News Archives - October 2009

Katie Bulgrin is a SEE-LA Fellow
October 30, 2009

Katie Bulgrin

UCLA Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering student Katie Bulgrin is a graduate teaching Fellow in UCLA’s Science and Engineering of the Environment of Los Angeles (SEE-LA) Program.  SEE-LA is an effort to improve science education at the middle and high school levels as well as raise students’ awareness and interest in the area of science and engineering. 

The program, which has received $3 million over five years from NSF’s Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 (GK-12) Education Program, pairs graduate fellows from UCLA with science teachers in the Los Angeles and Culver City unified school districts.

SEE-LA focuses on the environment of Los Angeles.  Issues such as urbanization, global and regional climate change, drought, floods, fires, earthquakes, pollution, transportation, preservation, biodiversity, energy and water use confront the students of L.A. on a daily basis.  Graduate fellows, with research interests in the above or related areas, contribute to the professional development programs of the science departments of the schools.  Katie’s research on thermal energy harvesting is directly relevant to the goals of the program.  Students at the schools also benefit from fellows through an enriched learning experience with more individualized attention in the classroom and by having an opportunity to directly interact with fellows.

Ann Karagozian selected to chair major study for the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board
October 21, 2009

Ann Karagozian

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Ann Karagozian was recently selected to chair a major study for the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) on the subject of future launch vehicle systems. Karagozian also recently completed four years of service as the SAB's Vice Chair. More information on the SAB may be found at https://www.sab.hq.af.mil/.

Rajit Gadh to give MobiCase and Simposio RFID 2009 keynotes
October 16, 2009

Rajit Gadh

UCLA Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department Professor Rajit Gadh will deliver the keynote address at MobiCASE 2009, an international conference on mobile computing, applications and services, to be held in San Diego later this month. Gadh's talk is titled "Mobile Experience 2.0 - Seamless Convergence of Media Content, Applications, Devices and Networks."

Additionally, Prof. Gadh is giving the keynote address at Brazil's Simposio RFID 2009. He was interviewed by Computer World and they wrote this article in Portuguese for the Brazilian community.

Here is a translated excerpt from that article:

According to Rajit Gadh, professor of University of Los Angeles (UCLA) and founder of Wireless Media Lab in the same institution, medium-sized companies will be the ones more equipped to adopt the new technology massively. “Small companies do not have investment power and the large ones, although contributing to the discussion, implement the technology too slowly due to their size,” he says.

“The market already offers complete solutions that are financially viable and capable of offering ROI (return on investment) in short or medium term,” says Gadh. Although the return is a reality, a case-to-case study must be done to know up to which point its adoption is viable, defends the professor.

With the large amount of standards available today, very similar to what happened to cellular telephony in the 80’s, the cost of the tags can vary from 10 cents to 10 dollars. “There are cases where the most expensive tags pay off, and the cheapest ones do not offer financial benefits,” says Gadh.

The professor is, however, optimistic regarding the future of the technology. “The tags can reach tenths of cents, and the reader can be as cheap as 10 dollars.” These values would be the assurance of ROI and massive adoption.

The RFID technology is also being developed to support an implementation of Smart Grid -- another application that has been widely discussed.

"It is part of the RFID evolution, initially for id-based inventory, subsequently for sensor-based monitoring and eventually for inventory control", says Gadh. The technology also offers opportunities in the area of healthcare and hospital administration. For this reason it needs significant governmental investment.

(According to CNET News, in the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Department of Energy will invest $4.5 billion in direct spending to modernize the electricity grid with Smart Grid technologies.)

Dr. Tetsuya Iwasaki joins UCLA's MAE Department
October 8, 2009

Tetsuya Iwasaki

Dr. Tetsuya Iwasaki joined the UCLA faculty in the summer of 2009 as Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He came to UCLA from the University of Virginia (UVa), where he was a faculty member since 2000.  Dr. Iwasaki specializes in dynamical systems and control, and has contributed to developments of systematic methods for control systems analysis and synthesis, with a recent focus on biological mechanisms underlying rhythmic body movements during animal locomotion.

His initial exposure to systems theory was at Tokyo Tech through power electronics research. He was quickly attracted by the beauty of systematic optimization when he investigated during his Master's study whether extended Kalman filtering was a viable tool for estimation of induction motor parameters. His Ph.D study at Purdue focused on development of feedback control theory to achieve stability and regulation performance for dynamical systems. The early 1990s was the time when the control community began to recognize linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) as a powerful computational tool for optimization. His Ph.D research showed how LMIs enable unification of robust and optimal control theories with a variety of specifications, and contributed to introduction of LMI-based design methods to the control community. His dissertation work appeared in a book publication, "A Unified Algebraic Approach to Linear Control Design," coauthored by his advisor R.E. Skelton and his colleague K.M. Grigoriadis.

In the late 1990s, Dr. Iwasaki joined the faculty of Tokyo Tech and collaborated with leading experts in robotics and automation as a member of a government funded Center-of-Excellence (COE) project on "super-mechano systems." The aim of the project was to establish a design theory for achieving highly robust and adaptive motion of robotic systems via feedback control. A direction of his research was aligned with a collective effort of the COE team toward development of biologically-inspired robotic systems, attempting to realize undulatory snake locomotion that is more suitable for rugged environments than wheeled vehicles. He successfully applied a robust control scheme to achieve crawling locomotion of a robotic snake, but then realized the necessity of a new control theory that enabled adaptation of the undulation pattern, or the gait, to the changing environment so that high efficiency of locomotion was maintained.

Soon after moving to UVa in 2000, he found a clue for such a control paradigm, oscillator in a feedback loop, by talking to Prof. W.O. Friesen, a biologist whose lifelong research aim was to discover neuronal control principles underlying undulatory swimming of leeches. They immediately started collaborative research through NIH funding on modeling of leech swimming mechanisms, involving the neuronal control circuits called the central pattern generator (CPG), muscle biomechanics and physiology with motoneuron activation, body-fluid interactions to generate thrust via undulation, and sensory feedback to adjust the CPG command for body oscillation. His research in this direction has recently been expanded to include the development of underwater vehicles inspired by ray swimming with flapping wings, and he collaborates with fluid mechanicians, a structural dynamicist, and a biologist on an ONR-funded MURI project.
Dr. Iwasaki's current research interests include neuronal control mechanism of animal locomotion, nonlinear oscillators, and robust/nonlinear control theory and its applications to mechanical, aerospace, and electrical systems.

Dr. Iwasaki received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) in 1987 and 1990, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University in 1993. He was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Purdue University (1994-1995), Research Associate (1995-1996), Lecturer (1996-1997) and Associate Professor (1997-2000) at Tokyo Tech, and Assistant Professor (2000-2002), Associate Professor (2002-2004), and Professor (2004-2009) at the University of Virginia.  He is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of ASME, and has served as associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Systems and Control Letters, IFAC Automatica, and International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control. He received the CAREER Award from NSF, Pioneer Prize from SICE, George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from IEEE, and Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award from ASME.