Fall 2020 ECE grad students’ successes
By Colbi Edmonds
PhD students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department have had a successful year in the wake of many challenges. Here is an update on some of their most notable accomplishments.
Leila Delshadtehrani was awarded a Grace Hopper Conference Scholarship to attend the 2020 Virtual GHC Celebration this fall. The GHC is the largest annual conference for women in technology, and nearly 30,000 women from more than 115 countries around the world attended this year. Applications are reviewed by a panel of more than 100 tech volunteers on leadership skills and academic history.
But, Delshadtehrani accomplishments don’t stop there. She was also invited to present her work at the virtual Future of Computing Architecture workshop this year. The workshop is organized by IBM Research, and is a day full of student presentations where they can showcase their research in several areas of technological architecture. Delshadtehrani presented her work on programmable hardware monitors called “Towards Programmable Hardware Monitors for Security,” which is focused on minimally-invasive implementation of a programmable hardware monitor called PHMon and the Linux-based software that is stacked around it. This flexible hardware will help ensure technology security. Delshadtehrani was one of seven invited speakers.
Siddhant Sharma, supervised by Professor Hamid Nawab, was a Research Assistant at Osram for four years. The group was issued a patent in 2020, and Sharma is listed as an inventor.
Alex Matlock and Yujia Xue, supervised by Professor Lei Tian, won the Optical Society’s Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper Competition in this year’s OSA Frontiers in Optics Annual meeting in September.
Yujia Xue, supervised by Professor Lei Tian, was selected as a best student paper finalist in this year’s IEEE Photonics Conference. Xue’s work was also featured as the cover article of the October issue of Science Advances.
Yuyu Li earned honorable mention in the Maiman Student Paper Competition at the CLEO conference in May — a Boston University student has not won this award since 2013. Li has another honor coming in December. The paper Plasmonic Ommatidia for Lensless Compound-Eye Vision will be published in the OSA’s Optics and Photonic News’ Year in Optics 2020 issue. Li worked on this paper in collaboration with two teams, one supervised by ECE Professor Roberto Paiella and the other by ECE Professor Lei Tian.
Waleed Tahir was awarded the Nokia Bell Labs Global Intern Program 2020 – Best Summer Intern Award for Outstanding Innovation for his work on developing a novel video code optimized for implementation on platforms with low computational resources and limited power constraints.
Our PhD students continue to make substantial contributions to various fields in engineering.