Peter Luh, the SNET Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering here at UConn, has recently been elected as the Chair of the IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB) Periodicals Committee for the 2018-2019 term.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world’s largest association of technical professionals, focusing on the advancement of electrical and electronic engineering, computer science, and information technology. The IEEE is cited over three times more often than any other publisher for patents filed with the US Patent Office by the top 40 patenting organizations (1997-2012).

IEEE publications constitute around 30% of the world’s literature in electrical engineering and computer science fields – an immense volume of information. The TAB Periodicals Committee oversees essentially all but a few IEEE periodicals (e.g., IEEE Proceedings, IEEE Spectrum, and IEEE Access) – over 120 academic journals and more than 40 magazines.

It is the duty of the periodicals committee to approve, monitor and review these journals and magazines to ensure their quality and timeliness. Each year, Editors-in-Chief of journals and magazines and Vice Presidents of Publications of IEEE Societies and Councils meet to discuss these publications and their status, and formal reviews are held every five years.

The publications committee consists of the Chair, Immediate Past Chair, 8 Directors or Society/Council Presidents (or their designees), and four additional voting members. Peter Luh, as Chair elected for the 2018-19 term, will be responsible for overseeing proposal developments, approvals, publication reviews, and overall quality and timeliness of IEEE TAB periodicals. The committee and IEEE at large aim to “push frontiers” of electrical engineering and computer science, while dealing with major challenges in academic publications such as emerging areas, competition and open access.

Program Manager – UCP 7 School of Engineering UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering

AWARD INFORMATION

The UTC-IASE Guest Professorship Award sponsors visiting professors with national and international reputation in the field of cyber-physical systems engineering to collaborate and mentor UConn faculty and students. The goal of the award is to attract exceptional researchers and educators and promote cross-disciplinary work in areas of interest to the UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering and the United Technologies Corporation. Guest Professors from all engineering all other related disciplines are invited to participate in a 3-6 week program with emphasis on cross-university collaboration, faculty and student mentoring and advising, research proposals creation, research project refinement, and creation of new educational directions (development of new courses or enhancement of existing courses).

AWARD SCOPE

Guest professors are expected to collaborate with UConn Faculty and UTC Engineers in the following areas:

• Offer seminars and lectures in an area of interest to the UTC-IASE
• Collaboration for the development of new collaborative research proposals
• Mentor graduate students and fellows currently working in projects sponsored by the UTC-IASE
• Present a seminar to UTC in the UTRC campus
• Review the curriculum content of the UTC-IASE and propose new directions, refinements and new content or applications

NOMINATION PROCESS

UConn Faculty are requested to nominate a Guest Professor in an application containing the following

• Letter of recommendation for the Guest Professor. (limit 1 page)
• Curriculum Vitae of the Guest Professor.
• A plan for the nominee’s proposed activities, including:
  1. A series of lectures or seminars
  2. A series of meeting with other faculty explaining briefly the common topic of interest
  3. A series of advising meetings with UTC-IASE graduate students and fellows explaining briefly common research interests
  4. Possible collaborative research proposals
  5. Educational content that will be reviewed and refined
  6. The title of a seminar to be given in the United Technologies Research Center.

Not all of the above are mandatory, but the ideal application will contain a plan with many of the above.  The proposed plan should not exceed 3 pages in length.

• Budget, brief budget justification and time table of activities. (limit 1 page).
• Support letters by at least 3 faculty that express their interest in inviting and supporting the Guest Professor. (limit 1 page per letter).

BUDGET

The UTC-IASE Guest Professorship Award will cover transportation, accommodation and living expenses and a honorarium for the Guest Professor up to a total not to exceed $30,000. Half of the award is sponsored by the Dean of the School of Engineering and the other half by the UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering. Only expenses made by the Guest Professor will be covered. Applications may distribute expenses as needed, but proposers should submit a draft budget justification with the proposal.

KEY DATES AND SELECTION PROCESS

• Submit your application as one single PDF file by 5:00pm, May 31^st 2017 to Michelle Morse at michelle.morse@uconn.edu.
• Applications will be reviewed by the UTC-IASE Governing Committee and applicants will be notified by June 10^th.
• Guest Professorship funds will be made available anytime between June 15^th and December 31^st

Avnish was born in the city of Bangalore in India. Being born and raised on an air force base nudged him to pursue his bachelors in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology – Bombay (IIT-B). It was there that he realized his interest in robotics and systems engineering. This led him to come to the University of Connecticut (UConn) for his Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering. At UConn, he works with Dr. Ashwin Dani in the Robotics & Control Lab. His research involves leveraging machine/deep learning techniques for efficient human-robot collaboration.

The University of Connecticut is part of a new national institute designed to advance robotics manufacturing and maintain America’s global competitiveness in that arena. UConn researchers will help develop new sensing, software, artificial intelligence, and other technologies to improve the use of robotics in manufacturing for the aerospace and shipbuilding industries.

The institute, called the Advanced Robotics Manufacturing Institute (ARM), was announced earlier this month and will include several Connecticut businesses and academic institutions. The Connecticut portion of the proposal was led by UConn, the United Technologies Research Center, UTC Aerospace Systems, and ABB US Corporate Research. The institute will be led by American Robotics Inc., a nonprofit associated with Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn.

The ARM institute is the 14th and final national institute created under President Obama’s Manufacturing USA initiative, according to Michael Accorsi, senior associate dean of engineering.

“The focus on robotics makes it a great fit for Connecticut, with our strong ties to the aerospace and shipbuilding industries – industries that can really benefit from the next generation of robotic innovation,” he said.

The new institute is supported by a total of $253 million in funding. Federal funding represents $80 million of that, with the remaining money coming from 123 industrial partners, 40 academic and academically affiliated partners, and 64 government and nonprofit partners.

At UConn, Ashwin P. Dani’s Robotics and Controls Lab is already performing research on interactions between robots and humans. Dani and his graduate students are creating algorithms so that industrial robots can learn what action a person will likely take in a given situation. By understanding where a person will move, a robot can work alongside a human and avoid injuring them.

“The new institute is designed to create an ecosystem of robotics,” said Dani, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “That ecosystem will involve creating collaborative robotics that can do flexible, highly variable jobs efficiently and create advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly human-robotic interactions. That’s an area we already focus on here at UConn.”

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Manufacturing USA initiative is designed to encourage private industry, academia, and government collaboration to revitalize and enhance U.S. competitiveness in key areas. As a part of ARM, UConn will create a new, advanced robotics facility within the new UConn Tech Park, which will expand on UConn’s existing robotic capabilities.

The aerospace, automotive, and electronics industries will represent 75 percent of all robots used in the country by 2025. UConn and other Connecticut partners are focusing on the aerospace and ship building industries, which have been slower to adopt robotic technologies than the automotive industry. Dani said that because these industries create a smaller volume of products than the automotive industry, they need robots that can do a variety of tasks.

“The automotive industry makes millions of cars every year, so each robot can be highly specialized. The aerospace industry creates far fewer individual products, so each robot needs to be able to quickly learn and perform multiple tasks,” Dani said. “UConn and ARM will make the innovations necessary to create agile, dexterous, and collaborative robotics.”

The new institute aims to increase small manufacturers’ use of robots by 500 percent. UConn will work with community colleges around the state to provide training in robotic jobs within existing STEM programs, to meet the increasing demands for the robotic manufacturing industry.

Published: January 13, 2017

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The priority of the UTC-IASE Breakthrough Award is to provide an award to recognize innovative, transformational and disruptive contributions in the field of advanced systems engineering. The amount of the Award shall be $50,000 in the first year the prize is awarded, and may be adjusted with time.

The UTC-IASE asked Xu Chen a variety of questions in regards to what plans he has prepared for the use of this award.

• How do you plan to use the funds provided by the Breakthrough Award?

This Breakthrough Award application seeks to explore transformative and collaborative strategies in research and education that respond to the fundamental challenge of poor reproducibility in additive manufacturing (AM) processes. A specific focus is powder bed fusion (PBF) – one of the few AM techniques that are capable of directly fabricating geometrically complex metal parts with good mechanical strength.

• Please provide a brief description of the collaboration opportunities the Breakthrough Award will generate for you and the UTC-IASE.

The research is a model- and data-centric study that considers dynamic systems and computer and information science and engineering as a unified whole. The generated knowledge and tools are expected to offer previously unattainable robustness and adaptability in AM, which are integral for applications such as digital manufacturing of jet engines and wing struts.

As the principal investigator, I have been leading a New Academic Plan project under the NextGen CT initiative, to build a testbed for PBF AM. The project will create a unique platform to create multidisciplinary research within the institute, spanning a rich spectrum of topics in, e.g. mechatronics, modeling and learning, data sciences, cyber physical systems, etc.

The Award will also support teaching activities in model-based controls and mechatronic designs. I have digitalized my teaching portfolio for a set of topics related to the pursued goal, and plan to create flipped/blended courses in AM and control systems.

I am extremely humbled to receive the Award. Thank you UTC-IASE for supporting junior faculties.

On Friday, October 28th, 2016, UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) graduate fellow William Hale (Billy) received a travel award to attend and present his work at the annual Foundations of Computer Aided Process Operations / Chemical Process Control (FOCAPO/CPC) 2017 conference. This award covers the cost of stay for the duration of the conference, January 8 – 12, 2017.

Billy is a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate under the supervision of Dr. George Bollas in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department at UConn. The work he will be presenting is on model-based active fault detection and isolation. In this work, a general formulation for maintenance testing is developed by optimizing inputs to produce unique system responses in the presence of various faults. The formulation is then applied to a gas compression system prone to several different actuator and sensor faults, and the results from this optimization show complete isolation of the 8 faults studied. Future work will focus on modifying the formulation to be robust to system uncertainties. Billy hopes that by attending this conference he will obtain valuable experiences and connections that will benefit him for the years to come as he continues working towards his Ph.D.

Click Here to View William Hale’s LinkedIn Profile

From May 31st to August 26th, 2016, UTC Aerospace Systems (UTAS) provided internship opportunities for two graduate students affiliated with UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE). Kyle Palmer and William Hale spent their past summer working on various projects assigned by UTAS using the knowledge and skills developed at the University of Connecticut (UConn).

Kyle Palmer is pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UConn. His interest in computational research consists of test design optimization for robust fault detection and identification.

During the internship at UTAS, Kyle focused on two projects. The first project involved an analysis of an air-craft environmental control system and its effect on fault detection with uncertainty. The second project involved nonlinear dynamic models and an assessment of which models were suitable for linearization.

Kyle was able to receive a “hands-on experience” as to what engineers within the industry can accomplish. Additionally, he was exposed to the work environment of UTAS and the expectations that the industry held regarding project timelines and management. He enjoyed applying his current research into relevant projects at UTAS, and this experience has shown that modeling and simulation work is a fulfilling career path. Lastly, he stated that the collaboration between UConn and UTAS helped provide him with a unique opportunity that exceeded his expectations of a standard internship.

William Hale (Billy) is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UConn and has been conducting research on robust fault detection and isolation methods for aerospace applications. His interests include computational modeling, simulation, and optimization for improving system reliability.

Billy worked on three projects during his time at UTAS. For the first project, Billy investigated the effect of uncertainty on the detection of a failed component in an aircraft environmental control system. For the second project, he analyzed flight test data to determine the feasibility of creating a detection and prevention algorithm for a separate failure. For the final project, Billy developed a modular control library for an aircraft environmental control system aimed at improving control model development.

Billy claimed that, “The most important thing I was able to learn, or re-establish in my mind, is that no results are bad as long as they are conclusive”. He came to this conclusion when he determined that it was infeasible to reliably detect and prevent a failure with the current system architecture. Overall, Billy feels he had a positive impact on his projects and that this UTAS internship was exceptionally rewarding proclaiming, “If given another opportunity to work for UTAS, I would accept it in a heartbeat”.

These two experiences are just the start of what UTC-IASE hopes to accomplish. With the completion of the first building at the UConn Tech Park in early 2017, future collaborations between UConn and UTC will invite similar student experiences for many years to come.

The United Technologies Corporation Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) at the University of Connecticut (UConn) solicits applications for a full-time tenure-track faculty position at the rank of Assistant, Associate or Full Professor in one of the Mechanical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or Computer Science & Engineering Departments to conduct research, education and outreach related to systems engineering. The successful candidate will:

• Develop, sustain, and grow a research program of excellence in the field of systems engineering, requirements formalization and modeling, model abstraction and platform-based system design, control and requirements design and checking. The research program is based on a deep collaboration between industry and the UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering.
• Teach undergraduate and graduate courses that meet the curricular needs of IASE with particular emphasis on enhancing UTC-IASE’s systems engineering curriculum. Advise and mentor undergraduate and graduate students with particular emphasis in the area of cyber-physical systems and systems engineering.
• Provide service and leadership to all units of the University of Connecticut, to external academic and scientific communities, and to the general public.

Complete Job Description: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/8224

Dr. Stuber holds a Bachelor of Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT.  His graduate research focused on the development of theory and algorithms for advanced formal methods in robust design and optimal design under uncertainty.  Specifically, he developed tools necessary to solve challenging problems in rigorous performance and safety verification of process systems for extreme and hostile environments.  Dr. Stuber’s post-doctoral work was as a scientist, engineer, and entrepreneur developing an optimized concentrating solar powered desalination process, launching a start-up company, and piloting the desalination technology for agricultural wastewater reuse in California’s agricultural sector.  Driven by the exciting opportunities in pure and applied research, Dr. Stuber decided to make his way back to academia joining the faculty at UConn.

Dr. Stuber’s research focuses on theory and methods for optimization-based approaches to solving challenging problems in energy, healthcare, and food and water security.  Dr. Stuber emphasizes the full-pipeline view of bringing fundamental developments and discovery to implementation and commercialization for greatest impact.  Recent projects involve rigorous model validation, large-scale global optimization, and optimal design for water and food security in underrepresented communities.