Faculty News

Professor Fernando Alvarado was an invited featured speaker at the NSF-sponsored Workshop on Future Research Directions for Complex Interactive Electric Networks, in Washington D.C., November 16 and 17, 2000. The title of his talk was "The Relationship Between Reliability and Market Design: Where are We?" It addressed the problems of connecting electricity reliability to the design of electricity markets.

Alvarado was also an invited session speaker at the INFORMS conference in San Antonio on the subject of "California Electricity Prices: A Spectral Analysis of Changing Price Patterns as a Result of Price Caps" on November 6, 2000.

Alvarado recently concluded three years as convenor of a 15-member task force formed to study methods for dealing with ancillary service costs in a deregulated electricity market. The task force analyzed current practices and included industry leaders from nine countries on four continents. CIGRE, a French-based international association that studies and exchanges knowledge about electric power systems worldwide, commissioned the study. Alvarado presented the group's findings and recommendations in Paris at the CIGRE conference, Aug. 25 through Sept. 1.

National Technological University (NTU) named Professor Robert Lorenz an Outstanding Instructor for 1999. The honor is based on student assessments of NTU's more than 700 instructors.

Professor Robert Lasseter was one of three invited guests on the National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday program on October 6. Program Host Ira Flatow led Lasseter, editor/publisher Richard Perez of Home Power Magazine, and the Department of Energy Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Robert Kripowicz through a one-hour discussion of the future of power generation and transmission.

Among other energy related topics, Lasseter explained the potential of microgrid power generation in which residential neighborhoods and businesses would employ small-scale natural-gas turbine generators to provide efficient power for their own use. To listen to the program on-line, go to www.npr.org/programs/scifri and click on `latest show' and then `previous show' until the Oct. 6 program appears.

Researchers in the college will share a prominent role in the National Science Foundation's new awards program to mold the future of information technology. NSF announced September 13 that 95 institutions will share $90 million in grants for the first year of its new Information Technology Research initiative.

The agency chose a total of 210 projects from more than 1,400 proposals. UW-Madison scientists and engineers will be the lead investigators on four projects totaling more than $8.1 million over five years. Another UW-Madison researcher is part of a multi-university team that will receive $11.8 million over five years.

Assistant Professor Mikko Lipasti and Professor James Smith were awarded $450,000 over three years to develop a better verification system for computations that occur on parallel computing networks.

Professor John Webster has been awarded a 3-year, $675,000 grant by the National Institutes of Health. His research project is titled, "Electrode Design for Cardiac Tachyarrhythmia RF Ablation." Unwanted extra electrical conduction pathways in the heart cause high heart rate (tachycardia). An electrode on a catheter threaded through the vessels into the heart maps responses to electrical stimulation to locate the site. Radio frequency (RF) current at 500 kHz through the same electrode causes Joule heating of the heart wall (myocardium). The pathways are heated to 50 degrees C (ablated) to form lesions that stop conduction. Heating is affected by thermal conduction and thermal convection, with excessive heating causing unwanted coagulum and steam formation.

Webster's team is working to design improved large area, non-contact and needle electrodes to yield more uniform current density, more uniform heating, and larger lesion volume. Professors Don Novotny, Willis Tompkins and John Webster have received IEEE Millennium Medals. Tompkins and Webster are also on the biomedical engineering faculty. As part of its celebration of the Third Millennium, the IEEE awarded the medals and certificates to selected members around the world in recognition and appreciation of valued services and outstanding contributions.

Two new grants involving ECE faculty and staff recently received approval from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Professor Franco Cerrina received a three-year, $1,880,820 grant to study extendibility and innovation in nanolithography, moving toward sub-50 nm patterning. The research will investigate novel solutions to the problem of overlay accuracy, and correcting magnification and other distortions in the mask. A long-term goal centers on issues affecting the ability to pattern at the true nanoscale level, with the focus on realistic approaches to materials problems.

Associate Professor Parameswaran Ramanathan received a three-year, $935,000 grant to study location-centric distributed computation and signal processing in microsensor networks. The overall goal is to provide programmers with a simple, intuitive abstraction of the data exchange in microsensor networks without sacrificing the efficiency of the underlying distributed computation.

Assistant Professor Lei He has received two grants from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). The first three-year contract of $450,000 will fund research on power-efficient high performance processor in deep submicron technology. It is a joint project with Professor James Smith.

The second, $150,000 contract is SRC custom funding provided by Hewlett Packard (HP) Labs. It will fund a study of power modeling and optimization for high-performance VLIW processors. HP donated a $20,000 workstation. He also recently received gift computers from SUN Microsystems, including two Enterprise 220R servers and 10 Sun Ray machines.