This website contains relevant information concerning our student branch at Northeastern University. Through this website you may find out when and where our latest meetings will take place, information concerning our ongoing student projects, and access to job resources for IEEE Members looking to apply for a co-op position. Don't forget to check out our Upcoming Activities to see what the currently planned meeting are about.

Weekly Meeting - WiFi and Bluetooth Networks

Written on September 28th, 2009 by Jeff

When: September 30th, 2009 at 11:45am
Where: 308 Snell Engineering
Our very own president Dan Iannotti will be presenting the history, uses and technical aspects of the two predominant wireless networks available. The presentation will cover the different types of WiFi, setup of networks, the working technology, and security. It will also cover the inner workings of Bluetooth technology!

As always there will be free pizza and drinks, so hope to see you all there!

An entire 1/4th of our officers are new!

Written on April 1st, 2009 by Jeff

Today's officer elections were the best ones we have ever had. We had many people run, and had some fierce debate over who should be what position and why. Here is a list of the Spring 2010 officers!

PRESIDENT
Jeff Geisperger
(current VP & Webmaster)

VICE PRESIDENT
Nay Pwint
(current Public Relations Chair)

SECRETARY
Noah Pestana
(incumbent)

TREASURER
Fernando Quivira
(2009 Fall Secretary)


Congrats and we look forward to a great Spring 2010.

Weekly Meeting - Harvesting Energy from the Sun with Photovoltaics

Written on March 25th, 2009 by Jeff

When: April 1st, 2009 at 11:45am
Where: 308 Snell Engineering
Speaker: Professor Brad Lehman, ECE
Website: http://www.ece.neu.edu/groups/power/lehman/

This talk will introduce the basic principals of how to harness energy from the sun. The United States energy needs will be discussed, and strategies for using solar energy to reduce the U.S. carbon footprint will be presented. Basic tutorial material will first be introduced, such as how to calculate the energy from the sun in different geographical locations and how to build solar photovoltaic panels. Then research in the field of smart solar panels will be presented. The panels have the ability to self-heal, reconfigure themselves depending on shade patterns, and alert the user when there are performance problems. Experimental lab prototypes that have been built at Northeastern University will be shown.

About the Speaker:
Professor Brad Lehman received the B.E.E. from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, the M.S.E.E. from University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and the Ph.D. E.E. from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1987, 1988, and 1992, respectively. The Ph.D. was jointly directed by the Department of Mathematics.

Dr. Lehman is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University and previously was a Hearin Hess Distinguished Assistant Professor at Mississippi State University. In 1994, Dr. Lehman was one of fifteen engineering faculty selected by the White House to become an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, cited for his work in applied and theoretical controls, power electronics and vibrations. This award, administered by the National Science Foundation, is given "to recognize and support some of the Nations most outstanding science and engineering faculty early in their careers" (taken from the NSF program announcement). He is also a recipient of an Alcoa Science Foundation Fellowship and previously was a visiting scientist at MIT.

Dr. Lehman actively performs research in the area of power electronics, electric motor drives, controls, and differential equations. He currently directs the Power-One/Northeastern University DC-DC Converter Research Center, established in 1999. The center focuses on the development, design and modeling of low power (<200W) DC-DC converters for telecommunication and data communication applications.

Dr. Lehman is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics and previously was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. In 1999 he was a lead science advisor to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on the Y2K issue for the Power Industry, where he aided State Senators to supervise utility industry Y2K remediation. From 1988-1991, Dr Lehman was the head swimming and diving coach of the Georgia Institute of Technology Varsity Men's Swim Team. He received a conference coach of the year award in 1991 and served as a technical consultant in the design of the 1996 Olympic swimming warm-up pool in Atlanta, GA.

Weekly Meeting - Investigative Architecture: Making Sense of your Enterprise

Written on March 21st, 2009 by Jeff

When: March 25th, 2009 at 11:45am
Where: 308 Snell Engineering
Speaker: Ben Sommer
Website: http://www.sysflow.com/

Ben Sommer will lead a brief session to present concrete techniques and structured rules of thumb to make sense of a technology enterprise using an "Investigative Architecture" approach. He will walk through a case study in order to illustrate the techniques. He'll also place these techniques in context of today's challenging business environment and the needs in the marketplace for the skill-set.

Synopsis:
A foundational skill for an architect is the capability to rapidly assess and document "as is" and proposed solution architectures. The challenge lies in the typical state of enterprise knowledge regarding the systems - a myriad of internal and external informations sources at all levels of quality and completeness. Critical to rapidly converting this sea of information into usable knowledge requires a repeatable, structured approach for gathering information from internal stakeholders and documents and performing focused research for publicly available product and industry information.

Weekly Meeting - The Role of Dynamics for Robust Computer Vision

Written on March 10th, 2009 by Jeff

When: March 18th, 2009 at 11:45am
Where: 308 Snell Engineering
Professor. Octavia I. Camps
ECE Department
Website: http://robustsystems.ece.neu.edu

Cameras are ubiquitous everywhere and hold the promise of significantly changing the way we live and interact with our environment. Dynamic vision systems are uniquely positioned to address the needs of a growing segment of the population. Smart environments that are aware of user activities would enable an aging population to carry on independent lives for as long as possible. Computers that interpret facial expressions to obtain cues to user confusion can lead to simpler
interfaces. Finally, activity monitoring systems capable of recognizing and correlating actions at different locations can improve security and reduce the time response to emergencies. However, at this point one of the critical factors limiting widespread use of dynamic vision techniques outside controlled environments is their potential fragility.

In this talk we will discuss how to use dynamics to build in robustness into the design of several vision problems such as visual tracking from single and multiple cameras, modeling dynamic appearance changes and structure from motion, all of which are key for the above applications.

Using system dynamics offers a number of advantages over currently available techniques. Examples of these advantages include the abilities to:

(a) Recast a wide range of problems into a tractable convex optimization form that can be efficiently solved.
(b) Furnish worst–case bounds and a priori guaranteed performance certificates that can be used to reduce the on–line computational burden when solving these problems.
(c) Exploit camera cooperation, both at the tracking and data analysis levels, to optimize performance.

About the Speaker
Octavia Camps received the B.S. degree in computer science and the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad de la Republica (Montevideo, Uruguay), and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. She is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. From 1991 to 2006 she was a faculty member at the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. In 2000, she was a visiting faculty at the California Institute of Technology and at the University of Southern California. Her current research interests include robust computer vision, image processing, and pattern recognition.

Weekly Meeting - Magnetic and Multiferroic Materials and Their Applications in RF/Microwave Devices

Written on February 19th, 2009 by Jeff

When: February 25th, 2009 at 11:45am
Where: 308 Snell Engineering
Professor. Nian X. Sun
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115
Phone: (617) 373-3351 Email: nian@ece.neu.edu

Strong magnetoelectric coupling have been recently realized in multiferroic composite materials with both ferri/ferromagnetic phase and ferro/piezoelectric phase, allowing for magnetization tuning with an external electric field, or electrical polarization tuning under an applied magnetic field. The strong magnetoelectric coupling and the combined high permeability and high permittivity in multiferroic composite materials have led to great opportunities for novel device applications such as pico-Tesla magnetometers, electrostatically tunable microwave signal processing devices, etc.

Multiferroic composite materials with strong magnetoelectric coupling are crucial for their applications in different devices, which have been challenging to achieve, particularly at microwave frequencies. This has been severely limiting the performance of these electrostatically tunable signal processing devices at RF/microwave frequencies. Novel multiferroic composite materials with strong magnetoelectric coupling at RF/microwave frequencies need to be developed.

In this presentation, we will demonstrate strong magnetoelectric coupling in novel microwave multiferroic heterostructures, which exhibit a new record of electrostatically tunable magnetic field of 750 Oe, and a record high electrostatically tunable ferromagnetic resonance frequency range between 1.75~ 7.57 GHz. The corresponding magnetoelectric coupling coefficient is 100 ~ 1000 Oe/(kV/cm), and the electrostatically tunable frequency rate is 1 ~ 15 GHz/ (kV/cm), or 20 ~ 300 MHz/V. Novel miniature antennas with self-biased magneto(di)electric substrates, and electrostatically tunable inductors and tunable filters will be demonstrated with magnetoelectric composites, which show significantly enhanced performance as well as new functionalities.

Weekly Meeting - Acoustic Underwater Remote Sensing

Written on February 17th, 2009 by Jeff

When: February 18th, 2009 at 11:45am
Where: 308 Snell Engineering
Massive Fish Population and Behavior Revealed by Instantaneous Continental Shelf-Scale Imaging

Prof. Purnima Ratilal
Laboratory for Acoustic Remote Sensing (LARS, NU)

Until now, continental shelf environments have been monitored with highly localized line-transect methods from slow-moving research vessels using conventional fish finding sonars. These methods significantly undersample fish populations in time and space, leaving an incomplete and ambiguous record of abundance and behavior. Here, we show that fish populations in continental shelf environments can be instantaneously imaged over thousands of square kilometers and continuously monitored by a remote sensing technique in which the ocean acts as an acoustic waveguide.

The technique has revealed the instantaneous horizontal structural characteristics and volatile short-term behavior of very large fish shoals, containing tens to hundreds of millions of fish and stretching for many kilometers. The fundamental physical principles and signal processing involved in ocean acoustic waveguide remote sensing (OAWRS) will be discussed.

Note: As always, there will be free pizza and drinks!

Corporate Windows Images

Written on February 16th, 2009 by Jeff

Hey everyone, our President Sunish took a few photos during corporate windows this year, and I have made them into a slide-show for your viewing pleasure. The link is here: http://www.ieee.neu.edu/?page=cw (Note Adobe Flash Player 8.0+ required)

IEEE On the Go

Written on February 13th, 2009 by Jeff

Hello Everyone. More and more people these days have internet browsers on their phones. iPhones, Blackberrys, Nokias, etc... I decided to make a mobile compatible version of this site. It should auto-detect your cell phone and format it accordingly. Enjoy

Two More Companies at Corporate Windows!

Written on February 10th, 2009 by Jeff

When: February 11th, 2009 at 6:00pm
Where: Raytheon Amphitheatre
Thats right. At IEEE's Corporate Windows we have two more companies who are attending. They are Millenial Net and Systems Flow. We hope you all come, have a great time, submit your resume's and don't forget... FREE FOOD!