UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael Taylor is contributing his expertise through the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing.
Recent UW ECE graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22) has received high honors for her work while at UW ECE. She will join Stanford University in September 2023 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
A UW ECE student team, led by UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson and Dr. Gregory Valentine from the UW School of Medicine, has engineered a low-cost, highly accurate intravenous (IV) fluid monitor aimed at improving infant health outcomes around the globe.
Alana Dee (left) and Marziyeh Rezaei (right) are second-year doctoral students at UW ECE and each is a recipient of a 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship. Both students are advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni.
Kai-Mei Fu, who is the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, was recently interviewed by UW News about the up-and-coming field of quantum research.
The Department is issuing a call to faculty, students and staff for new DEI initiative proposals that, if approved, will be supported by the UW ECE DEI Small Grants Program. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2023.
UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael Taylor is contributing his expertise through the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing.
Recent UW ECE graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22) has received high honors for her work while at UW ECE. She will join Stanford University in September 2023 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
Alana Dee (left) and Marziyeh Rezaei (right) are second-year doctoral students at UW ECE and each is a recipient of a 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship. Both students are advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni.
The Department is issuing a call to faculty, students and staff for new DEI initiative proposals that, if approved, will be supported by the UW ECE DEI Small Grants Program. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2023.
A UW ECE student team, led by UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson and Dr. Gregory Valentine from the UW School of Medicine, has engineered a low-cost, highly accurate intravenous (IV) fluid monitor aimed at improving infant health outcomes around the globe.
Kai-Mei Fu, who is the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, was recently interviewed by UW News about the up-and-coming field of quantum research.
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UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael Taylor (left) alongside Allen School professor Arvind Krishnamurthy (right) are working to tackle challenges in the field of distributed computing. Photo courtesy of the Allen School[/caption]
Adapted from an article by Roger Van Scyoc | Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
Data centers account for about 2% of total electricity use in the U.S., according to the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building. Meanwhile, advances in distributed computing have spurred innovation with the use of large, intensive applications — but at a high cost in terms of energy consumption and environmental impact.
Michael Taylor, who holds a joint appointment between UW ECE and the Allen School, alongside Allen School professor Arvind Krishnamurthy will contribute to a multi-university effort focused on tackling these challenges in the distributed computing landscape. The two will lend their expertise to the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, which will foster the development of computing technologies that improve the performance of microelectronics and semiconductors.
Funded by a $31.5 million grant from the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0), the ACE Center will advance distributed computing technology — from cloud-based datacenters to edge nodes — and further innovation in the semiconductor industry. Led by the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and with additional funds from partnering institutions, the ACE Center will have a total budget of $39.6 million over five years.
“Computation is becoming increasingly planet-scale, which means not only that energy efficiency is becoming more and more critical for environmental reasons, but that we need to rethink how computation is done so that we can efficiently orchestrate computations spread across many chips distributed around the planet,” Taylor said. “This center is organizing some of the best and brightest minds across the fields of computer architecture, distributed systems and hardware design so that we may come up with innovative solutions.”
Krishnamurthy, the Short-Dooley Professor in the Allen School, is an investigator on the “Distributed Evolvable Memory and Storage” theme. His research focuses on building effective and robust computer systems, both in terms of data centers and Internet-scale systems. The ACE Center is not the only forward-looking initiative that is benefiting from Krishnamurthy’s expertise; he is also co-director of the Center for the Future of Cloud Infrastructure (FOCI) at the Allen School, which was announced last year.
“We are seeing an explosion of innovations in computer architecture, with a continuous stream of innovations in accelerators, programmable networks and storage,” Krishnamurthy said. “One key goal of this center is how to make effective use of this hardware and how to organize them in large distributed systems necessary to support demanding applications such as machine learning and data processing.”
“This center is organizing some of the best and brightest minds across the fields of computer architecture, distributed systems and hardware design so that we may come up with innovative solutions.” – UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael Taylor
Taylor, who leads the Bespoke Silicon Group at the Allen School, is an investigator in the “Heterogeneous Computing Platforms” theme. He’ll act as a fulcrum for research directions and guide a talented team of graduate students in designing distributed energy-efficient accelerator chips that can better adapt with ever-changing and more complicated computing environments.
“Today’s accelerator chips are very fixed function, and rapidly become obsolete, for example, if a new video encoding standard is developed,” Taylor said. “With some fresh approaches to the problem, accelerators in older cell phones would still be able to decode the newer video standards.”
Taylor has previously worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which oversees JUMP, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), helping organize a pair of 5-year research centers, including the Applications Driving Architectures (ADA) center and the Center for Future Architecture Research (C-FAR) center. The NSF Career Award winner joined UW ECE and the Allen School in 2017.
Both Krishnamurthy and Taylor will contribute to the ACE Center’s goal to create an ecosystem that fosters direct engagement and collaborative research projects with industry partners drawn from SRC member companies as well as companies in the broader areas of microelectronics and distributed systems.
In addition to Taylor and Krishnamurthy at the University of Washington, other contributors to the ACE Center include faculty from the University of Illinois, Harvard, Cornell, Georgia Tech, MIT, Ohio State, Purdue, Stanford, the University of California San Diego, the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin.
[post_title] => UW ECE Professor Michael Taylor and the Allen School’s Arvind Krishnamurthy will help spur innovation in distributed computing as part of new multi-university research center
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[post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, photos by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_30323" align="alignright" width="600"]
Recent UW ECE graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22) received the 2022 Yang Research Award for her dissertation focused on enabling low-power communication for environmental sensing systems. She is currently in a year-long appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. In September 2023, she will join Stanford University as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.[/caption]
Originally published in UW ECE’s 2022 Integrator magazine
UW ECE congratulates recent graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22), who received the 2022 Yang Research Award for her dissertation focused on enabling low-power communication for environmental sensing systems. She developed and applied this research toward improving agricultural methods through the Microsoft FarmBeats program. Kapetanovic received the honor at the annual UW ECE Awards ceremony, which was held June 2 at the Paul G. Allen Center Atrium on the UW campus.
In late August, Kapetanovic also received the UW Graduate School’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Engineering. The award recognizes outstanding and exceptional scholarship at the doctoral level. Kapetanovic earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from UW ECE, while conducting research on topics such as finding new methods for passive wireless communication under supervision of her adviser, UW ECE Professor Joshua Smith. She is currently in a year-long appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. In September 2023, she will join Stanford University as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
“Receiving the Yang Research Award is exciting. It’s validating that the research I am doing is innovative and impactful, which is a great feeling,” Kapetanovic said. “The grad school award is also a high honor, and I’m really excited to start at Stanford next year. There are many great collaborators there, they have several climate-related initiatives and a new school for sustainability, which is very relevant to my own research.”
The Yang Research Award was established by successful entrepreneur and former UW ECE faculty member Andrew T. Yang. Yang has been one of the most influential people in the electronic design automation industry for nearly three decades, and he is known for being a visionary in both research and entrepreneurship. The purpose of this award is to recognize and encourage outstanding doctoral student research contributions to the field of electrical engineering. The award goes to one qualifying student per year and is open to all doctoral degree candidates in UW ECE. Receiving the Yang Research Award is considered a high honor and helps to create career opportunities for the recipient.
UW ECE mentorship and internships lead to success
[caption id="attachment_30325" align="alignright" width="550"]
Kapetanovic (right) testing her wireless communication device in Sylvan Grove on the UW campus alongside UW ECE doctoral degree candidate Shanti Garman (left). Unlike existing passive wireless and backscatter communication systems, Kapetanovic’s prototype does not depend on a radio signal to send and receive information. Instead, her device uses a byproduct of electrical resistance in its circuitry to enhance energy-efficiency and transmit a wireless signal.[/caption]
Kapetanovic credits much of her academic success to Smith, who is the Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor in Entrepreneurial Excellence at UW ECE, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and head of the Sensor Systems Laboratory at the UW. He is an internationally recognized leader in development of new types of sensor systems with applications in robotics, health care and the Internet of Things (IoT).
“Josh is awesome. I definitely don’t think I would have been as successful as I am without his advice and support,” Kapetanovic said of her adviser. “I think what’s really nice about Josh and the work he does is that he is interested in so many different areas. He looks at things from many perspectives, and that has influenced the way in which I approach my own research.”
In Smith’s lab, Kapetanovic made significant contributions to development of innovative wireless and backscatter communication techniques, battery-free sensors, and inexpensive low-power communication and IoT systems. Throughout graduate school, she worked to apply these new technologies in the real world through her internships at Microsoft, which were supervised by Ranveer Chandra, the company’s managing director for research for industry and chief technology officer of agri-food. Kapetanovic noted that, like Smith, Chandra was a mentor for her throughout graduate school, teaching her ways to look at problems from several different perspectives and encouraging creative approaches to presenting her work. Kapetanovic’s research related to Microsoft’s FarmBeats program — which aims to use collection of precise environmental data, such as soil temperature and moisture level, to help increase farm productivity — gained notice by the company and by the public. In 2020, she was awarded a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant to help further support her work in this area.
While at UW ECE, Kapetanovic also contributed to paving the way for other female engineers. Along with her lab mate, Shanti Garman, and with the support of UW ECE faculty and staff, Kapetanovic co-organized the inaugural “WomXn at the Forefront of ECE Research (WAFER),” an annual event highlighting outstanding female engineers, which is aimed at cultivating a more inclusive environment. Kapetanovic noted that in Smith’s lab there were several female engineers, and she always felt welcomed and included at UW ECE. But she also said she realized this wasn’t everyone’s experience in electrical and computer engineering, which is a traditionally male-dominated field. So, she co-organized this ongoing event to help ensure inclusiveness at UW ECE over the long-term.
“It has been such a delight to work with Zerina from the time she was an undergraduate through her doctoral degree,” Smith said. “She is fearless about taking on technical challenges, works incredibly hard, and is a wonderful colleague and mentor to other students. I have also been impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit she brings to diversity, equity and inclusion at UW ECE, imagining and implementing successful new programs. I am so excited to watch the next steps in her meteoric rise as she establishes her own research lab as a faculty member at Stanford!”
Preparing for a future at Stanford
[caption id="attachment_30328" align="alignright" width="550"]
Examples of the wireless communication prototype Kapetanovic developed in the lab of UW ECE Professor Joshua Smith.[/caption]
Today, Kapetanovic is looking forward to joining Stanford University. She said that Smith, other faculty and staff in the Department, and in particular, Professor Scott Hauck helped to prepare her for this new faculty role.
“I’ve received support in so many ways at UW ECE that helped to prepare me for the job application process, which also prepared me to start the job at Stanford. I’ve had a lot of great examples around me,” Kapetanovic said. “For instance, Professor Scott Hauck. I really love the way he teaches and being able to learn from him in that regard because I taught EE 271, which is the course that he developed. Having that opportunity at UW ECE helped me to realize more that I enjoy teaching.”
When asked what it was like to mentor and work with Kapetanovic as an educator, Hauck noted her exceptional abilities as a student and as an instructor.
"From the beginning, it was clear that Zerina was something special. At UW ECE, she has been a quiet force, eager to learn and go above and beyond what's required," Hauck said. "Toward the end of her UW career, when we needed an EE 271 instructor, we were incredibly fortunate to have Zerina run the class for us. She did an awesome job teaching, just like she has done in everything she has undertaken here. Normally, I'd say that a person would be lucky to land such a great position at Stanford. However, I think Stanford is lucky to have a rising star like Zerina as a new faculty member."
At Stanford, Kapetanovic’s lab will focus on low-power wireless communication and sensing, and IoT systems. This research work has a wide range of potential applications across many different fields. Kapetanovic said that her lab would be emphasizing sustainable technology and finding ways to apply new innovations to achieve immediate impact — a similar approach to what she did with FarmBeats — while still finding ways to help address major societal issues, such as climate change.
“I’m really passionate about taking these types of technologies and using them to help solve issues related to climate change, but my long-term research goal is to get us to the point where we can actually have battery-free, resilient, and potentially biodegradable sensors that are reliable,” Kapetanovic said. “If you think about all these different types of industries, whether it’s manufacturing or healthcare, agriculture — if you want to improve productivity or make any of those industries more sustainable, you need to rely on data. You need lots of data, and that’s where these sensors come into play and IoT systems in general.”
Kapetanovic is hiring graduate students for her lab at Stanford University. Visit her website for contact information and to learn more about her research.
[post_title] => Zerina Kapetanovic receives Yang Research Award, other honors, and secures a tenure-track faculty position at Stanford University
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Alana Dee (left) and Marziyeh Rezaei (right) are second-year doctoral students at UW ECE and each is a recipient of a 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship. Both students are advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni.[/caption]
Cadence, a world leader in electronic systems design, recently announced that two UW ECE doctoral students are among 38 recipients of the company’s 2022 Diversity in Technology Scholarship. This annual award recognizes underrepresented university students in technical fields who demonstrate outstanding leadership skills, academic achievement and drive to shape the world of technology.
Alana Dee and Marziyeh Rezaei are both second-year doctoral students at UW ECE, advised by Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni. Graduate students in Moazeni’s lab, such as Dee and Rezaei, conduct research at the intersection of integrated system design and photonics, with applications in computing and communication, sensing and imaging, and the life sciences.
“I really enjoy working with creative and hardworking students like Alana and Marziyeh,” Moazeni said. “I am also very proud of my students, whose great work is now being recognized and appreciated with this award, early in their professional life.”
Alana Dee
Dee received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2021 from the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a focus on signal processing and communications. At UW ECE, her research is focused on mixed-signal integrated circuits for computing and communication applications. Dee’s current research project is developing a CMOS-based Ising Machine for accelerated combinatorial optimization.
“This scholarship validates the work I’ve put into becoming a better electrical engineer and a diversity advocate in my field,” Dee said. “The financial support also allows me to spend my time focusing on research projects and community involvement.”
Marziyeh Rezaei
Rezaei received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2020 from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, with a focus on electronic integrated circuit design. At UW ECE, she is focusing on integrated circuits and optical systems design. Rezaei has been studying security aspects of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for autonomous vehicles. Her research illustrates the possibility of spoofing attacks against LiDAR systems and solutions for preventing this type of attack. She presented her work at the 2022 Workshop on Attacks and Solutions in Hardware Security (ASHES) conference.
“Winning this scholarship elevated my respect for myself as a female engineer and helped me, as a woman, to develop my position in the field of electronics.” Rezaei said. “The scholarship also provided further motivation for me to pursue my goals.”
More information about Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship programs is available on the company’s website.
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_30198" align="alignright" width="600"]
A Vision for Electronic Literacy & Access (AVELA) board members at Drumheller Fountain on the UW campus. In 2022, AVELA used funding from the UW ECE DEI Small Grants Program to help attract and retain a more diverse student body in the Department. From left to right: UW students Fatima Gbla, Kyle Johnson, Liban Hussein, Vicente Arroyos, Aisha Coara, Raul Villanueva. Photo courtesy of AVELA[/caption]
Over the last couple of years, UW ECE has launched several successful initiatives that foster greater diversity, equity and inclusion within the Department. This work has been implemented with academic rigor and in partnership with the UW College of Engineering’s Office for Inclusive Excellence and the University’s Office for Minority Affairs & Diversity. UW ECE has also encouraged DEI-related research and activities among faculty and students that augment traditional technical research and courses of study.
Now, the Department is issuing a call to faculty, students and staff for new initiative proposals that, if approved by a review committee, will be supported by the 2023 UW ECE DEI Small Grants Program. Budgets up to $5,000 will be considered for initiatives ranging in duration from six months to one year. Proposals can be submitted online through April 30, 2023.
This year, the Small Grants Program is targeting four key areas that align with the Department’s DEI vision and goals:
UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson[/caption]
The Department has made good progress toward this aim under Wilson and her predecessor, UW ECE Associate Professor Sam Burden, who was associate chair for diversity, equity, and inclusion during the 2021–22 academic year. With their leadership and the support of the DEI advisory committee, which is made up of faculty, staff and students from across UW ECE, the Department has implemented nine different DEI-related initiatives in a little over two years.
Wilson emphasized the wide range of DEI initiatives at UW ECE and that she would like to see a broad spectrum of students, faculty and staff apply for this year’s grants.
“In our DEI effort at UW ECE, our initiatives themselves are diverse. But people who don’t explicitly read DEI literature or are not in an underrepresented group still might have a mistaken impression that this is not for them, it’s for those people ‘over there,’” Wilson said. “We definitely want to change that way of thinking. We want students, faculty and staff — including those from majority or overrepresented populations — to get involved and realize how they can be more diverse, equitable or inclusive in their own programs to the benefit of all.”
Below are a few examples of DEI initiatives at UW ECE from the 2021–22 academic year.
Students from Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington, participating in an AVELA summer website development class. This course was led by AVELA instructor Charles Bugre, a doctoral student from the UW Information School. Photo courtesy of AVELA[/caption]
AVELA is a recognized UW student organization that conducts outreach to local K–12 students from underrepresented minority groups. Its members are minority students at the University who strive to bridge opportunity gaps in the public education system. AVELA brings science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to students, with the goal of sparking interest in STEM careers and higher education. In the process, AVELA members gain hands-on experience in mentorship, curriculum development and presentation of STEM activities to younger audiences.
In 2022, UW ECE supported an expansion of AVELA’s outreach to underrepresented minority students in elementary, middle and high schools in the Seattle area. This work included pairing
AVELA graduate and doctoral students with UW ECE undergraduates, mentoring and training them on how to work with K–12 students and lead outreach projects.
“To me, this initiative was about assisting students from underrepresented backgrounds who had made it to UW ECE and then empowering them to reach back to their own communities to help the next generation of students,” said Kyle Johnson, co-founder of AVELA and a recent UW ECE graduate (BSEE ‘20). Johnson is now a third-year doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, advised by UW ECE alumnus and Allen School Assistant Professor Vikram Iyer.
“We pride ourselves on being able to reach out to the same communities that we come from,” added Liban Hussein, co-founder of AVELA and a second-year doctoral student at UW ECE, advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni. “We find that when students learn from someone who comes from a background similar to their own, they are more inclined to give back in the future, whether it’s through outreach or mentorship.”
AVELA classes and workshops at middle schools and high schools over the summer included Arduino basics, website development, and computer-aided design tools and applications. The group also led a science adventure camp for elementary school students with autism, which was held on the UW campus. During the initiative, AVELA members taught more than 200 underrepresented minority students in local elementary, middle and high schools, and AVELA members provided individual tutoring for students who were struggling in STEM-related subjects. This benefited K–12 students in the Seattle area and increased their interest in applying to colleges, universities and departments such as UW ECE.
“The students we’ve worked with are now applying for scholarships to colleges and universities,” Hussein said. “They’re more confident in themselves. That’s an influence we are proud to have had on them.”
AVELA also collaborates with faculty who have National Science Foundation grants, using supplemental grant applications and the group’s connections to help provide Research Experience for Undergraduates opportunities for underrepresented minority students. Several UW ECE faculty members have already partnered with AVELA in this way, and the organization seeks to expand these opportunities for AVELA students. The group encourages faculty interested in providing an REU opportunity for underrepresented students to contact the organization for more information.
AVELA is growing fast and works in partnership with the National Society for Black Engineers, the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, the UW Black Student Union and other affinity student groups on campus. AVELA also recently became a federally recognized nonprofit organization, which will help further support the recruitment of students from underrepresented minority groups to participate in AVELA’s outreach and mentorship activities.
Learn more about AVELA on the organization’s website and social media channels (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn).
The DEI Book Club is led by UW ECE staff member John Nettles (left). This quarter, the Club is reading “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Criado Perez.[/caption]
The DEI Book Club was established summer quarter 2022, and it is open to UW ECE doctoral students, faculty and staff. The Book Club is intended to be a professional development opportunity for people interested in creating inclusive spaces for those who have been historically underrepresented in electrical and computer engineering. The group meets once per quarter to discuss a book that focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, along with ways to apply what is learned to UW ECE.
“I’m really passionate about providing opportunities for people who have been excluded in the past from institutions that weren’t created for them,” said DEI Book Club Director John Nettles. “I’m thinking about the little ways that culture shifts, and that is why I built an overall curriculum for the Book Club, because I wanted people to see how these topics are interconnected.”
Nettles' curriculum for the Book Club has been developed so discussion of each book read by the group builds upon the next, yet the topics are flexible, so new participants can join and become part of the conversation at any time. Books being read and discussed by the Book Club include, “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” (summer quarter 2022), “So, You Want to Talk About Race” (autumn quarter 2022) and “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” (winter quarter 2023).
“One of the things we talk about in the Book Club is how we see a book changing how we work, navigate or what we think we need to do differently as individuals,” Nettles said. “DEI work at this level is more about the individual, and this is providing grassroots space for change. We need that, along with the administration talking about these issues. This is a way staff, faculty and Ph.D. students can do their part.”
Interested in joining the DEI Book Club? Contact John Nettles to learn more.
UW ECE staff member Whitney Thomas (above) came up with the idea for the ECE Student Emergency Support Fund and leads its implementation.[/caption]
This fund serves to provide support for UW ECE students who are experiencing unanticipated hardship. Students can submit requests for financial assistance with unexpected expenses and situations such as health care costs, car repairs, legal fees, travel for family emergencies, stolen goods, and housing and food insecurity. The Fund launched in autumn 2022 and already has assisted several students with financial challenges, helping them to persist with their studies.
“Students have a lot of obligations. In addition to being students, they’re often working and must contribute financially to help their families,” said Whitney Thomas, who came up with the idea for the Fund and leads its implementation. “When all that piles on together, and an unexpected cost comes up, students can struggle with taking care of all their responsibilities. So, having a fund like this can give students a little bit to tide them over as they’re exploring their situation and finding other solutions that can help them.”
In addition to providing financial assistance to students who are in a tight spot, UW ECE academic advisers that review requests can point students to resources that can help them, even if the funding request isn’t approved. This can be valuable guidance during times when students may not know where else to turn. For that reason, Thomas emphasized that students should always feel comfortable applying to the Fund and asking for help.
“When a student is going through a unique, challenging time — a hardship — it can feel isolating. It can feel like no one is there to help you and that no one cares,” Thomas said. “I’m just hoping this kind of fund shows our students that we really do care about them. We want to try to do whatever we can to help them as our students.”
More information and resources for students are on the ECE Student Emergency Support Fund webpage. To learn more, contact Whitney Thomas.
The Engineering CAReS project webpage notes that acquiring a healthy sense of belonging in engineering can sometimes feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.[/caption]
The Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness Survey (CAReS) project seeks to understand how well basic psychological needs of engineers are met in the workplace. Funds provided by UW ECE support incentives to complete the survey. The CAReS survey is open to anyone who has worked in engineering or computer science or worked closely with engineers or computer scientists over the last 20 years.
“We know a whole hoot-load about what’s going on with engineering students, but once they graduate, they fall into a data abyss,” said Denise Wilson, who is director of the CAReS project. “We just don’t understand what’s going on in the workplace very well at all.”
In contrast to most workplace surveys, which emphasize barriers hindering the advancement of working engineers, the CAReS project focuses on met, unmet and thwarted psychological needs at work. Wilson says that this is key to opening a broader array of potential strategies to build belonging, persistence and productivity in the engineering workplace, especially for those who are underrepresented in engineering disciplines.
“We in engineering tend to ignore human psychological needs, but those needs are still there, whether we ignore them or not. Engineers are still humans,” Wilson said. “So, we want to use the CAReS project to get down to the root of it all because a) it’s the right thing to do. People have needs, and they should be fulfilled in the workplace. And b) once you distill the issues down to needs, you have a much broader range of choices of how you can meet those needs.”
The CAReS project is being rolled out in two phases. The first phase was a 20-minute online survey distributed to 210 individuals who work in engineering. This initial survey was completed in December 2022, and it provided information Wilson and her research team are using to refine an upcoming survey in phase two of the project. After first phase data analysis is complete, the second survey will be sent out in 2023 to thousands of individuals across the nation who work in engineering. Wilson plans to distribute the survey results and analysis broadly, in traditional journal publications and through popular media.
“Our goal here is to support a better engineering workplace for a more diverse group of people,” Wilson said. “We want to disseminate not only a deeper awareness of the problems, but also potential solutions.”
For more information about the call for new DEI initiative proposals or any of the initiatives described in this article, contact UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson.
[post_title] => UW ECE calls for proposals that improve diversity, equity and inclusion
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_30084" align="alignright" width="575"]
A team of UW ECE undergraduate students, led by UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson and Dr. Gregory Valentine from the pediatrics department at UW Medicine, has engineered a low-cost, accessible and highly accurate intravenous (IV) fluid monitor. This new device promises to improve newborn infant health outcomes around the globe, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Above: UW ECE graduate student Jan Silva adjusts the team’s prototype. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
According to the World Health Organization, the first month of life is the most vulnerable time for a child’s survival. Globally, almost half of all deaths under the age of five occur within the first four weeks, a span of time known as the newborn, or neonatal, period. For a variety of reasons, including better access to healthcare, the number of newborns who pass away every year has been halved since 1990, and that’s remarkable progress. However, the mortality rate for newborns is still staggeringly high worldwide. For example, in 2020, 2.4 million children died in their first month of life, with the vast majority of those deaths taking place in low- and middle-income countries around the world.
Dr. Gregory Valentine, an assistant professor of pediatrics and neonatologist in the UW School of Medicine, is probably more aware of this sobering fact than most. Valentine participates in several working groups at the World Health Organization focused on newborn healthcare, and he has witnessed the challenges for infants in under-resourced areas firsthand, having spent time working as a physician in a Malawi hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. He also conducts ongoing research on how to improve newborn health outcomes in countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic and India.
“When I was in Malawi, I saw babies die — at one point, two to four babies a day. Most lost significant weight within two to three days after birth and became severely dehydrated without access to IV [intravenous] fluids,” Valentine said. “So, that’s why I have focused my efforts on the newborn population. At the hospital in Malawi, there were not enough working IV pumps for all the babies, and even in developed countries, there currently isn’t a low-cost IV monitor available that counts drops and can detect infusion rates as low as what is needed for a small and sick newborn.”
[caption id="attachment_30092" align="alignleft" width="375"]
Dr. Gregory Valentine (left) and UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson (right). Wilson joined Valentine’s team in 2021 to help oversee prototype development and publish the research team’s findings.[/caption]
To help address this urgent need, Valentine consulted with his medical colleagues in Malawi and began a partnership in 2019 with the UW Engineering Innovation in Health program. Since then, through the EIH program, Valentine has been leading teams of students from UW ECE and mechanical engineering toward developing a low-cost, accessible, and highly accurate IV fluid pump and monitor. In 2020, these efforts received a $50K CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund Award, which assisted with prototype refinement and development.
In 2021, Valentine connected with UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson through people he met in the EIH program. He brought Wilson into the team to help oversee prototype development and publish research findings. Wilson is an expert in sensor systems and engineering education research. She is also the UW ECE associate chair for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“I have a strong interest and passion in applying engineering technology to resolve equity issues and to help support a better world,” Wilson said. “We have a lot of evidence that many students enter engineering to find opportunities to benefit society. They’re motivated by altruism. Giving students these opportunities not only supports these kinds of projects, but it also helps students persist in areas of engineering where society needs them the most.”
[caption id="attachment_30090" align="alignright" width="450"]
Malawi is where Dr. Valentine worked as a physician.[/caption]
Now, Valentine and Wilson’s EIH team, which includes three UW ECE undergraduate students, has published the results of their research. As described in a recent paper in IEEE Sensors Letters, the group has successfully engineered a low-cost, accessible and highly accurate IV fluid monitor, one that promises to improve health outcomes around the globe, especially for newborns in under-resourced areas.
“This project uniquely exposed me to the prototyping stages of product development, where we were directly involved with important design decisions,” said Jan Silva, lead author and UW ECE graduate student. Silva was an undergraduate student when research described in the paper took place. “Working with Dr. Valentine, Professor Wilson and the team and learning about the motivation for this project also inspired me to continue pursuing projects in equitable and accessible healthcare.”
The research team’s prototype, H2neO, has been demonstrated to be more accurate than existing commercial IV monitors that count drops using conventional gravity methods and over twice as accurate at monitoring low drip rates. H2neO uses optical sensing and sophisticated signal processing to go beyond drop counting. In addition to detecting drops in the fluid tube, the device also observes the shape of the drops themselves. This provides more robust data for the monitor, which improves accuracy. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
IV fluids deliver hydration, nutrition and medications. These can be critical to sustaining life, especially for premature or sick newborns. But because of their small size, newborns receive far less fluid than an older child or an adult. This fact translates to a low, very slow IV fluid drip rate that can be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to monitor with precision.
The research team’s prototype (called H2neO, which stands for “Hydration to Neonates,”) has been demonstrated to be more accurate than existing commercial IV monitors that count drops using conventional gravity methods to deliver IV fluids to babies. In fact, H2neO has been found to be over twice as accurate at monitoring low drip rates. It also is capable of monitoring drip rates that are lower than what can currently be detected with existing technology.
“Most of the work that has been done on IV monitors has been done with adults in mind. But with newborns, any mistake in monitoring can have severe consequences,” Wilson said. “There are tiny distinctions regarding when an actual drop is occurring, and therefore, this can create small sensing errors, which become a bigger percentage of the overall accuracy of the system with lower fluid rates. Our device, which was developed with newborns in mind, addresses these issues.”
Most IV monitors today simply detect and count the drops that occur within the fluid tube. But H2neO uses optical sensing and sophisticated signal processing to go beyond drop counting. In addition to detecting drops in the fluid tube, the device also observes the shape of the drops themselves. This provides more robust data for the monitor, which improves accuracy.
The prototype is also designed so it can be adapted to run on rechargeable solar batteries, with minimal power consumption. This helps to lower costs and is a key feature for people in health care systems with unreliable or nonexistent access to an electrical power grid. And while the original intent behind this device was to help make newborn healthcare more affordable and accessible in under-resourced areas, Valentine noted that H2neO could also help to save lives in high-income countries — for example, in higher-resourced neonatal intensive care units, rural communities, military deployments, or after a natural disaster such as a hurricane or an earthquake.
An overhead shot of the research team’s device, H2neO. Next steps for prototype development include compacting and optimizing the device by fine-tuning electrical and system components. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
Valentine is also working with undergraduate students in the mechanical engineering department, where he is an adjunct professor. There, he and the students are developing a regulator that will assist in ensuring precise flow rates are maintained in the next version of the prototype. This will allow H2neO to use gravity to move fluid, rather than IV pumps that rely on a continuous supply of electricity. The innovation will help further reduce power requirements for the device.
Next steps for prototype development include fine-tuning electrical and system components and many rounds of rigorous testing to ensure the device will be safe to use on people, especially newborns. For this purpose, Valentine is in close contact with several individuals, institutions, and experts in low- and middle-income countries, such as St. Paul’s Hospital Medical Millennium College in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which has voiced interest in collaborating in clinical trials. Device development will continue through the EIH program, which provides valuable educational opportunities such as this for UW engineering students.
“There are real, important opportunities for engineers in all fields to make a difference in low- and middle-income countries, especially in regard to healthcare access,” Wilson said. “These types of devices and systems have an enormous number of challenges and interesting things to do that engineering students can benefit from. I enjoy watching students solve problems that are driven by application and especially by these sorts of urgent issues.”
For more information about this research, please contact Dr. Gregory Valentine or UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson.
[post_title] => An IV fluid monitor that could help save the lives of newborns worldwide
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Kai-Mei Fu, who is the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, was recently interviewed by UW News about quantum research and its promising future. Fu is currently directing the UW Graduate Certificate in Quantum Information Science and Engineering program, which prepares students for careers related to quantum-enabled technologies. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
Adapted from an article by Sarah McQuate and James Urton | UW News
UW ECE Associate Professor Arka Majumdar on the UW campus. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
Quantum research on campus is coordinated through UW QuantumX, co-chaired by Kai-Mei Fu and Arka Majumdar, who are professors in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
In 2019, the UW, Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory founded the Northwest Quantum Nexus — a partnership now including Boeing, Amazon Web Services, IonQ, Washington State University and the University of Oregon.
UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael Taylor is contributing his expertise through the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing.
Recent UW ECE graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22) has received high honors for her work while at UW ECE. She will join Stanford University in September 2023 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
Alana Dee (left) and Marziyeh Rezaei (right) are second-year doctoral students at UW ECE and each is a recipient of a 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship. Both students are advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni.
The Department is issuing a call to faculty, students and staff for new DEI initiative proposals that, if approved, will be supported by the UW ECE DEI Small Grants Program. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2023.
A UW ECE student team, led by UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson and Dr. Gregory Valentine from the UW School of Medicine, has engineered a low-cost, highly accurate intravenous (IV) fluid monitor aimed at improving infant health outcomes around the globe.
Kai-Mei Fu, who is the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, was recently interviewed by UW News about the up-and-coming field of quantum research.
UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael Taylor (left) alongside Allen School professor Arvind Krishnamurthy (right) are working to tackle challenges in the field of distributed computing. Photo courtesy of the Allen School[/caption]
Adapted from an article by Roger Van Scyoc | Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
Data centers account for about 2% of total electricity use in the U.S., according to the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building. Meanwhile, advances in distributed computing have spurred innovation with the use of large, intensive applications — but at a high cost in terms of energy consumption and environmental impact.
Michael Taylor, who holds a joint appointment between UW ECE and the Allen School, alongside Allen School professor Arvind Krishnamurthy will contribute to a multi-university effort focused on tackling these challenges in the distributed computing landscape. The two will lend their expertise to the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, which will foster the development of computing technologies that improve the performance of microelectronics and semiconductors.
Funded by a $31.5 million grant from the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0), the ACE Center will advance distributed computing technology — from cloud-based datacenters to edge nodes — and further innovation in the semiconductor industry. Led by the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and with additional funds from partnering institutions, the ACE Center will have a total budget of $39.6 million over five years.
“Computation is becoming increasingly planet-scale, which means not only that energy efficiency is becoming more and more critical for environmental reasons, but that we need to rethink how computation is done so that we can efficiently orchestrate computations spread across many chips distributed around the planet,” Taylor said. “This center is organizing some of the best and brightest minds across the fields of computer architecture, distributed systems and hardware design so that we may come up with innovative solutions.”
Krishnamurthy, the Short-Dooley Professor in the Allen School, is an investigator on the “Distributed Evolvable Memory and Storage” theme. His research focuses on building effective and robust computer systems, both in terms of data centers and Internet-scale systems. The ACE Center is not the only forward-looking initiative that is benefiting from Krishnamurthy’s expertise; he is also co-director of the Center for the Future of Cloud Infrastructure (FOCI) at the Allen School, which was announced last year.
“We are seeing an explosion of innovations in computer architecture, with a continuous stream of innovations in accelerators, programmable networks and storage,” Krishnamurthy said. “One key goal of this center is how to make effective use of this hardware and how to organize them in large distributed systems necessary to support demanding applications such as machine learning and data processing.”
“This center is organizing some of the best and brightest minds across the fields of computer architecture, distributed systems and hardware design so that we may come up with innovative solutions.” – UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael TaylorTaylor, who leads the Bespoke Silicon Group at the Allen School, is an investigator in the “Heterogeneous Computing Platforms” theme. He’ll act as a fulcrum for research directions and guide a talented team of graduate students in designing distributed energy-efficient accelerator chips that can better adapt with ever-changing and more complicated computing environments. “Today’s accelerator chips are very fixed function, and rapidly become obsolete, for example, if a new video encoding standard is developed,” Taylor said. “With some fresh approaches to the problem, accelerators in older cell phones would still be able to decode the newer video standards.” Taylor has previously worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which oversees JUMP, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), helping organize a pair of 5-year research centers, including the Applications Driving Architectures (ADA) center and the Center for Future Architecture Research (C-FAR) center. The NSF Career Award winner joined UW ECE and the Allen School in 2017. Both Krishnamurthy and Taylor will contribute to the ACE Center’s goal to create an ecosystem that fosters direct engagement and collaborative research projects with industry partners drawn from SRC member companies as well as companies in the broader areas of microelectronics and distributed systems. In addition to Taylor and Krishnamurthy at the University of Washington, other contributors to the ACE Center include faculty from the University of Illinois, Harvard, Cornell, Georgia Tech, MIT, Ohio State, Purdue, Stanford, the University of California San Diego, the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin. [post_title] => UW ECE Professor Michael Taylor and the Allen School’s Arvind Krishnamurthy will help spur innovation in distributed computing as part of new multi-university research center [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => ace-center-evolvable-computing [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-03-20 08:56:51 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-03-20 15:56:51 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=30396 [menu_order] => 2 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [1] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 30318 [post_author] => 27 [post_date] => 2023-03-06 08:38:20 [post_date_gmt] => 2023-03-06 16:38:20 [post_content] => Article by Wayne Gillam, photos by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE News [caption id="attachment_30323" align="alignright" width="600"]
Recent UW ECE graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22) received the 2022 Yang Research Award for her dissertation focused on enabling low-power communication for environmental sensing systems. She is currently in a year-long appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. In September 2023, she will join Stanford University as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.[/caption]
Originally published in UW ECE’s 2022 Integrator magazine
UW ECE congratulates recent graduate Zerina Kapetanovic (Ph.D. ‘22), who received the 2022 Yang Research Award for her dissertation focused on enabling low-power communication for environmental sensing systems. She developed and applied this research toward improving agricultural methods through the Microsoft FarmBeats program. Kapetanovic received the honor at the annual UW ECE Awards ceremony, which was held June 2 at the Paul G. Allen Center Atrium on the UW campus.
In late August, Kapetanovic also received the UW Graduate School’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Engineering. The award recognizes outstanding and exceptional scholarship at the doctoral level. Kapetanovic earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from UW ECE, while conducting research on topics such as finding new methods for passive wireless communication under supervision of her adviser, UW ECE Professor Joshua Smith. She is currently in a year-long appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. In September 2023, she will join Stanford University as an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
“Receiving the Yang Research Award is exciting. It’s validating that the research I am doing is innovative and impactful, which is a great feeling,” Kapetanovic said. “The grad school award is also a high honor, and I’m really excited to start at Stanford next year. There are many great collaborators there, they have several climate-related initiatives and a new school for sustainability, which is very relevant to my own research.”
The Yang Research Award was established by successful entrepreneur and former UW ECE faculty member Andrew T. Yang. Yang has been one of the most influential people in the electronic design automation industry for nearly three decades, and he is known for being a visionary in both research and entrepreneurship. The purpose of this award is to recognize and encourage outstanding doctoral student research contributions to the field of electrical engineering. The award goes to one qualifying student per year and is open to all doctoral degree candidates in UW ECE. Receiving the Yang Research Award is considered a high honor and helps to create career opportunities for the recipient.
Kapetanovic (right) testing her wireless communication device in Sylvan Grove on the UW campus alongside UW ECE doctoral degree candidate Shanti Garman (left). Unlike existing passive wireless and backscatter communication systems, Kapetanovic’s prototype does not depend on a radio signal to send and receive information. Instead, her device uses a byproduct of electrical resistance in its circuitry to enhance energy-efficiency and transmit a wireless signal.[/caption]
Kapetanovic credits much of her academic success to Smith, who is the Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor in Entrepreneurial Excellence at UW ECE, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and head of the Sensor Systems Laboratory at the UW. He is an internationally recognized leader in development of new types of sensor systems with applications in robotics, health care and the Internet of Things (IoT).
“Josh is awesome. I definitely don’t think I would have been as successful as I am without his advice and support,” Kapetanovic said of her adviser. “I think what’s really nice about Josh and the work he does is that he is interested in so many different areas. He looks at things from many perspectives, and that has influenced the way in which I approach my own research.”
In Smith’s lab, Kapetanovic made significant contributions to development of innovative wireless and backscatter communication techniques, battery-free sensors, and inexpensive low-power communication and IoT systems. Throughout graduate school, she worked to apply these new technologies in the real world through her internships at Microsoft, which were supervised by Ranveer Chandra, the company’s managing director for research for industry and chief technology officer of agri-food. Kapetanovic noted that, like Smith, Chandra was a mentor for her throughout graduate school, teaching her ways to look at problems from several different perspectives and encouraging creative approaches to presenting her work. Kapetanovic’s research related to Microsoft’s FarmBeats program — which aims to use collection of precise environmental data, such as soil temperature and moisture level, to help increase farm productivity — gained notice by the company and by the public. In 2020, she was awarded a Microsoft Research Dissertation Grant to help further support her work in this area.
While at UW ECE, Kapetanovic also contributed to paving the way for other female engineers. Along with her lab mate, Shanti Garman, and with the support of UW ECE faculty and staff, Kapetanovic co-organized the inaugural “WomXn at the Forefront of ECE Research (WAFER),” an annual event highlighting outstanding female engineers, which is aimed at cultivating a more inclusive environment. Kapetanovic noted that in Smith’s lab there were several female engineers, and she always felt welcomed and included at UW ECE. But she also said she realized this wasn’t everyone’s experience in electrical and computer engineering, which is a traditionally male-dominated field. So, she co-organized this ongoing event to help ensure inclusiveness at UW ECE over the long-term.
“It has been such a delight to work with Zerina from the time she was an undergraduate through her doctoral degree,” Smith said. “She is fearless about taking on technical challenges, works incredibly hard, and is a wonderful colleague and mentor to other students. I have also been impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit she brings to diversity, equity and inclusion at UW ECE, imagining and implementing successful new programs. I am so excited to watch the next steps in her meteoric rise as she establishes her own research lab as a faculty member at Stanford!”
Examples of the wireless communication prototype Kapetanovic developed in the lab of UW ECE Professor Joshua Smith.[/caption]
Today, Kapetanovic is looking forward to joining Stanford University. She said that Smith, other faculty and staff in the Department, and in particular, Professor Scott Hauck helped to prepare her for this new faculty role.
“I’ve received support in so many ways at UW ECE that helped to prepare me for the job application process, which also prepared me to start the job at Stanford. I’ve had a lot of great examples around me,” Kapetanovic said. “For instance, Professor Scott Hauck. I really love the way he teaches and being able to learn from him in that regard because I taught EE 271, which is the course that he developed. Having that opportunity at UW ECE helped me to realize more that I enjoy teaching.”
When asked what it was like to mentor and work with Kapetanovic as an educator, Hauck noted her exceptional abilities as a student and as an instructor.
"From the beginning, it was clear that Zerina was something special. At UW ECE, she has been a quiet force, eager to learn and go above and beyond what's required," Hauck said. "Toward the end of her UW career, when we needed an EE 271 instructor, we were incredibly fortunate to have Zerina run the class for us. She did an awesome job teaching, just like she has done in everything she has undertaken here. Normally, I'd say that a person would be lucky to land such a great position at Stanford. However, I think Stanford is lucky to have a rising star like Zerina as a new faculty member."
At Stanford, Kapetanovic’s lab will focus on low-power wireless communication and sensing, and IoT systems. This research work has a wide range of potential applications across many different fields. Kapetanovic said that her lab would be emphasizing sustainable technology and finding ways to apply new innovations to achieve immediate impact — a similar approach to what she did with FarmBeats — while still finding ways to help address major societal issues, such as climate change.
“I’m really passionate about taking these types of technologies and using them to help solve issues related to climate change, but my long-term research goal is to get us to the point where we can actually have battery-free, resilient, and potentially biodegradable sensors that are reliable,” Kapetanovic said. “If you think about all these different types of industries, whether it’s manufacturing or healthcare, agriculture — if you want to improve productivity or make any of those industries more sustainable, you need to rely on data. You need lots of data, and that’s where these sensors come into play and IoT systems in general.”
Kapetanovic is hiring graduate students for her lab at Stanford University. Visit her website for contact information and to learn more about her research.
[post_title] => Zerina Kapetanovic receives Yang Research Award, other honors, and secures a tenure-track faculty position at Stanford University
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[post_content] => [caption id="attachment_30267" align="alignright" width="600"] Alana Dee (left) and Marziyeh Rezaei (right) are second-year doctoral students at UW ECE and each is a recipient of a 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship. Both students are advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni.[/caption]
Cadence, a world leader in electronic systems design, recently announced that two UW ECE doctoral students are among 38 recipients of the company’s 2022 Diversity in Technology Scholarship. This annual award recognizes underrepresented university students in technical fields who demonstrate outstanding leadership skills, academic achievement and drive to shape the world of technology.
Alana Dee and Marziyeh Rezaei are both second-year doctoral students at UW ECE, advised by Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni. Graduate students in Moazeni’s lab, such as Dee and Rezaei, conduct research at the intersection of integrated system design and photonics, with applications in computing and communication, sensing and imaging, and the life sciences.
“I really enjoy working with creative and hardworking students like Alana and Marziyeh,” Moazeni said. “I am also very proud of my students, whose great work is now being recognized and appreciated with this award, early in their professional life.”
A Vision for Electronic Literacy & Access (AVELA) board members at Drumheller Fountain on the UW campus. In 2022, AVELA used funding from the UW ECE DEI Small Grants Program to help attract and retain a more diverse student body in the Department. From left to right: UW students Fatima Gbla, Kyle Johnson, Liban Hussein, Vicente Arroyos, Aisha Coara, Raul Villanueva. Photo courtesy of AVELA[/caption]
Over the last couple of years, UW ECE has launched several successful initiatives that foster greater diversity, equity and inclusion within the Department. This work has been implemented with academic rigor and in partnership with the UW College of Engineering’s Office for Inclusive Excellence and the University’s Office for Minority Affairs & Diversity. UW ECE has also encouraged DEI-related research and activities among faculty and students that augment traditional technical research and courses of study.
Now, the Department is issuing a call to faculty, students and staff for new initiative proposals that, if approved by a review committee, will be supported by the 2023 UW ECE DEI Small Grants Program. Budgets up to $5,000 will be considered for initiatives ranging in duration from six months to one year. Proposals can be submitted online through April 30, 2023.
This year, the Small Grants Program is targeting four key areas that align with the Department’s DEI vision and goals:
UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson[/caption]
The Department has made good progress toward this aim under Wilson and her predecessor, UW ECE Associate Professor Sam Burden, who was associate chair for diversity, equity, and inclusion during the 2021–22 academic year. With their leadership and the support of the DEI advisory committee, which is made up of faculty, staff and students from across UW ECE, the Department has implemented nine different DEI-related initiatives in a little over two years.
Wilson emphasized the wide range of DEI initiatives at UW ECE and that she would like to see a broad spectrum of students, faculty and staff apply for this year’s grants.
“In our DEI effort at UW ECE, our initiatives themselves are diverse. But people who don’t explicitly read DEI literature or are not in an underrepresented group still might have a mistaken impression that this is not for them, it’s for those people ‘over there,’” Wilson said. “We definitely want to change that way of thinking. We want students, faculty and staff — including those from majority or overrepresented populations — to get involved and realize how they can be more diverse, equitable or inclusive in their own programs to the benefit of all.”
Below are a few examples of DEI initiatives at UW ECE from the 2021–22 academic year.
Students from Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington, participating in an AVELA summer website development class. This course was led by AVELA instructor Charles Bugre, a doctoral student from the UW Information School. Photo courtesy of AVELA[/caption]
AVELA is a recognized UW student organization that conducts outreach to local K–12 students from underrepresented minority groups. Its members are minority students at the University who strive to bridge opportunity gaps in the public education system. AVELA brings science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to students, with the goal of sparking interest in STEM careers and higher education. In the process, AVELA members gain hands-on experience in mentorship, curriculum development and presentation of STEM activities to younger audiences.
In 2022, UW ECE supported an expansion of AVELA’s outreach to underrepresented minority students in elementary, middle and high schools in the Seattle area. This work included pairing
AVELA graduate and doctoral students with UW ECE undergraduates, mentoring and training them on how to work with K–12 students and lead outreach projects.
“To me, this initiative was about assisting students from underrepresented backgrounds who had made it to UW ECE and then empowering them to reach back to their own communities to help the next generation of students,” said Kyle Johnson, co-founder of AVELA and a recent UW ECE graduate (BSEE ‘20). Johnson is now a third-year doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, advised by UW ECE alumnus and Allen School Assistant Professor Vikram Iyer.
“We pride ourselves on being able to reach out to the same communities that we come from,” added Liban Hussein, co-founder of AVELA and a second-year doctoral student at UW ECE, advised by UW ECE Assistant Professor Sajjad Moazeni. “We find that when students learn from someone who comes from a background similar to their own, they are more inclined to give back in the future, whether it’s through outreach or mentorship.”
AVELA classes and workshops at middle schools and high schools over the summer included Arduino basics, website development, and computer-aided design tools and applications. The group also led a science adventure camp for elementary school students with autism, which was held on the UW campus. During the initiative, AVELA members taught more than 200 underrepresented minority students in local elementary, middle and high schools, and AVELA members provided individual tutoring for students who were struggling in STEM-related subjects. This benefited K–12 students in the Seattle area and increased their interest in applying to colleges, universities and departments such as UW ECE.
“The students we’ve worked with are now applying for scholarships to colleges and universities,” Hussein said. “They’re more confident in themselves. That’s an influence we are proud to have had on them.”
AVELA also collaborates with faculty who have National Science Foundation grants, using supplemental grant applications and the group’s connections to help provide Research Experience for Undergraduates opportunities for underrepresented minority students. Several UW ECE faculty members have already partnered with AVELA in this way, and the organization seeks to expand these opportunities for AVELA students. The group encourages faculty interested in providing an REU opportunity for underrepresented students to contact the organization for more information.
AVELA is growing fast and works in partnership with the National Society for Black Engineers, the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, the UW Black Student Union and other affinity student groups on campus. AVELA also recently became a federally recognized nonprofit organization, which will help further support the recruitment of students from underrepresented minority groups to participate in AVELA’s outreach and mentorship activities.
Learn more about AVELA on the organization’s website and social media channels (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn).
The DEI Book Club is led by UW ECE staff member John Nettles (left). This quarter, the Club is reading “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Criado Perez.[/caption]
The DEI Book Club was established summer quarter 2022, and it is open to UW ECE doctoral students, faculty and staff. The Book Club is intended to be a professional development opportunity for people interested in creating inclusive spaces for those who have been historically underrepresented in electrical and computer engineering. The group meets once per quarter to discuss a book that focuses on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, along with ways to apply what is learned to UW ECE.
“I’m really passionate about providing opportunities for people who have been excluded in the past from institutions that weren’t created for them,” said DEI Book Club Director John Nettles. “I’m thinking about the little ways that culture shifts, and that is why I built an overall curriculum for the Book Club, because I wanted people to see how these topics are interconnected.”
Nettles' curriculum for the Book Club has been developed so discussion of each book read by the group builds upon the next, yet the topics are flexible, so new participants can join and become part of the conversation at any time. Books being read and discussed by the Book Club include, “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” (summer quarter 2022), “So, You Want to Talk About Race” (autumn quarter 2022) and “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” (winter quarter 2023).
“One of the things we talk about in the Book Club is how we see a book changing how we work, navigate or what we think we need to do differently as individuals,” Nettles said. “DEI work at this level is more about the individual, and this is providing grassroots space for change. We need that, along with the administration talking about these issues. This is a way staff, faculty and Ph.D. students can do their part.”
Interested in joining the DEI Book Club? Contact John Nettles to learn more.
UW ECE staff member Whitney Thomas (above) came up with the idea for the ECE Student Emergency Support Fund and leads its implementation.[/caption]
This fund serves to provide support for UW ECE students who are experiencing unanticipated hardship. Students can submit requests for financial assistance with unexpected expenses and situations such as health care costs, car repairs, legal fees, travel for family emergencies, stolen goods, and housing and food insecurity. The Fund launched in autumn 2022 and already has assisted several students with financial challenges, helping them to persist with their studies.
“Students have a lot of obligations. In addition to being students, they’re often working and must contribute financially to help their families,” said Whitney Thomas, who came up with the idea for the Fund and leads its implementation. “When all that piles on together, and an unexpected cost comes up, students can struggle with taking care of all their responsibilities. So, having a fund like this can give students a little bit to tide them over as they’re exploring their situation and finding other solutions that can help them.”
In addition to providing financial assistance to students who are in a tight spot, UW ECE academic advisers that review requests can point students to resources that can help them, even if the funding request isn’t approved. This can be valuable guidance during times when students may not know where else to turn. For that reason, Thomas emphasized that students should always feel comfortable applying to the Fund and asking for help.
“When a student is going through a unique, challenging time — a hardship — it can feel isolating. It can feel like no one is there to help you and that no one cares,” Thomas said. “I’m just hoping this kind of fund shows our students that we really do care about them. We want to try to do whatever we can to help them as our students.”
More information and resources for students are on the ECE Student Emergency Support Fund webpage. To learn more, contact Whitney Thomas.
The Engineering CAReS project webpage notes that acquiring a healthy sense of belonging in engineering can sometimes feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.[/caption]
The Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness Survey (CAReS) project seeks to understand how well basic psychological needs of engineers are met in the workplace. Funds provided by UW ECE support incentives to complete the survey. The CAReS survey is open to anyone who has worked in engineering or computer science or worked closely with engineers or computer scientists over the last 20 years.
“We know a whole hoot-load about what’s going on with engineering students, but once they graduate, they fall into a data abyss,” said Denise Wilson, who is director of the CAReS project. “We just don’t understand what’s going on in the workplace very well at all.”
In contrast to most workplace surveys, which emphasize barriers hindering the advancement of working engineers, the CAReS project focuses on met, unmet and thwarted psychological needs at work. Wilson says that this is key to opening a broader array of potential strategies to build belonging, persistence and productivity in the engineering workplace, especially for those who are underrepresented in engineering disciplines.
“We in engineering tend to ignore human psychological needs, but those needs are still there, whether we ignore them or not. Engineers are still humans,” Wilson said. “So, we want to use the CAReS project to get down to the root of it all because a) it’s the right thing to do. People have needs, and they should be fulfilled in the workplace. And b) once you distill the issues down to needs, you have a much broader range of choices of how you can meet those needs.”
The CAReS project is being rolled out in two phases. The first phase was a 20-minute online survey distributed to 210 individuals who work in engineering. This initial survey was completed in December 2022, and it provided information Wilson and her research team are using to refine an upcoming survey in phase two of the project. After first phase data analysis is complete, the second survey will be sent out in 2023 to thousands of individuals across the nation who work in engineering. Wilson plans to distribute the survey results and analysis broadly, in traditional journal publications and through popular media.
“Our goal here is to support a better engineering workplace for a more diverse group of people,” Wilson said. “We want to disseminate not only a deeper awareness of the problems, but also potential solutions.”
For more information about the call for new DEI initiative proposals or any of the initiatives described in this article, contact UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson.
[post_title] => UW ECE calls for proposals that improve diversity, equity and inclusion
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[post_date] => 2023-02-27 10:50:14
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[post_content] => By Wayne Gillam | UW ECE News
[caption id="attachment_30084" align="alignright" width="575"] A team of UW ECE undergraduate students, led by UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson and Dr. Gregory Valentine from the pediatrics department at UW Medicine, has engineered a low-cost, accessible and highly accurate intravenous (IV) fluid monitor. This new device promises to improve newborn infant health outcomes around the globe, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Above: UW ECE graduate student Jan Silva adjusts the team’s prototype. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
According to the World Health Organization, the first month of life is the most vulnerable time for a child’s survival. Globally, almost half of all deaths under the age of five occur within the first four weeks, a span of time known as the newborn, or neonatal, period. For a variety of reasons, including better access to healthcare, the number of newborns who pass away every year has been halved since 1990, and that’s remarkable progress. However, the mortality rate for newborns is still staggeringly high worldwide. For example, in 2020, 2.4 million children died in their first month of life, with the vast majority of those deaths taking place in low- and middle-income countries around the world.
Dr. Gregory Valentine, an assistant professor of pediatrics and neonatologist in the UW School of Medicine, is probably more aware of this sobering fact than most. Valentine participates in several working groups at the World Health Organization focused on newborn healthcare, and he has witnessed the challenges for infants in under-resourced areas firsthand, having spent time working as a physician in a Malawi hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. He also conducts ongoing research on how to improve newborn health outcomes in countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia, the Central African Republic and India.
“When I was in Malawi, I saw babies die — at one point, two to four babies a day. Most lost significant weight within two to three days after birth and became severely dehydrated without access to IV [intravenous] fluids,” Valentine said. “So, that’s why I have focused my efforts on the newborn population. At the hospital in Malawi, there were not enough working IV pumps for all the babies, and even in developed countries, there currently isn’t a low-cost IV monitor available that counts drops and can detect infusion rates as low as what is needed for a small and sick newborn.”
[caption id="attachment_30092" align="alignleft" width="375"] Dr. Gregory Valentine (left) and UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson (right). Wilson joined Valentine’s team in 2021 to help oversee prototype development and publish the research team’s findings.[/caption]
To help address this urgent need, Valentine consulted with his medical colleagues in Malawi and began a partnership in 2019 with the UW Engineering Innovation in Health program. Since then, through the EIH program, Valentine has been leading teams of students from UW ECE and mechanical engineering toward developing a low-cost, accessible, and highly accurate IV fluid pump and monitor. In 2020, these efforts received a $50K CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund Award, which assisted with prototype refinement and development.
In 2021, Valentine connected with UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson through people he met in the EIH program. He brought Wilson into the team to help oversee prototype development and publish research findings. Wilson is an expert in sensor systems and engineering education research. She is also the UW ECE associate chair for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“I have a strong interest and passion in applying engineering technology to resolve equity issues and to help support a better world,” Wilson said. “We have a lot of evidence that many students enter engineering to find opportunities to benefit society. They’re motivated by altruism. Giving students these opportunities not only supports these kinds of projects, but it also helps students persist in areas of engineering where society needs them the most.”
[caption id="attachment_30090" align="alignright" width="450"] Malawi is where Dr. Valentine worked as a physician.[/caption]
Now, Valentine and Wilson’s EIH team, which includes three UW ECE undergraduate students, has published the results of their research. As described in a recent paper in IEEE Sensors Letters, the group has successfully engineered a low-cost, accessible and highly accurate IV fluid monitor, one that promises to improve health outcomes around the globe, especially for newborns in under-resourced areas.
“This project uniquely exposed me to the prototyping stages of product development, where we were directly involved with important design decisions,” said Jan Silva, lead author and UW ECE graduate student. Silva was an undergraduate student when research described in the paper took place. “Working with Dr. Valentine, Professor Wilson and the team and learning about the motivation for this project also inspired me to continue pursuing projects in equitable and accessible healthcare.”
The research team’s prototype, H2neO, has been demonstrated to be more accurate than existing commercial IV monitors that count drops using conventional gravity methods and over twice as accurate at monitoring low drip rates. H2neO uses optical sensing and sophisticated signal processing to go beyond drop counting. In addition to detecting drops in the fluid tube, the device also observes the shape of the drops themselves. This provides more robust data for the monitor, which improves accuracy. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
IV fluids deliver hydration, nutrition and medications. These can be critical to sustaining life, especially for premature or sick newborns. But because of their small size, newborns receive far less fluid than an older child or an adult. This fact translates to a low, very slow IV fluid drip rate that can be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to monitor with precision.
The research team’s prototype (called H2neO, which stands for “Hydration to Neonates,”) has been demonstrated to be more accurate than existing commercial IV monitors that count drops using conventional gravity methods to deliver IV fluids to babies. In fact, H2neO has been found to be over twice as accurate at monitoring low drip rates. It also is capable of monitoring drip rates that are lower than what can currently be detected with existing technology.
“Most of the work that has been done on IV monitors has been done with adults in mind. But with newborns, any mistake in monitoring can have severe consequences,” Wilson said. “There are tiny distinctions regarding when an actual drop is occurring, and therefore, this can create small sensing errors, which become a bigger percentage of the overall accuracy of the system with lower fluid rates. Our device, which was developed with newborns in mind, addresses these issues.”
Most IV monitors today simply detect and count the drops that occur within the fluid tube. But H2neO uses optical sensing and sophisticated signal processing to go beyond drop counting. In addition to detecting drops in the fluid tube, the device also observes the shape of the drops themselves. This provides more robust data for the monitor, which improves accuracy.
The prototype is also designed so it can be adapted to run on rechargeable solar batteries, with minimal power consumption. This helps to lower costs and is a key feature for people in health care systems with unreliable or nonexistent access to an electrical power grid. And while the original intent behind this device was to help make newborn healthcare more affordable and accessible in under-resourced areas, Valentine noted that H2neO could also help to save lives in high-income countries — for example, in higher-resourced neonatal intensive care units, rural communities, military deployments, or after a natural disaster such as a hurricane or an earthquake.
An overhead shot of the research team’s device, H2neO. Next steps for prototype development include compacting and optimizing the device by fine-tuning electrical and system components. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
Valentine is also working with undergraduate students in the mechanical engineering department, where he is an adjunct professor. There, he and the students are developing a regulator that will assist in ensuring precise flow rates are maintained in the next version of the prototype. This will allow H2neO to use gravity to move fluid, rather than IV pumps that rely on a continuous supply of electricity. The innovation will help further reduce power requirements for the device.
Next steps for prototype development include fine-tuning electrical and system components and many rounds of rigorous testing to ensure the device will be safe to use on people, especially newborns. For this purpose, Valentine is in close contact with several individuals, institutions, and experts in low- and middle-income countries, such as St. Paul’s Hospital Medical Millennium College in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which has voiced interest in collaborating in clinical trials. Device development will continue through the EIH program, which provides valuable educational opportunities such as this for UW engineering students.
“There are real, important opportunities for engineers in all fields to make a difference in low- and middle-income countries, especially in regard to healthcare access,” Wilson said. “These types of devices and systems have an enormous number of challenges and interesting things to do that engineering students can benefit from. I enjoy watching students solve problems that are driven by application and especially by these sorts of urgent issues.”
For more information about this research, please contact Dr. Gregory Valentine or UW ECE Professor Denise Wilson.
[post_title] => An IV fluid monitor that could help save the lives of newborns worldwide
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[post_content] => [caption id="attachment_30057" align="alignright" width="596"] Kai-Mei Fu, who is the Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Physics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, was recently interviewed by UW News about quantum research and its promising future. Fu is currently directing the UW Graduate Certificate in Quantum Information Science and Engineering program, which prepares students for careers related to quantum-enabled technologies. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
Adapted from an article by Sarah McQuate and James Urton | UW News
UW ECE Associate Professor Arka Majumdar on the UW campus. Photo by Ryan Hoover | UW ECE[/caption]
Quantum research on campus is coordinated through UW QuantumX, co-chaired by Kai-Mei Fu and Arka Majumdar, who are professors in both the Department of Physics and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering.
In 2019, the UW, Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory founded the Northwest Quantum Nexus — a partnership now including Boeing, Amazon Web Services, IonQ, Washington State University and the University of Oregon.
UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael Taylor (left) alongside Allen School professor Arvind Krishnamurthy (right) are working to tackle challenges in the field of distributed computing. Photo courtesy of the Allen School[/caption]
Adapted from an article by Roger Van Scyoc | Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
Data centers account for about 2% of total electricity use in the U.S., according to the U.S. Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building. Meanwhile, advances in distributed computing have spurred innovation with the use of large, intensive applications — but at a high cost in terms of energy consumption and environmental impact.
Michael Taylor, who holds a joint appointment between UW ECE and the Allen School, alongside Allen School professor Arvind Krishnamurthy will contribute to a multi-university effort focused on tackling these challenges in the distributed computing landscape. The two will lend their expertise to the ACE Center for Evolvable Computing, which will foster the development of computing technologies that improve the performance of microelectronics and semiconductors.
Funded by a $31.5 million grant from the Joint University Microelectronics Program 2.0 (JUMP 2.0), the ACE Center will advance distributed computing technology — from cloud-based datacenters to edge nodes — and further innovation in the semiconductor industry. Led by the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and with additional funds from partnering institutions, the ACE Center will have a total budget of $39.6 million over five years.
“Computation is becoming increasingly planet-scale, which means not only that energy efficiency is becoming more and more critical for environmental reasons, but that we need to rethink how computation is done so that we can efficiently orchestrate computations spread across many chips distributed around the planet,” Taylor said. “This center is organizing some of the best and brightest minds across the fields of computer architecture, distributed systems and hardware design so that we may come up with innovative solutions.”
Krishnamurthy, the Short-Dooley Professor in the Allen School, is an investigator on the “Distributed Evolvable Memory and Storage” theme. His research focuses on building effective and robust computer systems, both in terms of data centers and Internet-scale systems. The ACE Center is not the only forward-looking initiative that is benefiting from Krishnamurthy’s expertise; he is also co-director of the Center for the Future of Cloud Infrastructure (FOCI) at the Allen School, which was announced last year.
“We are seeing an explosion of innovations in computer architecture, with a continuous stream of innovations in accelerators, programmable networks and storage,” Krishnamurthy said. “One key goal of this center is how to make effective use of this hardware and how to organize them in large distributed systems necessary to support demanding applications such as machine learning and data processing.”
“This center is organizing some of the best and brightest minds across the fields of computer architecture, distributed systems and hardware design so that we may come up with innovative solutions.” – UW ECE and Allen School professor Michael TaylorTaylor, who leads the Bespoke Silicon Group at the Allen School, is an investigator in the “Heterogeneous Computing Platforms” theme. He’ll act as a fulcrum for research directions and guide a talented team of graduate students in designing distributed energy-efficient accelerator chips that can better adapt with ever-changing and more complicated computing environments. “Today’s accelerator chips are very fixed function, and rapidly become obsolete, for example, if a new video encoding standard is developed,” Taylor said. “With some fresh approaches to the problem, accelerators in older cell phones would still be able to decode the newer video standards.” Taylor has previously worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which oversees JUMP, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), helping organize a pair of 5-year research centers, including the Applications Driving Architectures (ADA) center and the Center for Future Architecture Research (C-FAR) center. The NSF Career Award winner joined UW ECE and the Allen School in 2017. Both Krishnamurthy and Taylor will contribute to the ACE Center’s goal to create an ecosystem that fosters direct engagement and collaborative research projects with industry partners drawn from SRC member companies as well as companies in the broader areas of microelectronics and distributed systems. In addition to Taylor and Krishnamurthy at the University of Washington, other contributors to the ACE Center include faculty from the University of Illinois, Harvard, Cornell, Georgia Tech, MIT, Ohio State, Purdue, Stanford, the University of California San Diego, the University of Kansas, the University of Michigan and the University of Texas at Austin. [post_title] => UW ECE Professor Michael Taylor and the Allen School’s Arvind Krishnamurthy will help spur innovation in distributed computing as part of new multi-university research center [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => ace-center-evolvable-computing [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2023-03-20 08:56:51 [post_modified_gmt] => 2023-03-20 15:56:51 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.ece.uw.edu/?post_type=spotlight&p=30396 [menu_order] => 2 [post_type] => spotlight [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [comment_count] => 0 [current_comment] => -1 [found_posts] => 841 [max_num_pages] => 141 [max_num_comment_pages] => 0 [is_single] => [is_preview] => [is_page] => [is_archive] => 1 [is_date] => [is_year] => [is_month] => [is_day] => [is_time] => [is_author] => [is_category] => [is_tag] => [is_tax] => [is_search] => [is_feed] => [is_comment_feed] => [is_trackback] => [is_home] => [is_404] => [is_embed] => [is_paged] => [is_admin] => [is_attachment] => [is_singular] => [is_robots] => [is_posts_page] => [is_post_type_archive] => 1 [query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => c64914061c8ecf9b16abe746203f6ad7 [query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] => 1 [thumbnails_cached] => [allow_query_attachment_by_filename:protected] => [stopwords:WP_Query:private] => [compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => query_vars_hash [1] => query_vars_changed ) [compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => init_query_flags [1] => parse_tax_query ) ) )
