Altug to Receive Prestigious Optical Society Medal
Assistant Professor Hatice Altug (ECE)
The Optical Society of America (OSA) has selected Assistant Professor Hatice Altug (ECE, MSE) as the 2012 recipient of its Adolph Lomb Medal. Established in 1940, the award is presented to early career researchers who have made a significant contribution to the field of optics.
Through the Lomb Medal, the OSA recognizes Altug for “breakthrough contributions on integrated optical nano-biosensor and nanospectroscopy technologies based on nanoplasmonics, nanofluidics and novel nanofabrication.” She will receive a silver medal, certificate and $3,000 honorarium at an OSA conference this year.
“I am very honored to receive this medal and humbled to join past winners who contributed greatly to the field of optics,” said Altug. “I would like to acknowledge the hard work of my graduate students and valuable support from my mentors.”
A College of Engineering faculty member since 2007, Altug’s research involves confining and manipulating light at the nanoscale to dramatically improve biosensing capabilities. Initiating several advances in the fields of nanophotonics, nanoplasmonics and integrated nanofluidics over the past eight years, she has developed state-of-the-art technologies for real-time, label-free and high-throughput detection of very low quantities of biological molecules such as proteins and viruses. She has also contributed to the National Science Foundation Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center’s effort to build energy-efficient lighting-based communication and biochemical sensing systems in rooms.
Named as one of Popular Science magazine’s top 10 young scientists and engineers for 2010, Altug received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a Photonics Society Young Investigator Award in 2011.
-Mark Dwortzan
Paving the Way for High Speeds on the Electronics Highway
On March 7, Professor M. C. Frank Chang of UCLA visited Boston University's Electrical & Computer Engineering Department as part of the Spring 2012 Distinguished Lecture Series.
Throughout his career, Professor M. C. Frank Chang of UCLA has been a leader in high-speed electronics research. Holding over 20 patents and co-authoring more than 250 technical papers, Chang is a valuable resource when it comes to improving upon high-speed semiconductor devices and integrated circuits (ICs).
On March 7, Chang visited Boston University to talk about his latest research as part of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering’s Distinguished Lecture Series. Throughout the semester, prominent engineers like Chang are invited to BU to speak about their work with students and faculty in the ECE community.
Chang, who is also the Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at UCLA, is currently exploring how radio, radar, and imaging systems could be implemented by using millimeter-wave and terahertz systems-on-a-chip. These ICs would be integrated with a computer or other electronic system at very small dimensions.
“Ultra-high speed near-field communication systems are a hot topic of research right now,” said Chang. “There is a strong push to make them both faster and more efficient.”
Chang was the first to find success in transmitting and receiving waves through ICs using complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) radio frequency at the terahertz range. Still, he admits that there are drawbacks to using this method such as the fact that CMOS only works in a limited range.
Chang and his research team have already made considerable progress and are hoping the algorithms and techniques they’re developing at UCLA will help overcome the challenges encountered with CMOS technology. Eventually, they believe that using CMOS will result in radio, radar, and imaging systems that will be able to cover an unprecedented amount of spectra, run more efficiently, and be more cost-effective.
Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, Chang also received the IEEE David Sarnoff Award in 2006.
Chang’s talk was the second in the three-part Spring 2012 Distinguished Lecture Series. The next talk features Professor Charles W. Tu of the University of California, San Diego, who will speak on the topic, “Bandgap Engineering and Device Applications of Dilute Nitrides.” Hear him on March 28, 2012, at 4 p.m. in PHO 211.
-Rachel Harrington (rachelah@bu.edu)
Four ENG Faculty Win NSF CAREER Awards
Assistant Professor Lorena Barba (ME)
Assistant professors Lorena Barba (ME), Ayse Coskun (ECE), Ajay Joshi (ECE) and Michael L. Smith (BME) have each received the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award in recognition of their outstanding research and teaching capabilities.
The five-year, $400,000 - $550,000 award funds high-impact projects that effectively combine research and educational objectives. The NSF recognized Barba, Coskun and Joshi for three independent efforts to stretch the limits of computing, and Smith for innovative research on intercellular communication.
High-Performance Computing Research Nets Three Awards
“Receiving the CAREER award will give my research program considerable momentum at a time when computational science is rising in the national agenda,” said Barba, who seeks to upgrade a class of scientific computing algorithms to vastly improve their performance on “manycore” systems, in which multiple computer processors operate in parallel. Such high-speed algorithms could advance solutions to critical problems in computational fluid dynamics and computational biology, from understanding climate change to simulating the proteins that are the building blocks of life.
Assistant Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE)
“With rapid changes in computer hardware, the algorithms and software used in science need to be reinvented; they need to be parallel like never before,” she observed. “But first, we have to adapt our algorithms to work in massively parallel hardware and learn to compute at extreme scales—one quintillion calculations per second. Our group now has the support of the NSF to serve this high-priority national goal.”
Meanwhile, both Coskun and Joshi will use their CAREER awards to address rising performance and power demands on computer hardware. The need is critical as today’s inefficient technology imposes steep operational and cooling costs on data centers and high performance computing (HPC) clusters, and appears unlikely to meet the high performance demands of next-generation embedded systems.
Assistant Professor Ajay Joshi (ECE)
Coskun’s goal is to demonstrate that 3D stacked systems, in which multiple chips are manufactured and vertically connected, will provide major efficiency improvements to the nation’s computing infrastructure, leading to substantial cost and carbon footprint reductions.
“Our objective is to create the catalyst techniques required to make 3D systems effective agents for attaining low-power, high-throughput computing in both embedded systems and HPC/data centers.”
Joshi will apply his award to boost the energy efficiency of silicon-photonic manycore systems, which consist of dozens of independent, silicon-based processors operating in parallel and communicating with system memory via photonic links.
“This will pave the way for rapid adoption of silicon-photonic networks for processor-memory communication, which will significantly improve the energy efficiency—and, in turn, reduce the operational cost and carbon footprint of—manycore systems widely used today in server farms and data centers,” Joshi explained.
Smith Recognized for Intercellular Communication Studies
Assistant Professor Michael L. Smith (BME)
Smith intends to use his CAREER award to improve our understanding of how cells communicate. While it’s well known that cells communicate with one another by secreting signaling molecules that can control their behavior, cells may also communicate via other cues. To investigate these cues, Smith and members of his lab plan to pull on fibers of the extracellular matrix, a composite glue that surrounds cells and provides mechanical resiliency to tissues.
“No one has conclusively demonstrated that tugging on these structures permits cell-to-cell communication,” said Smith. “Elucidating this novel mechanism would have a transformative impact on a number of fields since cell-to-cell communication is a basic phenomenon critical to numerous aspects of cell biology and physiological processes from tissue development to wound repair.”
New Educational Initiatives
The NSF CAREER award funding will also enable Barba, Coskun, Joshi and Smith to redouble their efforts to provide innovative educational experiences to College of Engineering students and expose K-12 students to the excitement of engineering. Key initiatives they have planned include the development of leading-edge educational technologies; advanced studies institutes that promote international, interdisciplinary collaboration; new courses; new interactive, hands-on design challenges; and new undergraduate research opportunities.
To date, 31 College of Engineering faculty members have received NSF CAREER awards during their service to the College.
-Mark Dwortzan
Boston University Partners with Intune Networks on Telecommunications Research
Boston University Professor Alexander Sergienko (ECE) (left) poses with Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of Ireland, Enda Kenny (center), and Jim Lowrie, senior vice president of worldwide sales for Intune Networks.
As the world becomes more dependent on telecommunications, the older generation networks these run on become more and more overloaded. In the future, they will not be able to effectively support the traffic. To solve this problem, Boston University and Intune Networks recently announced that they will team up to work toward finding a solution.
Their research partnership, known as the Boston University Research Switch and Transport Network (BURST), will bring collaborators from BU’s Photonics Center and Ireland’s Intune Networks together to study new optical network architectures and identify how they can be used to combat the challenges of rising Internet usage.
“With internet video forecast to be 62 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2015, carriers providing consumer Internet face both a challenge and an opportunity,” said Professor Alexander Sergienko (ECE), who has been instrumental in bringing this project to BU.
BURST will serve as a testbed for Intune’s innovative Optical Packet Switch and Transport (OPST), technology that provides a new way to switch optical signals in a network.
Intune’s creation is the first commercial implementation of optical packet switching. The technology, which includes a networking platform that allows packets of data to be transferred simultaneously, has the potential to provide a solution for rising bandwidth demand and make networking both more efficient and green.
Said Sergienko: “We are very excited to work with Intune Networks and look forward to finding solutions to this growing problem and working collaboratively to contribute to research in this area.”
As part of the partnership, BU will receive approximately $3 million from Intune for development, operations and hardware.
Jim Lowrie, the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales for Intune Networks, said that Intune’s partnership with BU will give their company a chance to show the potential of their OPST technology, which will undergo US commercial trials this year, to Boston organizations.
“As we respond to the growing need to address the challenges caused by Internet usage trends, we are delighted to have a strategic partnership in place with Boston University,” said Lowrie.
Sergienko said that the collaboration has the potential to tie together major technology centers – from universities to business parks – using the new network.
“The proposed architecture promises a green approach to information transfer through lower resource consumption, ultimately delivering greater cost efficiency for future traffic volumes and improved quality of experience compared to current metro network architectures,” he said.
-Rachel Harrington (rachelah@bu.edu)
ECE Senior Spearheads Student-Friendly Charity
Situated on University Grill property, Project Mailbox's signature red and white mailbox receives cash donations for Engineers Without Borders, February's designated Charity of the Month.
Right in the heart of Boston University’s central campus, a simple, three-and-a-half-foot tall, red and white cast iron mailbox stands unobtrusively on a busy Commonwealth Avenue sidewalk. Perched like a sentry in front of the University Grill, the mailbox awaits not envelopes or packages, but dollar bills and coins—especially pocket change from students who have just grabbed a slice of pizza or a Terrier Burger.
The mailbox is the front end of Project Mailbox, a new charity launched by computer engineering senior Nick Dougherty that seeks to raise awareness and funds for different causes, one coin or bill at a time. Each month, interested BU students nominate and vote for a specific charitable organization to receive all Project Mailbox donations for the following month, alternating between local, national and international causes.
President and co-founder—with Kaylee Dombrowski (CFA ’11)—of the project, Dougherty modeled the idea after stories his family passed down of small towns where neighbors supported struggling families by anonymously leaving cash in their mailboxes.
“I started Project Mailbox to give busy undergraduate students like me an easy way to have an impact and give back to the community,” he said. “Rather than feeling the need to jump into a large commitment, we encourage our participants to take on only what they are willing to do.”
Since its launch in October, the project has raised more than $1,400 for Project Habitat (for Brimfield, Mass. tornado relief), the Turkish Red Crescent (earthquake relief), Bridge Over Troubled Waters (at-risk youth services) and the BU chapter of Engineers Without Borders (sustainable infrastructure projects in resource-limited countries).
In many cases, BU students have a personal connection to the selected charity. For instance, Bridge Over Troubled Waters was nominated by a student who said, “This charity saved my life.” Dougherty nominated Project Habitat to raise awareness about the small town of Brimfield, where a tornado touched down last June—and where he purchased the antique mailbox standing in front of the University Grill.
BU students, faculty and staff—and anyone else, for that matter—may donate to designated Project Mailbox charities either at the physical mailbox or online.
Currently, the project has 146 members on its Facebook page representing many of BU’s schools and colleges, and an inner circle of volunteers from The Colleges of Engineering, Communication, Arts & Sciences and Fine Arts. As the project gains more momentum here, Dougherty envisions rolling it out to other colleges and universities in New England and beyond.
“I would love to have a Project Mailbox Beanpot where the schools compete for a prize, potentially to have an artist perform at their school,” said Dougherty. “I can’t wait for people to start thinking inside the box.”
-Mark Dwortzan
BME PhD Student a Finalist for CIMIT Primary HealthCare Prize
CIMIT Prize finalist Margo Monroe (BME) working to develop a new diagnostic assay for allergen detection.
The Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) has selected PhD student Margo Monroe (BME) as one of 10 finalists for the 2012 CIMIT Prize in Primary HealthCare, which provides initial funding to engineering graduate students across the country to develop innovative technologies aimed at improving healthcare delivery at the frontlines of medicine. Issued by a distinguished panel of technologists and primary-care clinicians, the designation comes with $10,000 to help Monroe and her collaborators refine their project and research proposal for the competition’s final round.
“My team and I are excited to be among the ten finalists,” said Monroe. “This award validates the value of our lab’s technology as a potential device to be used in the primary healthcare setting.”
The CIMIT award will help fund the development of a point-of-care instrument that measures allergy sensitivity in whole blood—blood that has not been modified except for the introduction of an anticoagulant.
“The biggest obstacle in primary care diagnostics is patient blood preparation and processing, but a potential solution is to deliver a device that operates both accurately and sensitively in small volumes of whole blood,” Monroe explained. “With our technology patients will be diagnosed at an initial clinic visit and thereby spend less time and money for subsequent visits to specialty clinics.”
Costing less than $3,000 to manufacture and based on technology developed in Professor Selim Ünlü’s (ECE, MSE) lab, the device proposed by Monroe’s team would measure the response of an allergen-specific biomarker, called IgE, to purified major allergens within an hour. Only a finger-prick blood sample would be needed to perform the test.
To achieve this objective, Monroe is leading an interdisciplinary team that includes PhD students Alexander Reddington (ECE) and Jacob Trueb (ME ’11) and BME/EE senior Joseph Greenspun, a Lutchen Fellow. Drawing on initial support from the Coulter Translational Partnership program in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University, the team is partnering with pulmonary specialist Frédéric F. Little, M.D. (MED); Monroe and Reddington are also funded by the National Science Foundation Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center at BU.
CIMIT, a consortium of Boston-area teaching hospitals and universities, fielded 76 applications for the Primary HealthCare prize from 38 engineering programs nationally. The top three proposals will be announced in June. First prize will be $150,000, with second and third place receiving $100,000 and $50,000, respectively.
“The winners of our awards are undoubtedly headed toward truly significant careers and may well serve as role models for others in their field,” said Ronald Newbower, Ph.D., co-founder of CIMIT and director of the competition. “We are proud to recognize and support their efforts.”
-Mark Dwortzan
Five ENG Undergrads Named to America East Academic Honor Roll
The America East Conference has named five College of Engineering undergraduate student-athletes to its Fall Academic Honor Roll for earning a grade point average of at least 3.0 for the fall 2011 semester: Brian Greenfield (ME '13), Michael Bhatt (CE '13) and Joey Greenspun (BME, EE '12) from the BU Men's Cross Country team (top row); and Ethan Harlow (BME '14) and Vincente Colmenares (ME '14) from the Men's Soccer team (bottom row).
The America East Conference has named five College of Engineering undergraduate student-athletes to its Fall Academic Honor Roll for earning a grade point average of at least 3.0 for the fall 2011 semester. They were recognized along with 71 other Boston University student-athletes from five teams that compete during the fall.
The ENG honorees are Michael Bhatt (CE ’13), Brian Greenfield (ME ’13) and Joey Greenspun (BME, EE ’12) from the BU Men’s Cross Country team and Vincente Colmenares (ME ’14) and Ethan Harlow (BME ’14) from the Men’s Soccer team. Greenspun and Harlow were among 25 Terriers to also earn a place on the Commissioner’s Honor Roll, which recognizes student-athletes with a grade point average of at least 3.5.
Joey Greenspun (BME, EE '12) (left), a Lutchen Fellow who has pursued healthcare technology research in Professor Selim Unlu's (ECE, MSE) lab since his sophomore year, has already been accepted to two Ph.D. programs in electrical engineering.
All five ENG student-athletes have shown great promise both on and off the field.
Ethan Harlow, a center back on the Men’s Soccer team, plans to work in BU’s Molecular Aging and Development Lab this summer and aspires to become a surgeon or pursue healthcare technology research. Vincente Colmenares, a left-midfielder, looks forward to working in the U.S. as a mechanical engineer and applying his engineering skillset to solve societal challenges around the world.
Vincente Colmenares (ME '14) a left-midfielder, looks forward to working in the U.S. as a mechanical engineer and applying his engineering skillset to solve societal challenges around the world.
Competing in 8K and 10K runs for the Men’s Cross Country team are Michael Bhatt, who aims to pursue a master’s degree in computer engineering; Brian Greenfield, who has spent a year working in the Plasma Spray Deposition Lab under Associate Professor Michael Gevelber (ME); and Joey Greenspun, a Lutchen Fellow who has pursued healthcare technology research in Professor Selim Ünlü’s (ECE, MSE) lab since his sophomore year and has already been accepted to two Ph.D. programs in electrical engineering. Greenfield also competes in middle distance events for the Men’s Track & Field team.
“These students exemplify the best of the well-rounded individuals in our ENG programs, balancing the demands of a rigorous academic curriculum with the substantial commitment needed to excel at intercollegiate sports,” said Associate Dean for Educational Initiatives Donald Wroblewski.
-Mark Dwortzan
NSF Awards Densmore $1.1M for Clotho Research
Clotho presents a set of modular Apps for the specification, design, and assembly of novel biological systems. Apps are included with the software or can be written by the larger community.
In 2007, Assistant Professor Douglas Densmore (ECE) and his research team at the University of California, Berkeley started working on software that could engineer synthetic biological systems and improve how the data behind them was managed. Their work had the potential to improve disease diagnosis and treatment.
Five years later, their research is still going strong. Densmore was recently awarded a three-year grant totaling $1.1 million from the National Science Foundation’s Advances in Biological Informatics (ABI) for his open source platform, better known as Clotho.
“We’re very excited to work with NSF to take Clotho to the next level,” said Densmore. “This will start paving the way for Clotho to go from a proof of concept to viable commercial software.”
The project includes collaborations with researchers at Boston University, UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, and BIOFAB. Professor J. Christopher Anderson of UC Berkeley is a co-principal investigator on the grant and a co-founder of the Clotho framework.
Clotho helps manage complex DNA assembly processes by capturing the biological protocols formally and also providing commands to liquid handling robotics for their physical assembly and sample tracking.
Clotho uses an App environment similar to an iPhone so that anyone can share and create new tools. At the same time, it provides a mechanism to begin the process of creating standardized data, algorithms, and methodologies for synthetic biology.
The grant will provide Densmore and his research team with funding that will allow them to complete the development of the software. Their App store will serve as both a portal for Clotho development and a community resource.
Earlier this year, Clotho also acted as an educational resource by providing students with a chance to develop their own automated design software. Using Densmore’s platform, a team made up of Boston University and Wellesley College students used Clotho to create software tools that could potentially lead to more effective diagnostics and drugs for tuberculosis. They went on to win the “Best Software Tool” prize at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) World Jamboree at MIT.
-Rachel Harrington (rachelah@bu.edu)
Related links:
“Densmore Research Website Honored by the Communicator Awards”
“BU-Wellesley Team Wins ‘Best Software Tool’ Award at iGEM World Jamboree”
“BU-Wellesley Software Wins Gold at iGEM Americas Regional Jamboree”
Bytelight Featured in MIT’s Technology Review
Have you ever been stuck scanning aisles at the grocery store and struggling to find that last item on your list?
BU alumni, Dan Ryan (ECE ’10) and Aaron Ganick (ECE ’10), are working to solve this problem and more through their company, ByteLight, a Cambridge, Mass., startup recently featured in MIT’s Technology Review.
Read the article.
ByteLight aims to use LED bulbs as indoor positioning tools that can be used in applications to help people navigate and offer deals targeted to a person’s location.
Ryan and Ganick hope that department stores will replace some of their traditional bulbs with Bytelight’s design, expected to be available within a year. Their fast-flickering lights would emit signals to passing smart phones that could then pull up a deal offering a discount on a shirt on a nearby rack.
LED bulbs are more costly than standard lightbulbs but have been dropping in price. Bytelight’s bulbs will be only “marginally” pricier than LEDs.
Ultimately, by using Bytelight’s technology, finding that last item in the grocery store will be infinitely easier, and you may even get a discount at checkout.
“We want people to think about light bulbs in an entirely new way,” Ganick told Technology Review.
Bytelight has received a lot of attention lately with news about the company appearing in Mashable, The Daily Free Press, and The Boston Globe.
Bytelight was spun off from the NSF Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (ERC) and supported by Boston University’s Photonics Center.
-Samantha Gordon (COM ’12)
Related link:
“BU Startup, Bytelight, Receives Funding From U-Launch”
Making Every Pixel Count
Professor Lawrence Carin of Duke University speaks as part of the ECE Distinguished Lecture Series.
When it comes to image processing, electrical engineers are working to find ways to collect data in a manner that uses the least amount of energy and battery life. Improving the practice could enhance everything from security monitoring to MRI imaging.
Using compressive sensing, an information processing method that emerged about five years ago, a signal can be sampled and simultaneously compressed. This technique requires less energy and obtains enough data to still create an accurate replication.
Professor Lawrence Carin of Duke University and his research team make up some of the minds studying compressive sensing and how it can be used to improve image processing.
“The idea behind compressive sensing is that maybe we don’t need to measure as much data as we normally do,” said Carin.
Carin recently discussed their research at Boston University as part of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Distinguished Lecture Series.
In contrast with compressive sensing, the Nyquist theory, a standard approach commonly taught to electrical engineering undergraduates, assumes that much more data is required in order to create a perfect reconstruction.
In collaboration with Professor David Brady of Duke, Carin designed a compressive hyperspectral camera to help test the effectiveness of compressive sensing. They hope that they will be able to demonstrate that high-quality images can be yielded with substantially less data than a regular camera.
“We’re redesigning a camera from the very beginning,” said Carin. “We’re hoping to show that downsizing data sampling won’t affect the quality of the image.”
Carin said that while the Nyquist theory still plays an important part in information processing, compressive sensing may be the solution to problems such as trying to get a MRI of a young child who can’t lie still for very long.
“Compressive sensing won’t replace the Nyquist theory, but it will enable us to collect data we couldn’t otherwise,” he said.
Carin’s talk was the first in the three-part Spring 2012 Distinguished Lecture Series. The next talk features Professor Mau-Chung Frank Chang of University of California, Los Angeles, who will speak on the topic, “Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz System-on-a-Chip for Radio, Radar and Imaging Systems.” Hear him on March 7, 2012, at 4 p.m. in PHO 211.
-Rachel Harrington (rachelah@bu.edu)
Highlights
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