The need for big data that the internet of things (IoT) has created in recent years has turned the focus on integrating the human body in the quest to understand it better, and in turn use such information for detection and prevention of harmful conditions. Applications in which continuous and uninterrupted operation is required, or where the use of external power sources may be challenging demands the use of self-powered autonomous systems. Organic photovoltaic devices are flexible, lightweight, and soft, capable of interacting with the human body and its mechanical demands. Their processability from solutions permits their adaptation to versatile fabrication techniques such as spin coating, roll-to-roll coating and inkjet printing, with benefits including low material usage and freedom of design. In this talk, I will present how organic photovoltaics can be utilized in printed electronics as energy harvesting devices and go through the historical progress of organic/hybrid photovoltaics as well as the main activities that are ongoing in my research lab ‘Omegalab’.

Wide bandgap (WBG) compound semiconductors including GaN have shown enormous success in solid-state lighting, display, and electrification in recent decades due to superior properties such as direct bandgap, high electron mobility, and large breakdown field. They have been changing the world by elevating living standards and addressing grand challenges such as global warming. The pioneering researchers have been recognized by numerous accolades including the Nobel Prize and most recently, the Queen Elizabeth Prize. Lately, the III-nitride and III-oxide ultrawide bandgap (UWBG) compound semiconductors with bandgap larger than 3.4 eV have attracted increasing attentions: they have been regarded as the 4th wave/generation after the consequential Si, III-V, and WBG semiconductors. Because the UWBG along with other properties could enable electronics and photonics to operate with significantly greater power and frequency capability and at much shorter far−deep UV wavelengths, respectively, both crucial for human society. Besides, they could be employed for the revolutionary quantum information science as the host and photonic platform. However, extensive multi-disciplinary studies of growth, materials, physics, and devices are essential to unearth the potentials due to the infancy. This seminar would cover the latest research on those aspects. It includes growth of state-of-the-art materials, discovery of unique material properties, and development of a widely adopted device physics framework for photonics and electronics especially short and long wavelength photonic devices.

In this thesis, we focus on precisely analyzing the high dimensional error performance of such regularized convex optimization problems under the presence of different impairments (such as uncertainties and/or correlations) in the measurement matrix, which has independent Gaussian entries. The precise nature of our analysis allows performance comparison between different types of these estimators and enables us to optimally tune the involved hyperparameters. In particular, we study the performance of some of the most popular cases in linear inverse problems, such as the Least Squares (LS), Regularized Least Squares (RLS), LASSO, Elastic Net, and their box-constrained variants.

The widespread popularity of smart meters enables an immense amount of fine-grained smart meter data to be collected. Meanwhile, the deregulation of the power industry, particularly on the delivery side, has continuously been moving forward worldwide. Electricity retailer is one of the main participants in the retail market. This presentation will discuss how an electricity retailer can increase the competitiveness in the retail market by making full use of the fine-grained smart meter data. Since load forecasting is fundamental for various businesses of the retailer, the first part of this presentation will study how to enhance the performance of aggregated load forecasting using the fine-grained smart meter data. Designing customizing prices is an effective way to promote consumer interactions and increase customer stickiness for retailers. The second part of this presentation will introduce a novel data-driven approach for incentive-compatible customizing time-of-use (ToU) price design so that the benefits of both the retailer and consumers can be gained.

In this webinar we will give an overview of several key technologies related to our special issues in Frontiers of Communications and Networks; (1) visible light communications (VLC) and (2) applications of machine learning in optical and wireless communication systems.

With the advent of increasingly intelligent algorithms, robots are capable of planning and performing increasingly challenging and creative tasks. Safety, however, remains an essential requirement on robotic behaviors. It is also a property that is hard or impossible to prove for virtually all intelligent algorithms of practical value. Ariadne is a model-based paradigm that enables the safe operation of many robotic systems, even though the algorithms involved with the operation may not be verifiable. Ariadne, or "plan B" engineering, will be illustrated in various current Robotics contexts derived from Ariadne's own Greek mythology, railroad systems, nuclear energy production, air transportation, and others.

Actuators, electric vehicles, renewable energy systems, oil rigs and smart cities are all examples of complex systems that have evolved over time to better address societal needs. Mechatronics, the synergistic integration of electrical, mechanical and computing, has powered this evolution and enabled higher power density actuators, increased hosting of renewable energy in power grids, improved drilling efficiency and responsive cities. In this talk, I will share research highlights from the Mechatronics and Energy Systems Research Group (MERGE) to demonstrate value creation through engineered synergies.

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What will it take for UAVs—and the associated ecosystem—to take off? Arguably, ubiquitous high-capacity links paired with hyper-reliable command and control all along. And indeed, meeting these aspirations may entail a full-blown mobile network support. While the understanding of UAV cellular communications has been advancing, many fundamental challenges remain to be addressed, with new applications demanding original solutions. In this talk, we blend academic and industrial views, navigating from 4G to 6G UAV use cases, requirements, and enabling technologies

Due to the increasing scarcity of RF spectrum and growing interference due to multiple users, deploying next generation high-speed wireless networks is becoming increasingly difficult. The use of unlicensed optical bands for wireless communications has been heralded as an exciting development for future broadband access for indoor, underwater and space communication links.

A little more than half of the world’s population enjoy benefits of information technology which is enabled by complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) electronics. Going forward, we will enjoy further augmentation of quality of life through integrated CMOS electronic systems consisting of logic, memory, communication devices, energy storage and harvester, power management units, sensors and actuators. Their main attributes will include but not limited to high performance and storage capacity for data management; seamless connectivity; energy efficiency; hyper-scale integration density; appropriate functionalities based on their applications and operational environment; reliability and safety; and finally affordability and simplicity to expand their user base to include those who do not have any access to them today. Even using last fifty years’ wealth of knowledge and experience, such integrated electronic system development and deployment is a monumental engineering challenge. From that perspective, redesigning CMOS electronics might seem to be an overly ambitious goal specially, if that means transformation of such physically rigid complex electronic systems into a fully flexible one. To address this intriguing challenge, we have developed a unique coin like architecture based soft singular platform, which can be used as the building block of standalone fully flexible CMOS electronic system with all the aforementioned characteristics. We have devised an effective heterogeneous integration strategy based on mature and reliable CMOS technology only to integrate hybrid materials and diverse set of devices for multi-disciplinary applications. These will be the focus of this talk.

The need for higher data-rates and more ubiquitous connectivity for an ever-increasing number of wirelessly connected devices motivates the exploration of uncharted spectral bands. In this context, Terahertz (THz)-band (0.1–10 THz) communication is envisioned as a key wireless technology of the next decade. The very large bandwidth available at THz frequencies (tens to hundreds of consecutive GHz) can alleviate the spectrum scarcity problem while enabling wireless Terabit-per-second (Tb/s) links in personal and local area networks, backhaul for urban and rural areas, and even space networks.

The implementation of robotic solutions to accomplish automated tasks in industrial sectors has tremendously increased the human performance capacity and enhanced the cost, quality and delivery time for different tasks and products. Having already proven their utility at the macroscale, robots also show their usefulness when we approach the infinitely small dimensions, for applications such as inspection, cell manipulation, assembly, biopsy and drug delivery. The way to the microworld is not that simple; reducing the size of robots from macro scale to micro scale cannot be accomplished by merely miniaturizing the different parts of an existing robot. The variation in the scale of physical effects with the size scale and the difficulties of fabrication and assembly at the micro scale make the macro-solutions for actuation and sensing unsuitable for microdevices. Other actuation mechanisms with deformable structures and integrated sensing solutions are more efficient at microscale and compatible with microfabrication limitations. This talk focuses on different aspects related to mobile microrobots, including limitations and challenges, actuation mechanisms, power delivery, and current works in our team for the development of mobile microrobots.

Modular robotics deals with robots that are an assemblage of smaller sized and often identical robots. The benefits of modular robots are many, chief among them being how easily they can be transported from one location to another. Moreover, their size can be adjusted according to the task at hand without requiring extensive redesign or specialization, therefore making them the object of significant research efforts.

To suit massive connectivity of machine-type communications in smart cities, this talk discusses the energy-efficient resource allocation for layered-division multiplexing (LDM) based non-orthogonal multicast and unicast transmission in cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where each user equipment (UE) performs wireless information and power transfer simultaneously. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is an emerging paradigm for the enabling of massive connectivity in 5G networks and beyond.

Electromagnetic devices and systems are at the heart of technological advances revolutionizing many fields of science and engineering including energy management, biomedical electronics, communications and computing, and even environmental monitoring and civil design. Many of these systems are electrically large, their frequency of operation has a wide dynamic range, their device components are geometrically intricate with dimensions varying by orders of magnitude, and finally their optimal design requires many repetitions of characterizations with different parameters.

Wave functional materials are artificial materials that can control wave propagation as wish. In this talk, I will give a brief review on the progress of wave functional materials and reveal the secret behind the engineering of these materials to achieve desired properties. In particular, I will focus on our contributions on metamaterials and metasurfaces. I will introduce the development of effective medium, a powerful tool in modeling wave functional materials, followed by some illustrative examples demonstrating the intriguing properties, such as redirection, emission rate enhancement, wave steering and cloaking.

Abstract

We develop a computational framework for risk mitigation in high population density event

In this webinar, we describe the common terminology for these two communities. First, the traffic management system architecture, requirements, terminology, and services are discussed. A quick overview of existing technologies that can be useful for aerial deconfliction. Next, the focus will shift to wireless technologies used for the tactical (while flying) deconfliction: ADS-B, p2p LoRa, WiFi, FLARM.

Advances in power electronics have enabled many renewable energy applications. Wind energy harnessing is very promising and offshore farm installations have grown considerably in the past years. In this thesis, we introduce a novel power converter solution for the parallel connection of high-power offshore wind turbines, suitable for HVDC collection and transmission. For the parallel operation of energy sources in an HVDC grid, DC link voltage control is required. The proposed system is based on a full-power rated uncontrolled diode bridge rectifier in series with a partially-rated fully-controlled thyristor bridge rectifier. The thyristor bridge acts as a voltage regulator to ensure the flow of the desired current through each branch, where a reactor is placed in series for filtering of the DC current. AC filters are installed on the machine side to mitigate harmonic content. The mathematical modeling of the system is derived and the control design procedure is discussed. Guidelines for equipment and device specifications are presented. The concept is validated through simulation, and an experimental framework for testing of the system is suggested.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a foundational building block for the upcoming information revolution and imminent smart-world era. Particularly, the IoT bridges the cyber domain to everything and anything within our physical world which enables unprecedented ubiquitous monitoring, connectivity, and smart control. In this Ph.D. defense, we present Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) enabled IoT network designs for enhanced estimation, detection, and connectivity. The utilization of UAVs can offer an extra level of flexibility which results in more advanced and efficient connectivity and data aggregation for the IoT devices.

In this talk, we address fundamental questions that should be asked when contemplating future smart and connected systems, namely, How, Where and What? How can we design computing and communication nodes that best utilize resources in a way that is cognizant of both the abilities of the platform, as well as the requirements of the network? Where are the nodes deployed? By understanding the context of deployment, one can architect unique solutions that are currently unimaginable. With the transformation to diverse applications such as body area networking, critical infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, autonomous driving etc., the need for innovative solutions becomes even more amplified. What benefit can be inferred from the data gathered by nodes in the capacity of computing, communication and sensing? The talk will discuss how recent advances in wireless computing and communication nodes can be harnessed to serve the multitude of deployment scenarios required to empower communities of the future with smart and connected systems.

This webinar will explore the potentiality of massive MIMO arrays in a scenario where radar and communication tasks coexist. The first part of the talk will be devoted to the discussion of a scenario where a wireless network is to co-exist with an external radar system sharing the same frequency band. The second part of the talk will be instead focused on a scenario where a base station equipped with a large scale antenna array simultaneously perform the task of radar surveillance of the surrounding environment and of data communication with mobile users.

Nanophotonic research has a huge influence on various aspects of modern society, such as communication, commercial products, biochemistry, and information processing. A central topic in the research of nanophotonics is the geometrical optimization of the nanostructures since the geometries are deeply related to the Mie resonances and the localized surface plasmon resonances in dielectric and metallic nanomaterials. When many nanostructures are assembled to form a metamaterial, the tuning of the geometrical parameters can bring even more profound effects, such as bound states in the continuum (BIC) with infinite quality factors (Q factors). Moreover, with the development of nanofabrication technologies, there is a trend of integrating nanostructures in the vertical direction, which provides more degrees of freedom for controlling the device performance and functionality. In this dissertation, we explore how the geometrical changes of the nanostructures influence the nanophotonic devices, furthermore, we utilize machine learning techniques to actively control the topologies of the devices to enhance their performances.