This week’s spotlight is on Dr. Abhishek Dutta, who is an assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is affiliated with the UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering and the Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, here at the University of Connecticut. He conducted his postdoctoral research in aerospace engineering in the Coordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with Cedric Langbort. He received a PhD in Electromechanical Engineering from Ghent University under the supervision of Robin De Keyser and the advice of Jan Maciejowski, as a junior member of Wolfson College Cambridge. He also received an MSc with distinction from the University of Edinburgh, including an informatics prize for his outstanding thesis.

 

In the upcoming months, Dr. Dutta will be giving a presentation titled “Microcircuit Design for Real-Time Data Acquisition and Neuromuscular Control of Insect Motion” at the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Conference in September of 2018, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This presentation discusses a framework for an accessible device that would enable the control of advanced cyborg insects that would overcome current technological limitations that plague today’s micro-robots. This work has received attention from Governor Malloy and President Herbst.

 

Dr. Dutta has also recently submitted a paper titled “Robust Design of a Multirotor Aerial Vehicle” to the journal IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics. This paper introduces the methodology of systematic robust design of multi-rotor vehicles. Robustness in aerial vehicles is highly desirable as it guarantees a desired level of performance, even when there are environmental uncertainties present. Thus far, robustness has been considered in terms of active control in the space of multi-rotor vehicles, without exploring the design space itself. In this work, a conceptual design followed by a robust design is performed to come up with the specifications that lead to least uncertain performance of the multi-rotor vehicle, with respect to stochastic wind disturbances.

 

Evan Faulkner, a Junior undergraduate student majoring in Electrical Engineering is working on a project titled “Micro-circuit design for modeling and control of insects” under Dr. Dutta. He will also advise two other students working on projects this summer: Nicholas Gorbenko, a Senior undergraduate student majoring in Electrical Engineering, who is working on a project titled “Cultured Neural Networks for Robot Control”, and Hossein Hamidi, a PhD student in Electrical Engineering, who is working on “Modeling and control of neuromuscular dynamics”.

 

This summer, Dr. Dutta plans to work on two individual research projects. The first is titled “Design and Control of Cyborgs and Neural Cultures”. A state of the art lab has been set up for the design of biological circuits, which will help to enable the modeling and control of insects and also study neuronal cultures. This knowledge will then be leveraged to treat neurological disorders. The second project is titled “Design and Control for Biomedical Applications”. This project is a collaboration with the University of Cambridge and Ghent University amongst other European partners. Dr. Dutta also expects to receive a $225K grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Strategic Technology Office (STO). The grant is titled “Collection and Monitoring via Planning for Active Situation Scenarios (COMPASS)”. Partnering with UTRC and SRI, the COMPASS team will work towards enhancing gray zone operation by helping Joint Task Force Commanders understand the intent and tactics of adversaries as they engage in deceptive covert gray zone activities. Instead of relying on passive collection of sensory data, COMPASS will employ probing strategies that stimulate the environment with controlled actions to generate desirable intelligence.

 

This week’s faculty spotlight is on Dr. Matthew Stuber, an assistant professor in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Dr. Stuber received his Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities, and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research focuses on Process Systems Engineering topics of (1) Global Optimization, (2) Process Improvement and Intensification, (3) Renewable Energy and Process Integration, (4) Model Validation, and (5) formal Robust Design Under Uncertainty. Over the course of the summer, Dr. Stuber, and his students will be participating in a variety of conferences, presentations, and research projects across the country and internationally.

 

One of Dr. Stuber’s co-advised students, William Hale, will be presenting at the American Controls Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 27th-29th. The presentation is titled “Design of Built-In Tests for Robust Active Fault Detection and Isolation of Discrete Faults in Uncertain Systems”. Dr. Stuber will also be chairing the session titled “Fault Detection 1”, Friday June 29th. Another one of Dr. Stuber’s students, Matthew Wilhelm, will be presenting at the second annual JuMP-dev Workshop on June 27th-29th, at the Institut de Mathematiques de Bordeaux, Universite de Bordeaux, in France. The talk is titled “EAGO: A Deterministic Nonconvex Optimization Package for Julia”.

 

In addition, Dr. Stuber’s lab is hosting a student this summer as part of the UConn eREU program. UConn’s Entrepreneurial Research Experience for Undergraduates program (eREU) aims to immerse students in an integrated program containing entrepreneurship training and fundamental engineering research experience. This student will help to develop a new software and controls technology for significant energy-savings in municipal wastewater treatment and help develop a business and commercialization model around the technology.

 

Dr. Stuber and his students are also involved in conducting cancer research, using a new mathematical and numerical analysis approach. They will apply first-principles spatiotemporal conservation and transport equations to model solid tumors, an example being malignant breast tumors. With data that is supplied by the lab’s experimental and clinical collaborators at the University of Cyprus and the University of Tokyo, they will apply novel methods in global optimization to validate the models, and then use these models to understand the phenomena and limitations behind drug and nutrient transport in tumors. They will also use these models to understand the effects of certain drug therapies. More specifically, they are using the validated models to better understand how using certain drug therapies to modify the tumor microenvironment can enhance patient outcomes. They are hoping to publish this work and its findings in about a month.

 

Dr. Stuber is currently in the process of judging the Water Abundance XPrize. This is a $1.75 million dollar competition for innovators and start-up companies to prove significant cost savings and efficiency improvements in atmospheric water generation to solve the ultimate challenge of broad water security. In terms of upcoming publications and research, he has recently submitted a paper for the upcoming special issue of “Modeling and Simulation of Energy Systems” for the journal Processes. This paper discusses the development of a new dynamic model of concentrated solar thermal energy systems for hybridizing industrial process heat application. This is a first-of-its-kind model, constructed for optimizing the design of the hybrid solar industrial process heat system from a new-technology investment perspective. Finally, the lab’s advanced deterministic global optimization software, written in the Julia programming language is up and published (https://github.com/MatthewStuber/EAGO.jl). The objective of this project is to provide users with advanced methods and algorithms for deterministic global optimization in an easy-to-use language (which is very similar to MATLAB or Python), but that also has the computing power of C and FORTRAN. New features are continuously being added to and developed for the new program.

 

Dr. Stuber was recently named the recipient of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Computing and Systems Technology Division “W. David Smith, Jr. Graduate Publication Award”.  He was nominated for this award based on his paper “Convex and Concave Relaxations of Implicit Functions” published in 2015 in the journal Optimization Methods and Software.

The University of Connecticut’s (UConn) UTC Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (UTC-IASE) Associate Director of Academic Programs, Amy Thompson, was recently elected as the Vice President of the International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE) New England (NE) Chapter. Ebad Jahangir from UTRC was elected as the Secretary, Matt Tkac from CS Communication Systems was elected as President, and Ed Medri from Corindus Vascular Robotics was elected as the Treasurer.

 

INCOSE is a non-profit membership-based organization, that has dedicated it’s work since its founding in 1990 to advancing the field of systems engineering and to connect systems engineers from around the globe through a united and professional network. The main objective for INCOSE NE chapter will be to help bridge together systems engineers from all over the region across multiple different fields and domains such as energy, transport, aerospace, aviation, marine, defense, and healthcare. In conjunction with these objectives, INCOSE NE is specifically equipped to meet this objective due to the wealth and variety of industry, academic, and professional-based specialties and resources that are located within the northeast region from Connecticut to Maine. The chapter currently has 160+ systems engineering members across six states.

 

The new INCOSE NE leadership team hopes to build and sustain an invigorated atmosphere for professional growth for systems engineers and to create a strong network of resources to support the chapter in achieving their professional and organizational goals. The chapter will be (1) planning new learning opportunities, professional networking, and social networking events that will attract new members and bring-out existing members; (2) developing resources locally within the states to support local events; (3) building a network across the region with a focus on industry and business diversity; (4) working with chapters outside of the region to bring resources and value into the region; (5) instilling a renewed focus on education and workforce development; and (6) attracting engineers early in their career to get them interested in the work that INCOSE does.

 

The new INCOSE NE leadership held its first meeting on May 17th, 2018. (https://www.neincose.org/events/incose-new-england-membership-meeting-hartford) This was a multi-site meeting, which connected the new UConn-Hartford Campus site to another host site in Waltham, MA, as well as the guest speaker, David Long, and other remote viewers who could not attend in-person. At the first meeting, the new officers were introduced, a member feedback session was conducted to gauge what INCOSE NE members wanted to see from the chapter in the upcoming year, and a presentation was given by David Long, who is a past INCOSE President. Long’s presentation focused on his view of the field and discipline of systems engineering, and what we have to do as systems engineers to define and refine our roles and discipline in the development of future highly-connected, complex systems. Long proposes “the Engineering of Systems” vs. “Systems Engineering,” as a better perspective on what SE’s do.

General member meetings will begin to be held on a monthly basis, to keep members involved and active. The INCOSE NE leadership will be promoting new local sites in the future to connect and participate in meetings in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine areas.   More information on upcoming events and other information about INCOSE NE can be found on its website: https://www.neincose.org/

 

 

For more than a year, Dr. Sridhar Duggirala, an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut, and his students worked on building an autonomous model racing car F1/10.   The UConn team participated in an autonomous vehicle racing competition that took place at Cyber-Physical Systems week in Porto, Portugal. In its first time in real competition, the car won 2nd place, with a lap time of 11.50 seconds.

 

The F1/10 competition is centered around creating an educational and challenging design experience for students from around the world. The competition consists of designing, constructing and testing an autonomous 1/10th scale F1 model race car, that is capable of achieving speeds upwards of 40 mph. The components of the car, such as the design of the car, the required hardware, and the bill of materials were all provided by the competition organizers. “Building the hardware for an autonomous vehicle is a long and tedious task” (Duggirala, 2018). “Additionally, it does not answer the most interesting aspect of the autonomous technology, which is the software” (Duggirala, 2018). He said that the organizers provided the design and the bill of materials to help teams’ focus on the software aspect of the autonomous vehicle, and most of the team’s time was spent on designing the software and performing testing and iteration.

 

One of the most important design mechanisms in the team’s vehicle was the Lidar technology component. This technology is used to create a visual image of their surroundings by detecting when there is an object in front of them. It then sends this information along with the visual field image to the processors, which then directs the car to avoid the obstacle in the way. Lidar technology is useful in sensing the surrounding environment and provides a very high quality resolution image of the surrounding environment. It also provides a very accurate estimate of the distance of the Lidar from a given object in the environment. The processor is the one component that takes all the inputs from the environment and the external sensing devices, such as the Lidar mechanism. Some of these inputs include distance of the car from walls and surrounding obstacles, which are then give instructions to the car to determine certain factors such as its speed and steering angle.

 

“It took us around 6 weeks to build the car.” he said. “However, testing the car was the most challenging part and it took us around 8 weeks to come up with the current controller that we have in place” (Duggirala, 2018). The team used several phases in their design process to produce the software controller design that was seen in the final product. The first phase was to develop the controller mechanism that steered the car in the right direction, that is, the direction away from all the obstacles in the car’s way. Secondly, the team developed a speed controller part that used small incremental steps to steer the car in the forward direction. Finally, the team refined the speed controller mechanism to accelerate, if there were no upcoming obstacles or turns in a reasonable distance from the car. “The biggest challenge we faced was in developing the controller for the autonomous vehicle. The accelerometer on the car was not robust, so we could not perform a procedure commonly called ‘system identification’ of the car. We overcame this by building a test track in our lab and developing various controllers to make the car accelerate, break and make the turns properly” (Duggirala, 2018).

 

The team, directed by Dr. Duggirala, consisted of Abolfazl Karimi, a PhD student from the Department of Mathematics,  Reynaldo Morillo, a PhD student from the Department of Computer Science, Nandan Tumu, an undergraduate student majoring in Computer Science, Manish Goyal, a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Bineet Ghosh, a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. The prize that was gifted for their second-place finish was a second-generation NVidia Tegra Processor, that the team will use to replace the central processor and build a next generation second version of the car. The team has plans to participate in the next competition at Embedded Systems Week in October of 2018. This 2.0 version will enable the team to perform systems identification and design better controllers for the car.

 

This event focused on strengthening ties between our UTC-IASE Graduate fellows and sponsored researchers with business units of the United Technologies Corporation.

The luncheon provided our fellows with a chance to interact with UTC managers and engineers, discuss with their peers, present their work, research and scientific accomplishments. They were able to get feedback about research and its directions, and discuss future opportunities like research, training and employment.

United Technologies Research Center hosted this event and each of the graduate fellows presented a poster about their Systems Engineering research as well as a one slide overview.

Statements from Graduate Fellows:

“A great way to see what students outside of my lab group were up to and see what innovative work is being done.”

– Kyle Palmer

“Luncheon was a great opportunity to see the work of other UTC-IASE fellows and at the same time, I had the chance to meet people from UTC.”

– Evangelos Stefanidis

“I enjoyed getting a chance to see the impressive research that the other fellows have been working on and having the opportunity discuss future possibilities and new directions with both my colleagues and UTC engineers.”

– Brian Baillie

 

 

Congratulations to Brain Baillie!

Congratulations to Brain Baillie for receiving the CAST Director’s Award.  The title of the poster is Term Elimination and Optimal Selection for Model Reduction. Authors are Brian P. Baillie and George M. Bollas. This work is part of the Physics-Informed Machine Learning project with the Institute, sponsored by Pratt & Whitney and UTAS.

 

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Congratulations to Chen Chen!

Congratulations to Chen Chen for receiving The PSE Model-Based Innovation Prize 2017.  PSE offers prizes for the best papers describing the use of gPROMS family products in an innovative way or in a novel area of application or technology.

Previous work describes the integration of chemical-looping combustion, a novel combustion approach reducing CO2 emissions efficiently, with combine cycle power plant. In this paper, gPROMS (PSE software product) and Dymola (Modelica language software) were used for the simulation and optimization.

more info

Dr. Amy Thompson has joined the University of Connecticut’s United Technologies Corporation (UTC)

Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) as its new Associate Director of Academic Programs and as an Associate Professor-in- Residence of Systems Engineering.

Dr. Thompson has served for the past three years as President and Lead Engineer of Paguridae, LLC located in East Haven, Connecticut, which was founded by her in 2014 to provide operations, energy efficiency, and sustainability consulting services. Prior to founding Paguridae, Dr. Thompson was an Assistant Professor of Industrial & System Engineering at the University of New Haven and served as the BS System Engineering Program Coordinator for six years and helped the new program grow and attain ABET accreditation. Dr. Thompson earned her Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering, M.S. in Manufacturing Engineering, and B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Rhode Island.

Dr. Thompson’s research interests include whole building energy performance assessment as well as design of complex systems, manufacturing systems, facilities, and supply chains. In 2017, Dr. Thompson was awarded the US EPA Environmental Merit Award for her work helping organizations in Connecticut better understand their building energy performance and helping them lower their energy usage. Dr. Thompson served from 2011-2014 as a member of the Connecticut Energy Efficiency Board (EEB), served as its Program Evaluation Committee Chair, and was responsible for providing feedback to the ENERGIZE CT programs. Dr. Thompson has over 15 years of professional experience working in various industries including engineering consulting, building energy efficiency, software development, medical device, agricultural chemicals, and gaming cabinets.

In her new role, Dr. Thompson will help to promote and grow the academic programs of the Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering, teach its Introduction to Systems Engineering and Model-Based Systems Engineering courses, and work with its faculty to continuously improve the quality of its academic programs. She can be reached at amy.2.thompson@uconn.edu.

Award Information

The UTC Endowed Graduate Fellows Program sponsors graduate studies leading to masters or doctoral degrees in the field of cyber-physical systems engineering. The goal of the fellowship is to attract exceptional students and to cultivate ties between graduate students and faculty from UConn and engineers and managers from the United Technologies Corporation. Fellows are expected to work closely with UConn faculty on projects that have the potential to help meet the critical needs of the nation in the design of high performance, reliable and cost-effective systems.

Selection Criteria

These twelve-month fellowships will be offered to students who:

• Have an excellent academic record.
• Have demonstrated excellence in ongoing scholarly work aligned with UTC interests.
• Want to engage in new research directions in areas of interest to the UTC-IASE and UTC.
• Have excellent communication skills.
• Are engaged in activities that enrich the UConn Engineering community. Preferred (but not required) qualifications include:
  • Commitment by the candidate’s advisor (in writing) to provide the 50% RA support (to match the fellowship).
  • Underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields (STEM) are encouraged to apply to the program.
  • US Citizenship or Permanent Residency are not mandatory but will be considered a preferred qualification.

Nomination Process

To apply for the UTC-IASE Endowed Graduate Fellowship, please provide:
(1) Your name, department and thesis advisor name.
(2) Title and brief description (500 words max) of your current research.
(3) A summary of the relevance of your currently-funded or proposed research to areas of interest to the UTC-IASE (limit 200 words).
(4) If applicable, source of the 50% RA match and award period for this support (dates from/to).
(5) Your resume (limit 2 pages) including graduate and undergraduate GPA and key publications or conference proceedings.
(6) Recommendation and commitment letter from your advisor.

Key Dates and Selection Process

• Submit your application as one single PDF file by 5:00pm, August 18, 2017 to Michelle Morse at michelle.morse@uconn.edu.
• Up to 10 fellowships will be awarded depending on applications quality and matching funds.
• Applications will be reviewed by the UTC-IASE Governing Committee, on the basis of the aforementioned selection criteria.
• Awardees and their advisors will be notified by August 25, 2017.
• Fellowship funds will be made available with the start of the 2017 fall semester.

Fellowship Requirements

• Individuals accepting this award may not concurrently receive other fellowships or traineeships.
• All UTC-IASE Fellowship awardees will be expected to first notify and then acknowledge the UTC-IASE in their publications, conference presentations, and final theses.
• For research executed in collaboration with UTC, fellows are expected to conform with export control and confidentiality agreements between UConn and UTC.
• Awardees will be expected to give a short presentation at a UTC-UConn networking event.
• Awardees are expected to provide brief bios and research abstracts for promotion to the UTC-IASE webpage, LinkedIn account and social media.
• Awardees will be expected to participate in the outreach activities of the UTC-IASE.
• Awardees will be expected to attend the UTC-IASE seminar and distinguished lecture series.