• Chen-Ching Liu Named Director of APT Center
• Vagners' Robotic Airplane Completes Historic Flight
• Kim's Imaging Advance Improves Prostate Cancer Treatment
• Two EE faculty have recently been appointed Emeritus Professors
• Faculty Appointments
• New Faculty
• New Department Chair
• EE Robot Brings out First Baseball at Mariners Game
• Bartel's Distinguished Lecturer for Fall 1998 Announced
• Graduate Students Run Their Own Seminar EE 592
• ABC Features Department Research
• Department Hosts IGARSS98 Conference

Dean Denice Denton has announced the appointment of Chen-Ching Liu, Professor of Electrical Engineering, as Director of the Advanced Power Technologies (APT) Center. The APT Center is a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary research team formed by th e University of Washington, Arizona State University, Iowa State University and Virginia Tech. All four universities have well-recognized power engineering programs. The APT concept expands traditional power engineering to a broader context that involve s new technologies/ techniques in the areas of information, signal processing, computer science and economics. The formalized multi-university research and education collaboration is a special feature of the new APT program.

The APT Center was launched in July 1998. A set of industry membership and technology transfer agreements has been established through the effort led by Assistant Provost Don Baldwin. The APT Center at the UW is currently supported by Cegelec ESCA, Mi tsubishi Electric, Japan, and ENEL, Italy. The APT team has also been working together on proposals to NSF, EPRI, DoD and industry.

Dr. Liu has taught at the UW Department of Electrical Engineering since 1983. He received his BSEE in 1976 and his MSEE degree in 1978 from National Taiwan University. He received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. Other fac ulty members of the APT team include Mohamed El-Sharkawi, Mark Damborg, Rich Christie, Peter Lauritzen, Sinclair Yee, H.P. Yee, Ming-Ting Sun, Jeng-Neng Hwang, Steven Tanimoto (CS&E) and Jacques Lawarree (Economics).

With an assist from Latvia's lady luck, the third time was the charm for an Aerosonde miniature robotic airplane and its developers in their bid to complete the first trans-Atlantic crossing by an autonomous aircraft.

After two Aerosondes launched on August 17th failed to reach their destinations, a third plane, named Laima after the Latvian goddess of good fortune, successfully completed the 2,000 mile, 26-hour flight on Friday, August 21. The plane landed at about 1:40 p.m. (5:40 a.m. PDT) in a grass field on South Uist of the Outer Hebrides Islands of Scotland after taking off from Bell Island, Newfoundland, at 6:29 a.m. (1:59 a.m. PDT) Thursday. In addition to being the first trans-Atlantic flight by an unmanned airplane, the 29-pound aircraft becomes the smallest aircraft of any kind to cross the Atlantic.

"The third time was the charm, and apparently we needed Laima," added Juris Vagners, UW professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and adjunct professor of Electrical Engineering. Vagners was unable to join the field crews for the trans-Atlantic missio n but named what turned out to be the record-setting plane in honor of his Latvian heritage. "Of course, we didn't intend to get so wet before we succeeded, but the important point is that we did succeed and achieved a significant milestone in development of the aircraft."

The University of Washington team has been working on the development of the Aerosonde with Environmental Systems and Services of Melbourne, Australia, and The Insitu Group, a Bingen, Washington based aerospace research and development firm. The trans -Atlantic crossing project was sponsored by The Boeing Co., Conic Division, L-3 Communications, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

Vagners' teaching interests include dynamics, classical control systems, analysis and synthesis, and optimal control and estimation. His research interests are in the application of unconventional control techniques, i.e., artificial neural networks, f uzzy logic and evolutionary programming, to control systems design.

 
Dr. Hui Liu joined the EE Department as an Assistant Professor in July 1998.   He earned his doctorate in Electrical & Computer Engineering from University of Texas at Austin in 1995.  Prior to joining UW, Dr. Liu was an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia.  He conducts research in personal communication systems, channel equalization and coding as well as other aspects of  multiple access information theory. He is also involved in experimental studies of microwave propagation channels, antenna array signal processing, and fast algorithm development and DSP implementation.Hui Liu specializes in telecommunications, especially personal wireless services.

Akira Ishimaru first came to UW EE as a Ph.D. student in 1954. During this time, he also served as an acting instructor. He became a assistant Professor after receiving his Ph.D. in 1958. Dr. Ishimaru has conducted studies in many areas of antennas and propagation including pattern synthesis, unequally spaced arrays, leaky waves, periodic structures, anisotropic media, and waves in random media. His career in electrical engineering has been full of achievement, such as authoring Wave Propogation and Scattering in Random Media (Academic Press) which was translated into Russian and Chinese, and being the founding editor of the journal, Waves in Random Media, a publication of the Institute of Physics in the United Kingdom. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1996 and in 1998 was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society.

James Meditch joined the department in July of 1977 as Chair, a position he held for eight years. He also served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the College of Engineering from 1987-90. Dr. Meditchís research interests include digital commu nication networks, switching and traffic theory, broadband ISDN, and multimedia communications.

Howard Chizeck has announced the appointment of two Associate Chairs: Mohamed El-Sharkawi and Les Atlas.

Mohamed El-Sharkawi will serve as Associate Chair of Academics and Curriculum. He was first appointed Associate Chair by Greg Zick in 1996. He also serves as Chair of the departmentís ABET 2000 committee and served as the Graduate Program Coordinator from 1993-96.

Les Atlas will serve as Associate Chair in charge of Research. Professor Atlas joined the department in 1984. Professor Atlas is the director of the Interacttve Systems Design Lab. Les has served as director of technology transfer for a Department o f Defense multi-university research initiative as well as acting as General Chair of the 1998 IEEE Acoustics Speech.and Processing Conference, which brought 2,000 people to Seattle in May of this year.

When the Seattle Mariners needed a robot for a promotional game event, who did they call?  The University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineer ing. The M’s games vs. Kansas City on Saturday, July 18 was “Turn Ahead the Clock Night”, a premature celebration of 50 years of Mariners baseball.  Ads for the event promised Mariners and Royals in futuristic uniforms playing in a “Biodome” (formerly known as the Kingdome), with laser lights and robots providing the 21st century atmosphere.  

Gregg Greene, marketing relations coordinator for the Mariner’s and 1995 UW graduate, contacted Professor Bob Albrecht about robot availability.  Albrecht and graduate student Victor Moore proceeded to bring Miss Marple, a three-wheeled robot named for Agatha Christie’s fictional crime-solving sleuth, to the Kingdome where she was renamed “Mr. Scrapps” for the evening.   Coming out from the left field wall, Marple/Scrapps delivered the baseball for the first pitch to Mr. James Doohan (Scotty from the original StarTrek), as he emerged from a DeLorean.
 

The Mariners went on to win the game, beating the Royals by a score of 8-5 (perhaps due to Miss Marple’s magical delivery of the baseball?).Reports of an offer to add Miss Marple to the teamsĖ rooster have yet to be confirmed.  

Dr. Curt Carlson, Ph.D., will visit the UW on September 28 & 29 to give three talks in the first fall quarter 1998 presentation of the Bartels' Distinguished Lecturer Series. Dr. Carlson is the Executive Vice President for Ventures and Licensing of the Sarnoff Corporation. In his capacity as head of Ventures and Licensing, Dr. Carlson has helped Sarnoff found over ten new companies. They include Sensar, a security access comp any based on iris identification; SRTC, a video server company; SARIF, the first polysilicon display company in the U.S.; SDC, a cable-data modem company; PVT, a television broadcast products company; Secure Products, a product authentication company; Del sys, a pharmaceutical drug equipment company; Orchid, a combinatorial chemistry and genomics drug discovery company; Rivit, a company that creates remotely readable electronic tags; Songbird, a disposable hearing aid company; and VideoBrush, a consumer vi deo software company.

Dr. Carlson's first talk will occur on Sept. 28 at 4:30pm as part of EE500B's weekly seminar on Image Computing. The topic will be "Entrepreneurial R&D and the Sarnoff Way." The location for this event is Guggenheim 217

On September 29, Dr. Carlson will speak at 1:30pm on "Pyramid-Based Computer Vision" in EE/CSE 403 and at 4:30pm will be in EE/CSE Room 125, talking about "The Future of Digial Video."

IGARSS'98 (the 1998 INTERNATIONAL GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING SYMPOSIUM ) was held in Seattle, Washington from July 6-10, 1998.   The University of Washington and, in particular, the Electrical Engineering Department, served as host institutions. The theme of  IGARSS98 was Sensing and Managing the Environment, emphasizing the important role of remote sensing for managing limited natural resources.

Check out the nice article, graphics and photo of Professor Dan Dailey--all describing SmartTrek, on the ABC web site.