual Society Awards Banquet to be held during the International Microwave Symposium the week of June 6-10, 2011 in Baltimore, MD.

Every year the MTT Society presents awards to outstanding members of the microwave community for contributions made to the field of microwave technology and engineering. The awards are made following a process that includes nomination and a rigorous evaluation procedure. The award nominations are due July 1 of each year and the awardees are approved by the MTT Society ADCOM at their Winter meeting in January. Further details of these Society Awards can be found at http://www.mtt.org/awards.

The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society is a transnational society with more than 11,000 members and 150 chapters worldwide.  The Society promotes the advancement of microwave theory and its applications, including RF, microwave, millimeter-wave, and terahertz technologies.

Like dozens of other researchers at NC State, Misra is using nanotechnology - in which researchers manipulate the properties of the tiniest of materials - to make those advances happen.

"We want to demonstrate nanotechnology in a real device that can make a difference," said Misra, professor of electrical and computer engineering. "We can take nano fundamentals and apply them to real world applications."

Today you can find dozens of NC State engineers interacting with each other and with researchers across campus as part of the NC State Nanotechnology Initiative, a university-wide effort established in 2006. The initiative focuses on nanotechnology research, outreach and education and seeks to foster inter-disciplinary research and infrastructure; expand academic programs and educational impact in the field; and support nanotechnology-focused collaborations within the university and with local industry.

Nanotechnology focuses on the fabrication and manipulation of materials and devices with dimensions less than 100 nanometers; for perspective, the head of a pin is about 1 million nanometers wide. When these tiny materials and structures are altered and controlled, they exhibit unique properties not found in larger-scale systems. For example, aluminum, a normally stable material, becomes combustible on the "nanoscale."  And copper, an opaque substance, becomes transparent.

Such changes can lead to the creation and improvement of devices, products and materials that we use every day. NC State engineers have made key advances in this area, including developing new approaches for adding antimicrobial properties to microneedles, tiny needles that hold great promise for use in portable medical devices; developing an inexpensive treatment process using a nanoscale film that significantly lessens odors from poultry rendering operations; and creating a "smart coating" that helps surgical implants bond more closely with bone and ward off infection.

These results have gained NC State national recognition as a nanotechnology leader. In 2009, Small Times ranked NC State among its top 10 US academic institutions in nano commercialization and research. In addition, Raleigh was one of the top five cities designated as a "nano metro" cluster by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.

And Dr. Jagdish "Jay" Narayan, the John C.C. Fan Family Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, recently received the Acta Materialia Gold Medal and Prize for accomplishments in the field, which include creating materials that could allow a fingernail-size computer chip to store the equivalent of 250 million pages of text.

Researchers at NC State have been conducting world-class nanotechnology research for more than two decades, but in many cases, groups working in different disciplines weren't aware of what their NC State peers were doing. In the early 2000s, campus leaders began a push toward forming an umbrella nanotechnology group that would promote collaboration among nanotechnology researchers on campus and develop interaction opportunities for researchers interested in emerging nanotechnology fields, such as nanobiotechnology and nanotoxicology. That work spawned what became the Nanotechnology Initiative.

"People were thinking that nanotechnology had potential in a lot of different fields, so we wanted to have some way to help faculty on campus communicate about research that they're doing," said Dr. Gregory Parsons, director of the initiative and Alcoa Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Today, the initiative includes researchers from nine NC State colleges, including many from the College of Engineering. These engineers realize the importance of collaboration, especially regarding research proposals to funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation.

"In order to successfully get funded these days, proposals must be cross-disciplinary in nature and bring together scientists from different disciplines in order to effectively address the challenges," Misra said.

Among Misra's collaborative projects is an effort to use magnetic nanowires to decrease the power dissipation per chip, increase the number of transistors and improve the speed of electronic devices.

Silicon is the transistor material most frequently used in devices such as laptops, PCs and cell phones, but researchers appear to have hit a wall. Silicon is reaching its limit to be scaled down and is losing its ability to uphold Moore's Law, a technology rule of thumb holding that the number of transistors that can be squeezed into a computer chip doubles every 18 months. This pace of progress can't be sustained unless researchers work with new materials on the very small scale.

"We need alternative routes to continue the progress in electronic improvement, performance and power," said Misra. "We don't know what that answer is going to be, but there are many approaches being pursued and several of us at NC State are pursuing several promising pathways."

Others are also using the team approach. Dr. Nancy Monteiro-Riviere, professor of investigative dermatology and toxicology at NC State, assesses the safety and health effects of nanomaterials in everything from sunscreens to medical devices. She is working with NC State industrial and systems engineers to try to determine whether silver-coated prosthetic devices will release ions to kill bacteria and eliminate infection - an existing problem among prosthetic implants.

Dr. Jon-Paul Maria, professor of materials science and engineering, is working with Dr. Michael Dickey, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, to use nano-enhanced solar cells to develop automatic charging stations for soldiers' computers, night-vision displays and GPS devices. Instead of carrying additional batteries, soldiers can use the stations to recharge the batteries and decrease their loads.

More collaborations have come as a result of NC State nanotechnology forums, which are held regularly on campus. Researchers from across campus are invited to give short presentations on their current research. The forums help researchers learn what colleagues in related fields are doing.

For example, Parsons' collaboration with Dr. James Bonner, associate professor of toxicology at NC State, began shortly after he met Bonner at the first nanotechnology forum. Bonner was studying the potential health effects of nanotubes, which can be found in a variety of products including computer screens, heat-resistant cookware and prescription medication containers.

To learn more, Parsons suggested using his thin-film coating methods to change the surface structure of nanotubes and see if that might affect their toxicity level. The two researchers wrote a proposal and received funding from the National Institutes of Health. Today, they are one of the only groups in the country looking at how to modify nanotubes to affect and mitigate their toxicity, which could help make nanomanufacturing plants and resulting products safer.

Dr. Orlin Velev, INVISTA Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, also attributes some of his recent research successes to the initiative.

"The initiative has helped us find a way to speak with each other and collaborate," he said. "We want to know about each other's research, establish contacts, discuss experimental capabilities and start collaborative projects."

Velev recently led a team of researchers that showed how water-gel-based solar devices - "artificial leaves" - can function like solar cells to produce electricity. The findings proved the concept for making solar cells that more closely mimic nature. They also have the potential to be less expensive and more environmentally friendly than the current standard-bearer: silicon-based solar cells.

The work in Velev's group was funded through a grant from the US Department of Energy to investigate nanoscale processes for renewable energy. The grant project, developed and managed by the initiative, currently supports facilities and five research groups led by Velev, Dickey, Parsons, Misra and Dr. Christopher Gorman, professor of organic and materials chemistry.

"The discussions with our colleagues, the funding and the equipment have allowed us to finish our work and get published," Velev said. "Cooperating with other people and using shared facilities helped our work a lot."

NC State researchers see more opportunities for partnerships. Last year, they were awarded 25 nano- and micro-technology patents.

"Some of our own folks have gone on to create startup companies that create jobs," Misra said. "I think it just goes to show how important it is to continue our nanotechnology efforts to help the economy of North Carolina. There are a lot of opportunities for entrepreneurship in this area, so we need to continue to build that."

Parsons, who serves as co-chair of the research and scholarship division on Chancellor Randy Woodson's Strategic Planning Committee, hopes to see the Nanotechnology Initiative keep evolving positively as the new chancellor continues to roll out his vision for the university.

"I'm an alumnus, and I'm proud of what we're doing," Parsons said. "Keep your eyes on NC State. We're not waiting around; we're pushing forward."

View the original article - Engineering Communictations

Misra received the Alcoa Foundation Distinguished Engineering Research Award, made to a senior faculty member for research achievements over a period of at least five years at NC State. Escuti was awarded the Alcoa Foundation Engineering Research Achievement Award, intended to recognize young faculty who have accomplished outstanding research achievements during the preceding three years.

Misra is a world-renowned expert in the area of advanced CMOS materials and devices, nanoelectronics for memory and logic, organic solar cells, wide bandgap power devices, and bioelectronics. Her contribution to the exploration and development of advanced gate electrodes for high-k gated CMOS transistors is unmatched by researchers at any other university. She has developed a methodology for determining effective work functions of metal gates deposited on high-k gate dielectrics, which has been adapted and widely used in the gate stack community. Prior to her focus on the gate electrodes, Misra made valuable contributions to advanced gate dielectrics. Having expertise in both advanced gate dielectrics and advanced gate electrodes is a powerful combination that has served her well in this critical juncture when the semiconductor industry is making an extraordinary transition to adapt new materials for the gate stack.

During the past five years, Misra has authored 94 reviewed journal papers and 48 conference papers and given 35 invited talks. She has also graduated 11 PhD students and received several million dollars to support her research activities during this time. Her many honors include the NC State Alumni Research Award, the NSF Presidential Early CAREER Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the Alcoa Foundation Engineering Research Achievement Award. Misra received her PhD in electrical engineering from NC State in 1995 and joined the faculty in 1998.

Escuti's work developing new polarization gratings, as well as devices and applications based on them, has been extremely influential at the international level. His groundbreaking work has shown how these polarization gratings, with the improvement he has made in them, can solve problems in optics that many had thought unsolvable. This work is widely viewed as having changed the way industry views non-mechanical laser beam scanning. Escuti is commercializing his research through several industrial partnerships, including a promising start-up company, ImagineOptix, that has already prototyped a miniature, highly efficient projection display that has the potential to revolutionize displays on hand-held and mobile devices.

Escuti's research has resulted in 28 journal publications, 49 refereed conference proceedings, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, three awarded patents and seven pending patents. He has also received $4.3 million in external research funding from the National Science Foundation, NASA, Raytheon and many other public and private sources. Escuti also mentors graduate students and directs the work of undergraduate researchers. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Brown University in 2002 and joined the faculty at NC State in 2004.

View the original article - Engineering Communictations

Across the Arab world the flames of revolution are spreading, freeing Tunisia and Egypt from their oppressive regimes, igniting a civil war in Libya and sparking unrest in more than a dozen countries, from Syria to Yemen.

A world away, two students at NC State are preparing for the road trip of a lifetime, a two-month odyssey to experience history as it happens.

Mohammad Moussa, an electrical and computer engineering major, and Sameer Abdel-Khalek, a student in the environmental technology program, will travel to Tunisia and Egypt this summer with award-winning poets Kane Smego and Will McInerney.

There, they'll document the images, emotions and stories of everyday people who participated in the uprisings; Moussa as a spoken word artist and interpreter, Abdel-Khalek as a photographer and filmmaker.

Back in the United States in September, the team will create "poetic portraits of a revolution," weaving poetry, spoken word, video, audio clips and photographs into a multimedia collage. They plan to spin off a book, documentary film, theatrical performances and radio programming to reach a national audience with a message of hope.

"People have brought about change, and they've done it peacefully, respectfully and in such an organized way. And they've done it all through their voices," Moussa said in an interview this week. "As someone who writes poetry, it's extremely inspiring to see that, to see the voice winning in such a huge struggle."

Moussa, whose parents are Lebanese, spent much of his childhood living in the Middle East. The upcoming trip will give him an opportunity to savor the region's first tentative steps toward democracy. Listen to a podcast of Moussa discussing the project.

"The region has been oppressed for so long and across so many generations that you lose sight of the fact that people are actually able to take matters into their own hands," he said. "It's great to see people out on the street, using their voices to say they want a better life, they want change."

View the original article - David Hunt

NVMM technologies, such as phase-change memory, hold great promise to replace conventional dynamic random access memory (DRAM) in the main memory of computers. NVMM would allow computers to start instantly, and can fit more memory into the same amount of space used by existing technologies. However, NVMM poses a security risk.

Conventional DRAM main memory does not store data once the computer is turned off. That means, for example, that it doesn't store your credit card number and password after an online shopping spree. NVMM, on the other hand, retains all user data in main memory even years after the computer is turned off. This feature could give criminals access to your personal information or other data if your laptop or smart phone were stolen. And, because the data in the NVMM is stored in main memory, it cannot be encrypted using software. Software cannot manage main memory functions, because software itself operates in main memory.

NC State researchers have developed a solution using a hardware encryption system called i-NVMM.

"We could use hardware to encrypt everything," explains Dr. Yan Solihin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing i-NVMM, "but then the system would run very slowly - because it would constantly be encrypting and decrypting data.

"Instead, we developed an algorithm to detect data that is likely not needed by the processor. This allows us to keep 78 percent of main memory encrypted during typical operation, and only slows the system's performance by 3.7 percent."

The i-NVMM tool has two additional benefits as well. First, its algorithm also detects idleness. That means any data not currently in use - such as your credit card number - is automatically encrypted. This makes i-NVMM even more secure than DRAM. Second, while 78 percent of the main memory is encrypted when the computer is in use, the remaining 22 percent is encrypted when the computer is powered down.

"Basically, unless someone accesses your computer while you're using it, all of your data is protected," Solihin says.

i-NVMM relies on a self-contained encryption engine that is incorporated into a computer's memory module - and does not require changes to the computer's processors. That means it can be used with different processors and different systems.

"We're now seeking industry partners who are interested in this technology," Solihin says.

The paper, "i-NVMM: A Secure Non-Volatile Main Memory System with Incremental Encryption," will be presented June 6 at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in San Jose, Calif. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Siddhartha Chhabra, a former Ph.D. student at NC State. The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

NC State's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is part of the university's College of Engineering.

Forget the Pentium. As you read this, you're using a machine that puts the latest processor to shame--your brain. Its 100 billion neurons each have 10,000 synapses exchanging messages. Alice Parker '70, '75 phd hopes to one day duplicate that power with a synthetic brain. It may take a decade or more, she says, but eventually a synthetic brain could be used in prosthetic devices that could wire around damaged parts of the brain, or in brainlike systems that could drive robotic vehicles.

Other researchers simulate the workings of a few neurons using computer software, but building a whole brain that way would require too many processors, says Parker, a professor of electrical engineering and former vice provost for research at the University of Southern California. "Computer chips like the Pentium are considered comparable to a brainlike structure, but they're nowhere near the complexity of the brain," she says.

For example, a Swiss university has simulated a brain using software and an IBM multiprocessor that uses about 8,000 processors. But it can do the work for only 10,000 neurons. "To scale up to the size of a brain, you would need millions of these IBM multiprocessors," Parker Says.

In her vision, transistors will stand in for the neurons and synapses, and the electrical properties of voltage and current will simulate brain chemicals (neurotransmitters). Consider that it would take hundreds of transistors to simulate just one synapse, and you'll get some idea of the complexity of her task. "[The brain has] a quadrillion synapses, if I do the arithmetic right," Parker says. In other words, 10 to the 15th power, or a one with 15 zeros behind it. "It's a lot of circuitry," she says.

Parker has tackled daunting tasks before. She studied engineering at NC State in the early 1970s when few women did. In her first electrical engineering class, there were 120 students but just one other woman. "It was a bit isolating," she says. "The men might have been a little afraid to befriend me."

She sometimes made friends with fellow students' girlfriends, and she made other friends while singing in the chorus. She also got support from professors like Wayland P. Seagraves '32, '33 ms, who chose to take Parker to a regional conference sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, making her the first woman in the region to attend. "He was always trying to make opportunities for us. I don't know if I would have been as successful if it hadn't been for him," says Parker, who has been interested in synthetic-brain work since she was a graduate student. She began serious work on it several years ago when she saw that nanotechnology and other fields were improving fast enough to make the task feasible.

Parker and her collaborators are starting small, trying to simulate one neuron using transistors made out of carbon nanotubes, which are molecules of carbon that can be as much as 100,000 times narrower than a human hair. Because nanotubes are so small, even if each transistor used several, the synthetic brain wouldn't be too big to be practical.

"I'm trying to get my students launched so they can ultimately get there," Parker says. She keeps her eye on neuroscience developments that will influence her next move, such as an October 2009 study showing that a particular type of cell helps the retina adapt when light changes from bright to dim. "All of a sudden we know about these cells that nobody was factoring into these circuits before," she says. "It's like chess, where you're always thinking about the end game. We can't build this whole complicated system now, but every little piece that we make today has to make sense later in the final structure."

Angela Spivey, NC State Alumni Magazine
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of NC State. The alumni magazine is a benefit of membership in the NC State Alumni Association. Join the Alumni Association

The awards honor the crucial role that mentoring plays in the academic and personal development of students studying science or engineering and who belong to groups that are underrepresented in those fields. Bottomley was one of 22 individuals and organizations honored July 9 by President Barack Obama for excellence in mentoring. 

"There is no higher calling than furthering the educational advancement of our nation's young people and encouraging and inspiring our next generation of leaders," Obama said in a statement. "These awards represent a heartfelt salute of appreciation to a remarkable group of individuals who have devoted their lives and careers to helping others and in doing so have helped us all."

Candidates for the Presidential Mentoring Award are nominated by colleagues, administrators and students from their home institutions. The mentoring can involve students at any grade level from elementary through graduate school. In addition to being honored at a ceremony at the White House this fall, recipients receive awards of $10,000 to advance their mentoring efforts.

In her role as director of K-12 Engineering Outreach Programs at NC State, Bottomley reaches more than 5,000 students, 200 teachers and 500 parents each year. The programs she leads include summer camps for K-12 students; programs that send undergraduates and graduate students into schools to work with elementary and middle school students; training sessions for NC State engineering alumni who want to be volunteer teachers in their communities; and assistance for K-12 teachers who want to introduce engineering concepts to their young students.

Bottomley also directs NC State's Women in Engineering program, which works to boost the number of women engineers in academia and industry, and acts as a consultant to the N.C. Dept. of Public Instruction and Wake County Public Schools.

Bottomley received her bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech in 1984 and 1985, respectively. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from NC State in 1992. She has previously worked at AT&T Bell Labs and Duke University.

Original article - College of Engineering News