Three ECE students – Aatreya Chakravarti, Michael Tasellari, and Yuchang Zhang - were recently honored with winning 3rd Place Best Paper Award at the IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC) hosted on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts from October 11-13, 2019. URTC brings together undergraduates from all parts of the globe to present, discuss, and develop solutions to advance technology for humanity. As an IEEE official conference, URTC provides a unique opportunity to undergraduates to publish papers of their school projects, research, innovations, and/or case studies.
Chakravarti, Tasellari, and Zhang’s paper, entitled “An Integrated Signal Acquisition AFE for Latency Quantification of ENG Signals,” describes a novel design of an analog front-end (AFE) for capturing electroneurogram (ENG) signals. Electroneurogram methods are used to visualize directly recorded activity of neurons in the peripheral nervous system. Physicians use such data to diagnose a wide variety of disorders and diseases such as myotonia congenital, familial hypokalemic periodic paralysis, and muscle fatigue. The paper also provides simulation results verifying the design.
Working with Professor Ulkuhan Guler in her Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab (ICAS), Chakravarti, Tasellari, and Zhang have successfully undertaken many of the challenges inherent in acquiring ENG signals with a noninvasive methods. Their approach is novel and completely unlike other currently available methods.
Submission to the URTC is very competitive as more than a hundred submissions are reviewed. Only around 50 papers are accepted. This year, students from several top universities including MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Brown, and Georgia Tech presented. Winning a 3rd place Best Paper Award among such a distinguished group of peers is an outstanding achievement. Their paper will be available in the IEEE Digital library (ieeexplore.ieee.org).
Please join me in congratulating Aatreya Chakravarti, Michael Tasellari, and Yuchang Zhang.