News

Alumna Named Woman to Watch by Mass High Tech

Alumna Leslie Jelalian, VP of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance at BAE Systems, has been named by Mass High Tech as one of its 20 “Women to Watch” in 2013. Jelalian is a 1988 graduate of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. Now in its 10th year, the annual Women to Watch program recognizes women in tech and life sciences who are judged to be leaders in their field and shaping the future of their industries for years to come. According to Mass High Tech, “Leslie Jelalian has become part of BAE’s DNA. The vice president of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance at one of the largest defense companies in the nation has been with the company since college. In fact, it is where she landed her first job.” Read Mass High Tech article on Jelalian: jelalian.html

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UMass Team’s Black Box for Humans Featured on Yahoo! News

An enterprising team of student innovators from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department was the object of an admiring feature story on Yahoo! News (black-box-html). Though the UMass team did not win any prizes for its Personal Black Box as one of 30 finalists in the 2013 Cornell Cup competition during the first weekend in May, Yahoo! News judged that “The Amherst black box for humans was perhaps the most intriguing idea on display.” The team—comprised of Brett Kaplan, Jack Vorwald, Mike Burns, and Ryan Holmes, with assistance from advisors Professor David Irwin and Professor Tilman Wolf—presented its black box prototype at the annual competition hosted by Cornell University that challenges engineering students to create new technologies of their choosing using embedded Intel chips.

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CASA Radar Installed at University of North Texas

A weather-radar unit developed by the Engineering Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), a consortium based at UMass Amherst, has been installed at the University of North Texas in Denton. According to CASA, the radar installation at the Discovery Park campus of the University of North Texas is part of a multi-sensor network, called the CASA DFW Urban Demonstration Network or CASA WX, that will help local emergency managers, National Weather Service forecasters, and weather-sensitive industries save lives, as well as reduce injuries and the economic costs of tornadoes, flash floods, hail, and high-wind events. The installation was covered by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, NBC TV NBCDFW.com, and Fox TV foxdfw/casa-radar, among other media.

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