Four ECE Ph.D. students won three first place awards at the 21st annual SAIC Georgia Tech Student Paper Competition, held on November 18 at the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center. They include Douglas Brooks, Douglas Brown, Adam Charles, and Abbie Kressner.
Mr. Brooks' paper was entitled "Quantifying Upper-Arm Rehabilitation Metrics for Children through Interaction with a Humanoid Robot." The objective of this research effort is to further rehabilitation techniques for children by developing and validating the core technologies needed to integrate therapy instruction with child-robot play in order to improve upper-arm rehabilitation. His Ph.D. advisor is Ayanna Howard, an associate professor specializing in systems and controls.
Mr. Brown's paper, "Early Latch-up Detection of Gate Bipolar Transistor Faults in Electric Motor Drives," looks at the increased importance of IGBT reliability due to widespread use in military and commercial applications. Advancements in early fault-detection aids the development of the Navy's next generation of integrated power systems, which increase "fight through" capability and survivability by enabling near instantaneous reconfiguration of power resources following damage or equipment failure. He is advised by ECE Professor Emeritus George Vachtsevanos, who specializes in systems and controls.
The paper written by Mr. Charles and Ms. Kressner was entitled "A Causal Locally Competitive Algorithm for the Sparse Decomposition of Audio Signals." Recent results show that extracting information from a signal by solving a complex optimization problem can lead to better signal processing solutions. However, no good methods exist for solving this optimization in real-time as signals stream in, which is necessary for applications such as hearing aids and cochlear implants. The research in this paper presents a dynamical system that approximately solves these optimization problems for streaming audio signals in real time. Both of these Ph.D. students are advised by Christopher Rozell, an ECE assistant professor specializing in bioengineering and digital signal processing.