AESS – Events

♦Electronic Systems and Industrial Applications –

  Medical Imaging and Industrial Applications

Presented by: Michael Mayor, MSE, PE

Thursday, November 16, 2023, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

This is an overview of Electronic Systems and Instrumentation Applications. Starting with a brief history and key players, the presentation will cover key Electronic Systems Signal Processing Developments and Tools used in the development of Medical and Industrial Instrumentation. This presentation will cover the invention and development of the Computed Tomography (CT) Scan, formerly known as Computed Axial Tomography (CAT) Scan and two of the major applications, Medical Imaging, and Industrial Applications. The CT scan is one of the many key applications of Signal Processing and it is unique because it merited one of its inventors, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, a British Electrical Engineer, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1979.

♦Deep Learning for MMWave and THz Beamforming        Applications

Presented by: Dr. Kumar Vijay Mishra of US Army Research Laboratory

Friday, July 14, 2023, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Online and in Person at USF Engineering Bldg., Room 108

The millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) massive MIMO communications/radar employ hybrid analog-digital beamforming architectures to reduce the cost-power-size-hardware overheads. Lately, there is also a gradual push to move from the millimeter-wave (mmWave) to Terahertz (THz) frequencies for short-range communications and radar applications to exploit very wide THz bandwidths. At THz, ultra massive MIMO is an enabling technology to exploit even wider bandwidth while employing thousands of antennas. The design of the hybrid beamforming techniques requires the solution to difficult nonconvex optimization problems that involve a common performance metric as a cost function and several constraints related to the employed communication regime and the adopted architecture of the hybrid system(s). There is no standard methodology for solving such problems and usually, the derivation of an efficient solution is a very challenging task. Since optimization-based approaches suffer from high computational complexity and their performance strongly relies on the perfect channel condition, we introduce deep learning (DL) techniques that provide robust performance while designing a hybrid beamformer. In this lecture, the audience will learn about applying DL to various aspects of hybrid beamforming including channel estimation, antenna selection, wideband beamforming, and spatial modulation. In addition, we will examine these concepts in the context of joint radar-communications architectures.

♦Information Security, Cryptography and Cryptanalysis

Presented by: Michael A. Mayor, MSE, PE

Thursday, October 7, 2021, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

OnLine Virtual Presentation

The 21st Century has seen an explosion in the use of Digital Data where data containing personal identity, financial information, medical records, corporate business strategy and technical data as well as national defense data is stored and retrieved in digital form and transmitted over wireline and wireless communications links.

 Data Collection activities that were once the province of States targeting other Countries are now conducted by States, Private and Criminal Organizations (and even Private Individuals) targeting all sources of private data.

Starting with key concept definitions, proceeding through a brief historical background the presentation gives a survey of overall Information and Communications Systems Security, historical encryption methods and algorithms, data sanitization methods, recovery of erased data, wireline and wireless communications security, low signature RF Systems and future encryption trends and solutions like Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Cryptography.

♦How to do 3D Modeling for Fun and Profit

Presented by: Dr. Jim Anderson

OnLine Virtual Presentation

Changed to Thursday, May 20, 2021, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Wednesday, May 19, 2021, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

So what would you make if you could? Just in case you had not noticed, 3D modeling and 3D printing. For just a little bit over $100 you can buy a 3D printer. Great, now you’ve got a 3D printer, what are you going to print? If your life is anything like mine, you have 100’s of things that you could print if only you knew how. Let’s start with drawer handles. How about knobs for devices in your car? Replacement parts for all of the things that have either been broken or lost? Let’s agree that if you could 3D print things, then you would be busy doing so. However, there is that stumbling block of just exactly how to create the things that you want to print. Who’s got the software to do this and, even if we had it, who knows how to use it?  Your local IEEE Florida West Coast Section Computer Society hears your need and we’ve got just the solution for you. Join us for an online seminar in which we show you how to use free (!) software to model anything that you want. Once you’ve modeled the thing that you want to design, you can then save it to a file, download it to a 3D printer and ta-da! You have the thing that you designed. It really is that easy and we’ll show you how to do it from start to finish.

♦Google Page Rank and Beyond

Presented by: Michael A. Mayor, MSE, PE

Thursday, March 11, 2021, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

OnLine Virtual Presentation

This presentation covers the science of search engine rankings developed by Google. This is a multinational, publicly traded, company very well known in the Internet, built around the hugely successful search engine. In fact, the search engine and particularly the mathematics behind it, is one of the reasons of Google’s huge success in the Internet arena. Search Engines have become an integral part of handling Big Data where searches must be conducted, preferably in seconds, over millions of entries. This talk addresses first a brief history of Information Retrieval and the early search engines, like Boolean, Vector Space, Probabilistic and Meta Search Engines and subsequently goes into an in depth explanation of the search process. The lecture continues with an explanation of the Page Ranking method and the Mathematics of Google’s PageRank. Finally, I present an overview of the massive Computer Hardware, i.e. server farms, which make possible a practical, real-time, implementation of the PageRank algorithms. Cleve Moler, the founder of Matlab, wrote an article for his October 2002 Newsletter Matlab News that cited PageRank as “The World’s Largest Matrix Computation.”  Then Google was applying the power method to a sparse matrix of order 2.7 billion. Now it is up to 8.1 billion.

Signal Processing History and Applications I

Presented by: Michael A. Mayor, MSE, PE

Thursday, October 29, 2020; 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm

OnLine Virtual Presentation

This is an overview of the development of the Computed Tomography (CT) Scan, formerly known as Computed Axial Tomography (CAT) Scan and two of the major applications, Medical Imaging and Industrial Applications. The CT scan is one of the many key applications of Signal Processing and it is unique because it merited one of its inventors, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield a British Electrical Engineer, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1979. After a brief historical introduction I will cover the basic principles of Signal Processing as Applied to Computer Imaging in Medical and Industrial Applications. Finally, I will give a brief overview of Artificial Intelligence applied to CT Scans to reduce the amount of emitted radiation.

How Do You Know Were You Are?

Presented by: Michael A. Mayor, MSE, PE

Wednesday, July 29, 2020; 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm

OnLine Virtual Presentation

Can you imagine going on a trip without your mobile phone and Google’s Maps app? When you jump into your car, does it tell you how long it’s going to take to get to where you are going? Do you even still own any paper maps? Let’s face it – the world has changed and I think that we’d all agree for the better when it comes to how we navigate in our daily actives. However, how does this all work? How does your cell phone know where you are? How does it know how fast you are traveling? Are satellites involved? These questions and more are going to be answered as a part of a presentation that is being put on by the Florida West Coast Section’s AESS chapter. This presentation will give an overview of the different types of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). For those of you with long memories, this all started with the Long Range Navigation System (LORAN), which was not satellite based.

I will be addressing the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and methods of Geolocation and Geolocation accuracy. It turns out that just how accurate things are can be dialed up and dialed down. Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) refers to a constellation of satellites providing signals from space that transmit positioning and timing data to GNSS receivers. The receivers then use this data to determine location. By definition, GNSS provides global coverage. Examples of GNSS include Europe’s Galileo, the USA’s NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS), Russia’s Global’naya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS) and China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System. We’ll touch on all of them during this presentation.