Winners of 2016-2017 Dissertation Year Fellowship
(From left to right: Hariprasad Chandrakumar, Mark Gottscho, Sameed Hameed, Sina Basir-Kazeruni, Chung-Kai Yu)
Seven doctoral students from the Electrical Engineering department have received the 2016-2017 Dissertation Year Fellowship. The program selects doctoral students who are advanced to candidacy at the time of nomination (March 30) and are within one year of completing and filing the dissertation. The recipients will receive a $20,000 stipend, as well as standard tuition and fees, supporting their fellowship year prior to teaching or research appointments.
This year’s winners are:
Sameed Hameed
Chung-Kai Yu
Luyao Xu
Hariprasad Chandrakumar
Mark Gottscho
Alan Farrell
Sina Basir-Kazeruni
“Modern wireless handsets require multiple radio receivers to operate on all radio bands accessible to standards such as LTE and WiFi,” Hameed said. “A truly flexible radio receiver can significantly reduce the number of receivers needed. This enables new use cases such as intelligent radios that can detect and utilize vacant spectrum as and when they become available.”
“The ultimate goal of my research is to develop a game-theoretic learning framework to drive cooperation over networks with possibly selfish components,” Yu said. “These types of networks arise in many contexts, including social networks, economic trading with geographical considerations, power management over smart grids, and resource allocation.”
Xu’s new approach towards THz lasers will enhance the quality of beam patterns, raise the levels of power and enable versatile functionalities. All of which will “largely facilitate THz applications in many areas such as biomedical imaging, astronomy and astrophysics, non-destructive sensing”, according to Xu.
“But to be capable of implantation, there needs to be massive reductions in the size and power consumption as compared to rack-mounted systems while achieving the same dynamic range,” Chandrakumar said. “The power needs to be reduced by 3-4 orders of magnitude, and the entire system needs to be smaller than a single US penny. Additional constraints need to be satisfied to ensure patient safety. An implant would give neuroscientists access to long term neural recordings, which could prove extremely useful for finding cures for degenerative neurological conditions.”
“By ‘opportunistic’ I mean that when parts of a memory chip work really well, we exploit that for improved energy efficiency,” Gottscho said. “Conversely, when a part of the chip is working worse than expected, we tolerate those problems as they arise to ensure reliable operation.”
In addition, Gottscho uses an unconventional “multi-layer” approach that allow solutions to exist across several sub-fields, crafting better solutions than getting at it from a single perspective.
“Photon counting in the near-IR is essential for spectroscopy, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and quantum key cryptography,” Farrell said. “Current solutions require cryogenic cooling to operate at peak performance, making these sensors bulky and expensive. By reducing the noise in the sensors, the operating temperature can be increased to near room-temperature, allowing significant cost reductions and improving portability.
“To resolve this issue, we propose an energy-efficient hardware implementation of an Adaptive Stimulation Artifact Rejection (ASAR) algorithm capable of adaptively removing the artifact for varying stimulation characteristics at multiple sites,” Basir-Kazeruni said. “Additionally, a blind artifact template detection technique is introduced, which in combination with the proposed ASAR algorithm, eliminates the need for any prior knowledge of the temporal and structural characteristics of the stimulation pulse.”