Awards support developing careers of young engineers

Awards support developing careers of young engineers

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

Assistant professors Marcia O’Malley, mechanical engineering and materials science, and Yehia Massoud, electrical and computer engineering, have won Faculty Early Career Development (Career) Program Awards from the National Science Foundation. That increases Rice’s total number of Career grants this year to five, including three previously announced awards featured in the Rice News in February.

Career grants support early career development of junior faculty. They are among the most competitive grants at the National Science Foundation, which awards only about 400 of the five-year grants across all disciplines each year. All Career grants include both an educational and research component.

O’Malley will use her funding to create human-robot interaction systems that can efficiently train people to perform manual tasks or that can be used for physical therapy for stroke or brain-injury patients. The technology involves “haptics,” which allows users to simultaneously see and feel virtual environments through the use of computer-controlled desktop devices that contain sensors and actuators.

O’Malley’s aim is to first understand the ways that experts train novices by creating a human-robot interaction system that allows for data collection during training. Then, two system architectures will be developed — one that uses the robot as the expert teacher, and one that allows humans to interact with a robotic mediator. The first architecture could be used to deliver therapy in much the same way as experienced physical therapists, while the second could be used to allow skilled surgeons to demonstrate procedures to medical students, all with visual and haptic feedback.

The grant includes funding to develop innovative laboratory modules using haptic devices to enhance student learning, reinvigorate an introductory robotics course to include hands-on experiments with haptics and robotics, and high school outreach that includes internships, days on campus and demonstrations using haptics to encourage students to pursue careers in science and engineering

Massoud’s Career project will focus on developing more efficient methods of designing integrated circuits and system-on-chip. Due to the continuously increasing operating frequencies, interconnect has become the main limiting factor of integrated circuits’ performance. Current design automation techniques fail to include deep submicron interconnect effects directly into the synthesis process. To promote synthesis strategies that handle the increased complexity of mixed-signal nanoscale integrated circuits, Massoud will develop a new interconnect synthesis paradigm that evaluates the circuit signal integrity and performance during interconnect synthesis.

In the new paradigm proposed by Massoud, interconnect in mixed-signal systems is modeled, optimized and synthesized taking all aspects of the system’s interconnect into account, including analog interconnect structures and integrated components as well as interconnect in digital portions of the design. To facilitate and develop the new system-oriented interconnect synthesis paradigm for mixed-signal nanoscale interconnects, Massoud and his research group will research and create analytical modeling, optimization and synthesis methodologies that facilitate generalized design automation in integrated mixed-signal and system-on-chip designs. The system-oriented interconnect synthesis strategies will utilize statistical modeling methodologies incorporating inductance to produce layout that meets design constraints. Massoud aims to create a new paradigm for interconnect synthesis that will interconnect effects in mixed signal systems to be modeled, optimized and synthesized during the initial design phase.

The educational component of Massoud’s grant calls for the use of a dynamic computer engineering curriculum in both his graduate class, which uses an innovative semester-long project emphasizing original research, and his undergraduate class, which stresses the fundamentals of the very large-scale integration design process.