If you plan on attending this seminar please contact Terri Lavorgna or call the Academic Affairs Office at 471-7995 at least one day before the seminar.
Wireless Communications Lab Using the GNU Open Software Development Platform
PRESENTED BY:
Dr. Robert W. Heath Jr., Associate Professor
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
OVERVIEW:
Early exposure to wireless communications for undergraduates allows students
to connect wireless more readily to their fundamentals, gets them excited about
research, and makes them more marketable to industry. The wireless communication
laboratory course, cross-listed as both undergraduate course EE 371C and
graduate course EE 381V, teaches wireless communication to undergraduates from a
digital signal processing perspective. A key feature of this course is the
experimental component, which engages active learners. The students send and
receive real wireless waveforms, as opposed to simulation or circuit based
approaches. A complete set of lecture notes, a laboratory manual including
prelabs, a code framework, and lab experiments were created to support this
course. Unfortunately, a limitation of the present course is the use of
expensive hardware. This means that (i) students have limited access to the lab
since they must be monitored by a TA at all times (ii) experimentation is
discouraged for fear of damaging the equipment. This also results in few senior
design projects that take advantage of the lab for the same reasons.
The objective of this academic development project was to convert the
experimental portion of the course to the GNU software defined radio platform.
The GNU radio platform is a combined hardware and software framework for
software radio development. Hardware and software were designed based on an open
source model. The hardware platform has the advantage of lower cost but is more
difficult to program. I will describe progress made on using the GNU software
radio development platform, including challenges overcome and remaining tasks.
Development of Interactive Web-based Distance Learning on Biomedical Devices Technologies
PRESENTED BY:
Dr. John Zhang, Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
The new joint department of biomedical engineering at UT creates the
immediate need for long distance education and exchange of complementary
expertise across multiple campuses, hospitals and medical centers between Austin
and Houston. For medical devices technologies, the conventional classroom
instruction cost about $200 an hour. We estimate that the interactive web-based
training costs about one third of that. What’s more, training via the web can
serve instruction globally – no seat restrictions, around the clock, and without
travel costs. However, distance learners also face the unique challenge of
studying without the traditional structure of lecture rooms. We started the
development of an interactive and animated website to describe and teach scaling
effects across multiple physical disciplines with focus on Micro and Nano
biomedical device physics and applications. In addition to lecture notes and
power point slide shows, the site features the multimedia presentations and
videos of principles of micro and nano devices, materials and processes over
disparate time and length scales. Through the modular “knowledge nodes”, we
expect to help the undergraduate students and the general public better
understand why, in some cases, it makes sense to miniaturize a device for
reasons beyond economics, volume, and weight. There are two parts in the
project. Part I: we will deal with the development of enhanced web-based visual
learning portal using Flash animation, video streaming and audio/text
annotations). Part II: we will select representative research projects, and
present them online using JavaScript 3D tools.
We expect this academic development proposal to greatly enhance this
inter-institutional teaching effort to cover broad applications using
nanotechnologies for imaging and therapy in medicines. The technological
platform will be readily extendable to other engineering classes in the broad
areas of advanced material, product design and fabrication at disparate scales,
and multiscale simulations..