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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 10^th 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

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.

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.

Three Honored with Outstanding Faculty Awards

The College of Engineering has chosen three highly accomplished academics to receive 2013 Outstanding Faculty Awards, which will be distributed at the Senior Recognition Celebration for the Class of 2013, to be held on Saturday, May 11, beginning at 9:00 a.m. in the Recreation Center. Dr. Lixin Gao of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department will be the recipient of the Outstanding Senior Faculty Award, and Dr. Paul Dauenhauer of the Chemical Engineering Department and Dr. Casey Brown of the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department will accept the Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Awards. Dr. Michael Knodler of the CEE department was previously selected to receive the College Outstanding Teaching Award, which will also be handed out at the Senior Recognition Celebration.

ECE Stages First Annual ECE Showcase

The Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at UMass Amherst cordially invited all students, faculty, staff, and campus visitors to drop in on Saturday, April 20, and attend ECE Showcase 2013, a celebration of the undergrads who are designing and building the products of the future. The ECE Showcase was two fabulous technical events under one roof, and both were free and appropriate for all ages. From 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. in the lower level of Marcus Hall, the Senior Design Project Expo featured 13 teams of ECE students demonstrating their creative, useful, and socially conscious electronic inventions, created as the capstone projects of their ECE education. Then, from noon till 4:00 p.m. in M5, located in room 5 on the lower level of Marcus Hall, the 4^th biannual Circuits and Code event featured the first, second, and third year ECE students demonstrating the results of their independent design projects.

Engineers Host Sneak Preview of the Future

On Friday, April 19, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst hosted its 23^rd annual Senior Design Project Day on campus, when 13 teams of ECE students unveiled their creative, useful, and socially conscious electronic inventions. The event was a high-tech floor show for the electronics of the future. This year’s senior design projects included electronic devices for the fast location of avalanche victims, teaching the guitar quickly, helping sports trainers diagnose concussions, and automating parking payments from a wireless platform. For full descriptions of all the projects, go to Senior Design Project.

Moore Chosen as Student Speaker at Engineering Celebration

The College of Engineering has selected Krysten Moore, a senior in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department and a national spokeswoman for several anti-bullying organizations, as the student speaker at its Senior Recognition Celebration for the Class of 2013, to be held on Saturday, May 11, beginning at 9:00 a.m. in the Recreation Center. Moore, from Mahwah, New Jersey, is a national youth ambassador for Love Our Children USA™ and STOMP Out Bullying™, has educated more than 100,000 school children about bullying, and has won several New Jersey pageants to give her a platform for her cause. She also founded Students Helping Instill New Esteem (SHINE), whose goal is to give children a sense of respect and consideration for each other, while understanding and accepting each other’s differences.

CASA Whips up a Storm of Media Coverage in East Texas

The Engineering Research Center for the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, or CASA, is big in north central Texas, where of course Texans like things big. CASA has generated a front-page article in the Dallas Morning News (morning news article) and additional features in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (star-telegram.html), Cleburne Times (times curve; times system), Joshua Star (Star 22828739), and the City of Arlington website (casa-radar). Just for good measure, CASA was covered on the National Science Foundation Discoveries site (nsf.gov.click). But perhaps the most informative piece on CASA was a marketing video produced by the North Central Texas Council of Governments and local TV meteorologists to promote the CASA project (gdata player).

ECE Researchers Get GENI Best Paper Award

Michael Zink of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and his graduate student Cong Wang received the Best Research Paper Award at the second Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) Research and Educational Experiment Workshop, held from March 21 to 22 in Salt Lake City, Utah. GENI is a national research and education network for exploring future internets at scale, that is, similar in size to the current Internet. The title of the winning paper was “GENI WiMAX Performance: Evaluation and Comparison of Two Campus Testbeds.” Go to Geni workshop website: geni.GREE2013.

Training School of Alum Celebrates Grand Re-opening

On March 21, alumnus Rafael D. Guzman (B.S. ’88, EE), celebrated the grand re-opening his Lawrence Training School Inc., an occupational training center operating since 1998, which just moved into a remodeled building in the Arlington Mills Plaza at 530 Broadway Street in Lawrence, Mass. Guzman, the president and CEO of RM Technologies, Inc. (RMT) of Lawrence, is also the part owner of the Lawrence Training School and its new building. RMT, acquired by Guzman in 1997, is a small specialty contractor that deals in demolition, asbestos, and other hazardous material abatement. In fact, construction crews from RMT worked nonstop on the old mill building to convert it in just 60 days into a beautiful new training facility and office space.

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