The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins is committed to providing a rigorous educational experience that prepares students for further study and successful careers, and is dedicated to research that contributes to fundamental knowledge in both analytical and experimental aspects of the field. <more>
UPDATES & NEWSPhD student, Ndubuisi Ekekwe, has been invited by the African Union Commission to its December,2008 Congress in Yaounde, Cameroon. Mr. Ndubuisi will deliver a talk and will work with leading policy experts on various issues affecting the continent. This is partly in recognition of his work as the founder of www.neocircuit.org -an NGO he founded as a JHU student. Dr. Jacob Vogelstein, an Assistant Research Professor in ECE and a member of the Senior Professional Staff at the JHU Applied Physics Lab, has developed a system that allows amputees to play "Guitar Hero" with no hands. The system uses pattern recognition algorithms to decode electrical signals generated by an amputee's residual muscles, and uses the output of those algorithms to control a modified Guitar Hero controller on the Nintendo Wii gaming platform. The goal of this work (conducted as part of DARPA's Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 program) is to provide a fun and effective way to facilitate the rehabilitation process, evaluate pattern classifiers, and provide metrics for upper-extremity neuroprostheses. A summary of this work was presented at last week's IEEE Symposium on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, and an article about the project is available on the IEEE Spectrum's website: http://spectrum.ieee.org/nov08/6994. Francesco Tenore, who received his PhD from ECE in May 2008, received the Best "Ph.D. in a Nutshell" Award at the IEEE BioCAS 2008 Conference. His Ph.D. Thesis was titled "Biomoric Circuits and Systems: Control of Robotic and Prosthetic Limbs." Profs Andreas Andreou and Ralph Etienne-Cummings were General Co-Chairs of the IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference which was held in Baltimore, MD, from November 20th - 22nd. There were approximately 140 registrants from around the globe. With an acceptance rate of ~40%, the BioCAS Conference is becoming one of the highest quality conferences sponsored by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. The ECE Department, ERC CISST and the LCSR were co-sponsors of the Conference. Dr. Ralph Etienne-Cummings will deliver the Don P. Giddens Inaugural Professorial Lecture entitled "Learning from Nature to Make Machines See and Robots Walk" Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 3:00 p.m., 110 Hodson Hall Ralph Etienne-Cummings, a pioneer in the fields of neuromorphic and biomorphic engineering, develops biologically inspired computational and robotics systems that can "sense" their surroundings and even restore function after spinal cord injury. Etienne-Cummings creates mechanical and control systems that mimic essential components of biological systems. In his lecture, he will speak on the evolution of his research, including the development of robots for the study of legged locomotion, vision sensors that model the retina and visual cortex, silicon models of spinal neural circuits, and his latest work in brainmachine interfaces for neurally integrated prosthetic limbs. A professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Computational Motor-Systems Lab at Johns Hopkins, Etienne-Cummings earned his master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He has received an NSF CAREER Award, and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and was named a Visiting African Fellow and Fulbright Fellowship grantee at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Etienne-Cummings has published widely, including the book CMOS Imagers: From Phototransduction to Image Processing, and holds three patents. He has also been recognized for his work promoting the inclusion of women and minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. ECE Engineering Design Team Blog now on Google! - Access to the group on the web (http://groups.google.com/group/jhu-ece-engineering-teams) requires a Google Account. If you don't have a Google Account set up yet, you'll first need to create an account before you can access the group. Here is the group's description:
Objective (Preliminary): We are looking for multi-year, comprehensive projects that can enhance the educational experience to all undergraduates. Based on the strength of the teams and the white papers, the teams will be selected and the selected teams will be allowed to register for a new course called ECE Engineering Team. 1st and 2nd year students will receive 1 credit per semester. For 3rd and 4th year students, this will count as a senior design project and will received up to 6 credit hours toward the advanced lab credit. No student can received more than 12 credit hours total from the ECE engineering team course. Josh Blum, Rinat Zakirov, and Prof. Brinton Cooper have been awarded a 2008-09 Technology Fellowship Grant from the JHU Center for Educational Resources to build a graphical tool to facilitate FPGA design. Prof. Ralph Etienne-Cummings is selected as a National Academies of Science Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, November 8 - 11th, 2007 Johns Hopkins Gazette: On July 16, 2007, President George W. Bush announced the recipients of the Nation's highest honor for science and technology, naming the recipients of the 2006 National Medals of Science and Technology. We are proud to announce that James E. West received a 2006 National Medal of Technology Laureates. Click here for details and video about the event. |
