Upcoming Events

• RFIDs for the
  Birds

  

  • Date: 11:45 AM Thursday,

    February 20th, 2014

  • Speaker:  Chris Latimer
  • Location: Promega Bio Pharmaceutical Technology Center

    Room Number: 122

    5445 E Cheryl Pkwy

    Fitchburg,  Wisconsin

  • To sign up for this meeting, click
    here.
  Topic:
  Radio-frequency identification technologies in ecological
  studies.

  Radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies were first
  developed in the mid-to late 1930’s for specific military
  applications. Advances in engineering and manufacturing
  throughout the years have lowered the cost and size of RFID
  transmitters, making them available to an array of applications
  in a variety of industries. Today, RFID is commonly used in
  pharmaceutical, automobile and shopping industries, with
  increasing applications in environmental monitoring and
  ecological studies. Mr. Latimer will present a brief history of
  RFID and how it works, followed by a discussion about RFID use
  in ecological studies. Then he will present a case study of
  ongoing research using RFID to monitor behavior and survival of
  wintering birds in Wisconsin, and finally, provide some insight
  into future directions for RFID applications in ecological
  research.

  Chris Latimer is a Ph.D. student in the wildlife ecology program
  and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests
  include: understanding how anthropogenic factors affect the
  behavior, energetics and survival of wildlife, and technological
  applications in tracking and monitoring wildlife populations.
  His dissertation work involves using RFID technologies to
  determine how the interaction between land-cover and weather
  influence the foraging behaviors and survival of wintering birds
  in Wisconsin. 

• IEEE Signal
  Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer Series

  

• Date: 11:45 AM Friday,

  March 14th, 2014

• Speaker: Dr. V. John Mathews of The University of Utah
• Location:  (Tentative)

  Promega BioPharmaceutical Technology Center

  Room Number: 122

  5445 E Cheryl Pkwy

  Fitchburg,  Wisconsin

  Note:  Day is FRIDAY.

Topic:
Restoration of Motor Skills in Patients with Disorders of the
Central Nervous System

Recent technological innovations such as functional neural
stimulation (FNS) offer considerable benefits to paralyzed
individuals. FNS can produce movement in paralyzed muscles by the
application of electrical stimuli to the nerves innervating the
muscles. The first part of this talk will describe how smooth
muscle movements can be evoked using Utah slanted electrode arrays
(USEAs) inserted into the motor nerves of the peripheral nervous
system. The standard 4 x 4 mm USEAs contain 100 electrodes of
varying lengths. Implantation of a USEA in a peripheral nerve
allows highly selective electrical access to individual and small
groups of axons. We will review approaches for designing
asynchronously interleaved stimulation signals applied via
individual electrodes in the arrays to evoke smooth,
fatigue-resistant force that closely resembles normal motor
function. The second part of this talk will describe efforts to
decode cortical surface potentials, recorded with dense grids of
microelectrodes. Decoding human intent from neural signals is a
critical component of brain-computer interfaces. This information
can then be used to control the muscles in tasks involving
restoration of motor skills or to control a robot that performs
desired tasks. We will discuss recent work on decoding neural data
collected from patients implanted with microelectrode arrays. The
talk will conclude with a discussion of some of the current
research challenges in this area.

Biography: Dr. V. John
Mathews is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
the University of Utah. His research interests are in nonlinear
and adaptive signal processing and application of signal
processing techniques in audio and communication systems,
biomedical engineering, and structural health management. He
chaired the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
the University of Utah during 1999-2003. Dr. Mathews is a Fellow
of IEEE. He served as the Vice President (Finance) of the IEEE
Signal Processing Society during 2003-2005 and the Vice President
(Conferences) of the Society during 2009-2011. He is a past
associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing,
and the IEEE Signal Processing Letters and the IEEE Journal of
Selected Topics in Signal Processing and currently serves on the
editorial board of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He was a
recipient of the 2008-09 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the
National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India, and the
Utah Engineers Council’s Engineer of the Year Award in 2011. He
serves now as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal
Processing Society for 2013 and 2014.

Section News

Eric Rosenthal Talk Review (Provided
by Charles Gervasi): 

This excellent talk informed the
attendees about the “Magic” of Disney Engineering.  He
explained how Disney attractions begin with storyboard drawings
posted around a room. The creative team collaboratively identifies
which ideas are the best. People whose ideas were abandoned would
enthusiastically work on the ideas that were
adopted.    The work on the attractions involved
creative custom solutions that resulted in a series of funny
engineering anecdotes which he shared with us.  When he worked
on the Alien Encounter attraction, his first task was to make the
attraction less scary because people could not follow the story over
the audience screaming. They got rid of a large electrical arcing
display and installed “butt thumpers” and moving whiskers to brush
against the audiences legs. They configured speakers to give the
audience the impression the alien was walking nearby. They designed
a device to emit an “alien smell” when the the alien sounded like it
was nearby. The device emitted a freshener that eliminated the smell
as soon as the alien walked away.  He worked on an Indiana
Jones ride that used 600W subwoofers to give the audience the
impression of a huge rolling ball. People were reporting vibrations
in homes miles away. They had to reduce the power by
10dB.  

In another project, he worked on a ride with a large power
requirement. The design involved 11kV lines going to a transformer
on the roof to step it down to 480V.  Noise was coupling from
the power lines to the communication system, which as a fail-safe
shuts down the entire attraction if communication is interrupted.
The shielding on the power lines was ineffective because the
electrical conduit that appeared as steel on the drawing was
actually PVC to accommodate Florida’s high water table. Reinstalling
power through steel conduit solved the problem.  When he was
working on a 42nd Street New York ABC TV studio, contractors
installed soundproofing over electrical outlets. He believes they
did this on purpose, hoping to get paid to remove it, find the
outlets, and re-install it. To find the outlet locations, he got a
helium tank from a party store and connected it to the electrical
conduit, forcing the gas out the electrical boxes. Then he went
around with an inexpensive helium detector to find the locations of
the outlets.  The idea we came away with is that show business
engineering projects are unique in that they have a very large
budgets, strict schedules, and subjective design requirements that
are evaluated by executives with a creative non-technical
mindset.  For a copy of the talk slides, click here
(Warning: 12MBytes!)

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Madison IEEE Section

The IEEE-Madison Section of the IEEE is a section in Region 4 of the
IEEE-USA organized to serve IEEE members in the Madison, WI area with
over 600 members.  the 2013 Officers and Board Members are Tom
Kaminski – Chair, Charles Gervasi – Treasurer, Kevin Schoeneck –
Secretary, Timothy Chapman – Webmaster, Tom Kaminski – ECN Chair,
Members at Large: Mitch Bradt, Clark Johnson, Dennis Bahr, Craig
Heilman, Sandy Rotter, Steve Schultheis.

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Contact Us

Please direct any questions or comments to Tom Kaminski via email to
tjkaminski-at-ieee.org.