January 2022
New Chair Spotlight
By: B.S. Manjunath, University of California, Santa Barbara
I would like to begin by thanking the ECEDHA team for giving me the opportunity to share my experiences as the Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at UC Santa Barbara.
This is my second year as Chair. When I accepted this opportunity in spring 2020, I did not anticipate that 18 months later we would still be battling this rapidly evolving virus. Fortunately, I have had great support from the departmental staff and my faculty colleagues in navigating through the many challenges the department has faced.
Providing a high-quality learning environment despite these unprecedented circumstances was a challenge for everyone at the University. Students had to adapt quickly to remote instruction, and normal departmental activities, including instruction delivery, faculty recruitment, merits and promotions, all had to safely continue.
Our department’s ECE10 series teaches the students the foundations of analog and digital circuits and systems through a three-part sequence, with each part comprising coursework and lab work. During the summer of 2020, Professor Galan Moody, vice-chair Clint Scholl and the 10-series instructors, TAs, and staff transformed the in-person labs into remote (but still hands-on) kits that were shipped to each student. The labs reinforce the concepts taught during the lectures, including analog and digital circuit design, analysis, and basic instrumentation, by enabling students to construct and test their own circuits.
The heart of the kit is an Arduino Uno, which is an open-source microcontroller platform based on easy-to-use hardware and software. The Arduino Uno consists of digital and analog inputs and outputs that allow students to learn about current, voltage, digital logic, signal generation, and python programming to control a variety of hardware, such as motors, LEDs, musical instruments, and digital displays. With the kits, students construct digital and analog circuits to generate waveforms, input these into circuits they construct, and measure the output from the circuits using the Arduino Uno, which is also configured as an oscilloscope. In addition to the Arduino Uno microcontroller, the kit has been assembled with all of the components required for the complete ECE10 series labs, including resistors, capacitor, inductors, transistors, operational amplifiers, LEDs, a breadboard, jumper wires, and a digital multimeter.
For more information, see:
“In the Classroom: The 10 Series and The Kit”
UCSB CoE’s Convergence Magazine: “The Lab’s in the Mail”
The past year was also an opportunity for us to reflect on efforts needed to create a diverse learning and work environment for students, staff and faculty. We held several recruitment events focusing on students underrepresented (URM) in the STEM fields. Our department DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) committee is working with faculty and students to identify opportunities to increase the URM students and provide quality mentoring to enhance the retention rates, specifically during their first year on campus.
We began the 2022-23 academic year on the exciting note that campus life would return to “normal,” meaning that half of our students would be on campus for their very first in-person quarter. Though this excitement was somewhat short lived, thanks to omicron, we have the benefit of the past year’s experience in managing remote and hybrid instruction effectively. We have seen innovations in instruction delivery that many of us are likely to continue when we return to regular classroom teaching. This includes the concept of “flipped” classes, where lectures are pre-recorded and made available to students, with the scheduled lecture times being used for classroom discussions instead. One of my colleagues, Professor Behrooz Parhami, has an interesting article on this topic, see https://www.facebook.com/bparhami/posts/10159745688127579
To this point, my journey as the Chair has been interesting and somewhat unusual. I am grateful to all the support from students, staff, and faculty colleagues, and I look forward to finding out how it will be to lead the department under normal circumstances!
Short Bio:
B. S. Manjunath is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science (courtesy appointment) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is highly acclaimed for his technical excellence in bringing image processing to a diversity of applications that range from remote sensing to marine sciences and biology, and for having developed a reproducible scientific image analytics platform, BisQue. He has made fundamental contributions to image/video segmentation, registration, feature extraction, image search and retrieval that have been documented in over 300 peer-reviewed publications and 25 US and international patents. He is also a successful entrepreneur, being a co-founder of a small business, Mayachitra Inc., that specializes in developing robust image processing and machine learning methods for various customers. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, and a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award.