News & EventsDepartment Events
Events
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Nov18
EVENT DETAILS
ECE Seminar Series- Enabling Sustainable Sensor Networks with Microbe-powered RF Backscatter with Dr. Colleen JosephsonHosted by Professor Branden Ghena
We need affordable and innovative sensing to assist in tackling global-scale problems like sustainably feeding the next billion. RF backscatter systems such as RFID are well-known in the sensing community because of their low power consumption. This talk explores how we can leverage advances in low-power embedded systems to enable robust indoor/outdoor RF-backscatter sensing. The first portion of the talk will describe how we can leverage commodity indoor signals like WiFi to implement a backscatter-based wireless computer vision system. The second part focuses on an outdoor radar backscatter sensing system that uses RF to measure soil moisture with accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art commercial sensors, but at a fraction of the cost. The talk concludes with an overview of recent work on renewably powering outdoor sensor systems via energy harvested from non-traditional sources like microbes.
Colleen Josephson is an incoming Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz and a research scientist at VMware. Her research interests include wireless communication and sensing systems, with a focus on technologies to enable and improve sustainable practices. She is also co-chair of the GreenG Working Group within the Atis NextG Alliance, which aims to position North America as the global leader in environmental sustainability of future generations of wireless technology by reducing Next G technologies’ energy consumption and environmental impact. Colleen completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2020 at Stanford University, where she was advised by Sachin Katti and Keith Winstein. Before beginning her PhD, she worked at Cisco Meraki as a wireless engineer, and even before that she received her SB and MEng degrees from MIT. She is also a former Microsoft Research intern, a 2020 Rising Star in EECS, a finalist in the 2019 MIT Bay Area Research Slam, and a recipient of the Stanford Graduate, Schlumberger Innovation and D.E. Shaw Exploration fellowships.
TIME Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
LOCATION Tech A110, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Catherine Healey catherine.healey@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
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May28
EVENT DETAILS
Communications and sensing (say, radar sensing) are developed, designed and operated independently. However, they share many similarities such as frequency bands, hardware and signal processing techniques. Therefore, pressed by the deficiency of available frequency spectrum, there is a demand for integrating both functionalities of communications and sensing in the same waveform and operated in the same hardware platform. This integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has been made one of the six use scenarios of 6G cellular systems. The marriage of the two historically independent technologies brings many challenges, such as the fundamental trade-off between communications and sensing, waveform design, ADC sampling bottleneck for wideband processing, and security issues. In this talk, I will discuss these topics, together with the theoretical, algorithmic and experimental progress in my research lab.
TIME Wednesday, May 28, 2025 at 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
LOCATION L440, Technological Institute map it
CONTACT Catherine Healey catherine.healey@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
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Jun15
EVENT DETAILSmore info
2024-2025 Commencement Ceremony
TIME Sunday, June 15, 2025
CONTACT Office of the Registrar nu-registrar@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR University Academic Calendar
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Jun16
EVENT DETAILS
McCormick School of Engineering PhD Hooding and Master's Degree Recognition Ceremony. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.
TIME Monday, June 16, 2025 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
LOCATION 2705 Ashland Ave
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science
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Jun16
EVENT DETAILSmore info
McCormick School of Engineering Undergraduate Convocation. The most up to date information can be found on our graduation webpage.
TIME Monday, June 16, 2025 at 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
LOCATION 2705 Ashland Ave
CONTACT Northwestern Engineering Events northwestern-engineering-events@northwestern.edu EMAIL
CALENDAR McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science