(Left-right) Dean Keep presents the 1st Place prize of $12,000 to M&S Guitars: James Seyffart, Alex Matteson, and Tim Pfenninger. 2nd Place went to Campus Corner Laundry and 3rd Place to SurpriseMe at the Finale on April 3rd. (Photo courtesy of Deric Raymond

Engineering students had a great presence at the Mayo Business Competition this year. The competition consisted of seven teams, three of which featured engineering students. Alex Mattesons, mechanical engineering, and his team won first place and $12,000. Second place along with $6,000 went to Daniel DeChiara, computer engineering, and his team. The first place team M&S Guitars impressed the judges with their working prototype of a modular and low cost guitar system. The second place team Campus Corner Laundry proposed an email and text message service to notify students when their laundry was done. The third team Jacfit.com consisted of two engineering students, Steve Zilberberg, Computer Engineering and Alex Crane, Biomedical Engineering.

This competition is designed to increase student appreciation for the challenges associated with developing a viable business offering (product or service) while, through an iterative process, recognizing those students best able to articulate a plan that addresses these challenges. In recognition of both the time involved and the difficulty of the task, the competition also provides a suitable award for the successful teams

Learn More:

• NJ.com Article About Mayo
• Business Article About Mayo
• Signal article “M&S Guitar wins Mayo”

Completed Socket Module Prototype with custom printed circuit board

Dr. Anthony Deese, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, presented a paper at the International Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) in Seoul, South Korea. The paper is based on a senior project that students Brain Carrigan, Elliot Stein and Elie Klein designed in 2012. It examines the design and construction of a simple, yet effective circuit-based hardware solution to home automation. Emphasis is placed on cost-efficiency, ability to incorporate wide variety of loads (e.g. HVAC), minimal installation requirements, and user-friendly interfacing. This technology is becoming popular as homeowners desire easy access control over various electronics in their homes. Additionally, they speculate that this system will reduce power utility bills by 5% to 15%.

This past summer, three TCNJ students and ten students from other institutions, including international institutions, joined Dr. Anthony Deese on a trip to learn about Australia’s sustainable energy program. The trip is part of TCNJ’s three week Maymester course called Sustainability Australia.

The course can be taken as either an engineering or IDS 400 level course and is open to all majors. Those who take it as an engineering course are tested on the lectures and sites they visit and are required to design and present their own sustainable system by the end of the course. Alternatively, those who take this as an IDS requirement will attend the same events, but will do additional research in Australia as TCNJ student Mathew Southard did. Matt was able to meet with an aboriginal tribesman who taught him about Australian culture.

The group traveled from Sydney to Canberra and finally Cairns. At each location they toured such places as a waste recycling facility, a rain-forest park, and a photovoltaic research facility. The trip was not all work though; they also went skydiving, snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef, and met up with TCNJ alumni among other things.

Dr. Deese who was the Co-Director of the program this past summer will be leading it next year. Those who are interested should contact him at deesea@tcnj.edu. Additional information can be found here.

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Anthony Grullon is a senior Engineering Science-Management Major- with a specialization in Electical Engineering. Anthony and his team, The Elite Club placed second in the Mayo Business Plan Competition. To read more about the competition please click here.

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(DELOS) Best Paper Award winners

His responsibility as DSCC Publicity Chair is to promote the conference. This conference is sponsored by the DSCD of ASME International, and will be held October 31 through November 2, 2011 in Arlington, Virginia, jointly with ASME/Bath Fluid Power Symposium sponsored by the Fluid Power Systems & Technology Division (FPSTD) of ASME International. All those interested in dynamic systems and control and fluid power, are encouraged to attend this conference. Students coming to present their work at the conferences organized by the DSCD (Annual ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, and American Control Conference) are provided support using the DSCD and NSF funds.

Dr Paliwal would like to announce some of the key dates:

• Deadline for all submissions and proposals: March 15, 2011
• Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: May 15, 2011
• Final manuscript submission deadline: June 15, 2011
• Deadline for Student Travel Support: September 26, 2011

Dr. Paliwal was also elected to be the TC Chair to the MIIS. As Chair, some of his duties include annually publishing: accomplishments of the committee in the past year, significant accomplishments of the members, planned activities for the next year featured articles, collaborations with other committees and organizations, and other information of importance to the members. The Chair must also consider and vote on the nomination of a yearly award for contributions to modeling and identification (Henry Paynter Award) and intelligent systems (Devendra P. Garg Award) among other things. He is also responsible for maintaining his membership’s high level of activity by holding meetings at national conferences and bring funding, publication, and other opportunities to the attention of our members, and sponsoring special issues of publications from ASME, IEEE, etc. that help in the recruitment effort. He must also maintain a website that serves as a record for his Committee’s activities and as a repository for research, teaching, or other materials that serve his members.

Dr. Paliwal has been associated with the DSCD for a long time now and was active within its MIIS TC as well. He has organized symposiums, chaired numerous sessions for the MIIS TC of the DSCD and also served as the Newsletter editor for the DSCD during 2006-07. For 2010-2012 terms, he was nominated and appointed as the DSCD Student Travel Grants Coordinator. He was also previously elected the Secretary of the MIIS Technical Committee in the 2008 DSCC at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and continued in that role till 2010.

Learn more:

• American Society of Mechanical Engineers
• Dynamic Systems and Control Conference
• Publicity Chair for DSCC
• TC Chair of MIIS
• Dynamic Systems and Control Division
• Student Travel Support
• Henry Paynter Award
• DSCD Honors and Awards

Mr. Sarnoff’s legacy includes a collection of papers and memorabilia from the television and radio industry, which he deposited in a library built for that purpose by RCA at its central research laboratory on Route 1 in 1967. After his death in 1971, senior members of the technical staff deposited landmarks of their work in television cameras, displays, computer memory, and thin- film transistors. With the dissolution of the connection to the RCA Corporation, the Sarnoff Library assumed control of the RCA Labs notebooks, photos and reports. The Sarnoff Library and its museum was revived in 1998 Dr. Alex Magoun who began gathering documentary collections and artifacts which help tell the history and process of innovation for major RCA technologies, from television to solid-state electronics to electron microscopy.

Unfortunately in April, 2007 a major rainstorm flooded the sub-basement with 20 inches of water in 36 hours, which soaked about 600 cubic feet of RCA laboratory notebooks, technical reports and RCA equipment manuals. Luckily under Dr. Magoun’s direction, hundreds of volunteers helped sort through the mess and prepare the papers to be sent out to a conservatory lab for preservation and repair. Thanks to their effort 95 percent the archival collections were spared.

Even after the collection weathered this natural disaster it was still in trouble. The Sarnoff Corporation which had underwritten Dr. Magoun’s position and the overhead space that the Library occupied in its building, began to shift its business orientation to military and security innovations. What this meant for the Library was that the company could no longer support the Library which according to Dr. Magoun “is not unusual in a corporate environment and the company was very helpful in 2009 in enabling the transfer of the museum and archives to suitable non- profit institutions.”

One of the 1st electronic microscopes is housed at TCNJ

Thus the Library and its collection had to find a new home, or in this case homes. Thanks to the efforts of Hagley’s associate director, Terry Snyder, and archivist Lyn Catanese 2,000 cubic feet of archival collections were transferred to the Hagley Library at Wilmington, Delaware, while board member Rosita Sarnoff was responsible for suggesting to Dr. John Pollock that TCNJ might benefit by accessioning the museum collections. As a result of these negotiations, TCNJ has received a complete set of the digital files made of photos, publications, and audio-video recordings. The Museum’s holdings include early liquid crystal displays, radios and television, an electron microscope and signed photographs from Thomas Edison and U.S. presidents, among other artifacts.

The Sarnoff Museum opened this past April and is housed in the Roscoe West Library.

Learn more:

• David Sarnoff
• Former Sarnoff Library
• TCNJ’s Sarnoff Museum

The paper earned the first annual IEEE Microwave Magazine Best Paper Award which was awarded at the IEEE Microwave Techniques and Technology (MTT) Society’s International Microwave Symposium in Anaheim, CA, at the Reviewers’ Reception. It included a certificate and a $2,000 prize He also served as a reviewer for several IEEE/MTT publications in addition to the IEEE Microwave Magazine and, as a consequence, already had an invitation to the Reviewers’ Reception/dinner.

Dr. Katz stated “It was quite a pleasant surprise to discover that I had won this award.”

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“Vacuum tube amplifiers”