Student achievements and awards

2012

Best Student Poster Presentation

Congratulations go to Professor Jan Bajcsy and his PhD student Yong Jin Daniel Kim for receiving the Best Student Poster Presenation Award at the 2012 Turbo Symposium for their poster "An Architecture for Faster than Nyquist Turbo Broadcasting".

---

2009 - 2010

Best Paper Award

Congratulations go to Prof. Michael Rabbat and his PhD student Konstantinos Tsianos for receiving the Best Paper Award (Signal Processing and Information Theory Track) for their paper "Fast Decentralized Averaging via Multi-Scale Gossip". This paper was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS) in June 2010."

The Best Paper/Poster Award

Miss Maryam Golshayan, a PhD student supervised by Professor Steve McFee, received the award for best poster presentation for her paper entitled “The Importance of Including Fiber Oriented Conductivity Data in Computational Myocardium Defibrillation Analyses” at the 14th Biennial IEEE Conference on Electromagnetic Field Computation in Chicago, IL, May 2010.

 

 

 

Teaching Assistants Awards

Congratulations go out to Steve Khoury, Karim Allidina, Bhavin Shastri for winning the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for 2010. Outstanding!

 

 

 

William Everett Award of Excellence

Three promising graduating undergraduate students will be awarded a William Everett Award of Excellence. This year, they also included graduating students in the software Engineering Program. This year’s recipients are: Simon Fauvel, Marc Atie, and Ivan Aslamov. Congratulations gentlemen!

---

2008 - 2009

Double Best Paper Award

Congratulations go out to Dr. C.-K. Jen and his PhD student
Jeanne Shih for obtaining two best student paper awards. They are:

• J.-L. Shih, M. Kobayashi and C.-K. Jen, “Flexible ultrasonic transducers for structural health monitoring of pipes at high temperatures”, Best student paper award presented at IEEE Ultrasonics Symp., Rome, Italy, Sept.20-23, 2009.
• J.-L. Shih, M. Kobayashi, J.-F. Moisan and C.-K. Jen, “Energy harvesting using piezoelectric thick films fabricated by a sol-gel process”, 2008 Institute of Physics Best student paper award presented at CanSmart Int’l Workshop on Smart Materials and Structures, Oct.23-24, 2008. Detailed announcement here.

 

 

The Best Paper/Poster Award

Congratulations to Professor Mourad El-Gamal and Mr. Karim Allidina for winning the Best Student Paper/Poster Award during the CANEUS Fly-By-Wireless 2009 Workshop. The research work presented was: “Low Power Ultra Wideband Circuits – Front End Building Blocks”.

Both National and International students ran for this competition and judging was conducted by a panel of six industry representatives. The award was presented to Mr. Allidina by a senior Bombardier manager at the beginning of June. Mr. Allidina holds an NSERC / MEDA - Vadasz Scholarship.

 

 

Outstanding Teaching Assistants Awards

Congratulations to Vahid Raissi Dehkordi for being awarded the Faculty of Engineering’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for 2009. This award was given to recognize the important role that Undergraduate Student Course Assistants play in undergraduate education.

The CCPW Best Poster Award

Mr. David Fernandez, a PhD student co-supervised by Professor Dennis Giannacopoulos and Professor Warren Gross, won the "CCPW-2009 Best Poster Award" for his poster entitled "Efficient Multicore Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication for Finite Element Electromagnetics on the Cell-BE Processor".

---

2007 - 2008

IEEE Best Student Paper Award

Congratulations go to Usa Vilaipornsawai for winning the IEEE VTC2008-Fall Best Student Paper Award for writing "Spatial Correlation Effects on MAP-PSP Decoding of Multiple STTC’s".

Ms. Vilaipornsawai is currently pursuing her PhD Degree with Professor Harry Leib.

 

The IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Graduate Scholarship Award

The award goes to Mr. Kasra Payandehjoo, a PhD student currently pursuing his degree with supersivor, Professor Ramesh Abhari.

There is an increasing demand for high-gain beam steering antennas in reconfigurable wireless network and microwave wireless communication applications. Furthermore, multiple antennas are employed in MIMO systems to achieve diversity gain and increase link throughput and bitrate. Mr. Payandehjoo’s project explores analysis and modeling of these multilayer systems using multiconductor transmission line theory. The project also involves improvement of the isolation between the antenna elements in these multiantenna systems using frequency selective surfaces. Implementation of an efficient and compact ultra-wideband beam steering antenna array using a nonlinear transmission line feed network is also part of Mr. Payandehjoo’s project.

Governor General's Gold Medal & D. W. Ambridge Prize

The Governor General's Gold Medal was awarded to Dr. Joshua Schwartz on May 28th, 2008 at Convocation for being the top graduating student receiving a Ph.D. or Masters in any discipline of the Natural Sciences and Engineering. At the same time he received the D. W. Ambridge Prize as the top graduate student receiving a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering.

Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award

The Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award was presented to Mr. Adrian Ngoly by Dean Christophe Pierre at the 2008 Annual Staff Awards of Excellence on May 13 at the Lorne Trottier Building. He demonstrated excellence in teaching scholarship and service.

Best Paper

Mr. Asanee Suntives was recently awarded the INTEL Best Student Paper at the 2007 IEEE Electrical Performance and Electronic Packaging Conference (EPEP), for his work entitled "Dual-Mode High-Speed Data Transmission Using Substrate Integrated Waveguide Interconnects". Mr. Suntives is in the fourth year of his PhD degree which he is pursuing with supervisor, Professor Ramesh Abhari. Conventional interconnects are limiting factors in achieving high-speed data transmissions. Suntives is developing a new method for efficient high-speed signaling between systems by using all electrical components.

IBM Outstanding Problem Solving Award

While working on a project for this same conference, Mr. Darryl Kostka made use of the IBM EIP Tool Suite, in the research project entitled "Analysis of Power Distribution Networks Containing Electromagnetic Bandgap Strcutures Using Multiconductor Transmission Line Theory". As a result of his innovative approach to use of this software, Mr. Kostka was awarded the "IBM Outstanding Problem Solving Award Based on the Use of the EIP Tool Suite"

Best Paper

Mr. Chris Taillefer is completing his final year of a PhD degree which he is pursuing with supervisor, Professor Gordon Roberts. He was awarded the 2nd place in the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) Student Paper Competition for his paper titled Delta-Sigma Analog-to-Digital Conversion via Time-Mode Signal Processing. Taillefer became interested in the field of analog and mixed-signal design due to its challenging and diverse discipline. His research explores new ways of processing analog information by first converting voltage signals into time information, processing this time signal, and converting the processed time data into digital information.

PhD student Mona Safi-Harb was awarded the 2nd place in the Operational Chip Design Category of the 2006 DAC/ISSCC student design contest. Her paper entitled Increasing the Time Dynamic Range of Pulse Measurement Techniques in Digital CMOS (co-authored with Professor Gord Roberts), looked at an innovative way to measure information contained in pulses when the pulse width is extremely small. Ms Safi-Harb entered the student design contest and as a result was invited to several conferences , and has recently been granted another Best Paper award at the 2006 IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference for her publication (co authored with Professor G Roberts) entitled Embedded Narrow Pulse Measurement in Digital CMOS.

Canada Graduate Scholarships 

Mr. Philip Chopp who is pursuing a PhD degree with Professor Anas Hamoui was recently awarded a Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). His research aims at developing nano-scale integrated circuits for the combined frequency translation and digital conversion of high-speed analog signals. The targeted applications are wireless communication systems and medical sensory interfaces.

Mr. Ivan Bilicki who is pursuing a Masters degree, with supervisor Professor Zeljko Zilic, also recieved a one year scholarship from NSERC.

IEEE Graduate Research Award

Mr. Guangran (Kevin) Zhu received a $2,500 (US) scholarship this year from the IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society, for his research contributions in the field of microwave breast imaging.
Mr. Zhu’s project explores the physical contrast between the tumor and normal breast tissue under microwave radiation. When a microwave signal meets a breast tumor, part of the microwave energy is scattered by the tumor. The other part of the microwave energy is absorbed by the tumor and converted to heat, which causes the thermal expansion of the tumor and generates an acoustic wave. Correlating the scattered microwave signals and the induced acoustic signals provides the promise of early detection of breast tumors, which are not “opaque” enough to be seen by conventional means.
Kevin is in his third year as a PhD student with Professor Milica Popovic. They use sofisticated software and numerical techniques that simulate the interaction of human tissue and microwaves, thereby establishing the feasibility of the new imaging techniques.

2006 - 2007

Best Teaching Assistants

Mr. John Harrisson was voted the best teaching assistant last fall for his contributions to Introduction to Computer Engineering. John stated that he most enjoyed the numerous interactions with students at tutorials and office hours. The most challenging part of the job was the long hours of preparation work. He is currently pursuing his PhD Degree with Professor Frank Ferrie.

Mr. Frederic Thouin followed with the award for best TA in the winter term (2007) for teaching the Telecommunications Network Lab. He helped professors Lorne Mason and Mark Coates modifying the class and this was most rewarding. He is currently pursuing his PhD Degree with professor Coates.

LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award

Mr. Dominik Pudo won this prestigious award in 2006 for his work in the field of lasers and Electro-optics. Mr. Pudo’s research work focuses on the limitations and applications of the temporal Talbot effect within the context of pulse repetition rate multiplication. The Talbot effect manifests when a train of periodic optical pulses propagates through fiber-optics. The dispersion smears out individual pulses, but for specific distances, an exact replica of the incoming signal appears - but with a multiplied repetition rate. As such, this effect has a vast array of interesting applications, ranging from generating ultrafast optical pulse trains, to all-optical clock recovery.

Mr. Pudo is finishing his PhD degree with Professor Lawrence Chen. This is the second time since its inception in 1999 that a student of the Photonics Systems Group is granted this award, the first one having been given to Mr. Mike Venditti in 2002.

URSI Award for Best Student Paper

The URSI Award for Best Student Paper was given to Mr. Joshua Schwartz in 2006 for his paper titled “A Fully-Electronic Time-Stretch System”
Although the idea of temporal imaging was first proposed in 1969, this is the first time it has been done entirely with electronics in the GHz frequency range preferred by modern wireless communication systems. In his research, Mr. Schwartz has demonstrated how to process an electrical signal within a given time frame and put it through a sort of “time lens” (much as you would might send an image through photographic lens in order to enlarge or compress that image). He can then form an “image” of the signal, either slowed down or sped up in the time domain, without introducing distortion. This has key applications for performing fast digital-to-analog conversion and for generating arbitrary waveforms with high frequency content, of interest to developing ultra-wideband (UWB) systems.

IEEE 2nd Place for Best Student Paper

Mr. Kasra Payandehjoo was 2nd place winner of the Best Student Paper at the Antem 2006/URSI conference for his paper entitled "Modeling of Simultaneous Switching Noise in Power Distribution Network of Electronic Circuits".
With the increase in the speed (and therefore frequency content) of modern electronic circuits the "wave effect" of the noise generated at one part of the chip becomes an issue as it travels along the power distribution network to other parts of the chip and causes distortions. Mr. Payandehjoo's project was about finding accurate models for power distribution networks to capture this effect. Important applications of this research are in designing power distribution networks of electronic circuits for suppression of power/ground noise.

Outstanding Teaching Assistant

Mr. Jean Samuel Chenard and Mr. Amaan Mehrabian were voted the very best Teaching Assistants in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering last year. Mr. Chenard is a PhD student working with Professor Zejlko Zilic and Mr. Mehrabian is completing his PhD with Professor Peter Kabal.