Best Paper Award- National Radio Science Meeting

Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Ersin Yetisir won the 2nd place in student paper competition at the USNC/URSI National Radio Science Meeting held in Boulder, Colorado in January 2016. His research paper was titled: “A Novel Array with 6:1 Bandwidth and 70o  Scanning using Frequency Selective Surface Superstrate”, and was authored by Ersin Yetisir, Nima Ghalichechian and John L. Volakis.

Ersin received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2015 and was co-advised by Prof. Nima Ghalichechian. He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at Ghalichechian’s group.

iWAT 2016

PhD student Kaveh Keshtkaran will present his paper titled “Suspended 60 GHz Phased Array Antenna With High Efficiency” at the International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT), Hilton Cocoa Beach, FL, Feb 29- Mar 2, 2016.

iWAT 2016

PhD student Beham Ghassemiparvin will present his paper “Permittivity and Dielectric Loss Measurement of Paraffin for mW and THz Applications” at the International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT), Hilton Cocoa Beach, FL, Feb 29- Mar 2, 2016.

Paralyzed man becomes first person to “feel” sensations through a prosthetic hand connected to his brain

Image courtesy of DARPA

Image: courtesy of DARPA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources:

http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-09-11

http://boingboing.net/2015/09/13/paralyzed-man-becomes-first-pe.html

A 28-year-old paralyzed man became the first person to gain a sense of touch with a prosthetic hand. It was developed by DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program.

The clinical work involved the placement of electrode arrays onto the paralyzed volunteer’s sensory cortex—the brain region responsible for identifying tactile sensations such as pressure. In addition, the team placed arrays on the volunteer’s motor cortex, the part of the brain that directs body movements.

Wires were run from the arrays on the motor cortex to a mechanical hand developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University. That gave the volunteer—whose identity is being withheld to protect his privacy—the capacity to control the hand’s movements with his thoughts, a feat previously accomplished under the DARPA program by another person with similar injuries.

Then, breaking new neurotechnological ground, the researchers went on to provide the volunteer a sense of touch. The APL hand contains sophisticated torque sensors that can detect when pressure is being applied to any of its fingers, and can convert those physical “sensations” into electrical signals. The team used wires to route those signals to the arrays on the volunteer’s brain.

In the very first set of tests, in which researchers gently touched each of the prosthetic hand’s fingers while the volunteer was blindfolded, he was able to report with nearly 100 percent accuracy which mechanical finger was being touched. The feeling, he reported, was as if his own hand were being touched.

“At one point, instead of pressing one finger, the team decided to press two without telling him,” said Justin Sanchez, who oversees the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program. “He responded in jest asking whether somebody was trying to play a trick on him. That is when we knew that the feelings he was perceiving through the robotic hand were near-natural.”

 

Intel drops out of STEM competition

source: NPR

The giant semiconductor manufacturer Intel will be severing ties with a long- running science and mathematics competition that has awarded millions of dollars in prize money to America’s top high school students.

Intel has been a corporate sponsor of the Science Talent Search since 1998, according to the Society For Science, the group that administers the contest.

The competition, according to the group’s website has recognized nearly 3,000 finalists in its history and “served as the national stage for the country’s best and brightest young scientists to present original research to nationally recognized professional scientists.”

Some of the past winners and finalists have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, MacArthur Fellowships and other prestigious awards.

Intel has not released a statement detailing the reasons why it is ending its partnership with the competition. Requests for comment from Intel were not returned by the time of this posting.

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Will Free Online Courses Ever Replace a College Education?

Source: Atlantic Magazine

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/07/how-online-courses-are-becoming-educations-new-wave/375152/

Two years into their existence, MOOCs haven’t stolen students away from brick-and-mortar universities. Instead, they’ve become a genre of their own.

Peter Struck, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, stands in front of a special-effects-ready green screen as he records a MOOC on Greek mythology. Matt Slocum/AP

It’s 10:44 am on a Tuesday, and I’m lounging at home in my pajamas, sipping chamomile tea. I am, at the same time, taking a class at Harvard. Professor Gregory Nagy is rhapsodizing about the death of Roy, the cyborg from Blade Runner, and pointing out how certain tropes from his final soliloquy echo important themes from ancient Greek myth. The class is called “The Ancient Greek Hero,” and it’s one of many MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) created by HarvardX, the university’s online course production company. It appears, from my limited experience, to be a fabulous class, which comes as no surprise, since it’s based on a well-established in-person Harvard course of the same name.

The videos for this course are remarkably elegant and professional, conveying a certain vividness that lectures at the blackboard sometimes lack. The discourse on Roy’s death, for example, seamlessly cuts to key scenes from the film, as Professor Nagy’s voiceover explains the Greek notion of the “hora” (the “correct moment”). The production values are just as high in a HarvardX course called “Introduction to Neuroscience,” in which filmmakers use high-gloss animation to create a vibrantly wacky clip about cell biology.

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Airborne Wi-Fi

From economist.com

 

How airborne Wi-Fi works

AN ALWAYS-connected lifestyle is a blessing for some and a nightmare for others. Aeroplanes used to be the one respite in a typical business traveller’s itinerary—a place to escape from the e-mails and phone calls for a few hours, and perhaps even have some good ideas. (Travellers with long memories might remember seatback phones in some countries that allowed exceedingly expensive, poor-quality in-flight phone calls; fortunately, nobody ever used them.) Starting in the early 2000s, however, this blissful seclusion started to come under threat, as airlines started to provide internet service at 10,000 metres. In-air Wi-Fi is now increasingly common on domestic routes in America, and on long-haul routes elsewhere. Given that many routes fly largely over water or over uninhabited areas, how do you connect an aeroplane to the internet?

Delivering radio signals to a plane is nothing new, but the usual ways of doing it involve low-bandwidth links that would be painfully inadequate for internet traffic. Voice communication remains analogue, even in the digital age. The Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) provides digital links via VHF signals from the ground, or via satellites, allowing planes to send brief bursts of telemetry information. But ACARS operates at data rates comparable to dial-up modems, measured in thousands of bits per second (Kbps). These voice and telemetry systems are designed for international compatibility, reliability and resilience. In-flight internet requires something much more zippy, but with less of a requirement that everything must work perfectly at all times. Two approaches have emerged, one based on ground-to-air links and the other on satellites.

 

Boeing led the first efforts in the early 2000s, leasing dedicated transponder capacity on geostationary satellites that appear to hover at a fixed point in the sky, and designing an enclosure (or “radome”) to be retrofitted on top of its aircraft, and those made by other firms. Its Connexion service provided suitably equipped aircraft with an internet link running at a few megabits per second (Mbps), divvied up among passengers. Boeing also had to retrofit Wi-Fi (and, in some cases, Ethernet cabling) inside planes. But the service never became financially viable, in part because of the high cost of installing and operating the equipment, and Boeing discontinued it in 2006. That same year another firm, now called Gogo, purchased a thin sliver of air-to-ground spectrum in the United States, and began service in 2008, deploying dozens of ground stations that point upwards at aircraft, rather than downwards at people on the ground, and use a variant of 3G mobile-data technology called EV-DO. Service was extended to Canada in 2014. This provides enough bandwidth for e-mail and basic web browsing; Gogo blocks both streaming video and internet telephony to ensure that one user cannot hog all the capacity.

But satellite never entirely went away. After Boeing’s early, failed attempt, satellite equipment became lighter, cheaper and more capable, and newer planes are designed to accommodate Wi-Fi gear. Several firms now operate in-flight internet service via satellite; some own the satellites, like Panasonic Avionics (United’s contractor for its newer internet service), while others, such as Row 44 and OnAir, license the necessary capacity. Gogo has added satellite-based internet to its options as both a standalone new service and as part of a hybrid service that combines, where available, ground and satellite transmission. Meanwhile, speeds are poised to skyrocket as satellite operators expand service from the lower-frequency Ku band to the higher-frequency Ka band. Data rates should jump from a maximum of roughly 10Mbps to 50-80Mbps per plane. And America’s telecoms regulator will auction 500MHz of ground-to-air bandwidth in the near future, which could allow connection speeds of up to one gigabit per second for planes travelling over land. Travellers who worry about feeling out of touch while airborne will welcome these improvements. Those who prefer being disconnected can take solace in the fact that thousands of aircraft worldwide still remain unconnected—for the time being, at least.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/02/economist-explains-18

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