Summer Engineering Institute Freshmen "Break Things Better"

During the 5-week Summer Engineering Institute, incoming electrical engineering majors from primarily fourth and fifth quintile high schools took ECE5: Making, Breaking and Hacking Stuff. The class is held in the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio and is part of the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering’s Experience Engineering Initiative, aimed at giving every engineering and computer science undergraduate student a hands-on or experiential engineering course or lab each and every year – starting freshman year. 

The course is normally offered during the school year and is 10 weeks long. Students participating in the Summer Engineering Institute completed the course in just 5 weeks by meeting twice as often, with the advantage of a much smaller class size.

The final project in the course required students to program a robot to recognize the difference between black and white so that it could follow a black line drawn on white paper.  Some of the teams incorporated other features from their previous projects while other teams tried new sensors.

“Our students are building things and breaking them down to make them better,” said Truong Nguyen, Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. “That’s the goal of the hands-on curriculum – it’s open-ended so as to allow the students to discover how to make things better.”

“We adjusted the accuracy of tracking using sensors that tell the robot where it is in relation to the line,” said one student, whose robot veered off the track and spun in a circle.

My grand prize-winning experience in the 2015/16 ECE Design Competition

Over the last year I took part in the ECE Design competition. My team, “Fountain of Youth”, won first place (more on that later). The team consisted of myself (Ryan Collins), Gannon Gesiriech, Kevin Nematzadeh, and Boulos Haddad. All of us are electrical engineering students - except Boulos who was our business and marketing expert. Our goal was to design a product which helped mitigate the problems that come with aging. We designed a natural-feeling motor-assisted personal shopping cart that promotes activity and facilitates independent living.

Originally, I was not going to take part in the competition because I was busy with student orgs, a heavy class load, and TA-ing, but once I found out that it would satisfy senior-design credit (thank you, Dr. Nguyen) I could make it work with my schedule.  

As many engineering students know, class alone isn’t sufficient to satisfy craving the we have for technical knowledge.

One of my biggest goals this year was to carry out a technical project from start to finish so that I could talk about it in future job interviews. This project was perfect because it was multidisciplinary, included a business aspect, and had a direct application to a real-world problem.

This project was year-long and consisted of three steps: First was team selection in the fall, then research/data gathering and conceptual design in the winter, and finally the product development and marketing strategy in the spring. We held monthly design reviews where each team has 5 minutes to present to fellow students, and faculty (including the renowned godfather of design Dr. Don Norman). These reviews helped tremendously because it kept us accountable for the progress we made, and we developed invaluable presentation skills.

The design process for our team was pretty straightforward. First we went to senior centers and care facilities to talk to as many people as we could and learn more about the problems associated with aging. One of the interesting observations we made was that people tend to adapt to obstacles and have a hard time realizing their problems. We got around this by talking to caretakers and simply taking note of issues we had witnessed while observing people.

We were able to group the majority of problems into several major categories including mobility, health, safety, and memory. We brainstormed possible solutions and determined that the most reasonable goal was to design something that would solve a problem in mobility. We had several people say that grocery shopping was difficult due to heavy groceries and long distances traveled. This was something we knew we could solve by motorizing a cart and making it as user-friendly as possible.

We started with an already existing foldable shopping cart, and decided to retrofit it with motors and force sensors. The force sensors would read in the user’s force of push, and translate that into a speed that the motors should turn. Easy, right? Well it was easy on paper, until we actually started to build the prototype.

The first month of development was difficult because we could not find parts that fit all our requirements. We had to settle, but we were able to work around all the problems we encountered.

Word of advice: Avoid having to find motors. Finding the right ones is a nightmare.

Eventually, we made enough progress to assemble our prototype. We built a custom motor mount in the ECE makerspace in the basement of EBU 1 (thanks to our advisor Professor Michael Yip for allowing us access). We also attached our force sensors, and wrote control code to read the sensors and output the motors’ speeds.

We encountered many problems along the way, such as broken microcontrollers, mechanical issues, and safety of use. After a few long nights, and an all-nighter the night before the competition, we completed it. Though it did not feel as natural as we hoped, it worked. That was important because it provided a proof of concept and future improvements could always be implemented.

During the competition, many people tested out the prototype, and we had an exceedingly positive response during the demo phase. When it came time to present, we had actually had lots of practice from monthly presentations and we had even competed in several entrepreneurial challenges (which we did not win, but we learned a lot from). Somebody after our presentation said that it reminded them of an Apple presentation, which was quite flattering, but I remain skeptical.

In the end we took first place among some very dedicated teams. Dr. Don Norman said that the reason we placed first was because we showed the most consistent improvement throughout the design cycle from start to finish. We showed that we could set and meet goals, as well as use helpful criticism to improve our product. I also think that our presentation was engaging, and that we greatly benefitted from allowing people to get hands-on with our cart during the demo phase.

The faculty were very accommodating, making the whole process a pleasure from start to finish. We learned valuable lessons about marketing a product, solving a real problem, and the compromises necessary in product design. A big thanks to our mentor and professor Michael Yip, and the ECE Chair Dr. Nguyen for his tireless assistance. Also to Dr. Don Norman for lending his immense design wisdom over the course of the entire project. Lastly thanks to the staff and faculty of the ECE department as well as the Center for Healthy Aging for their help.

By Ryan Collins

UC San Diego Students Fabricate Device to Protect Seniors from a Fall

The AirSave team demonstrated their device during their presentation at the electrical engineering design competition in June

Falls are the leading cause of death from injury among people 65 and older killing more than 400,000 people each year. “This number is projected to increase due to the shift in the baby-boomer population,” said Jun Lu, a recent electrical engineering graduate of the University of California San Diego (BS ’16). “It is a common occurrence, seniors talk about how falling or the fear of falling affects their lives everyday but there is not a widely accepted solution.”

For Lu, that number became real when his great grandmother died after a fall. Together with electrical engineering graduate students Aida Shahi and Borhan Vasli (who are both specializing in machine learning), and Gabriel Frischer, a third year neuroscience major at UC San Diego, Lu created a device to protect seniors from this kind of accident.

The AirSave team took second place at the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s design competition in June

The device, called the AirSave impact protection system, took second place at the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s design competition in June. The competition was part of the university’s Aging and Innovation Initiative and is the result of a collaboration between the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. The goal for the projects in the competition was to improve quality of life for senior citizens.

Read more from the San Diego Union Tribune

During their research, they found that fatal falls occur mainly due to an impact of the hip, however impacts to the spine, neck and head are also common and can be catastrophic for the seniors. “We wanted to create something all-encompassing,” said Frischer.

The device includes a set of four air bags (one protecting the neck and cranium and three around the waist for hip protection) and a CO2 cartridge from a paintball gun to inflate them just before hitting the ground.

The students are using the resources in the UC San Diego EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio to fabricate prototypes. “We used the 3D printers to fabricate the airbags and the housing for the electrical components, and other tools like the function generators,” said Lu. “It’s a collaborative space, so we were also able to come up with ideas by talking to other students.”

"The AirSave Team was in the Maker Studio nearly every hour that we were open, and it is no surprise that their hard work and dedication earned them top marks in the competition," said Jesse DeWald, the facility’s director. "I think the best part of the AirSave Team using the EnVision Maker Studio, is that they inspired the other students around them to think about these very important problems and to help them realize that they have the tools and abilities to design the solutions to the problems."

“We learned a lot about the process of designing something,” said Frischer. “The biggest lesson was that we needed to design for the people we were making the device for. Initially, we thought we wanted to create a vest, but after talking to seniors, we decided on an exoskeleton.”

AirSave "exoskeleton" design

The change came about after the students spoke with residents at the La Costa Glen retirement community in Carlsbad and similar facilities.

“Everyone has a different style,” said Frischer. “It became clear that the seniors wanted a device they could wear underneath their clothes and still be comfortable. The frame of the exoskeleton is made of impact-absorbing foam, which adds an addition layer of protection on top of the airbags. Our design is unique, light, completely concealable under the wearers clothing and highly protective.”

The AirSave system includes a sensor that collects acceleration and coordination data and determines whether the person is falling, or just bending over to pick something up.

“We’re still working to improve the algorithm,” said Lu. “It’s pretty good though – the only thing it can’t differentiate is the jumping motion.”

When the AirSave team demonstrated their device during their presentation at the electrical engineering design competition in June, Frischer performed an actual tumble while wearing an accelerometer prototype so that the audience could see the rapid acceleration data from the sensor on the screen.

“The next step is to connect the airbag inflation component to the sensing component, which requires a high voltage battery, said Lu, who plans to work on the project full time next year. “The best part is, this is only the beginning.”

You can learn more about the project and how you can get involved here.

Additional Design Competition Results

In first place was the group that developed the MightyCart, a motorized, foldable shopping cart users steer by pressing sensors on the handle, making it easier to handle heavy loads. Ryan Collins, Gannon Gesiriech, Boulos Haddad and Kevin Nematzadeh — known collectively as Fountain of Youth — took home the $4,000 top prize.

The team that took home third place at the Design Competition was Team VITA, which developed pressure-sensitive carpet tiles embedded with LED lights that light a person’s path in the dark and alert others when someone has fallen. The team members were Chao-yu Lee, Wen Li, Pushen Wang and Edward Zhong. 

NanoEngineering meets chemical engineering meets electrical engineering for one grad student

Lindsay Freeman at Research Expo on Thursday, April 14, 2016

NanoEngineering meets chemical engineering meets electrical engineering for Lindsay Freeman, a graduate student at the University of California San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. Freeman is getting a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, her home department is NanoEngineering, and she is doing her research in an electrical engineering lab.

Freeman presented a poster on the fusion between optical physics and chemistry at Research Expo on Thursday, April 14 (see abstract below and see all poster abstracts here).

“The nucleic acids in DNA strands functionalized to silver have been shown to have fluorescent properties, similar to a fluoroflore,” said Freeman. “This is due to the charge transfer effect; energy is given off as light when the electrons move between the orbitals of the atoms of the nucleic acids and those of silver. We want to understand why this works. It began as trying to understand nucleic acid-silver composites, but turned into, ‘Can we use this as a way to figure out how molecules bind to a surface?’”

Freeman, from South Carolina, knew she wanted to be an engineer. As a child, she loved to build computers, and pursued computer engineering as a result. However, she shifted away from it when she realized she really liked chemistry.

“My passion is in bio-detection,” said Freeman. “I like the fusion between electrical and chemical engineering – the interdisciplinary effect of looking at biosensors. There are two components: sensors are easily understood by science, but biology is difficult. I find this field to be challenging.”

Freeman says she chose UC San Diego because the school is dedicated to both engineering and medicine, and San Diego is a well-known hub for biotech. “I looked at the facilities offered, the collaboration opportunities.”

Freeman plans to complete a postdoc at UC San Diego before pursuing other job opportunities in the area.

Regarding Research Expo, Freeman says, “My goal is to get better communicating science. In addition to networking with industry professionals, I also love interacting with other students. We publish all this great research, and this is the one time we get to see all of our fellow graduate students in one place.”

See the best poster award winners here.

Want to meet more than 200 graduate students doing innovative engineering research, like Freeman? Don’t miss Research Expo in 2017!

92. SIMULATED RAMAN CORRELATION SPECTROSCOPY FOR NUCLEIC ACID-SILVER COMPOSITES BINDING ANALYSIS

Department: Electrical & Computer Engineering
Research Institute Affiliation: Graduate Program in Chemical Engineering
Faculty Advisor(s): Y. Shaya Fainman

Abstract
Plasmonic devices are of great interest due to their ability to confine light to the nanoscale level and dramatically increase the intensity of the electromagnetic field, functioning as high performance platforms for Raman signal enhancement. While Raman spectroscopy has been proposed as a tool to identify the preferential binding sites and adsorption configurations of molecules to nanoparticles, the results have been limited by the assumption that a single binding site is responsible for molecular adsorption. Here, we develop the simulated Raman correlation spectroscopy (SRCS) process to determine which binding sites of a molecule preferentially bind to a plasmonic material and in what capacity. We apply the method to the case of nucleic acids binding to silver, discovering that multiple atoms are responsible for adsorption kinetics. This method can be applied to future systems, such as to study the molecular orientation of adsorbates to films or protein conformation upon adsorption.

Industry Application Area(s)
Electronics/Photonics | Materials | Biosensing

A Conversation with a Walt Disney Imagineer

A Conversation with Walt Disney Imagineer Jonathan Chew

Jonathan Chew, Blue Sky Program Manager at Walt Disney Imagineering, presented at this year’s ECE Day, hosted by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department for its 50th anniversary. Chew detailing the relationship between imagination and engineering. Chew’s job as the Blue Sky Program Manager is to come up with the next big idea that then get incorporated into the Disney amusement parks. Check out this Q&A:

What is imagineering?

Imagineering is the blend of creative imagination and technical know-how. We work on all of the amazing theme parks and resorts around the world that are done by Disney.

Do you see a unifying trait in all Imagineers?

They’ve gotten to explore the world and have seen how things work, why things work, what makes things work. They ask the hard questions, such as “How can I improve this experience? What is fun for the guests who come to our parks everyday? How can I make that even better? How can I make that magical? How do I hide the technology so that the story shines through?” I tell people that they should be ‘T’-shaped. The big vertical bar of the ‘T’ is like your field of expertise. I am an electrical engineer, and that’s how I approach the world. The horizontal bar is sort of what makes imagineering imagineering - experience. Imagineers bring their experiences to the table during a brainstorm, during a design, during the project.

Do you have any advice for current engineering students?

Be more open-minded. It’s okay if you don’t find the solution right away. Talk to your teammates or be willing to listen to another person’s opinion. We all get into the zone where we’re like, “I’m just going to do this myself because I know how it’s done, I know the exact answer.”

Be open to accepting the thoughts and paradigms of all of those people around you, and also know what your strengths are. I am seeing it from a technical standpoint, and this is what’s important to keep in mind. But when you’re working on a team, you shouldn’t be stuck in your viewpoint.

Finally, think of yourself as creative. Sometimes, engineers don’t think they’re creative because they can’t draw or because they can’t sing or because they can’t dance, but creativity - I think the very definition of engineering is to build and to create - Arduino, Maker projects and just plain inventing. Create, create, create.

#ILookLikeAnEngineer: Aichen Sun

Meet Aichen (Claire). Outside of painting in her free time and serving as secretary for UCSD’s HKN - one of only two females on board - she applies her electrical engineering knowledge to the medical device field.

Name: Aichen Sun

Major: Electrical Engineering

Graduation Date: June 2017

Why did you choose engineering at UC San Diego?

Before I came to UC San Diego, I wasn't completely sure about what major I wanted, but I knew what subjects I was better at and enjoyed more - math and science. I didn't grew up in a family of engineers. Actually,I was always been told that a girl like me should work on improving my communication and writing skills.

Even though I enjoyed math and science, I was confused about their real-life applications. I was first exposed to engineering during high school and was fascinated by how engineers can utilize knowledge of math and science to design products that benefit people’s lives.

I chose UC San Diego for several reasons. First of all, it has a very good engineering program. More importantly, it contains a large body of engineering students that includes many female engineering students just like me. It shows how much the school values diversity.

What are your career goals?

As an Asian and a female engineering student, I want to work at a company that greatly values diversity. I hope that I can either work as an engineer on a team or be in a position where I can have contact with the end-users of the company's products. Currently, my specific interests lie at the interface of electrical engineering and medical devices.

Do you have a favorite quote or mantra?

"Fake it ‘till you become it" and "Live life to the fullest."

What are three things that make you your own individual?

First, I think my major. As a female student, it took courage for me to pursue the electrical engineering field. Although engineering can be challenging, I believe that it has made me a more logical, precise and persistent person.

Second, I like to explore drawing and painting during my free time. They provide me with another way to define my character other than engineering.

Third, I went to school early, so I grew up with almost all older classmates. I think it's a unique experience, and it has made my mentality more mature than many other people my age.

What does this campaign mean to you?

During my schooling in China, I felt like people were less open to girls who are interested in the engineering field. From what I remember, most of the time when a girl expressed her interest of pursuing a career in engineering, people would comment that it's hard for girls to compete with guys in engineering, or that the workload is too much for a girl to handle. On the contrary, when a boy expressed his interest in pursuing an engineering degree, people complimented him and said something like "oh you are going to make good money".

I did feel a bit frustrated growing up around people who often questioned my abilities and potential, but after I came to UC San Diego, I can tell that people here are a lot more encouraging and open to female engineer students. I think it's very important that young girls be encouraged to pursue engineering, and that these girls be told not to be afraid of the stereotypes.

Regarding diversity, I did not truly realize its importance until I took a course on managing diverse teams this summer. The professor who taught the course shared some really interesting experiences she’d had. I was amazed by her stories about teams succeeding through the use of the inherent characteristics of each team member, such as race and gender. Every element has its own potential and should be greatly valued.

#ILookLikeAnEngineer: Ryan Collins

Here's the next student in our #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign. Though this campaign began with a woman facing stereotypes in engineering, we wanted to emphasize that one does not need to be part of (or look the part of) a lesser-represented group in order to have experienced any biases. Furthermore, no requirement of a particular gender or race is necessary to show support for the campaign and to recognize that inequalities do exist within engineering. 

Meet Ryan Collins, a fourth year B.S./M.S. electrical engineering student at the Jacobs School of Engineering. 

Name: Ryan Collins

Major: Electrical Engineering

Estimated graduation date: BS ‘16, MS ‘17

Why did you choose engineering at UC San Diego?

I heard it was a great school academically. Besides that, the weather is perfect, there is sort of an underdog spirit that motivates me and the campus is beautiful.

What are your career goals?

I am obsessed with outer space, I would love an engineering career that involved space in some way. I would like to work with robotics as well, so maybe one day I will be helping to put rovers - or even people - on Mars.

Do you have a favorite quote or mantra?

Luck favors the prepared.

What are three things you find unique about you?

I am a huge batman fan, I can rap the entire "The Real Slim Shady" song, and art is one of my hobbies.

What does this campaign mean to you?

In my experience, blatant discrimination towards others is a thing I rarely see, but that doesn’t mean discrimination isn’t happening.

The truth is that discrimination also comes in the form of subconscious bias, also referred to as "Colorblind Racism". That is the idea that between two otherwise equal people, you will give preference to the one whose race you subconsciously prefer or trust. Many people who believe themselves to be completely fair may not realize this, and it is important for them to analyze their behavior from an objective point of view to see if they are inadvertently discriminating.

I can say that there have been times where I noticed that I have been "lucky" when I was chosen for something, or that somebody trusted me more than they should have. I wonder if some of the reason has to do with my race.

You asked to place the frame underneath your face - why?

Since this campaign is to break free from stereotypes, I would put the frame below my face to represent the idea that we can break free from convention- it is to show that we should think outside the box and not just evaluate things at face value. The frame does serve an important point it shows that we are perceived by our physical image, and people DO see us for our race.

However, our character extends beyond our picture, just as our person extends beyond the frame.

Just a thought.

Keep up with us as we continue to feature students and stories! Remember to follow the Jacobs School on social media to stay updated with the hasthag!