EE Bulletin Board--announcements

The EE Program at South Dakota State University proudly graduated 18 new electrical engineers:

Carlson, Shane

Everson, Jeffrey

Johansen, Jared L.

Karl, Thomas

Klein, Micthell

Knudsen, Eric B.

Landau, Sara

Larson, Douglas

Meirose, Chad A.

Nguyen, Tung

Rolfes, Douglas

Rossow, Michael K.

Schenkel, Joseph W.

Schultz, Christopher P.

Schutz Dustin

Storovich, Julie A.

Uecker, Jeremy D.

Wingen, Wesley R.

The SDSU College of Engineering Expo was held in Frost Arena on the 31st of March. This event is designed for the College of Engineering to showcase the in-house talent, with booths and presentations demonstrating current students' work. It also gives SDSU the chance to provide area High School students with a day of engineering, competition, and fun. There are many activities that a high school 'team' may enter. For example, there are contests such as a robotic vehicle hill climb, a bridge building contest, a newspaper tower contest, and a Physics bowl, among others. Here is a photo gallery showing some of the students representing the EE department.

Start-up costs for a first-year team are about $600.00. The sponsors for the 2005 Hillcrest FIRST LEGO League Robotics Team included the South Dakota Space Grant Consortium, South Dakota State University Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Daktronics, and 3M. Money donated by these sponsors helped cover costs, which included the team registration fee, the official FLL LEGO Robot set, the field setup kit, and team t-shirts.

At its Dec. 15 meeting, the South Dakota Board of Regents approved a doctorate in electrical engineering at South Dakota State University. If the Legislature approves funding to support the program, it will begin with the fall 2006 term.

The new doctorate will focus on alternative energy, specifically photovoltaic (solar) energy. The program is part of the Governor’s 2010 Initiative to use state funding for research programs to impact the state’s economy.

“This investment by the state will mean millions of dollars of externally funded research and economic development impact on South Dakota,” said Dr. Lewis Brown, dean of the SDSU College of Engineering. “And that’s not even talking about the results of the research. This is going to be a big net gain for South Dakota, not just an expense.”

Gov. Mike Rounds has budgeted $600,000 to support the program. That will fund three new faculty research positions, six doctoral graduate assistantships, and other operating expenses. The College will also redirect internal resources in the amount of $375,000 over the next five years to support the doctoral program.

SDSU is currently the only land-grant university in the country and South Dakota is the only state in the U.S. without a doctorate in electrical engineering.

The EE Program at South Dakota State University proudly graduated 7 new EEs on December 10. They are:

A team of SDSU graduate students competed in the "Cricket Lite 2005" tournament held in Fargo, ND recently. Eight of the team's members--Vishwanath Reddy, Durga Devineni, Robi Behanan, Shriharsha Madhavan, Amit Angal, Sriramulu Pasikanti, Vinay Kumar Ravula, and Panakalu Vangala--are grad students in the EE program. This team went in as defending champions, and turned in a respectable third-place finish this year. Click here for a photograph of the team and list of its sponsors. Congratulations to the SDSU cricket players!

The Software Engineering program at SDSU is going strong and growing every semester. The first time I taught the Introductory course there were only 3 students, the second semester there were 7 students, and this semester there are 11. Also, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a small 2-year Program Initiation Grant from the NASA/EPSCoR program to establish a research collaboration with the NASA Software Engineering Lab at Goddard Space Flight Center. We are also starting a relationship with the Usability Engineering Lab at IBM Rochester, and our students are beginning new software projects this semester with CSC at the EROS Data Center.

The Software Engineering faculty has tripled in size since last year. We are pleased to announce the hire of 2 new faculty members, Dr. Sunho Lim and Dr. Yi Liu.

Dr. Lim received his B.S. degree (summa cum laude) from Dept. of Computer Science and M.S. degree in the Dept. of Computer Engineering from Hankuk Aviation University (HAU), Korea, in 1996 and 1998, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 2005. His research interests are in the areas of distributed systems, embedded mobile software and systems, mobile data management, and wireless networks and mobile computing. He was a recipient of the best graduate student teaching assistant award of the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University in 2002. He is a member of the IEEE.

He also likes playing any sport with a ball, including tennis, racket ball, and golf. He adds that: "It is my real joy to travel with my family and see how my lovely 4-years old daughter grows."

On a personal "note", she likes music and plays piano (started her violin and piano lessons when she was a little girl. She hasn’t touched violin for a loooooong time and doesn't know if she can still play it. However, it seems that she can still play a little piano, since she served as a pianist for the Chinese Christian Fellowship at the University of Mississippi for 2 years). Her favorite sport is tennis, but she hasn't found a tennis partner yet in Brookings. She also likes reading, especially detective novels.

Dr. Songxin Tan’s Multiwavelength Airborne Polarimetric Lidar (MAPL) system is a lidar system designed primarily for vegetation remote sensing. The MAPL system employs a pulsed Nd:YAG laser which emits light at both 1064 nm (near infrared) and 532 nm (green) simultaneously. The detectors are four photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) which enable dual-wavelength and dual-polarization detection. The system is now under ground field testing and will be installed inside an aircraft. The photo shows one field experiment where lidar backscattered signals from tree canopies were collected. The collected information could be used for tree species discrimination, forest biomass measurement, tree stress and health condition detection, forest fire prewarning, and many other applications.

Brian N. Bigge	Daniel L. McMahon
Jeffrey S. Carleton	Troy R. Mergen
Joshua D. Grabow	Dominic J. Walkes
John V. Kelley