IEEE UCSD News

Fellowship Opportunities for non-IEEE

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Of possible interest to those in/planning to pursue grad studies. Undergrads eligible for some. ASEE is the American Society for Engineering Education.

FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITIES. Applications are now open for the Federal programs that ASEE administers. The programs that offer fellowship opportunities, include the following:

NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Program. The purpose of this NASA program is to help advance the nation's aeronautics enterprise by investing in the educational development of the future aeronautics workforce and to provide opportunities to attract highly motivated undergraduate and graduate students to aeronautics and related fields. Scholarships awarded include competitive stipend payments anticipated amount for undergrad up to $15,000 and up to $35,000 for graduate. There is an option to attend a summer internship (up to $10,000 per summer) at a participating NASA Research Center. The undergraduate program is open to U.S. citizens, and applicants should have completed their sophomore year of college by fall of 2009, and should be in good standing at an accredited college or university. The graduate program is open to U.S. citizens, the applicants should be accepted or enrolled in an accredited program, and remain in good academic standing at their respected college or university. Application is expected to open in September and close December. For more information, contact nasa.asp@asee.org
The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. This program is open to US citizens and legal permanent residents and offers a competitive stipend as well as insurance, relocation, and travel allowances. This program offers one to three year postdoctoral fellowships designed to increase the involvement of scientists and engineers from academia and industry to scientific and technical areas of interest and relevance to the Navy. This program has a rolling admission. Go to: http://www.asee.org/nrl/.
The Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program (SFFP) . This program is intended for US citizens or permanent residents who have an earned doctorate in science or engineering and who hold full-time science or engineering faculty positions at US colleges, community colleges and universities. The duration of this summer fellowship is from 8 to 12 continuous weeks and research is performed on-site at Air Force laboratories. There is a competitive weekly stipend, and relocation and daily expense allowances are available for those who qualify. The application cycle is from August to November. To apply online, go to: http://www.asee.org/sffp.
The National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program (NDSEG) . The fellowship program is sponsored by the Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. This program is intended for U.S. citizens or nationals at or near the beginning of their graduate studies in science or engineering. The fellowships are for three-year tenures and include full tuition and fees, a competitive stipend, and a health insurance allowance. The application cycle is from September to January. Go to: http://ndseg.asee.org for the online application and detailed program information.
The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) . For U.S. citizens, nationals, or permanent resident aliens at or near the beginning of their graduate studies, this program offers a stipend of $30,000 a year for three years, a $10,500 cost of education allowance to the university, and a one-time $1,000 travel allowance. There are 900-1,600 anticipated awards in FY09 pending availability of funds. The application cycle is from August to early November. For additional program information, go to: http://www.nsfgrfp.org.
Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship for Service Program. The purpose is to promote the education, recruitment and retention of outstanding undergraduate and graduate students in science, mathematics, and engineering studies; the DoD is also interested in supporting the education of future scientists and engineers in a number of interdisciplinary areas. Scholarships and fellowships awarded include salary or stipend, full tuition, required fees, federal employee benefits, and up to $1000 book allowance per year. The SMART Program will allow individuals to acquire an education in exchange for a period of employment with the Department of Defense. The program is intended for citizens of the United States; students must be at least 18 years of age to be eligible for an award. Application cycle is August to December. For information and to apply online, go to http://www.asee.org/smart.
The East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) . These programs are designed to provide U.S. graduate students in science and engineering: 1) first-hand research experience in Australia, China, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Singapore or Taiwan; 2) an introduction to the science and science policy infrastructure of the respective location; and 3) orientation to the society, culture and language. The goals of EAPSI are to introduce students to East Asia and Pacific science and engineering in the context of a research setting, and to help students initiate scientific relationships that will better enable future collaboration with foreign counterparts. The institutes last approximately 8-10 weeks from June to August. Application cycle is from September to early December. For more information, please visit: http://www.nsf.gov/eapsi or http://www.nsfsi.org.
The Office of Naval Research (ONR) Summer Faculty Research and Sabbatical Leave Program. This program is intended for US citizens who hold teaching or research appointments relating to science and/or engineering at U.S. academic institutions. A competitive stipend, relocation and travel allowances, and a pre-program site visit are offered. The application cycle is from September to January. For more information go to http://www.asee.org/summer, or contact onrsummer@asee.org.
DOE GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced that up to $12.5 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be awarded in early 2010 to support at least 80 graduate fellowships to U.S. students pursuing advanced degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering through the newly created Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Fellowship program. The goal of the fellowship program is to encourage outstanding students to pursue graduate degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering, and environmental and computer sciences. Students can determine qualifications and apply online at: http://www.scied.science.doe.gov/SCGF.html . Completed applications are due November 30, 2009.

Humanitarian Technology Challenge Launches Student Design Competition

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

IEEE is sponsoring a Regional Student Design Competition for solutions to one of three humanitarian problems as part of the joint IEEE-United Nations Foundation Humanitarian Technology Challenge (HTC). The competition runs from Oct. 2009 to May 2010.

HTC is a partnership among humanitarians, technologists, funders, and others, to develop implementable technological solutions to some key challenges facing humanitarian health and disaster workers today. The participants volunteer their time to collaborate for the benefit of humanity.

Three challenges have been identified:

Reliable Electricity: Availability of electric power for lighting and other electronic devices in resource-constrained environments. Important for education, communications, and economic development.
Data Connectivity of Rural District Health Offices: Capability of exchanging data among remote field offices and central health facilities. Important for accessing treatment protocols, creating and monitoring health trends, and sharing results of treatments.
Individual ID Tied to Health Records: Consistent availability of patient medical records. Important for ongoing treatment of patients, especially migrants and those with long-term diseases.

The Regional Student Design Competition challenges students to provide a working prototype, scale model or detailed engineering design specifications for a project that satisfies one of the three Challenges. The project can be developed by student individuals or by student teams. Teams must be led by an IEEE student member.

More information about the HTC project, and detailed descriptions of the challenges, can be found at www.ieeehtc.org. Rules for the Regional Student Design Competition can be found at www.ieeehtc.org/students.

Contact - Harold Tepper
h.tepper@ieee.org

Lead a Natcar team! Application deadline is Oct 17.

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Fill out the online application here. Application deadline is 11:59pm, Sunday October 17.

Natcar is an undergraduate design project which culminates in a competition each spring. See http://ieee.ucsd.edu/socal-natcar and http://ieee.ucsd.edu/projects/natcar.

IEEE UCSD is seeking a student to lead a Natcar team. He or she will be provided with a budget of $500 and is expected to build a working Natcar and compete in May 2010.

Be sure to read the IEEE UCSD Project Policy which explains the role, responsibilities, and expectations of a project lead.

IEEE Presidents� Change the World � Submissions Now Being Accepted

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

2010 IEEE Presidents' Change the World Competition

IEEE is proud to announce the launch of the 2nd annual Presidents� Change the World contest. As a student who has previously expressed interest in participating, you will be glad to know that you can now submit your entry .

The Presidents� Change the World contest competition recognizes students who develop unique solutions to real-world problems, using engineering, science, computing, and leadership skills to benefit their community or humanity.

First Prize: IEEE Student Humanitarian Supreme � USD $10,000
Second Prize: IEEE Distinguished Student Humanitarian � US $5,000
Third Prize: IEEE Exceptional Student Humanitarian � US $2,500
Up to Five Outstanding Student Humanitarian prizes � US $1,000

The top three prizes will be awarded at the 2010 IEEE Honors Ceremony on 26 June 2010, in Montreal, Canada. The designated leader from each of the top three teams or individuals will be invited to attend and participate in this special IEEE event.

Please visit the IEEE Presidents' Change the World Web site for full details, eligibility requirements, and to submit your entry. Registration will close 31 January 2010.

You can make a difference. Take the challenge and change the world!

IEEE talk by Bhaskar Rao TONIGHT!!

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

ABSTRACT

This talk addresses Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems in which transmitters and receivers are equipped with multiple antennas. MIMO technology constitutes a major advance in the design of wireless communications systems, and is already at the core of several wireless standards. In addition to exploiting the time and frequency degrees of freedom, MIMO techniques exploit the spatial dimension to deliver significant performance enhancements in terms of data transmission rate and interference reduction. This talk discusses the benefits of MIMO systems followed by fundamental capacity limits of point to point MIMO systems, transmitter design, including limited feedback precoding and space-time coding. This will be followed by a discussion of issues in multiuser and cooperative MIMO.

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Bhaskar D. Rao received the B.Tech. degree in electronics and electrical communication engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1981 and 1983, respectively. Since 1983, he has been with the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, where he is currently a Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His interests are in the areas of digital signal processing, estimation theory, and optimization theory, with applications to digital communications, speech signal processing, and human-computer interactions. He is the holder of the Ericsson endowed chair in Wireless Access Networks and is the Director of the Center for Wireless Communications. His research group has received several paper awards. Recently, a paper he co-authored with B. Song and R. Cruz received the 2008 Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in the Field of Communications Systems and a paper he co-authored with S. Shivappa and M. Trivedi received the best paper award at AVSS 2008. He was elected to the fellow grade in 2000 for his contributions in high resolution spectral estimation.

Date & Time:

Monday, September 28, 2009
6:00 - 6:30 Pizza/Soda
6:30 � 8:00 Presentation

Cost:

Free for IEEE member
$5 for non-IEEE member

RSVP:

Sang Kim
sanggook@lge.com
858-635-5294

Location:

Executive Conference Room, LG Electronics MobileComm USA,Inc.
10225 Willow Creek Rd
San Diego, CA 92131

Some Useful Statistics

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Here are some useful statistics on UCSD students and IEEE UCSD including

Undergraduates by field of study (2008)
Undergraduate Engineers by Major Department (Spring 2009)
IEEE UCSD Members by Type

Seeking project members and leaders

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Join one of IEEE UCSD�s projects to apply knowledge learned inside the classroom, learn new technical skills, and build a robot that will compete in a nationally recognized competition. Earn course credit in ECE 199 or ECE 193H. To join a project, contact the project lead. All class levels and all majors are welcome. See projects for pictures, posters, and more information on each project.

Micromouse

Micromouse is an event where small robot mice solve a 16x16 maze. The mice are completely autonomous robots that must find their way from a predetermined starting position to the central area of the maze unaided. The mouse will need to keep track of where it is, discover walls as it explores, map out the maze and detect when it has reached the goal. Once the optimal route has been found, the mouse will run that route in the shortest possible time. Mice can run at up to three meters per second, with current world records around 6~7 seconds.

We are seeking students of all class levels to form 3 software teams of 2-4 people each. Each team will receive a robot and be responsible for programming the robot in time for competition in April, 2010.
We are seeking students of all class levels to form a hardware team of 3-5 people, which will receive a budget of up to $2000 to build and program a new robot in time for competition in April, 2010. We are seeking an exceptionally driven individual with strong track record to lead this team.

Contact: Alex Forencich, Micromouse Project Lead, jforenci@ucsd.edu

AUVSI

The Student Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Competition challenges students to design, build, and operate an autonomous unmanned aerial system. The complete mission objectives are for an unmanned, radio controllable aircraft to be launched and transition or continue to autonomous flight, navigate a specified course, and use onboard payload sensors to locate and assess a series of manmade objects in a search area prior to returning to the launch point for landing. This project requires circuit design, controls, DSP, embedded computing, machine learning, and image processing.

We are seeking students of all class levels from ECE, CSE, ME, AE to do hardware design & fabrication, software, simulation & modeling, mechanical design & fabrication, and airframe design and fabrication. Competition is in June, 2010.

Contact: Daniel Bedenko, AUVSI Project Lead, d.bedenko@gmail.com

Natcar

Southern California Natcar is an undergraduate design competition sponsored by ViaSat and hosted by UC San Diego. Teams of undergraduate students design, build, and race an autonomous car which must follow a track marked by black tape on blonde hardwood flooring. Under the tape, there is a wire carrying a 100mA rms 75kHz sinusoidal signal. The fastest cars travel at speeds up to 10m/s. See SoCal Natcar.

IEEE UCSD is funding 3 Natcar teams at $500 each. Team 1 is already formed, team 2 has a project lead, and team 3 is vacant. We are seeking

1-2 students to complete team 2
an exceptionally driven individual with strong track record to lead team 3. The team 3 project lead will be responsible for completing his team and building a car in time for competition in May, 2010.

Contact: Jordan Rhee, SoCal Natcar Chair, jerhee@ucsd.edu

RoboMagellan

RoboMagellan is a robotics competition emphasizing autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance over varied, outdoor terrain. At the start of the competition, a set of GPS waypoints are programmed into the robot, and it must find its way from start to finish without human intervention. Because of the irregularity of the terrain, the robot must use a combination of its sensory capabilities including GPS, machine vision, optical sensors, and ultrasound sensors to navigate around the obstacles. The number and complexity of the subsystems makes power and integration two of the largest challenges. The variety of sensor data being fed into the robot requires the use of sophisticated control techniques including fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence.

We are seeking students of all class levels from ECE, CSE, ME to design, build, and program a robot in time for the competition in June 2010.

Contact: Omeed Mirbod, RoboMagellan Project Lead, omirbod@gmail.com

Bettis Laboratory Internship Opportunities

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Bettis Summer Internship Program

Each year, Bettis hires approximately 30 students for its summer intern program. Laboratory internships offer students a unique opportunity to participate in the important work done at Bettis and a chance to work with some of the finest technical people in the country.

Candidates for internship positions should be undergraduate (completed sophomore year) and graduate students majoring in engineering, science, or business. Specific internship opportunities are based on Laboratory hiring needs and will vary annually. Details regarding the internship positions which we will interview for can be found in the summer internship position postings on our Career Site, hosted by Monster.com.

Internship postings for next summer will be available on Monster.com from October 1^st through October 21^st. Interviews are conducted between October and December. Internships have flexible beginning and ending dates, however, interns usually work from May/June through August/September.

Questions regarding the summer intern program can be sent to the Program Coordinator.

All candidates must be U.S. citizens. Applicants selected will be subject to a
Federal background investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for
access to classified matter.

An Equal Opportunity Employer

Short Course on Phase-Locked Loops

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

On September 16^th 2009, San Diego Chapter of the Circuits and Systems Society will host a Short Course on Phase-Locked Loops given by Professor Michael Perrott.

ABSTRACT

Short Course on Phase-Locked Loops IEEE Circuit and System Society, San Diego, CA, Michael H. Perrott Phase-locked loop (PLL) circuits are a key component of most modern communication circuits, and are also used in a variety of digital processor applications in order to generate high frequency, low jitter clock sources. This tutorial-level presentation will present an overview of analog and digital frequency synthesizers, including basic concepts and recent innovation. Classical analog integer-N synthesizers will first be examined in order to provide background on basic PLL components, modeling, and system level tradeoffs. Analog fractional-N synthesizers will then be presented along with key concepts in Sigma-Delta modulation. Finally, digital frequency synthesizers will be examined with high performance time-to-digital conversion being a particular focus point. High level design and simulation techniques are presented, as well as examples corresponding to recent implementations.

Date & Time:

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
9:00 am to 12:00 pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm - Break
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm

Cost:

Free

RSVP:

Not necessary

Location:

Bldg Q, Qualcomm
6455 Lusk Blvd, San Diego, CA 92121

JHU Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL)

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is a nationally recognized, university-affiliated R&D center investigating some of the nation's most complex science and engineering problems. Scientists and engineers work at the leading edge of technology in over 200 programs, ranging from defense systems engineering to space science and biomedicine.

To learn more about our organization, click here.

APL is an Equal Opportunity Employer and we value diversity in our workforce.