Texas A&M Engineering News

Ames part of $4 million NSF grant to expand cyber-physical systems

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:13

Dr. Aaron Ames, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is part of multi-university team that has received a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support research into cyber-physical systems (CPS).

The project, "Correct-by-Design Control Software Synthesis for Highly Dynamic Systems," is a collaboration of researchers from the University of Michigan, the University of California, Los Angeles, Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon University.

"We are proud of Dr. Ames and this multi-university effort to advance cyber-physical systems," said John Sharp, chancellor of The Texas A&M University System. "The game-changing effects of this type discovery will be felt not only by our citizens in the state of Texas, but in the entire country and eventually, the world. That is the role and responsibility of tier 1 research schools."

The aim of this four-year project is to streamline the production of CPS by developing sophisticated methods for synthesizing control software for engineered systems. The objective is to make it easier to design next-generation CPS so that minimal adjustment will be required during subsequent development and implementation processes. This work will have broad applications to many existing systems, including automobiles, prostheses and manufacturing.

"Our work is concerned with control theoretic methods that will allow advanced techniques from computer science to work on real-world systems where fast reactions are absolutely crucial," said Jessy Grizzle, professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and lead investigator on the collaboration.

"In the end, the most important aspect is safety," Grizzle said. "These software systems are going on cars that are automatically making steering and braking decisions for you or on robots that will be traipsing around rubble, and we need to have super high confidence in the correctness of the software that is operating them. This work aims to increase the likelihood that the software will do what it's supposed to do, and safely."

Ames said, “The formal natural of the work is its most exciting aspect. It is through this formal understanding of complex and dynamic systems that we can design software that will allow them to perform beyond their current capabilities. This performance will come with guarantees that the system will always perform correctly, ensuring safety together with these increase capabilities.“

Ames is the head of A&M Bipedal Experimental Robotics (AMBER) Lab, which focuses on the development of novel theoretical methods related to the control of highly dynamic robotic systems, along with the realization of these formal results on experimental robotic platforms such as custom-built bipedal robots.

In Ames' part of the project, funded for $1.1 million, he will utilize his expertise in the low-level control design based upon mathematically rigorous low-dimensional representations of highly dynamic systems to guide the development of discrete abstractions that will allow for the synthesis of control software that is guaranteed to be correct. These formal ideas will be developed, and tested experimentally, in the context of application domains ranging from highly dynamic maneuvers in automobiles to dynamic locomotion in bipedal robots.

“The team working on this project is very strong," Ames said, "with expertise ranging from low-level controller design for highly dynamic systems to discrete abstractions and software synthesis. This cross-disciplinary team will allow for the new avenues for unification of traditionally disparate ideas, and I believe the results will be very exciting as a result.”

CPS technologies employ sensors, processors and actuators to enable computers to perform dynamically in the physical world, providing people with useful real-time information. They are used in cruise control mechanisms in passenger cars, auto-pilot systems in aircraft, control mechanisms in prosthetics, and futuristic robotic devices for search and rescue.

CPSs also are core to the functioning of medical devices, energy-efficient structures, advanced manufacturing and modern agriculture.

"This investment in fundamental advances at the intersection of cyber and physical systems will pay huge dividends for our nation," said Farnam Jahanian, NSF's assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. "Advances in CPS hold the potential to reshape our world with more responsive, precise and efficient systems that augment human capabilities, work in dangerous or inaccessible environments, provide large-scale, distributed coordination and enhance societal well-being."

New research chair established at Texas A&M

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:12

A new five-year, $1.35 million funding package from the CMG Reservoir Simulation Foundation (Foundation CMG) will establish an Industrial Research Chair in Robust Reduced Complexity Modeling (R²CM) in Reservoir Engineering, in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University.

The Foundation CMG funding will support a chair in reservoir engineering, which will be led by Dr. Eduardo Gildin and Dr. Mike King. The chair will support Gildin and King’s team of research associates and students in undertaking leading edge research in innovative methods for reduced complexity modeling in reservoir simulation and optimization, applied to a variety of challenging problems in hydrocarbon recovery processes of conventional and unconventional reservoirs.

The central idea of the R²CM Chair is to develop, test and apply new methods of model validation (or invalidation) together with integrated dynamic reservoir monitoring and control, amenable to fast simulation, parameter estimation, uncertainty quantification, and production optimization. The team will examine a broad range of reservoir modeling techniques and their validation for consistent assessments of model simplifications and data assimilation for robust performance predictions.

Ultimately, R²CM will tackle the “reduced complexity modeling” paradigm for reservoir management and optimization as a basis for decision support under uncertainty. To this end, R²CM will develop physically motivated simplified models, applying upscaling, streamlines and reduced-order modelling, together with smart systems frameworks, such as control system theory, machine learning theory, real-time dynamical modeling, and high-performance computing.

R²CM has proposed the development of a novel structured model hierarchy that encompasses adequate comprehensive computer models for each tier, together with an underlying error analysis. This hierarchy will provide a framework that can be used to assess complex reservoir models used in optimization under uncertainty. R²CM will pay special attention to projects that provide practical benefits and establish solid mathematical and theoretical frameworks, which will be the building blocks for long-term research progress.

The main themes of this research chair are:

Upscaling and multiscale modeling
Development of novel multiscale methods, upscaling techniques and error analysis for mitigating large-scale computational simulation cost in complex reservoir simulation.

Model reduction, complexity reduction
Development of novel model reduction techniques of large-scale reservoir models based on system and control theory and streamlines simulation as key enablers to fast uncertainty quantification and parameter estimation methodologies.

Reduced complexity optimization under the uncertainty paradigm
Development of uncertainty quantification methodologies that involve simplified models and large quantities of data together with high-performance computing in simulation and optimization under the uncertainty paradigm.

About the Foundation CMG chairs
The holders of the Foundation CMG Chair at Texas A&M will develop novel concepts in the broad areas of complexity reduction for reservoir management and optimization under uncertainty. Foundation CMG will take advantage of the 30 years of reservoir management experience that Dr. Mike King brings to the formulation of the problems, and his expertise in upscaling, and the expertise in control theory and closed-loop optimization gained by Dr. Eduardo Gildin while working in the aerospace industry, to provide a fundamental understanding of the within and between model class errors for a hierarchy of model types: analogues, decline curves, other proxies, material balance, streamline simulation, and complex integrated reservoir models, to determine their impact on the overall confidence in performance predictions for potentially complex reservoir management decisions.

Gildin is an assistant professor of petroleum engineering at Texas A&M and holder of the CJ Craft Jr. Faculty Fellowship in Petroleum Engineering. Gildin joined the faculty in 2010. He holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and has held Postdoctoral Fellowships from The Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (Center for Subsurface Modeling) at The University of Texas at Austin and from the Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. Gildin has expertise in control of dynamical systems, the mathematics of reservoir simulation, numerical methods for control and model reduction of large-scale systems, finite element modeling, numerical analysis and optimization. His current projects involve multiscale model reduction modeling in porous media and production optimization in conventional and unconventional reservoirs.

King joined the faculty at Texas A&M in the fall of 2009. Dr. King holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in physics from Syracuse University and a B.S. in physics and mathematics from The Cooper Union in New York. Previously, he worked for BP America and the BP Amoco E&P Upstream Technology Group. He is the current SPE student chapter faculty adviser, a member of the Crisman Institute Steering Committee, and co-director of the MCERI (Model Calibration and Efficient Reservoir Imaging) consortium.

About the Dwight Look College of Engineering
The Dwight Look College of Engineering is the largest college on the Texas A&M campus with more than 350 faculty members and more than 11,000 engineering students in 22 different programs in 13 departments. The Dwight Look College of Engineering mission is to serve Texas, the nation and the global community by providing engineering graduates who are well founded in engineering fundamentals, instilled with the highest standards of professional and ethical behavior, and prepared to meet the complex technical challenges of society.

The Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering is ranked among the top departments in the nation. The department faculty has considerable expertise and international recognition in the areas of unconventional petroleum resources, drilling engineering, production engineering, reservoir engineering, reservoir characterization, improved oil recovery, and petroleum development. The department has an annual budget in excess of $16 million and has well-established laboratories and consortia in the areas of deepwater drilling, well stimulation, multiphase flow, thermal oil recovery, reservoir characterization, streamline modeling, and carbon dioxide sequestration. The petroleum engineering department has 22 tenured and tenure-track faculty members, representing a broad spectrum of talents and research interests. The current student enrollment is 729 undergraduate students and 388 graduate students.

About Foundation CMG
Founded in 1978, CMG Reservoir Simulation Foundation (Foundation CMG) was initially developed at the University of Calgary in the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Department. Foundation CMG promotes and financially supports research and development and students through research grants at universities around the world focusing on reservoir simulation. Foundation CMG has a rich history of more than 30 years working in 25 countries around the world.

For more information please contact:
Duke Anderson, President
CMG Reservoir Simulation Foundation
Suite 700, One Executive Place
1816 Crowchild Trail NW
Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2M 3Y7
Ph. (403) 450-8399

Dr. Eduardo Gildin and Dr. Mike King
Texas A&M University
Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering
3116 TAMU
College Station, TX, USA, 77843
Ph. (979) 862-4578

Computer science's Daugherity to head Faculty Senate

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:58

Dr. Walter C. Daugherity, senior lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, officially transitioned from speaker-elect to speaker of the Texas A&M Faculty Senate May 13.

Daugherity received a bachelor's degree from Oklahoma Christian University, and master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, and has been a member of the Texas A&M faculty since 1987. In addition to research and publication he has been very active in creating and upgrading courses, especially in the Honors Program. He developed the Honors sections of Introduction to Program Design and Concepts, Data Structures, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics and Engineering, and has been the adviser for six senior Honors theses.

He has received numerous honors and awards, including Harvard's Bowdoin Prize, ACM's Outstanding Regional Intercollegiate Programming Contest Director award, the CSE Department's Undergraduate Faculty Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award from the Graduate Student Council. In 2003 the A&M System named him to its Academy for Educator Development, a major component in the Regents' Initiative for Excellence in Education. (Only two faculty members in the Dwight Look College of Engineering were selected.)

The Faculty Senate is the sole body elected by all Texas A&M faculty, whom it is charged with representing in the governance of the university. Specifically, all university policies dealing with curricula and instruction, academic standards, scholarships, hiring and retention, and so on, must be reviewed by the Faculty Senate before being presented to the president. Visit the Faculty Senate website at facultysenate.tamu.edu for more information.

Engineering Academic and Student Affairs: New name, mission

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:54

Engineering Student Services and Academic Programs has changed its name to Engineering Academic and Student Affairs (EASA) effective May 17.

“The name change is a reflection of the increase in activities of the unit,” said Dr. Valerie Taylor, senior associate dean for academic affairs.

Within EASA, there are a number of areas that serve the Dwight Look College of Engineering, including academic support services; undergraduate and graduate academic programs, such as outreach, recruitment, retention and enrichment; the engineering design graphics faculty, who are responsible for freshman engineering courses; college-level scholarships and awards; faculty development; and international programs.

EASA aims to "further the mission of the Dwight Look College of Engineering to recruit, retain and develop successful students to be leaders for the 21^st century.”

To achieve the mission, EASA collaborates with students, faculty, staff, administrators and employers to:

Promote multidisciplinary academic experiences for all college of engineering students, especially during the first year;
Cultivate environments that welcome and value diversity;
Offer programs and support services to strengthen lifelong learning skills necessary for student success;
Develop strategic partnerships for recruiting outstanding students; and
Provide opportunities for college of engineering students to become global leaders.

For more information about EASA, visit engineering.tamu.edu/easa.

Look College honors 15 engineering student ambassadors

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:51

The Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University recognized 15 undergraduate engineering students for their service as Engineering Student Ambassadors for 2012-13.

The following students were honored at a luncheon:

Abby de Alba (chemical engineering)
Cole Barron (petroleum engineering)
Jonathan Foster (petroleum engineering)
Carlos Garcia (civil engineering)
Sadie Hnatow (chemical engineering)
Michele Mistretta (petroleum engineering)
Sara Muldoon (biomedical engineering)
Emily Rains (industrial engineering)
Abbey Reisz (chemical engineering)
Michael Reynolds (aerospace engineering)
Kimberly Ryan (civil engineering)
Benjamin Scott (chemical engineering)
Kate Stuckman (electrical and computer engineering)
Meghan Tears (chemical engineering)
Tiffany Titone (civil engineering)

The Engineering Student Ambassador program is a group of sophomore, junior and senior engineering students who not only maintain excellent academic records, but also participate in a variety of enrichment activities that support recruitment and outreach activities for prospective students, K-12 teachers and other visitors, donors and sponsors such as leading engineering tours and participating in student panels. The ambassadors’ responsibilities include attending dinners and meetings with prospective students and parents, participating in student panels after prospective student visit presentations and being representatives at resource tables for events such as Aggieland Saturday.

“The college of engineering appreciates the ambassadors’ commitment to this important program,” said Joy Monroe, program specialist with the student ambassador program. “They are extremely passionate about their studies in engineering and their experiences at Texas A&M University. Because of this, these students are outstanding representatives for our college.”

Students interested in participating in the Engineering Student Ambassadors program must complete an application that will be accepted in August. For more information on this program, please contact Monroe at jmonroe@tamu.edu.

Frazer scholarship to benefit nuclear engineering at Texas A&M

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:47

Carol and Ross Frazer of College Station, Texas, have endowed a scholarship for nuclear engineering undergraduates at Texas A&M University.

Their gift will establish the Carol Fox Frazer ’77 and G. Ross Frazer ’77 Scholarship. Matching funds from Ray Rothrock of Portola Valley, Calif., will increase the endowment to $25,000. Preference will be given to applicants who participate in the Society of Women Engineers and in a cooperative education program.

Both are Class of 1977 with Carol receiving her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and Ross earning his in nuclear engineering.

“Texas A&M and its engineering school have been central to so much of what both Carol and I have been able to accomplish and enjoy,” Ross said. “We hope this effort will similarly equip future graduates and also inspire other Class of 1977 engineers to do what they can.”

The scholarship is part of the Robert G. Cochran Scholars Program, honoring the first Texas A&M nuclear engineering department head. Cochran served 22 years and under his leadership the discipline’s first undergraduate program emerged.

The Frazers have been longtime supporters of Texas A&M, contributing to both the Texas A&M Foundation and The Association of Former Students.

About the Dwight Look College of Engineering
With nearly 350 tenured/tenure-track faculty members and more than 11,000 students, the Look College is the second-largest engineering school in the country. The college is ranked seventh in graduate studies, ninth in undergraduate programs, and second in research expenditures among public institutions by U.S. News & World Report, with seven of the college’s 12 departments ranked in the Top 10.

About the Texas A&M Foundation
The Texas A&M Foundation is a private nonprofit organization that solicits and manages investments in academics and leadership programs to enhance Texas A&M’s capability to be among the best universities. For more information on the Texas A&M Foundation and related giving opportunities, visit giving.tamu.edu.

Lafield and Moncrief endow full scholarship at Texas A&M

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:28

While there are numerous scholarships in the Dwight Look College of Engineering endowed by generous former students, full scholarships are rare.

The Michele and Jack M. Lafield ’72 Scholarship in Engineering and Carla and Richard D. Moncrief ’81 Scholarship in Engineering, a combined contribution of $500,000 to the Texas A&M Foundation, will provide a full scholarship for one engineering student at Texas A&M University.

“I applaud the generous commitment by the Lafields and Moncriefs to ensure that a deserving student has the opportunity to pursue an Aggie engineering degree without financial concerns,” said Dr. M. Katherine Banks, vice chancellor of dean of engineering. “Increasing access to our program is a top priority and I appreciate the contribution these former students are making toward achieving that goal."

The combine scholarship will be awarded to one full-time student in good standing pursuing a petroleum engineering, chemical engineering or mechanical engineering degree who demonstrates financial need. The scholarship may be renewed every year for four years when awarded to a freshman, and retention is dependent upon the recipient maintaining a GPR of 3.0 or higher.

Jack Lafield said, “We wanted to focus on a student that was qualified from an academic standpoint, but less so from a financial one. It was important to us to give an academically qualified student the opportunity to pursue an education at this great university.”

Rick Moncrief added, “A scholarship of this nature has the ability to change someone’s life, especially with an engineering degree from Texas A&M and may even provide an educational opportunity they would not otherwise be able to access.”

Lafield and Moncrief earned their degrees from Texas A&M, Lafield in chemical engineering and Moncrief in petroleum engineering . Lafield is chairman and CEO of Caiman Energy II LLC in Dallas, and Moncrief is the company’s president and chief operating officer.

About the Dwight Look College of Engineering

With nearly 350 tenured/tenure-track faculty members and more than 11,000 students, the Look College is the second-largest engineering school in the country. The college is ranked seventh in graduate studies, ninth in undergraduate programs, and second in research expenditures among public institutions by U.S. News & World Report, with seven of the college’s 12 departments ranked in the Top 10.

Fourth edition of Stroustrup's book released

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:09

The fourth edition of Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup's book, "The C++ Programming Language," was released May 13.

And sold out within an hour.

"I got my copy (the very first copy!) on Friday [May 10]," said Stroustrup, distinguished professor and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University, and designer and implementer of the C++ programming language. "At 9 a.m. Monday, it became available on the publisher's site, InformIT, and at 10 a.m. it had sold out. Now, they have re-stocked, but this is all very scary for an author. I have worked hard on this for about four years, not counting the 13 years it took getting the C++11 standard out."

What makes the fourth edition of "The C++ Programming Language" distinctive and appreciated is its inclusion of the new C++11 standard. C++11 "allows programmers to express ideas more clearly, simply and directly, and to write faster, more efficient code," Stroustrup wrote.

"The C++ Programming Language, Fourth Edition" has been extensively rewritten to introduce the C++11 language, the C++11 standard library, and the programming techniques they support. This includes "support for concurrency; regular expressions, resource management pointers, random numbers, and improved containers; general and uniform initialization, simplified for statements, move semantics, and Unicode support; Lambdas, general constant expressions, control over class defaults, variadic templates, template aliases, and user-defined literals; and compatibility issues."

Stroustrup is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association of Computing Machinery. His research interests include distributed systems, simulation, design, programming techniques, software development tools, and programming languages. He remains actively involved in the ANSI/ISO standardization of C++.

Stroustrup holds an advanced degree from the University of Aarhus in his native Denmark and a Ph.D. in computer science from Cambridge University in England.

Texas A&M smoke detector research featured on NBC’s “Dateline”

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:40

Dr. B. Don Russell and the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service’s (TEEX) Brayton Fire Field were recently featured on NBC’s “Dateline” and NBC News. Investigative reporters from NBC visited Texas A&M to witness experiments conducted by Russell, who has, for more than two decades, conducted research on smoke and fire detection systems.

Russell describes this research as a “sideline” activity outside his primary research area of electric power systems.

“I maintain my interest in smoke detector performance because of the significance it has to public safety,” Russell said. “Hundreds of people die or are injured each year in residential fires, too often because their smoke detectors did not provide a timely alarm.”

Russell’s advice to homeowners is to buy smoke detectors that use both ionization and photoelectric sensing technologies. Combination detectors with both sensors are available in big box stores.

“Use many detectors scattered in your home and make sure you have detectors of both types, ionization and photoelectric or combination devices,” Russell said. “This is the only way you will be properly warned of the next fire that occurs in your home.”

The “Dateline” story can be viewed here.

Research by biomedical engineering undergrad selected to appear in Texas A&M journal

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:41

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, May 10, 2013 – Megan Poorman, an undergraduate student in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is having her research on transforming red blood cells into sensors for blood-analysis published by the Texas A&M journal “Explorations.”

Poorman, a junior from Plano, Texas is working with Associate Professor Kenith Meissner on a project aimed at inserting sensor chemistry inside red blood cells to provide various blood analysis readings while overcoming compatibility issues between implanted sensors and the human body. Her work could represent a minimally invasive alternative to the traditional drawing of blood for analysis – something that can be tedious and painful for individuals who require constant blood analysis, such as those suffering from diabetes.

Her article, “Developing Minimally-invasive biosensors from Fluorescent Dye and Red Blood Cells,” details the sensing technology she is developing, which incorporates Fluorescein-based fluorescent dyes as sensing molecules.

The article will appear in the next issue of the annual Texas A&M journal. The student-run journal selects and publishes student-authored articles of general interest across a variety of disciplines. The journal, which is guided by faculty and administrators, accepts less than 20 percent of submitted proposals after a rigorous two-round review process by faculty-student teams.

In addition, Poorman also has been recognized for her research at the “Present Around the World” competition, sponsored by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), receiving top honors for her presentation detailing the work. As a first-place winner, she advances to the next stage of the competition, which is part of the IET Volunteers Conference in Toronto, August 9-11th.

The dyes used in the sensing technology, Poorman explains, emit light in direct proportion to the pH of the surrounding environment when excited by a laser. By shining light of a certain wavelength on the red blood cells containing the dye and measuring the intensity of the light emitted, an accurate reading of the environmental pH can be obtained, she notes.

Once the modified red blood cells are implanted in the body, a patient or physician could simply use a calibrated device to shine light on the body in an area where the skin is thin, such as the inside of the wrist, Poorman says. The user could then obtain a reading based on the light collected by the device. This reading could then be displayed on the device, stored for tracking or sent to a remote location for analysis.

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