2020 IEEE Student Scholarship awarded to Madeline Loui

The winner of the IEEE Rochester Section, RES Scholarship for 2020, is Madeline Loui. Madeline is a Junior at Georgia Institute of Technology with a 4.0 GPA, who is majoring in Electrical Engineering. She began distinguishing herself with a summer internship at RIT while still in high school, by writing software to analyze images of an ancient map to reveal hidden content.

At GIT, Madeline has worked with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on several projects, including developing custom hardware and software for a satellite-based object recognition system using a convolutional neural network and a stereo vision algorithm. She worked with Northop Grumman on standardized data validation software, as well as security software. In the classroom, Madeline has served as a teaching assistant in a digital design lab, providing mentoring and technical assistance for 30 students. Professionally, she is serving as the Chair of the Atlanta, Georgia chapter of Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering Industry, as the point of contact for faculty, industry sponsors, and social media outreach.

Publication in IEEE Conference: Undergraduate Education Highlight

George Klimiashvili, a recent University of Rochester graduate, said,

“One of the proudest moments of my college career and my life in general was getting published in the IEEE conference as a first author.”

George is a recipient of The Charles L. Newton Prize, which recognizes engineering students who show a special proficiency in an engineering subject and have conducted research, given a presentation, or published a paper.

Here is the reference to George’s paper: G. Klimiashvili, C. Tapparello and W. Heinzelman, “LoRa vs. WiFi Ad Hoc: A Performance Analysis and Comparison,” 2020 International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), Big Island, HI, USA, 2020, pp. 654-660, doi: 10.1109/ICNC47757.2020.9049724.

Tutorial: Fast Deep Learning Prototypes with Tensorflow and Keras

The Rochester Signal Processing Society hosted a virtual zoom session on Thurs, April 30th entitled “Fast Deep Learning Prototypes with Tensorflow and Keras Tutorial”, by RIT PhD student Miguel Dominguez. 63 people registered for this hour-long session which included the distribution of iPython notebook sample code and deep learning software installation instructions. This tutorial was very well attended, in spite of being held, non-traditionally, via Zoom.

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are a powerful tool for computer vision, signal processing, and natural language processing tasks. The last few years have seen the development of a plethora of software tools for the development of DNNs. This tutorial discussed using Tensorflow 2.0 with the Keras API to enable rapid prototyping of DNNs with a minimum of code. All software is free open-source code. The tutorial demonstrated how to get several variants of Convolutional Networks up and running, for training, prediction, and logging.

Miguel Dominguez is a PhD candidate in Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology, set to graduate in the summer of 2020. His research interests include graph and point cloud neural networks as well as speech processing.Image of Miguel Dominguez

The TensorBoard dashboard pictured here shows the performance of models as they are being trained.

TensorBoard dashboard showing training performance of Deep Learning Models

2020 Terra Science Fair

Two of our members, Sreeram Dhurjaty and Mark Schrader, helped judge entries in the 2020 Terra Science and Engineering Fair. Due to the COVID-19 shutdowns and the need for physical distancing, the entrants used electronic communications to present their work to the judges, who participated from as far away as Texas. More than 50 students, from 19 schools and homeschooling in Monroe, Ontario, and Wayne counties, entered with impressive projects. The judges awarded six “Highest Honor Commendations” to these projects: “Watching our Water 2.0”, “A Comparative Analysis of Underactuated 3D Printed Hands”, “Bridges”, “SODIS Method”, “The Effects of K-12 Bliss on Antibiotic Resistant Organisms”, and “Green Tea as a Preventive Measure Against Disease Pathways Originating in the Oral Cavity”.