Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering News

In the news: Westerhoff advises consumers on protection from toxins in water

20080515

Paul Westerhoff, chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was sought out by ABC Channel 15 news in Phoenix, for his expertise on water qualty and treatment.

Westerhoff was interviewed on air for the news show's report on how consumers can protect themselves from toxins that may be present in some water supplies.

To see a video and some text from the report, click here:
Protection against high toxin levels in water

Winning high school robotics team aided by ASU engineering expertise

20080512

Carl Hayden High School’s Falcon Robotics team celebrated its recent victory in an international robotics competition at a May 7 event hosted by Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

In April, the Phoenix high school team bested 350 other high school robotics teams from 26 countries in taking the first-place prize in the competition in Atlanta.

Many of the Falcon team’s 42 members came to the celebration at ASU for a demonstration of computer-game development, an exchange of ideas with ASU robotics experts, a congratulatory presentation by school of engineering Dean Deirdre Meldrum and Executive Dean Paul Johnson, a dinner and a tour of the engineering school’s robotics facilities.

The engineering school has played a role in the education of the Falcon team through its outreach efforts to spark interest in science, engineering and technology among K-12 students.

With support of a U.S. Department of Education grant, faculty members Wei-Tek Tsai, Gary Bitter, Yinong Chen, James Collofello and Yann-Hang Lee have been developing high school computing curriculum since 2006. Robotics programming has been used to teach computing concepts, Chen explains.

With funding from a Science Foundation Arizona grant, Chen taught a robotics-based computing class to a group of Arizona high school teachers in 2007. Two of the teachers, Steu Mann and Eira Rodriguez, were from Carl Hayden High School.

That led Chen to meet Carl Hayden High School teacher Faridodon Lajvardi and Allan Cameron, the founders of the Falcon Robotics team. They are now working together, using the attraction of robotics to interest students in all aspects of engineering.

They are also working with Intel Corporation to provide scholarships for two of the Falcon Robotics team’s programmers to attend the engineering school’s Summer Robotics Camp in June and July.

The camp experience “will prepare [the students] to improve the programming of their robots for future competitions,” Chen says.

“We are celebrating not just our success in robot building,” Cameron says. “We are celebrating how our students have been inspired and how they are inspiring others about the fun of engineering.”

Falcon team members have been giving demonstrations of their robotics work to schoolchildren and community groups.

“We are influencing the culture of our neighborhoods, the state and the country,” Cameron says. “Our robotics team has become a model for those who want to positively affect their world.”

Winning the international robotics competition was “a thrilling accomplishment,” he says, “but broadening our culture’s appreciation of science, technology, engineering and math is the goal we are really striving for, and the celebration of our victory by ASU’s engineering school is a great encouragement to us.”

The involvement of ASU’s engineering school faculty “has raised the expectations, ambitions and academic achievement levels of students,” he says. “We feel like ASU is our university, and we look forward to more collaboration. I think there are quite a few future ASU Sun Devils at Carl Hayden High School who will be studying in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.”

Montgomery to receive international industrial engineering award

20080512

Douglas Montgomery, a professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering, has been selected to receive one of the top honors bestowed by the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS).

Montgomery will receive the 2008 George Box Medal, recognizing outstanding contributions to the development and application of statistical methods in European business and industry.

He will give an address and be presented the award at the ENBIS international meeting in Athens, Greece in September.

The ENBIS awards committee cited Montgomery’s industrial statistics work in the design of experiments, quality control, applications of linear models, and series modeling and forecasting.

The committee also noted his authorship of several books in the field and many journal articles that reflected the depth of his expertise.

Montgomery has worked in engineering assignments with major businesses such as Union Carbide Corporation and Eli Lily and Company, and been a consultant to many national and international engineering organizations.

He has lectured extensively throughout the Americas, Europe and the Far East, and is one of the co-editors of Statistical Practice in Business and Industry, which the ENBIS awards committee deems a “famous” book in the statistics field.

In 2006, Montgomery was made an Arizona State University Regents Professor. The designation is given to faculty member at Arizona’s public universities who have demonstrated exceptional scholarship and outstanding achievement. He is one of six Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering faculty members to hold the Regents Professor designation.

Four earn School of Engineering 2008 Best Teacher Awards

20080506

Four Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering faculty members have earned the school's annual Best Teacher Awards for 2008. Recipients are chosen through a process that begins with nominations by students and culminates with a performance review by peers overseen by the school's Quality of Instruction Committee. Nine other faculty members ranked in the top 5 percent for teaching excellence.

Here's a brief snapshot of the top teachers:

David Allee

Associate Professor

Department of Electrical Engineering

Teaching Experience:

Has taught at ASU for 17 years

Courses he teaches:

EEE 334 Circuits II

EEE 425 Digital Systems and Circuits

EEE 525 VLSI Design

EEE 523 Advanced Analog Integrated Circuits

EEE 527 Analog to Digital Converter Design

On his approach to teaching:

I frequently remember and am inspired by Sir Thomas Moore's conversation with young Richard in the play A Man for All Seasons:

Moore: Be a teacher, Richard. You would be a good teacher. Perhaps a great one.

Richard: And if I were, who would know it?

Moore: You, your students, God. Not a bad public, that.

Web sites:

Find our more about Allee at:

http://flexdisplay.asu.edu and http://www.fulton.asu.edu/fulton/people/page.php?profile=10

Jeffrey Heys

Assistant Professor

Department of Chemical Engineering

Teaching experience:

3 years teaching applied mathematics at the University of Colorado (2001-2004); 4 years teaching chemical engineering at ASU (2004-present). This is second consecutive year Heys has won the School of Engineering's Best Teacher Award.

Courses he teaches:

CHE211 Introduction to Chemical Processing

CHE 331 Fluid Dynamics

CHE 527 Advanced Applied Mathematics for Chemical Engineering

On his approach to teaching:

"My basic teaching philosophy has been inspired by the many wonderful and inspirational teachers that I have had the privilege of knowing. These teachers taught me that the most important things are that I care about the learners, come prepared to teach, bring enthusiasm and energy, and keep an open mind about alternative methods of teaching. All of the many teaching related activities that I participate in are, hopefully, a reflection of that philosophy."

Web site:

http://www.public.asu.edu/~jheys/

Includes information on the courses he teaches, plus descriptions of his research projects.

Dieter Schroder

Professor

Department of Electrical Engineering

Teaching experience:

26 years teaching electrical engineering at ASU

Courses he teaches:

EEE 436 Fundamentals of Solid State Devices

EEE 531 Semiconductor Device Theory I

EEE 532 Semiconductor Device Theory II

EEE 536 Semiconductor Characterization

EEE 731 Advanced MOS Devices

On his approach to teaching:

In my graduate and undergraduate courses I focus on the device concepts, the physics, and the circuits. Of course, I use equations, but I do not manipulate equations for the sake of manipulating equations, because I sincerely believe it is more important to understand the concepts than to memorize equations. The equations are quickly forgotten and can always be looked up; but if the concepts are not understood, then the student has very little to take away from a course. I carry this further into homework assignments and examinations. I try very hard to get students to think about a problem and come up with a solution. I do not believe in long derivations on exams; I want to know whether the student has understood what the semiconductor device is all about, how it works, what are the ramifications.

Web site:

http://www.eas.asu.edu/~schroder/

Includes biographical information, plus details on courses he teaches, his research and publications in science and engineering journals.

Kenneth T. Sullivan

Assistant Professor

Del E. Webb School of Construction

Teaching experience:

Three and a half years, all at ASU

Courses he teaches:

CON 383 - Construction Estimating

CON 483 - Advanced Building Estimating

CON 598 - Research Methods

CON 598 - Facility Management Fundamentals

CON 598 - Project Management Methodologies

On his approach to teaching:

"The most important aspect of teaching is to truly care about the students, their wellbeing, and their growth.  If the student knows that you have his or her best interest at heart, then they will be more responsive to the information, knowledge, and experience that you are trying to share."

Other engineering school faculty members who ranked in the top 5 percent for teaching excellence:

Linda Chattin, Department of Industrial Engineering

James Collofello, Academic and Student Affairs Dean's Office

Daniel Tylavsky, Department of Electrical Engineering

Mutsumi Nakamura, School of Computing and Informatics

Subramaniam Dharmarajan, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

James Mayer, School of Materials

Pavlos Mikellides, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

George Runger, Department of Industrial Engineering

Dan Shunk, Department of Industrial Engineering

E-waste expertise: Helping Congress figure out what the nation can do about electronic waste

20080505

Eric Williams, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and ASU’s School of Sustainability, testified on April 30 in the nation’s capital before the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee about the environmental and economic challenges of dealing with increasing amounts of electronic equipment waste, called e-waste, in the United States.

Williams and other experts gave congressional representatives their perspectives on options for recycling, refurbishment, resale and safe disposal of the growing volume of old computers, televisions, cell phones, printers, video players and other popular consumer electronic products being rapidly added to the country’s waste piles.

Williams’ ASU colleague, civil and environmental engineering professor Brad Allenby, said the hearing marked a significant step for the university’s reputation.

Said Allenby, "That Congress asked Eric to testify on this issue of national concern is an encouraging sign of how ASU Engineering, and the new Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management, are increasingly being recognized as leaders in sustainable engineering and related policy issues."

Alleny is director and Williams is vice director of the center. Its mission is to provide a basis for understanding, designing and managing the complex and integrated built, human and natural systems that increasingly characterize our planet. It combines research, teaching and pubic service in an effort to learn how engineered and built systems are integrated with natural and human systems in an age that scientists are calling the “Anthropocene” Age — or the Age of Humans.

For more information on the congressonal hearing and transcripts of testimony by Williams and other experts, visit the committee’s web site at:

Congressional e-waste hearing

See the webcast of the hearing at:

E-waste experts' testimony

NSF Career Award will support computer gaming research to look at how communities can sustain resources

20080502

How can a computer game contribute to sustainable development? Just ask Marco Janssen, associate director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity.

Janssen has earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award for his innovative work, which includes using group experiments with computer simulations to test how people share common resources — such as forests, pastures and irrigation systems — and craft institutional rules governing those resources.

The award is among the most prestigious for scientists and engineers early in their careers. It recognizes researchers and educators for their potential to be leaders in their areas of expertise.

Janssen is an assistant professor in ASU’s School of Human Evolution of Social Change and also, through mid-2008, in the School of Computing and Informatics in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

His Career Award will provide more than $400,000 over five years to help fund his research on institutional innovation in the governance of common resources. It also will be used to develop interactive sustainability games and educational material on computing in the social sciences for middle school and high school students.

Though Janssen was trained as an applied mathematician, he has long been interested in environmental issues and has aimed his research in that direction since the early 1990s.

Janssen, who is striving to produce research that has real-world applicability, became frustrated with the boundaries of traditional disciplinary research and turned to the flexibility of intellectual fusion.

His work at ASU’s Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity allows him to meld his interests in ecology, mathematics, anthropology, economics and computing in pioneering endeavors.

In one of Janssen’s typical experiments for this research, recruited undergraduate students — who can interact only online — receive instructions and then kick back and enjoy a “Pac-Man”-type game, in which they maneuver an avatar around the computer screen collecting renewable resources. They receive monetary rewards for the amounts consumed, but uncoordinated greedy behavior leads to a collapse of the resource and lower rewards for the students.

Between the various rounds, the students can use a chat room to coordinate their strategies.

"Using games can help make the experience fun and allows for 'resources' to be safely destroyed by the participants," says Janssen. "Also, it is difficult to observe in natural resource management how people develop rules, but in this scenario we can collect all online chat from the students and analyze it. It may help us determine why one group does better than another."

"The goal is to get better formal models about society. We need realistic solutions to the problems we face, and we need to understand which institutions fit best in which cases. Ecology varies among locations, and social organization doesn’t necessarily fit with the environment. Many na�ve concepts are being used, and that creates bad or inefficient outcomes."

Janssen’s award is the second for the center, which officially launched earlier this year. J. Marty Anderies — an assistant professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, in addition to the School of Sustainability — earned the center’s first NSF Career Award for his work in resource degradation.

ASU prepares to play major role in cutting-edge project to explore ocean depths

20080501

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
News Release

TEMPE, Ariz. — Scientists know that what happens in the oceans covering 70 percent of Earth has a critical impact on environmental conditions and life across the entire planet. Still, much remains unknown about the undersea domain.

“The ocean depths are the last unexplored frontier on Earth,” and a better understanding of that frontier “would revolutionize the ways humans can perceive and eventually manage their world,” says John Delaney, a professor in the University of Washington School of Oceanography.

He is among leaders of an ambitious endeavor to unlock deep-sea mysteries — a program supported by the National Science Foundation to develop and deploy new technologies designed to probe the oceans in innovative ways.

Arizona State University researchers are gearing up to play a significant role through the Center for Ecogenomics, which is based in ASU’s Biodesign Institute and directed by Deirdre Meldrum, dean of the university’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

Delaney will be at the Tempe Center for the Arts on May 5 to give a free public presentation on the program. It’s from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., with a reception to follow.

In a lecture laced with poetry and vivid imagery of such things as active underwater volcanoes, Delaney will describe efforts to establish a widespread “telepresence” in the ocean that will provide scientists new perspectives on the interaction between the seas and the planet’s atmosphere, on deep-sea geological activity, on the migration patterns of marine animals and much more.

“The oceans reflect the interconnectedness of all life and all the elements that exist on Earth. The environmental health of the planet can be gauged by assessing the health and vitality of marine biodiversity in real-time,” Delaney says. “The ocean environments have major impacts on climate change, on the planet’s capacity for food production on land, and a profound influence on the quality of life on the continents.”

The National Science Foundation is investing $335 million in the overall program known as the Ocean Observatory Initiative. The part of the program on which of Delaney and Meldrum are collaborating focuses on studying ecosystems in the region of the Pacific Ocean that overlies the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the U.S. Northwest coast. It offers an active geo-ecosystem that includes volcanic eruptions, strong wave currents, tectonic plate movement and undersea “chimneys” that vent water that is up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Meldrum’s center at ASU is developing sensors and other sophisticated devices to measure biological, chemical and physical aspects of the sea-floor environs at the microbial level. The sensors will make use of the high power and high bandwidth of an underwater observation system designed to provide real-time data and measurements to researchers on land via the worldwide web.

The planned 30-year exploration program will be enabled by an interconnected system that is to eventually include 1,500 miles of high-powered, high-bandwidth, electro-optical cable placed across the sea floor. The cable network will be woven among chemical and biological sensors mounted on both mobile and fixed underwater robots, comprising an extensive array of submarine laboratories.

Together these tools will form an observational network to provide, among many other things, a real-time, high-definition Internet video of undersea events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and landslides. It will give scientists opportunities to conduct complex experiments using the network’s interactive capabilities.

“When this new system is connected to the Internet it will allow scientists anywhere in the world to interact with the oceans,” Delaney says.

“Such developing technologies allow us to design and perform entirely new types of studies as if we were actually in the ocean,” Meldrum explains. “Now we can literally conduct oceanographic research from the desert, and make ASU a leader in this kind of remote environmental science.”

Says Delaney, “My hope is that Meldrum’s work in genomic analyses will become a major test-case for this next generation of technologies designed to explore the ocean’s depths.”

With the combination of advanced fiber-optic communications tools, more powerful computers for assimilating and modeling data, enhanced robotics and ecogenomic analyses all linked to the worldwide web, “we will bring ocean exploration to laboratories, classrooms and living rooms in high-definition,” Delaney says.

For more information on the National Science Foundation Ocean Observatories Initiative, see the web site http://www.ooi.washington.edu/
# # #

SOURCES:
Deirdre Meldrum, deirdre.meldrum@asu.edu
Dean, Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering
(480)965-2147

John Delaney, jdelaney@u.washignton.edu
Professor, School of Oceanography
University of Washington
(206) 543-5059

MEDIA CONTACT:
Joe Kullman, joe.kullman@asu.edu
(480) 965-8122 direct line
(480) 773-1364 mobile

Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona USA
www.fulton.asu.edu/fulton/

Baral is new chair of Department of Computer Science and Engineering

20080424

Attracting top high school students and undergraduates to the world of computer technology innovation is high on the priority list of professor Chitta Baral as he takes on his new role as chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the School of Computing and Informatics.

The school is part of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

“Sometimes it’s difficult for high school students to distinguish between computers and computer science,” Baral says. “They’re seeing computers only from a user’s perspective, but not seeing everything that is behind the technology that enables computers to do all the things that they can do today.”

In addition to an outreach program aimed at high schoolers, Baral plans for his department to develop an introductory course for undergraduates designed to make students aware “of all the top-notch discoveries and inventions in computer science” to pique their interest in majoring in the field.

“There are so many interesting and exciting challenges,” he says. “It’s not just stereotypical programming. It’s about making computers smarter, designing better graphics, creating the next Google or Digg.com. There are so many lucrative career options to consider.”

Baral, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland in 1991, came to ASU in 1999 after about eight years on the faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso.

During that time he was also a visiting scientist at i2 Technologies in Dallas and a visiting faculty member in the computer and information science department at Linkoping University in Sweden. He has been a consultant to the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix.

Baral is the author of a textbook on knowledge representation and reasoning. His current research involves studying biologists’ knowledge of cell behavior, looking at cell signaling and gene-protein interactions and examining various kinds of reasoning used for determining the side effects of drugs, explaining abnormal cell behavior and designing drug therapy.

He has done research in bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, logic programming and cognitive robotics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and an editor of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Transactions of Computational Logic.

Baral has been a recipient of prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Awards — the Career Award and Research Initiation Award — and finished in first place in the 1997 American Association for Artificial Intelligence robot contest.

In addition to NSF funding, his research has been supported by NASA, the Office of Naval Research and Science Foundation Arizona.

“An accomplished and forward-thinking scholar and researcher such as Chitta Baral is someone who can take us to the next level in computer science and computer engineering education,” says Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the School of Computing and Informatics.

Writers: Joe Kullman and Emily Falkner

Electrical engineering advances hold hope for the hard of hearing

20080422

Hearing could be improved for the approximately 28 million Americans who suffer from hearing loss if researchers in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering succeed in their efforts to improve hearing-aid technology.

Department of Electrical Engineering professor Sayfe Kiaei and associate professors Bertan Bakkaloglu, Junseok Chae, and Rudy Diaz, have been awarded a $385,000 grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop an advanced hearing aid through their work in ASU’s Connection One center, part of an NSF industry-university research consortium.

The project seeks to address the common complaints of hearing-aid users.

“People with hearing aids in crowded rooms or noisy environments such as cars have a hard time figuring out who is saying what,” Bakkaloglu explains.

The goal is to develop the first inner ear canal hearing aid using two microphones in each ear. This makes it easier for the user to tell where sounds are coming from by mimicking natural hearing patterns.

“The biggest challenge in directionality is that those two microphones should have the exact same sensitivity. And like most things in life, no two things match 100 percent,” Bakkaloglu says. “To overcome the matching problem is the toughest challenge.”

This challenge falls to Chae, the team’s microphone and loudspeaker expert. He has developed a potential solution using the Micro Electro Mechanical System, in which he will exactly match the hearing aid microphones themselves, and not just the electronics.

“The way people do it now to generate the directional microphones is not to match the microphone itself, but to manipulate the electronics to make it look like it’s matched,” Chae says.

Using an electrical matching method severely shortens the battery life, forcing the patient to recharge hearing aid batteries every few hours. Chae says this isn’t really practical for hearing-aid users because they need something more environmentally adaptable.

“My technology, if it is successful, is going to be adaptively changing the matching performance based upon the environment. So once the microphones are matched, it’s going to change and track that matched performance as the environment changes,” Chae says. “So you don’t need to re-tweak it.”

The team recently began receiving funds from the NSF’s Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) program to be distributed over three years. The ASU researchers have partnered with Symphony Acoustics Inc., a microphone and sensor manufacturer, which they hope will carry the hearing aid to the market once it’s developed.

NSF Career Award will support bioengineering research on the body’s neural connections

20080418

Research aimed at understanding how the brain combines different forms of sensory information to help plan and modify our physical movements will be supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award recently won by Christopher Buneo, an assistant professor in the Harrington Department of Bioengineering in ASU’s Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

NSF Career Awards recognize scientists and engineers considered to be potential leaders in their fields.

The award will provide about $609,000 over five years for Buneo’s research, as well as for an educational program to develop material for a biotechnology course geared for high school students.

Buneo is studying how information about objects we perceive around us — their position and velocity — is transmitted to the brain by our senses, which describe our perceptions to us using different neural “languages.”

For example, he explains, “Our eyes provide information about the visual motion of a fly buzzing around us from the perspective of the direction in which we are looking. At the same time, our ears relay information — the buzzing sound generated by the flapping of the fly’s wings.”

If we want to reach out and swat the fly, the brain must combine information from our eyes and ears with information from our moving arm, “which speaks yet another neural language,” Buneo says.

”Clearly, some sort of �interpreter’ is needed to allow the senses to work together to perform this task,” he says.

It’s currently believed that the part of the brain known as the posterior parietal cortex may serve this interpreter role. But precisely how this is accomplished is unclear.

Buneo’s research seeks to understand the role of the posterior parietal cortex in the perception of the world around us, as well as its role in producing physical movements.

To do this, he records the activity of posterior parietal neurons as movements are made in a virtual-reality environment. This environment allows sensory information to be easily manipulated, which Buneo hopes will reveal the role of this neural information in movement production.

From a broad perspective, the work will lead to a better understanding of how our brains work. Buneo says this knowledge should help advance the development of technologies for people with nervous system dysfunction.

The education component of his work will involve using Career Award funding to incorporate neuroscience and neural engineering concepts into a high school course in biotechnology.

ASU bioengineering students will assist in developing and delivering the course work for select high school students in Gilbert public schools. Some of the high school students will have to an opportunity to do summer research internships at ASU.

Buneo teaches physiology for engineers to undergraduates in the school of engineering, and a graduate-level course in modeling and simulation of physiological systems.

He has been at ASU since 2005 after earning a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in physical therapy from Long Island University in New York and a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Minnesota. He later worked at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., through a post-doctoral fellowship.