March 2020 - Letter from the Editor

March 2020

Letter from the Editor

A Global Pandemic of .... Opportunity?

By Badri Roysam, University of Houston

Dear ECEDHA family and friends,

First of all, we have compiled a Chair’s Checklist and Resources for coping with the COVID-19 virus at our doorsteps. However, this is also a time to consider the quintessentially ECE opportunities that it brings to our doorsteps. Do we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the way humanity responds to new germs?

In this issue of the Source, we are pleased to spotlight a article from Sid Deliwala at UPenn’s ESE department aimed at ECE Lab Managers – please remember to share it with your lab manager. We are also delighted to feature an article from Keysight Technologies – describing an exciting way to introduce ECE students to electromagnetics by way of a Fox Hunt game. Finally, we are delighted to spotlight two of our host Universities for the upcoming ECEDHA conference and ECExpo in Orlando. Hope to see you there. Remember that we will avoid shaking hands, but find alternative ways to greet each other, with just as much delight.

A CHAIR’s CORONAVIRUS CHECKLIST 

By this time, all ECE Chairs are being bombarded by the upper administration, faculty, staff, and students for guidance regarding the department’s handling of the Corona Virus situation. Below is a simple checklist for Chairs.

If or when your university experiences Corona Virus one or more incidents, expect sudden campus-wide changes.

• Students will, understandably, be afraid to come to classes, and act en masse. We will suddenly see empty classrooms and seminar halls.
• Students and their parents will bombard faculty and the Chair with frantic messages that will require rapid responses. While most of these messages will be genuine, expect a sub-population of students who are interested in exploiting the situation. We may need to act with heart and act in their best interests.
• We can reduce the volume of these messages by getting ahead of the curve, and messaging the students proactively with a reasonable contingency plan that states the ground rules to the extent that we can plan them.
• In responding to student messages, it is best for us to show kindness and flexibility. We must keep in mind that when all is said and done, lives and the safety of people will be far more important than the operational continuity of departments.

PREPARATORY ACTION ITEMS 

The suddenness with which we will be called upon to act imply that preparations must begin immediately, if they are not already underway. Below are some things to keep in mind.

1. Institute a “no handshake” policy in the department with immediate effect, and set the example in your interactions with faculty, visitors, and students.
2. Allow staff members who can work from home to do so, and provide student-facing staff with video teleconferencing ability (e.g., Zoom)
3. Consider switching the seminar series to online mode for the rest of the semester. This is surprisingly easy to do using tools like Zoom.
4. Make sure that your faculty with equipment, software, and training to switch to fully online teaching on very short notice (~  one day). Below are some helpful links:

a.     Preparing and posting video lectures from home: This is quite easy to do from a laptop using tools like SnagIt ($29.95, https://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.html ) or Camtasia ($169, https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html ), and a document camera (https://www.ipevo.com/products/v4k ). Tutorials for Snagit are at https://www.techsmith.com/tutorial-snagit.html , and tutorials for Camtasia are at https://www.techsmith.com/tutorial-camtasia.html. The Apple iPad, especially the pen-equipped iPad Pro, can be used to create video lectures for teaching online courses. The suggested app for this is Notability. It provides a nice interface to write, annotate slides, and organize hand-written notes. It also syncs with Mac computers, so that any notes you create on the iPad will show up on your computer, and can be readily exported to PDF files to be shared with students. Using Notability, a video lecture can be created easily by recording the iPad screen as the instructor goes through slides, annotates slides, or writes notes on the iPad while delivering the lecture. This is particularly helpful when working with material that is heavy on equations, derivations or working/stepping through examples. Audio is captured from the built-in microphone or earbuds/headphones. To enable screen recording on iOS, go to Settings, tap control center, and then go to customize controls. Scroll down and tap the green plus (+) button next to screen recording. Once this is done, a circular record button will appear in the control center when you swipe down from the top right of the iPad, allowing you to record your interactions with the screen (and your audio) as a video file. The screen recording feature saves the recorded video as a video (.avi) file that can be shared with students. Sharing videos can be done using an institutional platform, or in a crunch, using YouTube, and the instructions are at this link: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/57407?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en  .

b.     Teaching live from home: This is easy to do using a tool like Zoom (https://zoom.us , free to use for meetings up to 100 participants and <40 minutes, annual license for most universities with a campus wide agreement is $45/year for faculty, or $145 individually). It allows faculty to share slides, show video of handwriting, and interact by video and text with students (typ. Up to 300 students at a time), and record lectures. Zoom can also be used to hold office hours, and for video exam proctoring. Zoom tutorials are at: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/206618765-Zoom-Video-Tutorials  Again, the iPad is an alternative platform that can be used in conjunction with Zoom to tech live. It t is also possible to live stream a lecture on YouTube, and the instructions are at: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2474026?hl=en .

c.     Exams, Grading, and Teaching Assistants: Most LMS systems (e.g., BlackBoard) allow students to submit their work as PDF files online, and allow TA’s to do their grading fully online. Here is the link to tutorials on how to handle assignments, conduct tests and exams, and post grades on Blackboard, how to use Zoom with Blackboard, and a whole bunch of related topics: https://www.instruction.uh.edu/knowledgebase/ . Blackboard Collaborate (https://www.blackboard.com/teaching-learning/collaboration-web-conferencing/blackboard-collaborate ) is an excellent online teaching tool that is already available at most universities.

d.     Confirmation of Preparedness: You may wish to send out a personalized email (https://www.webucator.com/how-to/how-use-mail-merge-microsoft-word.cfm ) to each faculty member asking about his/her preparedness. Without such explicit messaging, faculty/staff may put off their preparations. Below are suggested questions:

What is your contingency plan for assuring continuity of the courses that you are teaching this semester?

• Faculty members must plan for various possible scenarios.
• They must be prepared to switch to full online teaching at short notice. This requires hardware (e.g., laptop, document video camera, tablet, etc.), and software licenses (e.g., Zoom/WebEx, BlackBoard or such other learning Management System).
• Faculty members should make sure that students are prepared and equipped (e.g., laptop/tablet, good internet connection, document scanner for submitting assignments online by PDF).
• Faculty members should make sure that Teaching Assistants (TA’s) are prepared and equipped to perform grading fully online.

Have you communicated these plans to your students and TA’s?

• If you yourself are affected by coronavirus, will you be in a position to inform the department chair, and your students rapidly?
• Are you equipped and trained to teach fully online from home if need be? Do you need help, and if so, what kind of help?
• Many faculty members have never taught online before, and will need training and equipment to do so.

In case the semester proves to be shorter than planned, what is your plan to determine student grades?

• Faculty need to consider what topics to prioritize, and vice versa.
• All faculty need to make sure that they have some basis for determining grades based on interim work. For example, if the student’s grade depends entirely or heavily on an end-of-semester project/assignment, they will be at risk. Such courses must be restructured, and the restructuring must be explicitly discussed with students.

What is your contingency plan and level of preparedness for your research laboratory?

• For computational labs, students/postdocs may need VPN and remote desktop tools on their laptops
• For experimental labs, students/postdocs must be trained on maintaining distance, covering coughs/sneezes, cleaning up workspaces with bleach/alcohol wipes, etc.
• Do you have emergency contact information (e.g., cell phone numbers) for all lab members at hand?

What is your contingency plan and level of preparedness for your teaching laboratory?

• Most ECE teaching labs can be replaced by computational simulations using tools like MATLAB, MultiSim. We need to make sure that they have the software licenses in place.
• Many ECE labs, e.g., embedded systems, can be performed on kits that can be provided to students, or owned by them.

Can you please provide me with a contact and phone number at which you and someone close to you can be reached in case the University is closed (partially or completely)?

MOONSHOT-LIKE OPPORTUNITIES IN THE MIDST OF AN IMPENDING CRISIS? 

The $8.3B U.S. Coronavirus Funding Bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/6074/text ) was signed into law on Friday of last week[1]. While the details are not fully available at the time of this writing, we can expect roughly $800M of this funding to go towards research and development. This is a significant investment, albeit short term (~ 2 years), and it is not unreasonable to expect federal agencies to set aside additional funds for R&D in the longer term.

Given just how tightly the economies of nations are interwoven in the modern global economy, and the near impossibility of decoupling these linkages, it is reasonable to assume that we must find ways to detect newly emerged pathogens as early as possible, and act in a globally coordinated manner to minimize the impacts of these germs on humanity. This is a perfect time to develop a global pathogen surveillance network.

This will require low-cost, mass-produced, wearable, wirelessly-networked, microfabricated bio-sensors that can detect and report previously unseen pathogens. This will result in massive streams of data that will require big-data analytic algorithms that can analyze the massive sensor data streams in real time, detecting the onset of new pathological conditions at the population scale, tracking their progression, an communicating their gene sequences globally so that nations can immunize their people rapidly. This will require the ability to prototype and validate new vaccines computationally. All of these capability present opportunities for ECE. 

I sincerely hope that we are entering a new phase of “cooperative globalization” in which scientists and engineers are able to build, operate, and enhance the global pathogen surveillance network. It would not be unreasonable to expect ECE to play a central and enabling role in this new moonshot.

Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu