ECE @ Michigan - eNews

	Lessons from cockroaches could inform robotics [story and video] Running cockroaches start to recover from being shoved sideways before their dawdling nervous system kicks in to tell their legs what to do. This insight by Prof. Shai Revzen and colleagues at UC-Berkeley into how biological systems stabilize could one day help engineers design steadier robots and improve understanding of human gait abnormalities.
	Scientific Milestone: A room temperature Bose-Einstein condensate Pallab Bhattacharya, Charles M. Vest Distinguished University Professor, and a team of researchers have created and directly observed what they believe to be a near-equilibrium room temperature Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). A BEC is an unusual state of matter in which a group of boson particles can exist in a single quantum state, giving scientists the rare opportunity to directly observe novel quantum phenomena.
	Workshop on Nano and Micro Manufacturing May 22-23, 2013 - Dearborn, MI Topics of this workshop, organized by the Center for Wireless Integrated MicroSensing & Systems (WIMS²), include: industry needs; new manufacturing processes and their commercialization; policy and partnership models; as well as metrology, standards, and safety of nano and micro technologies.
	Winning research in mm-scale and high-performance computing Congratulations to Bharan Giridhar and Gyouho Kim for receiving University of Michigan Rackham Predoctoral Fellowships for their soon-to-be completed dissertations. Bharan Giridhar’s thesis: Circuit Techniques for Adaptive and Reliable, High-Performance Computing [read more about his research] Gyouho Kim’s thesis: Ultra-Low Power Optical Interfaces for Nearly Invisible Cubic-Millimeter Wireless Sensor Nodes [read more about his research]
	Computers that mimic the brain thanks to memristors [Video] Prof. Wei Lu and graduate student Patrick Sheridan talk about their research developing a new type of electronic switch that mimics the behavior of a biological neuron in the human brain. Resulting computers can learn without being programmed. [More Info]
	From Student Team to Startup ECE is a sponsor of the interdisciplinary U-M Autonomous Aerial Vehicles Team (MAAV), which after only 3 years took first place at the 2012 International Aerial Robotics Competition. More than half of the team was EECS students. This year, two of those students, Sam DeBruin (BSE CE ‘12 and current CSE graduate student) and Ryan Moore (BSE CE ‘11) are among the four co-founders of a startup called SkySpecs. They are already finding investors, and added $50K to their coffers by winning the 2013 Michigan Clean Energy Venture Challenge.

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