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.

IEEE at Northeastern's Fall Activity Fair

Written on September 5th, 2012 by Cheng.e

It's the start of the Fall Semester and IEEE is going to be hosting a table for the Fall Activity's Fair. Come by and learn what exciting speakers and events we will be hosting for this Fall. Get more information as how you can be involved with IEEE!

Weekly Meeting - Teaching Computers to See

Written on April 9th, 2012 by Jeff

When: April 11th, 2012 at 11:45am
Where: 235 Ryder Hall
This week we have a few events coming up. The seniors will also be giving their capstone presentations tomorrow (Tuesday, April 10th) from 9am to 3:30pm. Make sure to stop by and check out all the awesome senior projects (including mine and Dan's projects). We also have Dr. Octavia Camps, who will be giving a talk on Extracting Actionable Information Sparsely Encoded in Video. Its an exciting talk about processing images and video through computers to teach them to see and understand whats going on in the image. As always, there will be free pizza and drinks, so come on by.

Who: Dr. Octavia Camps
What: Extracting Actionable Information Sparsely Encoded in Video or Teaching Computers to See

Hope to see you all there,
-Jeff

Abstract:
We live in a world overflowing with data collection and non-stop communications. 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, a major roadblock in taking full advantage of the exponential growth in data collection and actuation capabilities stems from the curse of dimensionality. As an example, a short video sequence from a single camera contains mega bytes of (highly redundant) data. Similar situations arise when dealing with time-traces of gene promoters in systems biology. Simply put, existing techniques are ill equipped to deal with the resulting overwhelming volume of data.

This talk discusses the key role that systems theory can play in timely extracting and exploiting actionable information that is very sparsely encoded in high dimensional data streams. The central theme of this approach is the use of dynamical models as information encoding paradigms. Our basic premise is that spatio/temporal dynamic information can be compactly encapsulated in dynamic models, whose rank, a measure of the dimension of useful information, is often far lower than the raw data dimension. Embedding problems in the conceptual world of dynamical systems makes available a rich, extremely powerful resource base, leading to robust solutions, or, in cases where the underlying problem is intrinsically hard, to computationally tractable approximations with suboptimality certificates. These ideas are illustrated with several applications, including multi-camera target tracking and activity recognition.

Speaker Biography:
Octavia Camps received a B.S. degree in computer science and a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay), and a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. Since 2006, she is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. From 1991 to 2006 she was a faculty of Electrical Engineering and of 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 main research interests include robust computer vision, image processing, and machine learning. She is a former associate editor of Pattern Recognition and Machine Vision Applications. She is a member of the IEEE society.

Weekly Meeting - E-field Control of Magnetism in Layered Multiferroic Devices & OFFICER ELECTIONS

Written on April 3rd, 2012 by Jeff

When: April 4th, 2012 at 11:45am
Where: 235 Ryder Hall
This week we have a very exciting meeting for everyone. First off, Professor Nian Sun will be giving a talk about his research on multiferroic devices and how to control the magnetism through electrical fields. This allows for a single antenna to obtain a wide range of frequencies that without those properties would not be achievable. This is just one of the many uses of multiferroic devices. This week, we will also be having our IEEE Officer Elections. We have some great candidates running this year, so come on down to vote! If you are interested in running, and haven't already done so, please email me what position you would like to run for, as well as 1-2 sentences about why you would be a good fit for the position. As always there will be free pizza and drinks at the meeting.

Who: Professor Nian Sun
What: E-field Control of Magnetism in Layered Multiferroic Heterostructures and Devices, a New Paradigm for Tunable RF/Microwave Components and Spintronics

Remember to come on time to vote for the new officers. I hope to see you all there.
-Jeff

Abstract:
Electrical field control of magnetism has been attracting a great amount of recent interest due to its potential technological impacts. The coexistence of electrical polarization and magnetization in multiferroic materials provides great opportunities for realizing effective electric field control, or vice versa, through a strain mediated magnetoelectric interaction effect in layered magnetic/ferroelectric multiferroic heterostructures. Strong magnetoelectric coupling has been the enabling factor for different multiferroic devices, which however has been hard to achieve, particularly at RF/microwave frequencies.

In this presentation, we will cover the most recent progress on novel layered microwave multiferroic heterostructures and devices. We will demonstrate strong magnetoelectric coupling in novel microwave multiferroic heterostructures. These multiferroic heterostructures exhibit a giant electrostatically tunable magnetic field of 860 Oe, and a high electrostatically tunable ferromagnetic resonance frequency range between 1.75~ 7.57 GHz, a tunable frequency of 5.82 GHz or fmax/fmin=4.3. At the same time, we will demonstrate E-field modulation of exchange bias and realization of electric field controlled near 180° dynamic magnetization switching at room temperature in antiferromagnetic/ferromagnetic/ferroelectric multiferroic heterostructures. Through competition between the E-field induced uniaxial anisotropy and unidirectional anisotropy, large E-field induced tunable exchange field and near 180° deterministic magnetization switching will be demonstrated in exchange coupled multiferroic heterostructures. New multiferroic devices will also be covered in the talk.

Speaker Biography:
Nian Sun is an associate professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 2002. Prior to joining Northeastern University, he was a research scientist at IBM and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies between 2001~2004. Dr. Sun was the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, USAF Summer Faculty Fellowship, and the first prize IDEMA Fellowship. His research interests include novel magnetic, ferroelectric and multiferroic materials, devices and subsystems. He has over 80 publications and has >20 patents and patent disclosures. One of his papers published in 2009 was selected as the “ten most outstanding papers in the past decade (2001~2010) in Advanced Functional Materials”.

Weekly Meeting - Grad School Info Session and Officer Elections Information

Written on March 28th, 2012 by Jeff

When: March 28th, 2012 at 11:45am
Where: 235 Ryder Hall
Tomorrow (Wednesday) we will be having an ECE Graduate School Information session, as well as information about what its like running for an IEEE officer position. Our very own Noah Pestana will also be talking about what its like being a graduate student at Northeastern, as well as his transition process from undergrad to grad here. As always there will be free pizza and drinks, so come on by.

Who: Noah Pestana
What: Grad School Info Session and IEEE Officer Elections Information

P.S. Wednesday night, will be a speaker session with David Ferrucci, the head of the IBM Watson team. He will be discussing the project and all its complexity at 5pm in the Curry Student Center Ballroom. It's going to be really interesting from a technical perspective to see a bit on how it works.

Weekly Meeting - Laptop Cooler Project (CAD)

Written on March 13th, 2012 by Jeff

When: March 14th, 2012 at 6:00pm
Where: 442 Dana (Inside ECE office glass doors)
Tomorrow is a joint IEEE - Wireless Club session where we will be learning KiCad, an E-CAD tool. We will be using it to create the schematic and board layout for our laptop cooler project. We will be meeting in 442 Dana at 6 PM (Inside the ECE office, through the glass doors). Please note that this is a conference room, so you will need to bring your own laptops (there are enough power outlets for as many people as can fit in the room). If you can, please install KiCad before coming in to class; KiCad is a free, open-source program requiring no license of any kind, so it is free and easy to install. You can find it to download it here (http://kicad.sourceforge.net/wiki/Downloads).

Who: Ches Koblents
What: Laptop Cooler Project CAD session

P.S. There is an event going on next weekend (Mach 23rd to 25th) called Engineers for the Greater Good (EGG). You may have seen eggs all around the tunnels advertising this. You have to sign up before hand and could win up to $2000 in prizes. Here is the link: http://www.northeastern.edu/entrepreneurs/programs/egg/

Weekly Meeting - High Performance Applications through Heterogeneous Computing

Written on February 29th, 2012 by Jeff

When: February 29th, 2012 at 11:45am
Where: 235 Ryder Hall
This week we have an exciting meeting with Professor Miriam Leeser on accelerating applications through the use of multiplatform heterogeneous computing while reducing cost, as well as considering precision requirements. We will also be discussing E-Board elections for the upcoming year, and how you can apply, and what each position entails. As always, there will be free pizza and drinks, so come on by.

Who: Professor Miriam Leeser
What: Research in the Reconfigurable and GPU Computing Laboratory

Speaker Biography:
Miriam Leeser joined the faculty at Northeastern University in January 1996. Her specialty is Computer Engineering. She received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and Diploma and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Cambridge University in England. She joined the faculty of Cornell University's Department of Electrical Engineering in 1988. She received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1992. Her research interests are in the areas of design and design tools for field programmable logic, and high level design tools for digital systems. She is the head of the Reconfigurable Computing Lab.

Weekly Meeting - Security in a Digital Age

Written on February 22nd, 2012 by Jeff

When: February 22nd, 2012 at 11:45am
Where: 235 Ryder Hall
This week I will be presenting on the issues of security in the digital age. In today's day and age, the security of software has become very important. There is currently a war being fought between countries that isn't one with people, or guns, but one with hackers, and intellectual property. This talk will go over some of the common issues of securing both software and hardware, and what you can do to prevent it. As always, there will be free pizza and drinks, so come on by.

Who: Jeff Geisperger
What: Security in a Digital Age

Speaker Biography:
Jeff Geisperger is a Senior Computer Engineering Major. He is the President of IEEE for Division A. He was also responsible for creating the website you are currently looking at. As President, it is his duty to make sure everything is working smoothly, such as having events and speakers scheduled to speak, and to lead the officer meetings that are held weekly (so we can all work together to make this the best student group ever). He has done three coops so far, one at MIT's Lincoln Labs working in Group 64 (Advanced Satcom Systems and Operations), one at AMD in the GPU Products Division (Formerly ATI) in the Shader Compiler Group, and one at VMware in the Platform Security Group.

Weekly Meeting - Cognitive Radio: A Next Generation Communication Paradigm

Written on February 14th, 2012 by Jeff

When: February 15th, 2012 at 11:45am
Where: 235 Ryder Hall
This week we have a very exciting meeting, where Professor Kaushik Chowdhury will be presenting on the topic of Cognitive Radio. His research involves helping solve the very concerning problem of spectrum usage in the wireless age. As always there will be free pizza and drinks, so come on down and visit us for our weekly meeting. We will also be doing sign-ups for our laptop cooler project this semester.

Who: Kaushik Chowdhury
What: Cognitive Radio: A Next Generation Communication Paradigm

Abstract:
Wireless spectrum is a scarce resource, with almost all of it already licensed to operators at high capital costs. However, observations reveal that portions of this spectrum are used sporadically and geographical variations in the utilization of the assigned spectrum range from 15% to 85% with a high variance in time. The limited available spectrum and the inefficiency in spectrum usage call for a new networking paradigm based on more flexible opportunistic utilization of the existing wireless spectrum. This new networking paradigm is referred to as cognitive radio network. In this talk, the new functionalities and current research challenges of cognitive radio networks are outlined and discussed in detail. More specifically, an overview of the cognitive radio technology is provided and key network architectures are introduced. Furthermore, experimental activities and emerging application areas in the medical domain and emergency vehicular networks are outlined.

Speaker Biography:
Kaushik Chowdhury (krc@ece.neu.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA. He graduated with B.E. in Electronics Engineering with distinction from VJTI, Mumbai University, India, in 2003. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati, OH, in 2006, and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA in 2009. His M.S. thesis was given the outstanding thesis award jointly by the ECE and CS departments at the University of Cincinnati. He received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE ICC Conference in 2009, in the Ad Hoc and Sensor Network Symposium. He is currently serving as the guest editor of the Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks journal, special issue on Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks, and as a regular area editor for the same journal. He has served as the technical chair/co‐chair in several workshops on the topic of wireless networks over the past several years, and is the Vice Chair for the IEEE Technical Committee on Simulation.

Weekly Meeting - Introduction to Linux

Written on February 7th, 2012 by Jeff

When: February 8th, 2012 at 11:45am
Where: 208 Snell Engineering
Do you know linux? Heard the name, but don't know what it is? Know what is is but don't know how to use it? Our Project Coordinator, Ches is hosting an introduction to linux session tomorrow. He will be going over filesystem basics, navigation, redirection and piping, and writing small programs, all using the terminal (using Fedora on a VM).

Who: Ches Koblents
What: Introduction to Linux

Also, last week we had our annual Corporate Windows event. We had a total of 142 student attend as well as our 6 companies. I personally wanted to thank everyone who came by as without you, it wouldn't have been the success it was. Pictures from the event can be found online at http://www.ieee.neu.edu/?page=cw (requires flash).

IEEE Presents: Corporate Windows

Written on January 30th, 2012 by Jeff

When: February 1st, 2012 at 6:00pm
Where: Curry Ballroom
This Wednesday is IEEE's annual Corporate Windows event. Want a job? Come meet with professionals in a different kind of job fair. Instead of recruiters, companies send both recruiters as well as engineers so you can ask directly what you would do at that job. Meet and network with professionals all over the industry.


The companies we have this year are:

Analog Devices
Maxim
NSTAR
Qualcomm
Raytheon
VMware

But wait! There's more! Also included in your FREE admission is Dinner, Door Prizes and more! Come on down this Wednesday at 6pm in the Curry Student Center Ballroom, invite your ECE friends too!

More information can be found at The corporate windows webpage.