King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals

Electrical Engineering Department

Seminar Series (Abstracts)

You are cordially invited to attend a seminar 

 

09 Seminar 14

Speaker     :       Dr. Mohamed Abdul Haleem

 Assistant Professor, EE Department, KFUPM

Date           :        Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Time           :        1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

Target localization in distributed MIMO radar systems

Abstract

The Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar concept is based on a set of widely separated transmit and receive radars having the ability to jointly process the received signals. For most applications, time synchronization among radars is a sufficient requirement. These are classified as non-coherent systems. High resolution target location estimation is based on phase synchronization among radars and is defined as coherent processing. The lower bound on target localization error was derived by use of the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) on target localization accuracy for coherent MIMO radar systems. The spatial advantage is found to be proportional to MN where M is the number of transmit radars and N is the number of receive radars. The coherence advantage is proportional to fc/B where fc is the signal carrier frequency and B is the bandwidth. In low SNR, the estimation capabilities are predominated by sidelobe ambiguity. Thinned and randomized nature of elements in the MIMO radar results in the ability to break the grating lobes and leads to the reduction of peak side lobe level proportional MN. In this seminar, we also discuss the possibility to trade-off bandwidth to the number of radar elements by the use of multi-carrier signals.


09 Seminar 13

Speaker      :     Dr. Wissam Jamal

                                   Director of IPMTechnology

Date            :       Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2010.

Time            :       1:00 pm.

Venue          :    Building 59 -2002 (Refreshment will be served)

Title

Fundamentals of Power Electronics and Applications

Abstract

Power Electronics play an essential role in modern technology and are now used extensively in low and high power products. Such products include motor controls, welding machines, electric vehicles, office and home appliances, machine tools, uninterruptible power supplies, lightings and many others. Special high power applications include Static VAr Generation (SVG) and renewable energy control management (Wind, Photovoltaic).

 

The purpose of this presentation is to give an overview of power electronic systems and present various power converter topologies and their switching characteristics, which can be found in many consumer and industrial products. The presentation will also focus on specific applications that utilize power electronic circuits.

 

 Speakers Bio


 

Dr Wissam Jamal received his B.Eng. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Wales Swansea, UK in 1996. He then readmitted to the same University to pursue his higher degree education in Power Electronics. He completed his PhD in 2001 and thesis submitted was on the “Application of Modern Control Techniques in AC speed drives”.

 In January 2000, he became a senior research assistant in the School of Engineering at the University of Wales Swansea, where he worked on various research and industrial projects related to power electronics applications. From February 2002 to November 2004, he joined the Power Electronics Design Centre (PEDC) at the University of Wales Swansea as a technical manager, leading the centre’s application and design group. He took particular responsibility for the design of new power electronics products in liaison with many industrial partners.

 From December 2004 to November 2007 he worked for Eaton Corporation in the UK as a leading designer, where he was responsible for the design and test of new controller circuits for twin-pilot electrohydraulic valve system. He was also responsible for conducting type testing on CAN Joystick Controller in order to acquire product CE marking. In November 2007, he moved to Saudi Arabia and setup a new company to provide unique services in the areas of power quality, industrial and process automation and electric hoisting applications.

      
Research Interests Include:

·         Application Specific Power Integrated Circuit (ASPIC)

·         Modern Control Techniques

·         Switched Mode Power Supplies

·         Variable Speed Drives

·          Power Quality and Filtering

      

 

09 Seminar 12

Speaker: Mr. Nael Obeid

    GM, Management Technology, Riyadh

    (General introduction 10-15 minutes)

 

    Eng. Kailash Purohith

    Power Research & Development Consultants, Ltd.

               Bangalore, India

    (Technical presentation & Live Demo)

 

Date:       Tuesday, Dec. 29rd, 2009.

Time:       1:00 pm.

Venue:    Building 59 -2002 (Refreshment will be served)

Title

Power System Simulation using "MiPower"

 

Abstract

MiPower is a highly interactive, user friendly windows based Power System Analysis package. It includes a set of programs for performing a range of power system design and analysis study. MiPower features include a top notch Windows GUI with network editor and automatic single line diagram generation. It includes the application programs like Load Flow Analysis, Short Circuit, transient Stability, Relay Co-ordination, Harmonic Analysis, Long Term Load Forecast etc.  Speakers will offer demonstration of package with case studies.            

 

09 Seminar 11

Speaker: Dr. Merouane Debbah

               Head of Alcatel-Lucent Chair on Flexible Radio

               SUPELEC, France

Date:       Wednesday, Dec. 23rd, 2009.

Time:       1:00 pm.

Venue:    Building 59 -2004 (Refreshment will be served)

Title

Mobile Flexible Networks: breaking the spectral efficiency barrier

Abstract

The general framework of Mobile Flexible Networks (MFN) is to design dense self-organizing, self-healing and self-energy harvesting secure networks where terminals and base stations interact and self-adapt in an intelligent manner without the need of a central controller or with the right amount of regulation to let the terminas/base stations  in the network exploit fully the degrees of freedom. The design depends mainly on the mobility pattern  as in highly mobile environments, intelligence at the terminal reduces the cost of signalling whereas for fixed (non-mobile) networks, all the intelligence can be put on the network side. One of the big challenges is to find how to optimally split the intelligence between cognitive terminals and cognitive networks. In this talk, we discuss the  challenges ahead and provide some research directions to develop the theoretical foundations of these networks.

 Speakers Bio


Mérouane Debbah was born in Madrid, Spain. He entered the Ecole Normale Suprieure de Cachan (France) in 1996 where he received his M.Sc and Ph.D. degrees respectively in 1999 and 2002. From 1999 to 2002, he worked for Motorola Labs on Wireless Local Area Networks and prospective fourth generation systems. From 2002 until 2003, he was appointed Senior Researcher at the Vienna Research Center for Telecommunications (FTW) (Vienna, Austria) working on MIMO wireless channel modeling issues. From 2003 until 2007, he joined the Mobile Communications de-partment of the Institut Eurecom (Sophia Antipolis, France) as an Assistant Professor. He is presently a Professor at Supelec (Gif-sur-Yvette, France), holder of the Alcatel-Lucent Chair on Flexible Radio. His research interests are in information theory, signal process-ing and wireless communications. Mérouane Debbah is the recipient of the "Mario Boella" prize award in 2005, the 2007 General Symposium IEEE GLOBECOM best paper award, the Wi-Opt 2009 best paper award as well as the Valuetools 2007,Valuetools 2008 and CrownCom2009 best student paper awards. He is a WWRF fellow.

 

 

09 Seminar 10

Speaker: Dr. Ahmed Tewfik

                Professor

                Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer

                Science, University of Minnesota, USA

Date:       Monday, Dec. 21st, 2009.

Time:       1:00 pm.

Venue:    Building 59 -2002 (Refreshment will be served)

Title:

Real Time Tracking of 3D Organ Deformation Using Limited Field Optical Views

 

Abstract

This talk describes an innovative approach for providing the surgeon with a real time 3D view of the organs as they deform during the surgery. Our proposed approach relies on computing an initial 3D model of the organs using CT or MRI scans and tracking the deformation of the organs during surgery using a small number of 2 to 4 needlescopic fiber cameras. These needlescopic cameras require micrometer size incisions. The talk will describe the first ever demonstration of ex-vivo 3 D organ tracking using limited optical views.

Speakers Bio

 

Ahmed H Tewfik received his B.Sc. degree from Cairo University, Cairo Egypt, in 1982 and his M.Sc., E.E. and Sc.D. degrees from MIT, in 1984, 1985 and 1987 respectively. He is the E. F. Johnson professor of Electronic Communications with the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Tewfik worked at Alphatech, Inc. and served as a consultant to several companies. From August 1997 to August 2001, he was the President and CEO of Cognicity, Inc., an entertainment marketing software tools publisher that he co-founded, on partial leave of absence from the University of Minnesota. His current research interests are in genomics and proteomics, minimally invasive surgery, wearable sensors for patients at cardiac risk or with traumatic brain injury, brain computing interfaces and programmable wireless networks. Prof. Tewfik is a Fellow of the IEEE. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 1997 - 1999. He received the IEEE third Millennium award in 2000. He was elected to the position of VP Technical Directions of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2009 and served on the board of governors of that Society from 2006 to 2008. He has given several plenary and keynote lecture at IEEE conferences.

 

 09 Seminar 9

Speaker     :       Dr. Ghassan AlRegib, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Date           :        Wednesday Dec. 16, 2009

Time           :        1:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

True Convergence via Immersive Communications

Abstract

In this talk I will describe the various projects we conduct at the Multimedia and Sensors Lab at Georgia Tech. More specifically, I am going to talk about immersive communications projects related to multi-camera systems, hand movement processing and networking, and hand gesture recognition. In the multi-camera system, I will describe the system we have in our lab and was built in collaboration between my lab and HPL. I will also describe the quality measure that we developed to provide an objective measure for images that are captured by multi-camera systems. In the hand movement project, I will describe our transmission algorithms that were developed for micro-level movements in collaborative virtual environments. I will also talk about other projects including a hybrid variable length coding algorithm that was developed for high-resolution video sequences and was patented by Cisco Systems Inc. I will conclude my talk with a summary of the latest project, called Convergence in One System (CiOS), where we build the future media center that is based on a hybrid CPU-GPU platform and supports seamless interaction and personalized service. This project is in collaboration with multiple Korean companies and is funded by the Korean government via a $10M grant.

 

Speaker Bio

Dr. AlRegib received his Bachelor and Master degrees from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in electrical engineering in 1997 and 1998, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003. He joined the Faculty of the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). His research group is working on projects related to multimedia processing and communications, distributed processing, collaborative systems, immersive communications, and social signal processing.

 

Dr. AlRegib received the ECE Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in spring 2001, the Center for Signal and Image Processing Research Award in spring 2003, and the Center for Signal and Image Processing Service Award in spring 2003, all from Georgia Tech. In 2008, he received the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award.

 

Dr. AlRegib is the Area Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and is the Editor-in-
Chief of the ICST Transactions on Immersive Communications. He was the General Co-Chair and Co-Founder of the First International Conference on Immersive Telecommunication (IMMERSCOM) that was held in Italy in November 2007. He is the Steering Committee Co-Chair for the Second International Conference on Immersive Telecommunications to be held in California in May 2009. He was the Chair of the Special Sessions Program at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2006. He also served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine and as the Chair and Founder of the Immersive Communications Technical and Business Unit (TAB) at the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST). Dr. AlRegib served as session chair and technical program committee member for several international conferences and workshops.

 

 09 Seminar 8

Speaker     :       Dr. Wajih Abu Al-Saud

 Assistant Professor, EE Department, KFUPM

Date           :        Tuesday Dec. 8, 2009

Time           :        1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

Outcome-Based ABET Assessment Methods

Abstract

With next week’s visit of the ABET program assessment team scheduled for December 12-14 being only few days away, it is very important for faculty in all concerned departments to be aware of the ABET assessment process as much as possible as the ABET team may meet with individual faculty members of these departments. This seminar is one of many seminars that (have been/will be) conducted in different departments of the Collage of Engineering to increase awareness of the ABET assessment process in preparation for the visit.

Many methods have been traditionally used for assessment of the degree of achieving different program outcomes. These include but are not limited to written surveys and questionnaires, exit interviews, standardized and locally developed examinations, focus groups, performance appraisals, and oral examinations. Some faculty members who have been involved in their department’s ABET assessment committees may be aware of these methods but many of us are not. This presentation will describe many ABET assessment methods and discuss their advantages/disadvantages from the point of ease of use, validity, accuracy, and relevance of the results obtained from these methods, in addition to methods of reducing the disadvantages of each method.

 

 

09 Seminar 7 (Special Seminar)


The Office of Cooperation with KAUST

&

The Electrical Engineering Department

 

 

Speaker      :           Dr. Atef Shamim

                                Research Fellow

                                KAUST

                 

Date            :        Sunday Dec. 6th, 2009

Time            :        12:15 pm

Venue          :           Room 2002, Building 59                               

                                     

RF System-on-Chip (SoC) and System-on-Package (SoP) Design For Wireless Communications
 

 

Low cost wireless sensor systems are becoming crucial in modern day health care. These can be utilized in a number of applications like continuous monitoring of human vital signs, remote health care, locating patients in a hospital environment, communicating the dose of automated medicine to medical staff and measuring radiation dose in radiotherapy applications. The wireless aspect is not only revolutionary for health care delivery but also brings in added convenience for the patients. The desired characteristics for such a wireless device are very small size, minimum power consumption and low cost. The miniaturization and low cost requirements can be achieved by employing low cost CMOS integrated circuit (IC) technology in a SoC format with a minimum number of off-chip components. For added flexibility, functionality and efficiency, a SoP approach can be followed as an alternate solution for such wireless biomedical sensor systems. In this regard, Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramics (LTCC) technology offers many attractive features and possibilities. Size reduction is possible because of the 3D nature of the multi-layer, low loss medium and because passive components such as capacitors, resistors, inductors and antennas can be embedded, allowing for a high degree of integration. This presentation will cover some novel RF SoC and SoP design examples consistent with the theme of wireless sensors. It will also highlight some new trends and challenges associated with these designs.

 

 

Speaker Bio


Atif Shamim received his M.A.Sc. and Ph.D degrees in electrical engineering at Carleton University, Canada in 2004 and 2009 respectively. He was a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Alexander Graham Bell Graduate scholar at Carleton University from 2007 till 2009. Presently, he is an NSERC research fellow at the Department of Electrical Engineering in King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). His research interests are in RF System-on-Chip (SoC) with particular focus on integrated on-chip antennas and low power CMOS RFIC’s, and advanced LTCC packaging techniques for System-on-Package (SoP) applications. He has published 23 international papers and holds two pending US patents in the field of RF systems and Antennas.

 

He has been named in the “Great Grads Honors list” of Carleton University for his research work (only 22 scientists have made it to this list since 1942). He was the recipient of the “overall best paper prize” in the European Wireless Technology Conference (2008). He won the Ottawa Centre of Research Innovation (OCRI) Researcher of the Year Award (2008). His work on “Wireless Dosimeter for Cancer Treatment” won the ITAC SMC Award at Canadian Microelectronics Corporation TEXPO (2007). He was an invited researcher at the VTT Micromodule Research Center (Oulu, Finland) in 2006. He received the best student paper finalist prize at IEEE APS conference in 2005. He has also won many entrepreneurial awards, the latest being the Canada-wide 2009 Enterprise Canada Business Plan Award.


09 Seminar 6

Speaker     :       Dr. Khurram Karim Qureshi

 Assistant Professor, EE Department, KFUPM

Date           :        Tuesday November 17, 2009

Time           :        1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

C-band single longitudinal mode lanthanum co-doped Bismuth based fiber ring laser

Abstract

In this work we propose and demonstrate a stable, tunable and narrow linewidth C-band lanthanum co-doped bismuth based erbium doped fiber (EDF) ring laser with single longitudinal mode (SLM) operation. A free space thin film filter acts as a wavelength discriminative component selecting a few oscillating modes while a Lyot filter formed by a polarization maintaining (PM) fiber and a linear polarizer further discriminates and selects SLM efficiently. A power stability of ≤ 0.05 dB, central wavelength variation of ≤ 0.02 nm, a side-mode suppression ratio (SMSR) of at least > 43 dB, and a linewidth of about 1.3 kHz have been experimentally demonstrated.

 

Short Biography

Khurram Karim Qureshi received his B.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering with honors from the University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore, Pakistan in 1999. After his graduation he worked at Engro Innovative Automation Engineering Private Limited as an automation engineer. Later he won a very competitive international scholarship offered by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for his postgraduate studies in Hong Kong, where he completed his PhD in 2006. In 2007-2008 he worked as an Assistant Professor in the newly established Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. In 2008-2009 he won a very prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship offered by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for his post-doctoral research. He joined the Electrical Engineering department of KFUPM in September 2009, where he is working as an Assistant Professor. His areas of research include fiber lasers, fiber sensors, optical performance monitoring, all-optical signal processing, and gain clamping techniques in optical amplifiers. He has published over 25 international research papers (journals/conferences) in these areas.

 

 

09 Seminar 5 (Special Seminar)

 

Speaker     :         Mr. Roy Moxley,  

Senior Product Manager, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories. Inc. USA

Date           :        Sunday  November 8, 2009     

Time           :        10:00-11:30a.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

Synchrophasor-Based Power System Monitoring, Analysis, and Control

Abstract

Advancements in the availability and installation of phasor measurement units (PMUs) have progressed faster than the installed base of applications for this new technology. The electric power industry has begun to recognize the potential for new synchronized phasor measurement (synchrophasor) applications but is

only beginning to put these into service. Electric power systems are changing to meet economic, environmental, and political requirements. These changes have many consequences. There is greater transmission of power, with longer separations between generation and load. More distributed and relatively uncontrolled generation, such as wind power, is being installed. All of this is coupled with a greater drive for improved efficiency and reliability of service.

 

This presentation addresses how these changing power system requirements are being matched with the capabilities of widespread PMUs, phasor data concentration systems, and now synchrophasor vector processors. Traditional synchronized phasor measurement systems record system events for later analysis. Recent applications involve real-time display of synchronized values for use by system controllers to improve stability. The latest applications close the control loop by using wide-area measurements to initiate changes to the system state.

 

Short Biography

 

Roy Moxley has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado. He has been involved in electric power systems for 30 years.  He joined Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Inc. in 2000 and serves as a senior product manager. Prior to joining SEL, he was with General Electric Company as a relay application engineer, transmission and distribution (T&D) field application engineer, and T&D account manager. He is a registered professional engineer in the State of Pennsylvania and has authored numerous technical papers presented at U.S. and international relay and automation conferences.

 

 

091 Seminar 4

Speaker     :       Mr. Noman Ali Tasaduq

 Lecturer, EE Department, KFUPM

Date           :        Tuesday November 3, 2009

Time           :        1:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

Realizations of CMOS Fully Differential Current Followers/ Amplifiers

Abstract

Fully differential architectures are essential to enhance the performance of mixed analog/digital systems in terms of supply noise rejection, dynamic range, and harmonic distortion and also to reduce the effect of coupling between various blocks. The main objective of this work is to present several fully differential Current Follower topologies and to investigate their characteristics.

 

 

 

 

 

091 Seminar 3  (Special Seminar)

Speaker     :       Mr. Shahab A. Najmi

                            Sr. Manager (Technical Marketing), IC MICROSYSTEMS, Malaysia

 

Date           :        Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Time           :        1:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

Semiconductor Industry and Opportunities in IC Design and Fabrication Process Design

 

Abstract

To brief researchers and interested students about the design process and methodology which should benefit them in developing a deeper understanding of semiconductor  industry, IC design and fabrication process.

 

 

 

091 Seminar 2

Speaker     :       Dr. Mohammad S. Sharawi

 Assistant Professor, EE Department, KFUPM

Date           :        Tuesday October 20, 2009

Time           :        1:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

Inter/Multi-Disciplinary Engineering: Education and Research

Abstract

This talk will touch upon the new wave that some international institutions are riding in introducing degrees in multi-disciplinary fields in the areas of engineering and science. It will also contain an overview of the need for such degrees in our region (Arab World) based on the type of industry and institutions that we have. Finally, several examples of multi-disciplinary research projects that the speaker was involved in are presented.

 

 

091 Seminar 1

Speaker     :       Dr. Samir Al-Ghadhban

 Assistant Professor, EE Department, KFUPM

Date           :        Tuesday October 13, 2009

Time           :        1:15 p.m. – 2:00 p.m.

Venue        :        Building 59 Room 2002

 

Title:

Scheduling for V-Blast Users over MIMO Channels

Abstract

We present in this talk uplink scheduling for V-BLAST users.  Each user spatially multiplexes his data over multiple transmit antennas. This spatial multiplexing (SM) scheme provides high data rates while multi-user diversity obtained from scheduling improves the performance of the uplink system. The scheduler selects one user at a time based on a criterion that minimizes aggregate BER. The main results of this study show that the scheduler that maximizes the optimal MIMO capacity doesn’t work well for a V-BLAST system. Instead, a scheduler that maximizes the V-BLAST capacity is derived specifically from the V-BLAST detection algorithm. Furthermore, we propose and compare suboptimal schedulers that are based on the received MIMO channels before processing.

 

 

NOTE: For more details about EE Seminars, please visit our seminar home page,

http://faculty.kfupm.edu.sa/ee/muqaibel/seminars.htm

http://www.kfupm.edu.sa/ee/seminar.htm