ELEC 599: 2008-2009
First Year Projects
ECE Faculty will provide titles/abstracts for projects by November 21.
Student Proposals:
Spring 2007 -
Spring 2008
Computer Engineering
Joseph Cavallaro
Student needs: 2
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Topics in Architecture Analysis
of Processors and Accelerators for Wireless Systems.
Alan Cox
Student needs: 1
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- rethinking virtual-to-physical
address translation for data intensive applications
Farinaz Koushanfar
Student needs: 2
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Topics in security, trust, and
data integrity of reconfigurable and cognitive radios
Kartik Mohanram
Student needs: 3 students
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Topics in circuit design and
computer engineering
Peter Varman
Student needs: 1 to 2 students
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Resource Management Issues in
Data Centers
Lin Zhong
Student needs: 3
Suggested Elec 599 project:
- Efficiency-driven wireless
system design
- Energy management in trace-gas
sensor networks for event detection
- Efficiency and equilibriums of
information exchange in socially inspired networks
Multimedia Communications
Wireless Networks
Edward Knightly
Student needs: approximately 2
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Topics in multihop wireless networking
spanning theory to experimental research.
Example projects include medium access protocol design and analysis,
network
analysis and control, mobility, security, and new applications.
Signal and Image Processing
Richard Baraniuk
Student needs:
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Topics in Compressive Sensing
Erzsébet Merényi
Student needs: 1
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Neural manifold learning in
high-dimensional spaces
Topics range from theories of self-organized learning to applications.
Self-organized learning is one of the biologically most plausible
machine learning paradigms, mimicking information processing in the
cerebral cortex. SOMs and variants are powerful for identification of
structure in "complicated" data.
Theories for project topics include
"recent advances in
self-organizing maps (SOMs)"; magnification control in
adaptive map formation; graph representation of SOM knowledge and
optimum segmentation; metric learning for (classification of)
inhomogeneous fused data. Applications include structure
identification (unsupervised segmentation or clustering) for
discoveries from multi- and hyperspectral images (of Earth, Mars,
other planets, Moon), or from clinical data; comparative studies in
supervised "precision" classification; studies
in selection of relevant features / compression for hyperspectral
images; classification of fused disparate image data of planetary
surfaces.
The 599 project will be a well-defined subset of the chosen topic, and
will build on tools developed in previous work.
Michael Orchard
Student needs: 1
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
- Multiple-frame super-resolution
As you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, taking in the stunning
scene before you, you regret not having invested the extra money for
the 16-megapixel SLR camera you had decided was too much a luxury.
You decide to shoot the scene with your 10-megapixel camera N (e.g.
N=16) different times. This project addresses the challenge of how to
process the N different low-resolution (LR) images to produce a
higher-resolution (HR) image that might approach the quality of the
desired 16-megapixel image. Since the N LR images will not be exactly
aligned, you will need to estimate local, sub-pixel alignment offsets
between LR images (i.e. the "image registration"
problem). Given the alignments, the problem of estimating the HR
image is complicated by the fact that ALL digital images suffer from
substantial aliasing, particularly in their highest frequency
components. Due to aliasing, every high-frequency component of each
LR image is composed of a sum of two or more unknown frequency
components of the original continuous scene. However, since your N
different LR images provide information about different sums of the
unknown spectral components, it should be possible to resolve the
unknown spectral components, thereby estimating a higher-resolution,
de-aliased image. Since aliasing in the LR images also effects image
registration, the image registration and de-aliasing problems will
need to be addressed jointly.
Photonics and Nanoengineering
Daniel Mittleman
Student needs: 1 or 2
Suggested Elec 599 projects:
-
The science and technology associated with terahertz radiation is a
rapidly growing area of research and development. New techniques for
generating, detecting, manipulating, and controlling terahertz
electromagnetic radiation are leading to many exciting possible
applications in sensing, imaging, and spectroscopy. Recently, we have
discovered several new waveguiding techniques which hold great
promise. One of these involves the propagation of terahertz pulses
between two smooth parallel metal plates. Calculations of the
intrinsic attenuation suggest that this method could provide orders of
magnitude improvement, as compared to all previous waveguiding
methods. This 599 project involves an experimental validation of
these computational results. A successful completion of this project
will involve several steps:
- Become familiar with the basic science and technology of terahertz
radiation, and why it is important.
- Become familiar with the theory of parallel plate metal waveguides
as applied to the THz domain, as well as other common waveguide
techniques.
- Become trained in the operation of the THz time-domain spectrometer
in the laboratory.
- Design and fabricate parallel plate metal waveguides for testing.
These will need to be long enough so that a very small
attenuation-per-unit-length can still produce a measureable effect.
- Test and compare to theoretical predictions.
Bioengineering
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Last modified: November 21, 2008