Device could be future optical replacement for on-chip wires. Scientists from the University of Michigan (Prof. Bhattacharya) and Intel Corporation in the US have demonstrated what appears to be the first electrically powered, room-temperature polariton laser. The device, based on a GaN-based microcavity diode, could advance efforts to replace on-chip wire connections with lasers, leading to smaller and more powerful electronics, say the researchers. [Full Story]

Congratulations to the following faculty who received promotions this year: Valeria Bertacco, Jason Flinn, Satish Narayanasamy, Edwin Olson, Mina Rais-Zadeh, and Zhaohui Zhong. Keep up the great work! [Full Story]

Jiangfeng Wu, graduate student in electrical engineering, received the Mikio Takagi Student Prize for his research in designing and building an antenna that can better determine the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The Mikio Takagi Student Prize is given to the best of the top three Student Prize Paper Awards granted at the IEEE Int. Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium. [Full Story]

Dr. Dipak L. Sengupta, former research scientist and treasured friend of the department, passed away Saturday, July 19, 2014 at the age of 83. Dr. Sengupta came to the office nearly every day, including Saturday mornings. Faculty and staff alike will miss his cheerful and gentle presence in the building. [Full Story]

Three hundred and eighty alumni and children visited North Campus June 26 and 27 as part of the Xplore Engineering summer camp, with many of the activities related to or hosted by EECS. [Full Story]

Prof. Barzan Mozafari and his collaborators have received the Best Demo Award at the 2014 ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference. The demo was of their Analytical Bootstrap (ABS) System, which enables complex exploratory data analysis on large volumes of data. ABS is described in their paper, ABS: a System for Scalable Approximate Queries with Accuracy Guarantees. [Full Story]

Babak Parviz (MSE, PhD EE), the man who led Google's development of wearable technology project Glass, is moving to rival Amazon.com. Babak posted a photo of the Amazon logo on his social account with the short comment, status: super excited. (photo by Doug Plummer) [Full Story]

Independent game designer and CSE Lecturer Jeremy Gibson has authored a new book entitled Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development, which for the first time brings these three disciplines together in a single volume. [Full Story]

This New Tech City Audio Story on wNYC describes work that Prof. Emily Mower Provost is doing in conjunction with psychiatrist Melvin McInnis to use smartphones in detecting the mood swings of patients with bipolar disorder as they talk on smartphones. [Full Story]

Gyouho Kim is completing his thesis in electrical engineering in the area of ultra-low power VLSI design. He is designing a millimeter-scale visual system that is complete with optics, processing capability and battery. Solar cells are used to harvest the minuscule amount of energy needed to operate. [Full Story]

Profs. Gregory Wakefield and David Kieras, along with three coauthors from the Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, received the Best Paper Award at the 20th International Conference on Auditory Display for EPIC Modeling of a Two-Talker CRM Listening Task. [Full Story]

Thomas Frost received a Best Paper Award for achieving a high quality quantum dot red laser using novel materials. Lasers emitting in the 600nm wavelength range have important applications in medicine, optical information processing, plastic fiber communication systems, optical storage, and full color laser displays and laser projectors. [Full Story]

Eric Michielssen, Professor of EECS, Associate Vice President for Advanced Research Computing, and Director of the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering, has been awarded the 2014 IEEE Antenna and Propagation Society Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award, "In recognition of being an outstanding educator, mentor and role model for the next generation of faculty members." [Full Story]

Saniya Desphande is a PhD candidate conducting research in nanowire and quantum-dot based quantum light sources, LEDs and laser. One specific area of research in which she's already made a big impact is in quantum communications and quantum cryptography. [Full Story]

A new approach to manipulating light using two-dimensional metamaterials called metasurfaces offers a compact alternative to traditional methods. The researchers believe the basic geometry of cascading patterned metallic sheets can provide the basis for cleverly designing and fabricating a broad range of optical devices, including symmetric circular polarizers, polarization rotators, and asymmetric linear polarizers. [Full Story]

Prof. David Kieras has coauthored Towards Accurate and Practical Predictive Models of Active-Vision-Based Visual Search, which has been selected for a SIGCHI Best of CHI Best Paper Award at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [Full Story]

Prof. Grant Schoenebeck has been selected as the recipient of a Facebook Faculty Award for his work in theoretical computer science and its potential for impact in the area of social networking. He is currently working on better understanding "complex" contagions, which, unlike diseases and rumors, typically require more than one neighbor for infection. [Full Story]

CSE graduate student Zakir Durumeric has been selected to receive a Google PhD Fellowship in Security for the 2014-15 academic year. Zakir was chosen as a Google Fellow on the basis of his security research related to Internet-wide scanning, the HTTPS ecosystem, weaknesses in cryptographic keys and protocols, and network mismanagement. [Full Story]

In work that unmasks some of the magic behind memristors and RRAM, cutting-edge computer components that combine logic and memory functions, researchers have shown that the metal particles in memristors don't stay put as previously thought. The findings have broad implications for the semiconductor industry and beyond. They show, for the first time, exactly how some memristors remember. [Full Story]

Cockroaches actually have much to teach in the realm of robust systems - something we want in our technology. The article references a recent video featuring Prof. Shai Revzen's work in applying cockroach lessons to robotics. [Full Story]

High school students from the Ann Arbor area got a crash course in computing and its connections to creativity at a College of Engineering computer science camp during the week of June 16. Entitled It's All About the Music, the camp allowed students to explore CS in the context of real-world problems and applications through challenging, hands-on, and music-centric applications. [Full Story]

ECE is home to a new major research program that aims to provide a better understanding of phenomena driven by the magnetic field component of light. A key long-term goal of this five-year, $7.5M MURI, called the Center for Dynamic Magneto-Optics (DYNAMO), is to investigate the prospects for direct conversion of light to electricity without the thermodynamic losses typical of photovoltaic (solar cell) technology. [Full Story]

Already a key lighting material for smart phones, a new approach to building phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (PHOLEDs) will make them useful even for general lighting. [Full Story]

Bredt Family Professor of Engineering Trevor Mudge has received the ACM/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, which is widely viewed as the computer architecture community's most prestigious recognition, for his pioneering contributions to low-power computer architecture and its interaction with technology. [Full Story]

Brian Buss arrived as a graduate student at Michigan in 2009, wanting to do something in Systems. He first applied his skills to insulin dosing for glucose regulation, and then switched to robotics. He is now working on the bipedal robot known as MARLO. He believes we will one day see bipedal robots like MARLO deployed in situations such as wilderness search and rescue, fire fighting and disaster response. [Full Story]

ECE graduate student Muzhi Wang received a best student paper award, honorable mention, at the 2014 IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS2014) for his research in RF MEMS switches for high-power RF applications. [Full Story]

Crossbar, Inc., a start-up company pioneering Resistive RAM (RRAM) technology, today announced it has completed a $25 million Series C funding in an oversubscribed round. The company was co-founded by Prof. Wei Lu, who also acts as Chief Scientist. [Full Story]

Prof. Jay Guo and his team have engineered what are believed to be the first semitransparent, colored photovoltaic cells. Broadening the use of solar power while maintaining aesthetic appeal for all kinds of environments, this technology could become energy-harvesting billboards on the sides of buildings, solar window shades in our homes and even stained glass, Guo said. [Full Story]

What happens when you send a rolling robot out for a mission, and it turns out to need legs instead? In this video, Shai Revzen, assistant professor of ECE, describes how his team is working to create "self-assembling" robots that can build themselves into any form required. [Full Story]

Prof. Jasprit Singh arranged for U-M students to visit the Golden Temple in India to learn the concept of "langar," or community kitchen. They are learning how volunteers work together to prepare meals for 60,000 people everyday, the power that draws participants who serve and were served, the role played by merchants and farmers in the 'langar' and 'daswandh' (donating 10% of earnings). [Full Story]

Thomas Frost was the first person in his family to go to college, and he's far surpassing that goal as he works on his dissertation in the field of solid-state optoelectronics. He is part of the team working with Prof. Pallab Bhattacharya that recently developed the first room-temperature polariton laser fueled by electrical current as opposed to light. This work could advance efforts to put lasers on computer circuits, leading to smaller and more powerful electronics. [Full Story]

Professor Thomas F. Wenisch and his collaborator Prof. Babak Falsafi of EPFL Switzerland have authored a new book entitled A Primer on Hardware Prefetching, which has been published by Morgan & Claypool as one of their Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture. [Full Story]

Benjamin Englard, who has completed one year of study toward a degree in computer science at Michigan, has been selected as a 2014 Thiel Fellow. The Fellowship provides promising young entrepreneurs with two years of funding to pursue an innovative or scientific project and mentorship for commercialization. [Full Story]

With precarious particles called polaritons that straddle the worlds of light and matter, ECE researchers have demonstrated a new, practical and potentially more efficient way to make a coherent laser-like beam. They have made what's believed to be the first room-temperature polariton laser that is fueled by electrical current as opposed to light. [Full Story]

CoE robotics researchers Prof. Edwin Olson of CSE and Prof. Ryan Eustice of NAME will be amongst the first users of the Mobility Transformation Facility, the automated vehicle test facility being built on North Campus. The two will initially use the facility to run tests related to the development of sensing and mapping technology. [Full Story]

Chia-Hsiang Chen, a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical Engineering, has been selected to receive a prestigious Intel Corporation Ph.D. Fellowship. His research focuses on designing low-power and error-resilient circuit techniques for communication and computing devices such as cell phones, tablets, and sensors [Full Story]

Dr. Kathryn Clay believes, The only way to make real progress for the country is to find the common ground upon which we can move forward to advance everyones interests. A natural coalition builder, Kathryn implements this philosophy in her current job as Vice President of Policy Strategy at the American Gas Association (AGA), and its as helpful now as it was during her career on Capitol Hill where she influenced key energy policy. [Full Story]

Nick conducts research in the area of machine learning and statistical signal processing under the guidance of Prof. Raj Nadakuditi. He has been employing random matrix theory to create new algorithms that aim to improve multi-modal correlation analysis. He has led the ECE Graduate Student Council and plays the carillon on North Campus. [Full Story]

Terahertz waves, which are non-ionizing and can penetrate fabrics and body tissue, could be used to reveal hidden weapons and spot skin cancer and tooth decay. But they are notoriously difficult to detect. Engineers at the University of Michigan [Prof. Jay Guo, Prof. Ted Norris and their students] have invented a simple new way to sense them. [Full Story]

In the Wall Street Journal opinion piece, the authors quote Prof. J. Alex Halderman on electronic voting, who says "With today's security technology, no country in the world is able to provide a secure Internet voting system." More that 30 US states and territories currently allow some form of internet voting. [Full Story]

HiJack, the hardware/software platform for use in creating cubic-inch sensor peripherals for smartphones, has been adopted for use in a product offering by NXP Semiconductors. HiJack was developed under the direction of Prof. Prabal Dutta, and allows for the integration of sensors to a smartphone through the phone's audio jack, making it a universal, low cost interface. [Full Story]

Parinaz Naghizadeh, a graduate student in electrical engineering, has been named a 2014 Barbour Scholar. She is conducting research in the general area of computer and network security, and more specifically, combining communications with economics to assess the security level of a network and then apply that data to design cyber-insurance contracts. [Full Story]

Doowon Lee, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Engineering program, has been selected to receive a prestigious IBM Ph.D. Fellowship to continue his studies in improving the dependability of computer systems by both efficient design-time validation and run-time fault tolerance techniques. [Full Story]

"Terahertz waves, which are non-ionizing and can penetrate fabrics and body tissue, could be used to reveal hidden weapons and spot skin cancer and tooth decay. But they are notoriously difficult to detect. Engineers at the University of Michigan have invented a simple new way to sense them." [Full Story]

"For more than a decade technologists have predicted and argued about the onslaught of these ubiquitous devices [Internet of Things]. 'There is lot of quibbling about what to call it, but theres little doubt that were seeing the inklings of a new class of computer,' says David Blaauw, who leads a lab at the University of Michigan that makes functioning computers no bigger than a typed letter o." [Full Story]

Prof. David Blaauw comments on What's Next - which in this article means the Internet of Things, and the need for a wireless network for "things" rather than person-to-person communication. [Full Story]

In this audio interview, Prof. J. Alex Halderman details some of the security risks that his research team has uncovered in the Estonian electronic voting system. Up to a quarter of the electorate will vote online. [Full Story]

"Today terahertz detectors are commonplace in airports, where you enter a glass-walled chamber while the detector swings around you, snooping under your clothes for weapons. Now researchers have found a way to downsize the detector portion of those machines into chip-sized devices." [Full Story]

A research team led by Profs. Jay Guo and Ted Norris created a device that turns terahertz waves (T-rays) into ultrasound, which can then be detected by a highly sensitive acoustic sensor. Applications for T-rays include weapons detection, medical imaging, and astronomy. [Full Story]

Prof. Elliot Soloway comments on the trend toward integration of coding as an important aspect of one's education. [Full Story]