STRATEGIC PLAN PART I - UMass Amherst...STRATEGIC PLAN – PART I Kris Hollot ... jobs both in the Commonwealth and in the national technology hubs, attend the best graduate schools,

STRATEGIC PLAN – PART I

Kris Hollot

Department Head,

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

January 2015

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING STRATEGIC PLAN – PART I

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Table of Contents

Section 1 – Introduction

1-1 Executive Summary………………………………………………………….…3 1-2 Mission……………………………………………………………………….…..3 1-3 Vision………………….. …..……...……………...………………..…………..3 1-4 Goals………………………………………………………………………….….3

Section 2 – A Look in the Mirror

2-1 Intellectual Mission & Scholarly Recognition………………………….……..4 2-2 Graduate Education.…………………………………………………………....9 2-3 Undergraduate Education...………………………………………………….14


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Section 1 Introduction

Section 1-1: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Section 1-2: MISSION

The Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is dedicated to a selective program that provides a high-quality educational experience to our undergraduate and graduate students, and to conducting leading-edge research in strategically selected areas of electrical and computer engineering. Through the quality of our students, we contribute to long-term economic development at the state and national level.

Section 1-3: VISION (draft) To be ranked in the 80% percentile rank of national ECE departments, in both reputation and productivity metrics.

Section 1-4: GOALS (draft)

1. Attract a world-class faculty in emerging areas, and support them with fellowshipped students.

2. Help develop a BME program.

3. Develop an industrial MSECE in cyber security engineering.

4. Align undergraduate curriculum with emerging and impactful career opportunities.

5. Support programs that impact diversity and society.

6. Support and market our maker culture.

7. Build a culture of entrepreneurship.


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Section 2 A Look in the Mirror

Section 2-1: INVESTMENT OF CHOICE – INTELLECTUAL MISSION & SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION

Overview:

ECE research bears out the popular quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. ECE helps create amazing computing devices out of sand; develops electronic technologies that pluck “texts” and “tweets” out of the thin air; and creates sensing system networks that guide the blind and helps save lives and property by mapping storms, wind and rain.

ECE is comprised of electrical engineering (EE) and computer systems engineering (CSE)1. It offers two accredited undergraduate degrees: the BSEE and BSCSE, with the MS and PhD granted in ECE. By the numbers, the department has 35 faculty members, 400 undergraduates, 170 MS students and 85 doctoral students. Thirteen (13) faculty members are Fellows of the IEEE2, one is Fellow of the ACM3, 12 are recipients of the NSF CAREER award and 2 have received the DARPA Young Faculty Award. Annual research-expenditures are $10M, and ECE is home to CASA - the recently-graduated NSF Engineering Research Center ($40M over 10 years). The primary research areas at UMass Amherst ECE are: sensing systems, nanoelectronics, computer engineering, and communication/network sciences.

UMass ECE undergraduates are highly-employable (85% placement)4, receive high-paying jobs both in the Commonwealth and in the national technology hubs, attend the best graduate schools, and consistently rate the ECE department as a highly-satisfying major (top-quintile on campus). ECE has a two-semester senior design project which provides a pre-professional design experience, and in 2008 created the campus’s first academic maker space M5 to provide unique experiential opportunities. ECE offers a 5yr B.S./M.S. program.

The MSECE is the preferred degree by the electronics and computer industries that have need for a highly-skilled and technical workforce, and our thriving MS program brings substantial monetary benefit to the campus and makes significant diversity impact as 30% of ECE MS students are female. The ECE Department has been the target school for Raytheon’s Industrial Education MS Program in radar engineering5 for over 30 years with its 250 graduates heavily populating the leadership ranks of Raytheon.

The MSECE thesis is also a gateway to our doctoral program where roughly 50% of current doctoral students have received their MSECE from our program. Both MS and doctoral enrollments are at an all-time high. Approximately 20% of our PhD recipients pursue academic careers while 75% are research engineers in industrial and government labs.

1 Computer Systems Engineering is synonymous to computer engineering.

2 IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers) is the ECE professional society.

3 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the computer science professional society.

4 Placement in industry or graduate school within six months of graduation.

5 Raytheon’s Integrated Defense Systems, Andover and Tewksbury, MA.


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Research Areas: The primary research areas in ECE at UMass are: sensing systems, nanoelectronics, computer engineering, and communication/network sciences. Below, we briefly describe each area and comment on the department’s expertise and future trends.

Sensing systems: Consider mapping the earth’s canopy coverage from afar, say from a satellite. ECEs solve this problem by using electromagnetic energy to illuminate bits of the canopy, collecting the electromagnetic reflections, and analyzing this sensor data to infer physical properties of the canopy – crucial information for climate change study and hydrology assessment since sensing-from-afar allows for large swaths of the earth’s surface to be surveyed in great detail. This exemplifies the notion of ECE sensing system expertise: a radar system that incorporates highly-sensitive electronic instruments to transmit and receive electromagnetic energy, together with data processing expertise to tease-out pertinent information from reflections, and first-principles understanding of physical phenomena to make quantitative data-driven assessments. Faculty members in sensing system research have expertise including radiowave propagation, the design of sophisticated antennas and high- speed electronics. In addition to measuring the environment, ECE’s sensing research is applied to applications such as high-speed wireless systems, deep-space communication, radio astronomy and biological/biomedical measurements.

ECE’s Microwave and Remote Sensing Lab (MIRSL) has been a nationally-recognized leader for over 30 years in building and deploying instruments that use slices of the electromagnetic energy spectrum to sense hurricanes, tornadoes, ice and precipitation. MIRSL beget CASA (Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere) the first (and still only) NSF Engineering Research Center on campus. CASA develops novel weather radar systems for detecting extreme weather events such as tornadoes and flash floods. Looking forward, MIRSL and CASA will play significant roles in environmental sensing and in developing next generation weather radar systems by working with federal agencies and industrial partners such as Raytheon.

Nanoelectronics: Transistors are the “legos” of all computing hardware, and today’s computing devices lean on ever-faster and ever-smaller transistors. But, existing technology has reached the limit in making such devices, and working at the nano-scale of electronic materials holds the key to next-generation computational machines and sensors. Our nanoelectronics research group works on these problems and has expertise in the fabrication and integration of nanoscale electronic devices. Their research spans the experimental, theoretical and computational. Nanoelectronics research is a high-growth area and the department is poised to take advantage. Our recent hires in this area are aligned with our college’s goal of creating a materials engineering program and with campus’s initiative in personalized health monitoring and its need for nano-sized biological sensors.

Computer engineering: Whereas transistors are building blocks, it’s the computer engineers who architect 100’s of millions of these electrical switches into the computing devices on which all software systems are deployed. Our computer engineering researchers are experts in making computing devices faster, cheaper, more reliable, more energy efficient and more secure. Looking forward, growth areas are in the security of embedded hardware and systems, and in the nano-architecting of emerging computing platforms.

Communication/Network Sciences is the study of fast, reliable and secure transmission of information – data, voice and video. ECE research is at the physical layer where information


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is converted to electrical signals, wirelessly transmitted to a network, received, and then converted back to information. ECE research here is broad and deep. It ranges from the theoretical treatment of secure data communication, to dealing with the ever-creasing mobility and bigness of data, to applications such as Spotlight Scholar Aura Ganz’s “seeing-eye directory” for the blind, and David Irwin’s Sustainable Computing Lab which focuses on low cost smart electric grids and on optimizing energy usage in buildings. Looking forward, ECE research will be about further advances in secure data transmission, high-dimensional sensing, the melding of large and far-ranging sensor networks with the compute clouds and physical applications. It will be about applications that can contribute to human welfare and the earth’s sustainability.

Reputation and Rankings:

ECE pays attention to two sources for program reputation and rankings: the US News and World Report (USNWR) graduate program rankings, and productivity data from the Academic Analytics database. The former is primarily reputational as USNWR graduate program rankings are based on the collective opinion of all the national ECE Department Heads, while the latter provides timely, data-driven analysis including customized selection of peer programs. The USNWR rankings are influential on graduate school applicants, in particular on international students as this is an available and current reputational data. Figure 1 shows some recent history of USNWR rankings of 120 computer engineering (CSE) programs and 174 electrical engineering (EE) graduate programs. UMass ranks in the upper-third of CSE programs and in the upper quartile of EE programs.

Based on the (2009-12) Academic Analytics database, the radar plot in Figure 1 illustrates the percentile ranking of the ECE faculty’s productivity in grants, articles, awards, conference proceedings and citations against the other national ECE programs. On average, ECE

ranks in the 70th percentile with the highest (75th percentile) in conference proceedings6 and

the lowest (60th percentile) in articles. These data-driven comparisons correlate with the USNWR reputational rankings.

Figure 1: Both the USNWR reputational rankings and Academic Analytic faculty productivity rankings show UMass ECE to be in the top-third to top quartile of the 174 national electrical engineering programs and 120 computer engineering programs.

Faculty productivity trends: We now present historical trends in faculty productivity using metrics similar to that used in the previous radar plot; namely, grant expenditures, journal publications, conference

6 Conference publications are highly-valued in computer engineering, and some feel that they are the preferred

publication outlet for research.


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proceedings, and citation metrics. In Figure 2 (left), we first plot the trajectory of ECE faculty size over the past 15 years showing a 12% decrease over 2002-2005, and then steady growth since 2009 to reach the present faculty size of 37. Figure 2 (right) shows grant expenditures per faculty member. The impact of CASA funding over 2003-2013 is clear, and though there’s only data point (2014), it’s encouraging that the FY2014 expenditures have not dropped off with CASA’s graduation. This may be due to the successes of the post-NSF CASA research as well as an overall increased productivity of the faculty.

Figure 2: (left) ECE’s faculty size decreased 12% between 2002-2005 and since 2009 has increased 20%. (right) Time trace of research expenditures from FY2000 to FY2014. The impact of the NSF engineering research center CASA (2003-2013) is clear. The 2014 data point is encouraging – expenditures did not drop off with CASA’s graduation.

The next figure shows the number of journal articles and conference proceedings published per faculty member. This data is taken from AFRs. The decrease in articles published over 2004-06 coincides with the 12% decrease in faculty size; see Figure 2. Likewise, the steady growth in this same metric since 2010 corresponds to the increasing faculty size. ECE faculty members tend to publish twice as many conference proceedings as journal articles. For our computer engineering faculty members, especially those in computer networks, conference publications can be more prestigious than journal articles.

Figure 3: (left) Journal articles per faculty. (right) Conference proceedings per faculty. Journal articles track the faculty size in Figure 2. ECE faculty members publish twice as many conference proceedings than articles. Conference proceedings can be more prestigious than articles for computer engineering faculty members.

As a citation metric we use Google Scholar’s estimate of an author’s h-index, and in Figure 4 compare the department’s h-index distribution in 2010 to that in 2015. The average h-index increases from 17 in 2010 to 23 in 2015. This appears to be a significant improvement


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in citations over a five year interval.

Figure 4: Comparison of department’s h-index distribution between that in 2010 and 2015. The average h-index for these two years is 17 and 23 respectively.

Lastly, in terms of awards, the expectation in ECE is to hire faculty members who are worthy of NSF CAREER Awards, to promote Associate Professors who are worthy for election to the highest grade in our society – the IEEE Fellow. Presently, 72% of our Professors are IEEE Fellows and 50% of our eight tenure-track professors have already received the CAREER. Senior faculty members aspire to IEEE Field Awards and election to the National Academy of Engineering.

Emerging Research Trends: One view of emerging trends in research can be gleaned from the research areas and foci of ECE’s tenure-track faculty; see Table 1 for a listing. The determination of areas for faculty searches are the most strategic decisions made by the department, and they are made collectively through a bottom-up approach involving proposals made by faculty groups that are discussed at faculty retreats and meetings. From this perspective, there are strong research trends in nanoelectronics and biomedical engineering followed by that in cyber-physical systems. Another emerging research trend follows from the preceding description of ECE’s research areas where cyber-security engineering is pervasive in both computer engineering and communication and network sciences research. This is not surprising since security is about information and its sensing, transmission, storage and processing which are topics at the heart of ECE.

ECE Tenure-Track Faculty Faculty Research group Research

focus TDY

Do-Hoon Kwon sensing systems antenna design 2014-15

Chris Salthouse sensing systems bioelectronics 2014-15

Joseph Bardina,b

sensing systems RF nanoelectronics 2015-16

Mario Parente sensing systems hyperspectral imaging 2017-18

TBD sensing systems personal health monitoring Qiangfei Xia

a,b nanoelectronics fabrication and integration of nano devices 2015-16

Zlatan Aksamija nanoelectronics nanostructures for energy applications 2019-20

Joshua Yang nanoelectronics fabrication of novel nano devices 2020-21

Michael Zinka

computer engineering cyber-physical systems/weather radars 2014-15

David Irwina

computer engineering cyber-physical systems/sustainability 2018-19

Daniel Holcomb computer engineering embedded systems, medical device security 2020-21

Marco Duarte communication/network sciences

hi-dimensional signal processing 2017-18

Table 1: Areas chosen for faculty searches are strategic and decisions are made collectively at the department level.

arecipient of NSF CAREER;

brecipient DARPA YFA.


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Section 2-2: Graduate Education Overview: ECE has a robust graduate education program where the MSECE (with thesis) is the typical gateway to our doctoral program. Roughly 50% of our doctoral students receive their MSECE from UMass Amherst. Approximately 30% of our MS students are female – making a significant diversity impact, while 85% of both the MS and PhD students are international. Our graduates find high-level industrial jobs, become academicians and are entrepreneurial. The enrollment of each has significantly increased in the recent past to reach historical highs (170MS, 86 PhD) students; see Figure 5 below.

Figure 5: Approximately 50% of PhD students received the MSECE from UMass Amherst. Approximately 30% of MS students are female. Approximately 85% of these graduate students are international

Figure 6 below shows the time traces of graduate applications and numbers of admitted students. The MS applications have dramatically increased, while the doctoral applications have been steadily decreasing. However, the number of admitted doctoral students has remained at a steady level. One explanation is that there are more pre-application conversations (by email) between potential doctoral students and faculty advisors to determine fit and availability of funding. This could result in a decrease in the number of “blind” doctoral applications.

Figure 6: Significant increase in MS applicants and admissions. Steady number of PhD admissions in spite of decreasing applications.

In Figure 7 we plot the annual MS and PhD degrees awarded per faculty member. The number of MS degrees shows a recent increase while the number of PhD degrees remains steady.


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Figure 7: The department graduates approximately 2 MS students (thesis and non-thesis) per faculty member. It graduates almost 0.4 PhD per faculty member per year.

M.S. program: The attractiveness of the MS program in electrical and computer engineering is distinctive – both in engineering schools and academia as a whole. In 2012-13, the number of MS degrees awarded nationally in ECE was 12,000, almost double that of the next largest engineering discipline7. It represents a “sweet spot” of education between the BS and PhD degrees, and is the preferred degree by the electronics and computer industries that have need for a highly- skilled and highly-technical workforce.

The UMass MS program plays several roles:

It is ECE culture, both here and nationally, to require an MS thesis experience as

prerequisite to conducting doctoral research. Having a large pool of MS students provides opportunity for the ECE faculty to audition these students for the PhD through the experience of completing an MS thesis. Currently, almost 50% of our doctoral students have completed their MS degree in our department. The other half of PhD students are a mix of students having received their MS degrees at other institutions, and those pursuing the PhD directly from the BS. This latter group is relatively small but growing.

It provides specialized workforce development. The ECE Department has been the target school for Raytheon’s Industrial Education MS Program in radar engineering for over 30 years with its 220 graduates heavily populating the leadership ranks of Raytheon. This industrial engagement has led to successful research partnerships including CASA, and most recently, the embedding of Raytheon employees at UMass for the PhD. It has also led to engagement with other regional microwave companies: M/A-COM, RFMD, BAE Systems who value our MS graduates.

It responds to the robust international demand for the MSECE with computer

engineering courses being the most popular. The large fraction of MS students pays their own tuition which brings substantial monetary benefit to the campus –

7 Source: “Engineering by the numbers,” ASEE www.asee.org/colleges. The ECE numbers include the MS degrees

in electrical engineering, computer engineering and ECE programs

http://www.asee.org/colleges


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approximately $700K in 2013. The department return of this amount is used for both hiring TAs (for which PhD students have priority) and for faculty startup.

It makes significant diversity impact as 30% of ECE MS students are female. This

diversity is much larger than that in our undergraduate program.

PhD program: The department takes the education and mentoring of graduate students seriously, and to this end doctoral students gain admission only if they are financially supported as a research assistant by a faculty member. In similar spirit, the department gives highest priority to PhD students in filling teaching assistantships. In addition to placing the highest emphasis on scholarship, and because ECE is a discipline providing significant opportunities for the PhD in industry and government labs, we also encourage our doctoral student to take advantage of internships (often enabled by advisors’ industrial relationships) and entrepreneurial activities.

Best paper prizes We strive for our doctoral student to go beyond the co-authoring of journal and conference papers with their advisors, and to compete and win best presentation and best paper prizes at conferences. Some recent examples of such winners include:

The Nanoscale Computing Fabrics Lab of Professor Andras Moritz has won the Best

Paper Award for the third time in the past four years at the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures8. The 2014 winning paper, entitled "Wave-based Multi-valued Computation Framework," was presented by graduate student Santosh Khasanvis.

Rob Palumbo, student in the Microwave Remote Sensing Lab (MIRSL) and advised

by Professor Steve Frasier received the 2013 Best Student Oral Presentation at the 36th American Meteorological Society’s Conference on Radar Meteorology “Polarimetric Observations of Prescribed Bushfires in South Australia using an X-band Phased Array Radar.”

Kekai Hu, computer engineering student, won a best paper prize at the 2013

IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security, “Scalable Hardware Monitors to Protect Network Processors from Data Plane Attacks,” with co-authors Professor Russell Tessier and Professor Tilman Wolf.

To foster interaction amongst our doctoral students and to provide a venue for them to display and gain experience in presenting their research results, we have instituted an annual PhD poster session event. The 2013 first place winner was Akshaya Shanmugam, advised by Professor Christopher Salthouse, for her poster entitled “Lensless Fluorescence imaging with height calculation.

Internships We mentor our doctoral students with the expectations of leadership in industry and academia. Advisors enable internships with their industrial partners; e.g., Professor Eric Polizzi’s doctoral students James Kestyn and Tejas Addagarla have just completed 12-month internships at Intel working in the Math Kernel Library team (Hillsboro, OR) and the Internet of Things group (Santa-Clara, CA) respectively.

8 Leading conference in post-CMOS nanocomputing.


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Entrepreneurship Our doctoral students take advantage of the campus’s Innovation Challenge as exemplified with two of our students’ successes. Previously mentioned doctoral student Akshaya Shanmugam was a winner in the Spring 2014 Innovation Challenge for her business pitch on mDiagnostics - a reliable, portable, single-use, low-cost, hepatitis C screening device. Recent graduate Dr. Krzysyztof Orzel (PhD’14) guided a team comprised of three ISOM students to win first place in the Spring 2014 Innovation Challenge Minute Pitch Competition and then second in the Fall 2014 Executive Summary stage of this same competition. This was an outcome beginning in 2013 when Krzysyztof took charge of the student design project for these ISOM students. Their idea is a mobile app concept dubbed CitySky that will use the CASA radar system in the Dallas Fort Worth area to provide accurate weather nowcasting. This team has also submitted an NSF I- Corps proposal.

Placement In 2010, we surveyed the ECE faculty to determine the placement of their former PhD students. As shown in the figure below, almost 20% of these students are academicians and 75% are researchers or engineers in industrial and government research labs.

Figure 8: 2010 survey of placement of ECE’s doctoral students.

Peer comparison

As prompted by the campus’s 2013 doctoral program review, we used the National Research Council’s 2010 Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs to conduct a peer comparison9 of doctoral program metrics as shown in the radar plot in Figure 9. UMass ECE’s faculty size is the 10th largest in this set of peers. When ECE ranks higher in a metric (lower in a metric) than 10th against its peers, then ECE is said to perform above-size (below-size) in that given metric. Otherwise, ECE is said to perform-at-size.

From Figure 9 we see that ECE ranks above-size in:

first-year PhD support

% female

% international and below-size in

9 The peers (with faculty sizes noted): Iowa State (58), NC State (60), Ohio State (54), Purdue (84), Rutgers, Stony

Brook, UColorado (41), UConn, UCSB (51), UDelaware, UIUC (128), UMaryland (43), UMass (34), UT Austin (64).


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average GRE (V and Q)

average PhDs/faculty

% completion in six years The below-average GRE’s are likely correlated to our comparatively large percentage of international PhD students and their lower performance in the verbal GRE component as compared to their US counterparts. While quantitative skills are necessary to conduct high-quality research in ECE, the lack of verbal skills impacts their ability to publish and requires additional faculty advisor time and effort to remedy. This could contribute to ECE’s below-size performance in PhD’s/faculty and % completion in six years.

Figure 9: Dotted line: performance at-size (ref). Solid line shows ECE performance. ECE performs above-size in % 1

st yr. full support, % non-Asian minority, % female and % PhDs with academic positions. ECE performs

below-size in average GRE, average PhDs/faculty and % completion in six years


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Section 2-2: UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

Overview: UMass ECE came into existence for the expressed purpose of providing undergraduate education to returning veterans of World War II and the Korean War. The Electrical Engineering undergraduate program was born in the early 1950’s and was accredited soon thereafter. The Computer Systems Engineering undergraduate program was established in the early 70’s, one of the first such computer engineering programs in the nation. Together they form the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) undergraduate program. Nationally, “ECE” is the predominant name for academic departments awarding undergraduate degrees in both electrical and computer engineering10. The UMass EE and CSE undergraduate programs recently underwent its periodic accreditation visit and received full accreditation. An accreditation concern was raised about the adequacy of the size of the senior design project lab to meet both increasing ECE enrollments and the inclusion of interdisciplinary teaming with mechanical engineering. ECE undergraduate enrollments are in the upswing of a 10-15 year cycle (see Figure 10 below) driven by the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000’s and the recession of 2008. Computer engineering enrollments decreased from 2003-2008 with enrollments in electrical engineering holding steady during this period. Computer engineering enrollments bounced back in 2008 with overall enrollments back to millennial highs. Over time, the ratio of CSE to EE enrollments has varied between one-third and one-half with the present ratio close to one-half.

Figure 10: Dot-com bubble burst of 2001 triggered decreased interest in computer engineering. Reversal of that trend coincided with onset of the 2008 recession.

ECE undergraduates are highly-employable and receive high-paying jobs both in the Commonwealth and in the national technology hubs. They are also prepared to attend the best graduate schools. Figure 11 shows the ECE placement trend (combined industry and graduate school) from 2008 to 2013 showing a return towards pre-recession placement levels. About 15% of our undergraduates go directly to graduate school, with the majority of these pursuing the PhD. Over 2011-2013, ECE students were accepted at: Arizona State, Cornell,

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Some institutions such as MIT, UCBerkeley and the University of Michigan have combined ECE and CS departments referred to at EECS departments.


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Harvard, MIT, Ohio State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, U Michigan, UT Austin, and U Washington. A sizable fraction of graduating seniors taking jobs eventually pursue the MS degree, and do so via their employers’ programs. In fact, the prospect of such paid-MS is an attractive benefit, and a significant number of our undergraduates end up with terminal degrees from institutions in the eastern part of the Commonwealth. The department instituted a 5yr BS/MS in 2009 and while a dozen or so students annually opt-in, it’s only about one-quarter of these that follow-through and obtain their MSECE at UMass. Those opting-out of the 5th year are attracted by the previously-mentioned benefit of an employer-paid MS.

Figure 11: Undergraduate placement (both industry and graduate school) returning to pre-recession levels. Over the past five years, ECE seniors have consistently rated the department as a highly-satisfying major (top-quintile ranking in comparison to all campus departments). The students rate their satisfaction highest in “career preparation and guidance” (more than one standard deviation above the average for all departments); and rate ECE within one standard deviation in all other categories of satisfaction.

Figure 12: Since 2008, ECE students rank their satisfaction with the major higher than 80% of other campus departments. Design Experiences: “Design” is the hallmark characteristic of engineering, and is a key student outcome for its graduates. ECEs use knowledge of physics, mathematics and computing to design and create technological systems that can appear “indistinguishable from magic.” Uniquely, design tools and components are widely available and feasible to use in ECE undergraduate


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lab spaces to design and prototype sophisticated technological systems. The department capitalizes on this with its ECE capstone experience, the two-semester Senior Design Project (SDP), and its academic maker space M5 which provides distinctive design experiences to the younger students. SDP provides a pre-professional experience where student teams take their own ideas to fully-functioning prototypes. M5, the campus’s first academic maker space (created in 2008), is an opt-in environment that augments traditional study and social spaces with resources, both material and instructional, to advance students’ technical interests through experimentation, exploration, interaction and entrepreneurship. Senior Design Project (SDP) As a capstone course, SDP’s objectives include the practice and development of creativity, teamwork, communication skills, engineering design, lifelong learning, ethics, and societal impact. It takes the whole ECE Department to do SDP – all faculty members participate, serving as team advisors and project evaluators. The scope of an SDP project is exemplified by the 2013 project, the Real-time concussion analyzer. This project aimed to provide coaches, trainers and parents of young football players with a low-cost, real-time monitor of helmet impact. It was comprised of a smart sensor network and wireless transmitter embedded in a helmet’s padding, and a phone app that worked together with the helmet electronics to capture, analyze and archive, on a per-player basis, the location and magnitude of helmet impact. The student team engaged both the UMass football training staff and outside experts in their design. SDP student teams are comprised of four students, two electrical and two computer engineers to provide an interdisciplinary experience. Team formation, project ideas and faculty advisors come together from the ground up – teams self-form, teams brainstorm on project ideas, and teams and faculty advisors self-select. In 2014-15 there are 23 teams, including a joint electrical and mechanical engineering team. SDP is coordinated by two faculty members who give lectures and provide overall technical and organizational guidance. There are four formal team reviews during the year conducted before two faculty evaluators. Such reviews include formal team presentations (power point, lab bench demos) and Q&A from the evaluators. These evaluators provide valuable professional and technical feedback to the teams. SDP culminates in two days of public demonstration – one for the campus and the second for the public. Course deliverables include a working prototype, a written report, and a team website archiving all review materials. In addition to these formal deliverables and objectives, SDP promotes senior class esprit de corps, and provides the impetus for students to take their projects to off-campus competitions such as the Cornell Cup and to consider the possibility of commercialization. M5 Motivated by the design experience SDP brought to our graduating seniors, we created M5 in 2008 to provide hands-on project opportunities for the younger undergraduate students. M5 provides the material resources: lab space, parts, and measurement and fabrication equipment for students to build, as well as providing on-line tutorials, workshops, faculty and peer-student project advising and project courses for credit that can either be individual or team-based. M5 is an opt-in environment that runs asynchronously with the ECE curriculum. An exception is our first-semester engineering course where the lab component is held in M5 where these incoming students are immediately exposed to hands-on projects. An unexpected, but welcomed, outcome of M5 has been the increased student participation in off-campus design competitions. Last year saw two UMass ECE teams participate in


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IEEE’s Micromouse Competition. The goal of this competition is to design a small autonomous robot (mouse-like) to find the center of a given arbitrary maze in minimum time. Interestingly, one of these teams was comprised of first year students from Astronomy (2), Physics, ECE (2) and CS, and they won first place in the regional competition held in New Jersey. Another was the Firefighting Robot Competition hosted at Trinity College. A UMass ECE team won the overall competition, and just as important, this team of junior ECE’s mentored several younger teams in the competition. Finally, our students organized and hosted the first campus hackathon, HackUMass which attracted almost 90 students from the region (Mount Holyoke College, Smith and WNEU) as well as from Brown and MIT. This was a 24 hour event in which all teams started with a common set of electronic/computer parts and, together with surplus electronics in M5, hacked together projects. The event was supported by the IEEE Springfield Branch and over 20 alumni and practicing engineers acted as mentors.

Figure 13: M5 has helped create a culture where ECE students compete and participate in off-campus design competitions. In April 2014, ECE students organized and hosted the first regional hardware/software hackathon. Almost 90 students participated in this 24 hour event held in M5. Hackathons are becoming quite popular with Mount Holyoke College following suite and holding a 200+ student hackathon this past fall, and UMass students are now planning to organize and host an “NCAA Division 1” hackathon in the Mullins Center for spring 2015. Student leadership is from engineering, management and computer science.

Student Organizations: The ECE department is home to three student organizations: the IEEE student branch (student branch of ECE’s professional organization IEEE); IEEE-HKN, the student honor society of IEEE dedicated to encouraging and recognizing excellence in the IEEE-designated fields of interest; and ESAC (ECE Student Advisory Council) which is a representative body of ECE undergraduates charged to advise the department on all curricular aspects. Looking Forward – Comprehensive Curriculum Revision: The last significant revision to the ECE undergraduate curriculum occurred in the early 2000’s, when the department redesigned the first 4 semesters to more closely couple electrical and computer engineering courses. This effectively allowed ECE students to delay their choice between electrical or computer engineering to their junior years. It was this same revision that had computer engineering students join the electrical engineering students in SDP and


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this had a significant positive impact on culture. The comprehensive revisions that the department is now contemplating have goals to:

eliminate unnecessary topics & excess depth

teach fewer things better

retain flexibility

consider concentrations The department’s curriculum committee has been working on this revision for three semesters and has been discussed at two ECE retreats.

STRATEGIC PLAN PART I - UMass Amherst...STRATEGIC PLAN – PART I Kris Hollot ... jobs both in the Commonwealth and in the national technology hubs, attend the best graduate schools,

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