News

The Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering released our 2022 Annual Newsletter! The newsletter contains highlights of the accomplishments of our students, faculty and staff in the past year.

The 2022 newsletter and past annual newsletters can be found here.

ECSE department welcomes three outstanding new faculty: Assistant Professor Liu Liu and Lecturers Alex Patterson and Kimberly Oakes  

ECSE Professor Robert Karlicek, director of the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA), explains how indoor lighting can be improved with “light sculpting” in an episode of the Academic Minute.

Listen to the episode here.

ECSE Professor Emeritus John Woods co-authored "Wavelet-Based Learned Scalable Video Coding," with Cunhui Dong, Haichuan Ma, Dong Liu, all with the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) that won the top creativity award of the ISCAS (IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems) 2022 grand challenge.  ISCAS 2022 was held in Austin, Texas, from May 28 to June 1, 2022.

Abstract of this award-winning paper:

Congratulations to ECSE Prof. Joe Chow on being awarded 2022 IEEE PES Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award! Prof. Chow will be honored and celebrated at the IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting Awards Gala Dinner & Ceremony on Tuesday, July 19th.

The IEEE Power & Energy Society sponsors twenty-four society-level awards. Award recipients are selected through a competitive, vetted nomination process.

See Prof. Chow’s profile for more information on his research.

To honor our 2022 graduates, ECSE held a celebration at the Hilton Garden Inn on Thursday, May 19th. At the celebration, departmental awards and certificates were announced as we celebrated the achievements of graduates and undergraduates completing their degrees. Congratulations again to the Class of 2022!

To watch the celebration, click here.

ECSE Associate Professor Meng Wang was presented with the James M. Tien '66 Early Career Award. This award, in recognition of early career achievement, is funded and awarded by the faculty. Nominations are made by the faculty, and the recipient is chosen by the Faculty Committee on Honors. The award is given to a member of the faculty, who has been on the faculty at Rensselaer for a minimum of three years, and has a maximum of 10 years of professional experience.

The paper, “Designing Model-Free Time Derivatives in the Frequency Domain for Ambient PMU Data Applications” was selected as one of the Best Conference Papers submitted to the 2022 IEEE PES General Meeting. This paper was a part of ongoing collaboration between Prof.

On April 20, 2022, at the annual Grainger Scholars ceremony, three ESCE students received the prestigious Grainger Scholars Award, which is given every spring. Prof. Emeritus Sheppard Salon gave a talk to start the awards, after which the award winners shared their journey to studying Electric Power. Funding for the awards is provided by the Grainger Foundation, a private organization based in Lake Forest, IL which supports U.S.

Neelanga Thelasingha is a Ph.D. student working with Prof. Agung Julius on optimal control and motion planning in autonomous systems like unmanned aerial vehicles. He earned his MS in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2021 and his BSc. in Electrical and Electronic Engineering with first-class honors from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, in 2017. He became interested in autonomous exploration planning through his undergraduate research.