College of Engineering and Computer Science

‘��-Dearborn is a respected institution . . . I feel very lucky to study here’

stuxbury — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 18:08:09 +0000

‘��-Dearborn is a respected institution . . . I feel very lucky to study here’ stuxbury Sun, 02/02/2025 - 13:08

Sambathchatovong Na is ��-Dearborn’s first Fulbright Scholar studying in a doctoral program. This point of pride can be added to other experiences he’s had. Na, who goes by the first name Vong, is a volunteer researcher with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, commonly known as UNESCO, through their Asia-Pacific Regional Center of the CultureLink Network. Na has also heard President Barack Obama speak — and shook his hand.

Na, who has a reserved, humble nature, appreciates the experiences that he’s had. He sees them as milestones on his path to help others.“President Obama spoke about how we need to work together to effectively solve problems and he encouraged us to not sit back, but to get involved,” says Na, a cybersecurity professional who was selected as a Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative fellow in 2015. This is a still-active program created by the Obama administration that aims to build leadership capabilities and cross-border cooperation for solving global challenges. “I want to be a part of advancing cybersecurity technology — which changes second by second — while also helping shape how it is used through public policy.”

Na is learning to do this through his latest endeavors — studying in the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s Computer Information Systems doctoral program as a Fulbright Scholar, with CIS Professor Di Ma as his advisor. Ma is a cybersecurity and information assurance expert.

Na wants to strengthen his country’s education and legislation in the always-evolving industry by seeing how other nations fight hackers and enforce the safety measures in ways that work for the citizens.“Cambodia, my country, has not passed cybersecurity laws to protect our infrastructure yet. It’s in the process. I’m hoping, with my combined experiences, that I’m a person who can assist with this,” he says. “I am very appreciative that I am here to earn my degree and Dr. Ma is helping me meet my research goals.” His goals include drafting a cybersecurity framework for Cambodia that balances government and citizen needs when it comes to security and privacy, along with appropriate enforcement. Na also hopes that his degree will assist him in contributing to Cambodia’s foreign policy direction in cyber diplomacy.

Na has worked in the cybersecurity field in Cambodia for nearly a decade, both in the private and public sector. He established information technology security and IT governance departments for a bank in his country, Na has served as a cybersecurity-advising official for Cambodia's deputy prime minister cabinet. And Na teaches at two universities — American University of Phnom Penh and Royal University of Phnom Penh — to develop the next generation of Cambodia's cybersecurity experts and grow interest in the field.

“I started with an interest in the technology aspect, but the more we learn and things change — like AI and data-science mining — the more I’ve become interested in the public policy surrounding it,” he says, noting that the U.S. is a good place to study because there are many U.S. protection laws related to cybersecurity.

When applying for the Fulbright award, Na had his sights set on ��-Dearborn after reading about the university’s faculty expertise in the computer science field and seeing the number of research publications. “I looked for the best programs in the United States. ��-Dearborn is a respected institution in my field with professors who have published research in prestigious journals and have connections to industry. I feel very lucky to study here,” he says.

Na earned his undergraduate degree from Royal University of Phnom Penh and a master’s degree in cybersecurity from the University of Southampton in England, where he attended as a Chevening Scholar, which is a fully funded award to study in the United Kingdom.

“I had dreams to study in other countries for programming skills, networking and learning how other countries do things so I can help my country build a framework for cybersecurity. The resources for education in cybersecurity are limited in Cambodia, so I kept looking for ways to go out and bring what I learn back with me so I can teach others,” Na says. “It’s hard to study abroad when you don’t have the money. I kept applying even when I didn’t have success at first. You don’t give up on your dreams.”

Na’s parents must have known about their son’s commitment and drive from the beginning — as evidenced by his name. “My first name, ‘Sambathachatovong,’ is three words put together,” Na says. “‘Sambath’ symbolizes a richness or a wealth. ‘Chato’ is because I am the fourth born. ‘Vong,’ which is short for ‘Vong Trokaul', is for family tree. It’s about working together to bring about a richness. It doesn’t need to be about money, it can be about knowledge or community.”

Now in his second semester at ��-Dearborn, Na says he has met friends, enjoys the campus and has the best of all worlds by being a part of the U-M system. “Both campuses are beautiful and provide very good, but different, things. Going to Ann Arbor is great for being in a busy place and meeting up with friends. Staying in Dearborn is nice because it is peaceful and welcoming and your professors and colleagues look out for you.”

In addition to traveling to Ann Arbor — Na first took the train, which is walking distance from campus, but now has a car — he’s planning to see other parts of Michigan. He especially wants to travel to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to see its forests, rock formations and waterfalls.

Na shares his fun Michigan adventures and plans with his family and friends in Cambodia and looks forward to the day when he can share his completed research work too.“I’ve been building layers of education for many years to help me become a qualified person to help advise my country,” he says. “I am grateful for all of my experiences, but my time at ��-Dearborn is especially important. Earning my PhD here is a big step forward when it comes to reaching my goals.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

Graduate Research

International

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Graduate Studies

Off

Sun, 02/02/2025 - 18:07

Meet Sambathchatovong Na, ��-Dearborn’s first doctoral Fulbright Scholar. He’s a cybersecurity professional from Cambodia who’s in CECS’ computer information systems program.

Sambathchatovong Na, who goes by Vong, is ��-Dearborn's first doctoral Fulbright student. Photo by Annie Barker

How can we make driver assist features play nice together?

lblouin — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 13:14:53 +0000

How can we make driver assist features play nice together? lblouin Mon, 01/27/2025 - 08:14

The periodic cycles of excitement and disappointment over the emerging future of fully autonomous vehicles sometimes overshadow the reality that our vehicles are steadily getting more intelligent. Blind spot monitoring, which is often standard in new cars, will give you an alert anytime a driver (and maybe even a pedestrian) enters an area that generally represents the vehicle’s blind spot. Adaptive cruise control automatically maintains a preset distance to the car in front of you. Lane keep assist varies by vehicle, but in vehicles with electronic power steering, it can nudge your vehicle back between the lane markers if you start to drift too far. Autonomous emergency braking forcefully engages the brakes if your car detects an imminent frontal collision. And a total of eight 2024 models available in the U.S. offer some version of hands-free driving under certain conditions. This is on top of more convenience-focused technologies, like cars that parallel park for you and those with optional one-pedal driving, where the driver brakes and accelerates with a single pedal.

Assistant Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Areen Alsaid says these driver assist features have the ability to reduce driver workload and make driving safer. But as an expert in human-technology interactions, she’s also been wondering if the learning curve associated with this growing list of advanced features could limit their benefits. “For example, I have a vehicle that has both lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control, and I was under the impression that you couldn’t have them both engaged at the same time, but I tried it and I totally could,” she explains. “That sort of made it like an AV, because the car was controlling both its speed and lateral orientation within the lanes. I definitely did not expect that.” She says sort of like an AV, of course, because, in her vehicle, she discovered these features only remain engaged as long as she has her hands on the steering wheel. But for Alsaid, the experience underscores an important caveat about new driver assist features: When drivers are purchasing a vehicle equipped with several of these advanced technologies, they don’t automatically understand how they work, what their limitations are, and if features will interact with each other in ways they find intuitive. It’s only once drivers become more familiar with how these technologies function that they can fully reap their benefits.

Doctoral student Duha Alkurdi is helping Alsaid with a new project that explores how drivers respond to using multiple driver assist features simultaneously. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Alsaid says there is a growing body of research on individual driver assist technologies, but researchers are just scratching the surface on understanding the various scenarios when multiple features are operating simultaneously. As part of a new project funded by Toyota, Alsaid is hoping to build some foundational knowledge in this space by studying how drivers behave as they use multiple longitudinal features — technologies that, as contrasted with lateral features like lane keep assist, control the forward momentum of the vehicle. These include things like adaptive cruise control, one pedal driving, forward collision warning, autonomous emergency braking and hands-free driving at low speeds. In the first stage of her study, she’ll observe 10 participants as they engage multiple driver assist features in real vehicles on real roads, monitoring their behavior with cameras and real-time questions, as well as biometrics, like eye tracking and heart-rate monitoring. Using some of the initial insights from this experiment, she and her student research assistants will then design a full driving simulator experience, where dozens more drivers will be confronted with challenging driving situations.

Alsaid says after this initial study, the team will review the results and try to identify areas where the interactions between features and the user interfaces can be made more intuitive for drivers. Her hope is that their work in this area can help drivers adapt more smoothly to these new features so they can enjoy the full potential of their smarter new cars.

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Mon, 01/27/2025 - 13:14

Assistant Professor Areen Alsaid says the growing suite of semi-autonomous technologies have the ability to make driving safer, more convenient and less stressful. But we’ll only fully realize these benefits if the learning curve doesn’t confuse drivers.

Assistant Professor Areen Alsaid (right), pictured here with doctoral student Shiva Rasouli, has been using a driving simulator to study how drivers respond to interactions between driver assist features. Photo by Julianne Lindsey

Planning for EV infrastructure is complicated. Here’s a better way to do it.

lblouin — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 13:45:53 +0000

Planning for EV infrastructure is complicated. Here’s a better way to do it. lblouin Wed, 01/22/2025 - 08:45

Electric vehicles still represent less than 1% of registered vehicles in the U.S. and comprised just over 8% of new U.S. vehicle sales in 2024. But government officials across the country are already planning for a future in which EVs are the go-to mode of private transportation — as evidenced by increasingly large public investments in EV charging infrastructure, like the $7.5 billion pledged under the Biden administration. When it comes to actually making a plan for building out that infrastructure, however, the devil is in a complex web of largely unknown details, says Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Jian Hu. Ideally, Hu says, you’d want to build a charging system that serves people’s needs for the next 10 years. The tricky part is that involves correctly anticipating a host of trendlines which are basically impossible to predict. “There are so many uncertainties,” Hu says. “We don’t know how fast the EV market will grow, which means we don’t know what the charging demand will be. Will the public want fast or slow charging? Will people charge at home or at work? During peak hours, or non-peak hours? Will utilities adopt dynamic pricing so it’s cheaper to charge at certain times of day? And how will this affect charging behavior? And what if there are new technologies that emerge? There are so many things we don’t know.”

Typically, when government agencies are planning for things like this, Hu says they might use what statisticians call a deterministic model. When you’re making this kind of model, you take account of what data you have, plug it into a formula that defines the relationship between the variables, and then you typically get a single answer, which then guides your plan of action. A simple retirement calculator, which takes your current age, retirement age, anticipated rate of return, the rate of inflation, and monthly savings target and tells you how much money you’ll have when you retire is a simple kind of deterministic model. But Hu argues that these kinds of prediction models aren’t the best tools when you’re dealing with complex situations with lots of uncertainty. “What if your rate of return on your investments isn’t the 7% you’ve put into that calculator? What if it is less and then you don’t have the money you expect when you retire? If you only use this kind of model, you’ll have this single prediction and you base everything on that. But you’re not preparing for a possible worst-case scenario.”

Because of this, statisticians often use different tools for forecasting complex, highly uncertain phenomena, like investment performance. One of the most popular is called stochastic modeling, which, instead of giving you just one answer, provides a range of results represented by thousands of different simulated scenarios in which the values and probabilities of the underlying variables are allowed to change. A popular type of stochastic model is a Monte Carlo simulation, which is used in financial planning. Unlike a simple retirement calculator, which assumes fixed values for things like the rate of inflation or a rate of return, a Monte Carlo analysis will run thousands of simulations in which all the variables you have in your model have different values and assigned probabilities. As a result, you get a much wider representation of possible outcomes, including best-case, worst-case and most likely scenarios. A Monte Carlo simulation might tell you, say, that in 98 percent of its simulated scenarios, which account for a wide range of possible economic conditions, your savings plans are going to get you to the end of your life with money in the bank. That might give you much more confidence in your investment strategy. You might even decide to take a more aggressive approach. Or, as Hu frames it, stochastic modeling gives us a much more complete way to understand risk.

Because stochastic models are so much better at helping us understand risk of uncertain events, Hu says they could be an excellent approach for planning EV infrastructure, given that reliable data on important details, like consumer charging preferences and future electricity demand, are sparse or lacking altogether. As part of a National Science Foundation-funded project, and in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, which is itself partnering with the Chicago Transit Authority, Hu will be creating novel approaches to stochastic modeling that he hopes can profoundly improve this planning process. To get just a little bit technical for a moment: Hu says one of the big challenges of stochastic modeling is coping with “distributional ambiguity,” which is where you’re lacking a lot of reliable information about the probability of key phenomena. Currently, one of the ways statisticians deal with this is a method called distributionally robust optimization, but Hu says DRO has a few limitations. One, it’s computationally intensive, which means as models get more complex, it becomes increasingly cumbersome and time consuming to run them and adapt them to new data. Second, DRO tends to hedge against worst-case scenarios and can therefore lead to overly conservative outcomes. Third, it's a machine learning-based process that is a “black box,” meaning it does not show how it arrives at its answers. It therefore might not be a great option for publicly funded agencies, who, in spending large sums of taxpayer dollars, could certainly benefit from transparent or interpretable models. Hu says his novel stochastic modeling strategy aims not only to improve on these limitations, but also provide more overall usability for public agencies, including models that can be more easily updated as better data emerge.

After developing the model, Hu is looking forward to a big field test toward the end of the project: helping the Chicago Transit Authority as it embarks on electrifying their massive fleet of public buses. Current electric bus battery technology generally provides a range of around 60 miles. But many of CTA’s current scheduled vehicle route blocks are much longer; nearly a third of weekday blocks are longer than 100 miles. CTA therefore envisions building out a bus-charging infrastructure that’s integrated with their garages and bus routes, which will also require enhancements to the local electric grid to accommodate the new electricity load. Figuring out where these grid modifications need to be made and the ideal placement for the charging stations in a way that harmonizes with the complex bus routes — which are likely to change in the future — is exactly the kind of complicated, ambiguous planning task Hu says his model can help with. Most importantly, it gives a government agency its best chance of spending limited public resources for EV charging as effectively as possible.

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Wed, 01/22/2025 - 13:40

Given a web of uncertainties, like future electricity price, consumer charging behavior and EV market growth, Associate Professor Jian Hu says a novel type of stochastic modeling can minimize the risks of public investments in EV infrastructure.

Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Jian Hu is testing a new approach to planning charging infrastructure with the Chicago Transit Authority. Photo by Annie Barker

Explore Dearborn (2.17.25)

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:52:12 +0000

Explore Dearborn (2.17.25) Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/21/2025 - 16:52

At the President's Day Exploration Event and Tour, you will learn about the exciting opportunities and programs available at ��-Dearborn. You will have the opportunity to learn about our practice-based learning approach, research opportunities, and unique offerings in our various degree programs. Interact with staff and current students to hear first-hand the incredible experience ��-Dearborn provides. This event also features an optional 45-minute walking tour of campus. This event is designed to showcase our academic programs and see what ��-Dearborn has to offer. For a complete list of majors, visit: /academics/undergraduate-studies/majors-and-minors.

2025-02-17T10:00:00-0500 to 2025-02-17T12:00:00-0500

United States

Office of Undergraduate Admissions

313-593-5100

umd-admissions@umich.edu

Prospective students

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Info Session

The challenges with younger drivers and autonomous vehicles

lblouin — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 15:28:25 +0000

The challenges with younger drivers and autonomous vehicles lblouin Mon, 01/13/2025 - 10:28

Autonomous vehicles promise a future of almost unimaginable driver convenience. After all, who wouldn't want to be able to watch a movie during a tedious stop-and-go rush hour commute? But proponents of AVs think the technology’s even more meaningful impact will be in the realm of safety, given that more than 90% of traffic accidents are thought to be the result of human error. Indeed, we’re already seeing some of the safety benefits as semi-autonomous driver assist features, like lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring and emergency braking, become commonplace on newer vehicles. Even so, the next big developmental leap to so-called Level 3 vehicles, which are capable of doing all the driving for us in certain situations and are now starting to enter American and European markets, could introduce a whole new set of safety and driver behavior challenges, says Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Bochen Jia. That’s because Level 3 AVs still require full driver intervention when conditions are beyond the system’s capability — like when lane markers aren’t clearly marked or are obscured by weather; or in the event of system malfunction. That introduces a whole new type of driver experience, which the AV research community calls “takeover.” That’s the tricky liminal moment when a driver has to abruptly shift their focus from, say, watching their favorite Netflix series, to dealing with a potential road emergency.

Intuitively, takeover is a fraught, psychologically complex space, which is why Jia says a lot of research has been devoted to studying how drivers respond to this type of demand. For example, early research has indicated, somewhat counterintuitively, that the risk of driver fatigue actually increases when operating a Level 3 vehicle. It seems the mental task of constantly monitoring a vehicle doing the driving for us can actually be more draining than doing the driving ourselves. And in Jia’s lab, he’s been focusing on a neglected area of takeover research: younger, inexperienced drivers. From a research perspective, he says it’s a fascinating population. First, young people’s brains are still developing, particularly when it comes to attention resources and situational awareness, which can influence things like fatigue development and how well they respond to potentially hazardous situations, like takeover. In addition, younger people tend to, in general, be more trusting of technology, which could lead to less intense monitoring of the vehicle and undesirable takeover outcomes. Moreover, Jia says we might not be too far away from an era where young drivers’ only driving experience is on Level 3 vehicles. “That would mean they actually aren’t getting much experience doing actual driving, which could influence how well they respond to situations when the vehicle asks them to take over,” Jia says.

In focusing on younger drivers, Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Bochen Jia has been exploring a neglected area of AV research. Photo by Annie Barker

For one of his latest projects, Jia has been digging into the particular issue of fatigue onset in younger, novice drivers. For this study, he recruited both drivers under the age of 19 who had limited driving experience and middle-aged drivers who had years of experience. Using a high-fidelity driving simulator, both sets of participants engaged in extended periods of autonomous driving and were instructed to take control of the vehicle when the autonomous mode was not safe or had failed. During their driving experience, Jia then introduced several types of takeover events to see how drivers would react. By combining physiological measures and self-reported assessments collected periodically during their driving task, Jia then monitored each set of participants for fatigue onset. The results were pretty interesting: Novice young adult drivers developed both physical and mental fatigue earlier than their middle-aged counterparts during extended periods of autonomous driving. "This is somewhat surprising to people because they think young people naturally have more energy," Jia explains. "However, it appears that the mental demands of autonomous driving, or the tendency of younger drivers to be more engaged in non-driving tasks during autonomous operation, may accelerate the onset of fatigue in younger drivers." Moreover, the takeover outcomes for fatigued drivers were often far from desirable. “Essentially, we were looking at how often participants would fail to prevent a collision,” Jia says. “And it happened more frequently than we had hoped.”

Jia says the results point to a need for highly effective fatigue warning systems for Level 3 AVs that have special considerations for younger, inexperienced drivers. Interestingly, Jia envisions this system would be most effective if it wasn’t just part of the vehicle, but integrated with other readily available wellness monitoring technologies, like wearable fitness trackers that monitor heart rates and sleep quality. “I don't think you can have a system that’s confined to the car — that’s not enough,” Jia says. “It should be part of your life monitoring — an overall system — because they don’t suddenly become a different person when they get in the car. With all the personal data monitoring technologies we have nowadays, we could easily identify younger drivers, and we likely have a lot of the data we would need.”

Next up, Jia says he plans to continue his research on fatigue onset with a study that puts participants in real automated vehicles within a closed testbed, such as the Mcity test facility. In addition, he has a similar project that is studying differences in distraction levels between younger, novice drivers and middle-aged experienced drivers. He hopes both studies will provide critical insights into improving the safety and usability of autonomous vehicle systems for drivers of all experience levels.

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Story by Lou Blouin. Want to learn more about Jia's work on driver fatigue? You can read the full-text of his recent article on the subject in the “Journal of Safety Research,” which was co-authored by Jia's student Yourui Tong, ��-Dearborn Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Shan Bao, Tsinghua University Professor of Industrial Engineering Changxu Wu and ��-Dearborn Associate Professor of Psychology Nitya Sethuraman.

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

Off

Mon, 01/13/2025 - 15:22

Associate Professor Bochen Jia’s latest research is revealing some surprising things about how fatigue can impact younger, inexperienced drivers when they're operating semi-autonomous vehicles.

Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Bochen Jia (right) and graduate student Darlington Egeonu check out the driving simulator Jia used for his most recent project on driver fatigue. Photo by Annie Barker

‘Healing’ batteries with ultrasonics

lblouin — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 17:59:20 +0000

‘Healing’ batteries with ultrasonics lblouin Wed, 01/08/2025 - 12:59

High-capacity batteries have emerged as an essential building block of the clean energy future, but it likely won’t be today’s lithium-ion batteries alone that get us there. That’s because, as powerful and ubiquitous as they are, lithium-ion batteries have some major limitations. For starters, they are very heavy — a fundamental quality that curbs the range of today’s electric vehicles and basically rules them out as an option for powering commercial aircraft. The world’s growing demand for the minerals needed to manufacture lithium-ion batteries also requires ever expanding mining operations, which have environmental, climate and geopolitical consequences. And on the safety front, the liquid electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries are highly flammable, which is one reason why electric vehicle battery fires can be so catastrophic.

Because of these issues, researchers are developing new kinds of batteries, including solid-state batteries, which are lighter, can hold more energy for their weight and require fewer materials. They are also considered safer, since, as the name suggests, they don’t require a liquid electrolyte. But mechanical engineering postdoc research fellow Yaohong Xiao, who works with Associate Professor Lei Chen, says that last quality is both a blessing and a curse. Inside a typical lithium-ion battery, the liquid electrolyte is responsible for transferring charged particles back and forth between the cathode and anode sides of the battery, which is necessary both for charging and discharging. Because this electrolyte is a liquid, Xiao says it creates a nearly uniform interface between the two sides of the battery, since liquids naturally fill tiny nooks and crannies that might exist between the anode and cathode materials. In a solid-state battery, however, the electrolyte separating the anode and cathode sides is a strong, stiff, solid piece of material, and Xiao says that makes it more difficult to get really good contact between the two sides. “Essentially, you have solid on solid on solid,” Xiao explains. “Right after manufacturing, you might have no problem with this interface, but after a few cycles, or after the battery has experienced vibrations from being on the road, you start to get little voids in the interface so the electrolyte is no longer making perfect contact with both sides of the battery.” As a result, Xiao says a battery can develop zones of higher than usual current, which reduces its overall effectiveness.

Typically, Xiao says researchers have tried to solve this solid-state battery interface problem in a couple of different ways. First, they use pressure to basically squish all the components back together. Or they can use an “interlayer” material, which, kind of like double-sided tape, keeps the anode and cathode materials snug up against the solid electrolyte. But each approach has its limitations. Xiao says introducing interlayers to a process is typically expensive. That might not be a huge deal for experiments in a lab, but it would increase the already high costs of solid-state batteries when they’re being manufactured at scale. On the other hand, Xiao says using pressure to smooth out the interface is sort of like trying to squish two pieces of wood together. The rigidity of the lumber and any imperfections along the surfaces mean that pressure alone often isn’t enough to create perfect contact.

A couple years ago, Xiao began kicking around a sort of unconventional solution for this interface challenge. Xiao’s background is actually in metallurgy, not battery chemistry, and he saw this issue primarily as a question of how to get different metals to stick together. As it turns out, this is actually a pretty common problem in the metals universe, and one with a variety of well-established solutions. Specifically, Xiao was thinking that a technique called ultrasonic welding might be able to “heal” the voids in the interface, restoring uniform contact with the electrolyte. Ultrasonic healing, which is commonly deployed in a wide range of industries to weld pieces of plastic or thin pieces of metal together, uses high-frequency acoustic vibrations instead of high temperatures or solders to join materials together. The result is a highly uniform bond, but the process doesn’t use a whole lot of energy and can be done very quickly. Xiao worked with his postdoc colleague in Chen’s lab, XinXin Yao, who helped provide the theoretical feasibility for the welding concept, to set up an experiment, which revealed that ultrasonic welding could indeed nearly completely restore the uniformity of the electrolyte interface in as little as a minute. Moreover, the process required temperatures barely warmer than the water in your hot water heater and used about as much energy as an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb.

Xiao says the effectiveness of this metals-based approach came as a surprise to many of his colleagues, most of whom are experts in battery chemistry. Now, he’s hoping the results, which were recently published in “Advanced Energy Materials,” will help inspire other researchers to further explore the technique’s full potential. He says one possible application would be to use this as a tune-up strategy for eventual solid-state battery-powered EVs, which could come in for a quick ultrasonic healing treatment and get their optimal range back. And one other surprise finding from his experiment is that ultrasonic welding actually increased the conductivity of the electrolyte, albeit temporarily. That result was particularly intriguing to some colleagues at ��-Ann Arbor, who recently visited the newly established Battery Manufacturing and Testing Lab for a firsthand look. “They were very interested in this point,” Xiao says. “The conductivity would slowly recover after treatment, but they were thinking, what if we can fix that? What if we can figure out a way to not let it recover? So it’s very exciting to see this research already inspiring further work in this area.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

Off

Wed, 01/08/2025 - 17:58

Two mechanical engineering postdoc research fellows have discovered a novel way to solve a pesky challenge with next-generation solid-state batteries.

In Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Lei Chen's lab, postdoc research fellow Yaohong Xiao has been working on developing solid-state batteries, a safer, more energy dense alternative to today's lithium-ion batteries. Photo by Annie Barker

‘How will you make your mark on the world?’

stuxbury — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 19:14:43 +0000

‘How will you make your mark on the world?’ stuxbury Sat, 12/21/2024 - 14:14

Nearly 40 years after Henry Maier earned his diploma from ��-Dearborn, he attended his first campus commencement. The retired FedEx ground president and CEO skipped his own ceremony because he moved immediately after finals to begin working. On Dec. 21, he was back at his alma mater — this time delivering the keynote speech to the Class of Fall 2024.

Keynote speaker Henry Maier

“Thanks for the opportunity to finally attend — even if it is almost 50 years late,” said Maier, who graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in economics in 1986. “I entered ��-Dearborn as a freshman in the fall of 1972, only the second class of freshmen admitted to the university. My family couldn’t afford college, so I had to work one, two and once three jobs to pay tuition. I’m sure many of you sitting here can relate.” Maier went on to have a 35-year career with FedEx. “��-Dearborn made it possible for students like me to get not just a college education, but a Michigan education,” he continued.

Surrounded by family, friends and favorite professors, hundreds of Dearborn Wolverines were awarded 713 degrees during two 90-minute commencement ceremonies in the Fieldhouse. The morning ceremony recognized graduates of the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters and the College of Business. The afternoon ceremony celebrated graduates of the College of Education, Health and Human Services and the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Delivering the keynote, Maier congratulated the graduates on reaching their goals. He said their hard work will continue to open doors for more opportunities. “Today you reached a milestone, but what you really have done is given yourself choices. You can choose to earn a living, what problems you want to help solve and decide what direction you want your life to go in,” he said.

Maier added that, as life unfolds, the knowledge the graduates have gained will prove important — but so will the understanding that there will always be lessons to learn and skills to grow. “If you take nothing else with you today, be curious, inquisitive and remember that your education does not end when you leave today,” he said.

Student speaker Almunthir Elhady echoed the idea that graduation is not a conclusion. The College of Engineering and Computer Science graduate told his fellow students that with each step they take, they will be called to adapt, to grow and to rise. “The future is not a destination — it is a process of becoming, a journey of constant redefinition, of striving not just for personal success, but for a world that is better for those who will follow,” Elhady said.

Student speaker Almunthir Elhady

As Chancellor Domenico Grasso certified the degrees, he told the students that he looks forward to seeing the good that they bring into the world. “I welcome you to the society of learned men and women and to the pantheon of distinguished Michigan alumni — almost 700,000 strong — who have shaped and defined the world in which we live,” Grasso said. “Today also marks the shortest day of the year in terms of daylight, but from here on, the days will gradually grow longer. Just as the light of the sun increases, so too will the light of your education — symbolized by our university seal — guide you, illuminating your futures for the rest of your lives.”

Then, students in the Class of Fall 2024 — who ranged from ages 18 to 65 and hailed from 14 U.S. states and many nations around the world — turned their tassels, marking their official transition to alumni. During the two ceremonies, 482 undergraduate, 226 graduate and five doctoral degrees were awarded.

Grasso also awarded one special diploma — to Maier. “We are going to present him with the diploma that he did not receive during his commencement,” Grasso said. “Congratulations.” Smiling, Maier accepted it with one word: “Finally.”

Chancellor Domenico Grasso and Class of Fall 2024 keynote speaker Henry Maier

During his keynote speech, Maier noted that the anthem for his generation — the Baby Boomers — was a Graham Nash song titled “Chicago.” He paraphrased the lyrics: “We can change the world. Rearrange the world. It’s dying to get better.” He encouraged the newest ��-Dearborn alums to think about their song, while also talking about what a big day it was for them both — even though their graduations were nearly 40 years apart.

“To the Class of 2024, I ask, ‘What’s your anthem? How will you leave your mark on the world?” Maier said. “What I can tell you is you have already begun.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury. Photos by Annie Barker and Andrew Mascharka

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��-Dearborn awarded 713 degrees during two 90-minute commencement ceremonies on Dec. 21 in the Fieldhouse.

The Class of Fall 2024 was celebrated at two commencement ceremonies on Dec. 21. Photo by Annie Barker

Faculty Fulbrights bring international partnerships to Dearborn Wolverines

stuxbury — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:55:56 +0000

Faculty Fulbrights bring international partnerships to Dearborn Wolverines stuxbury Mon, 12/16/2024 - 11:55

Three ��-Dearborn faculty from three different colleges were awarded grants to teach or conduct research in three different areas of the world — Indonesia, Egypt and Ethiopia — through the Fulbright awards program.

The U.S. Fulbright Scholar exchange program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, awarded grants to ��-Dearborn faculty. Composition and Rhetoric Teaching Professor Kristian Stewart received an award for the 2023-24 cycle. Business Economics and Finance Lecturer Mercedes Miranda and Computer and Information Science Associate Professor Birhanu Eshete earned grants for the 2024-25 cycle.

“A Fulbright Award is a way we can bring other parts of the world back to our students,” says Stewart, who did her most recent Fulbright in Indonesia over the summer. “We have diversity on our campus. There are times when I have students with five different first languages in my classroom. But we can still get isolated in our own groups, in our own enclaves. So it’s important to connect our students with people in different areas of the world that they may be unfamiliar with. And it’s important for them to learn how to tell — and listen — to the stories of others. Fulbright awards open doors to connect our students to people in different areas of the world.”

Reporter spoke with Stewart and Miranda about their recent awards. Eshete, who is currently in Ethiopia, will be highlighted in a future story.

Mercedes Miranda, Egypt

Miranda says an exchange opportunity changed her life when she was a college undergraduate. As a part of a pilot program at her university in her home country of Ecuador, Miranda — an economics student — was chosen to join a cohort that would study at the University of New Orleans in the United States.

“That opened a world of opportunities for me to create new networks to climb the career ladder and to experience a different culture,” says Miranda, who notes that, as cultural immersion, she watched “Saturday Night Live” until she was able to pick up the references and laugh at the jokes. “Many of our students at ��-Dearborn may be of Arabic descent, but they are born here and do not have the financial means to travel outside of the U.S. I see this Fulbright as a way to help me better understand life in a MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) country, while also creating ways to help my ��-Dearborn students connect with people across the world.”

Starting in February, Miranda will be teaching four-month business economics courses in Egypt, contributing her expertise to global academic exchanges and fostering international collaboration. Miranda has previously done non-Fulbright teaching in China for MBA students and in Italy for undergraduates.

Miranda’s Fulbright university will be in Cairo, but the name of the institution will not be shared with her until 10 days prior to the beginning of the Fulbright due to their protocol. She will teach both undergraduate and graduate courses that have an interdisciplinary, hands-on approach and merge concepts from finance, business economics and international business.

“I am going to teach through using business case studies through the Egyptian economic perspective, while also having the students reach out to Egyptian businesses to create a collaborative project that will help the businesses and give students the applicable knowledge they need,” she says. “I do something similar at ��-Dearborn, except from an American perspective and we work with Dearborn- and Detroit-based small businesses.”

Miranda enjoys seeing other areas of the world, but this will be the first time she’s traveled to Egypt. She chose to apply to the country specifically because it was the largest country in the MENA region with an institution where she could apply her international business economics expertise and 20% of the population are in the age range of 15 to 24.

“Many of our students are fluent in Arabic and I wanted an Arabic-speaking country that had a younger demographic. I see my Fulbright as the first step to a partnership of some type. Maybe it’s a project or a class. Maybe it’s having ��-Dearborn students go there or for Egyptian students to study here,” says Miranda, who notes COB Dean Frédéric Brunel will visit Egypt while she is there to meet faculty and university officials. “No matter what it will look like, I do know that this is only the beginning of something very wonderful.”

Kristian Stewart, Indonesia

When Stewart returned from Greece in fall 2023, after her first Fulbright Scholar Award, Stewart looked for additional international collaboration opportunities through Fulbright. She found a Fulbright Specialist opportunity to create a Center for Academic Writing at the Universitas Negeri Medan in Medan, Indonesia, in the summer 2024.

In addition to developing a Centre for Academic Writing on the Medan campus, running workshops and giving talks, Stewart provides one-on-one instruction and critiques for faculty academic papers. “After the six weeks, I left them the curriculum that I developed as a foundation for their Centre for Academic Writing,” she says. “To continue our relationship, I'm still working with their faculty. On Tuesday mornings our time, I'm theirs for the morning. They can put questions or their scholarly work in WhatsApp or a Google drive and I can edit and give feedback.”

Before Stewart left Indonesia, she and university employees discussed how they would like to come to ��-Dearborn and co-teach with her or how they can bring ��-Dearborn students there.

“The Fulbright Specialist award might be for a relatively short period of time, but the effects of the work being done through the program will be long lasting for me, their faculty and our students,” Stewart says.

Working with the University of Peloponnese in Greece during her first Fulbright Award, Stewart tailored her ��-Dearborn digital storytelling course to fit the needs of the Greek school’s curriculum, available technologies and student population. One such example project comes from Stewart’s ��-Dearborn course, “Being Human Today.” Stewart’s Dearborn Wolverines collaborate with students from universities around the world to create short videos that present life through individual lenses. “You combat stereotypes by having experiences outside of your own. You find solutions to world issues by learning from other people and seeing how they solve problems. Exposure is key,” says Stewart, who has previously taught in multiple countries, including South Africa, China, Germany and Italy.

A highlight of her first Fulbright Award was an invitation to provide a plenary address at Jefferson House, the residence of the United States Ambassador to Greece, where she was proud to provide remarks and represent ��-Dearborn to an international audience that included United States Ambassador to Greece, George J. Tsunis.

Stewart says as a result of her Fulbrights, her goals are to foster additional international connections and projects to benefit ��-Dearborn students. And it’s working.

��-Dearborn and the University of the Peloponnese recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding. Students and faculty from the two schools plan to work together for the next five years on writing-related research endeavors, including students virtually working together and sharing stories.

Stewart has additionally established a Collaborative Online International Learning partnership with biotechnology students in South Africa, and they just finished an eight-week project. Together, in WhatsApp groups, students investigated one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals students then co-authored StoryMaps reflective of their research. Stewart also plans to connect Dearborn students to the Indonesian students, stemming from her work in Medan, in the near future.

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

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Three faculty members from three ��-Dearborn colleges — COB, CECS and CASL — earned awards to work in Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia.

��-Dearborn faculty members, from left, Mercedes Miranda, Kristian Stewart and Birhanu Eshete

Class of Fall 2024: CECS graduate Dania Ammar

lblouin — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 16:46:13 +0000

Class of Fall 2024: CECS graduate Dania Ammar lblouin Mon, 12/16/2024 - 11:46

When Dania Ammar moved with her family from Beirut to southeast Michigan in 2017, her plan was to build on her civil engineering background and start the master’s in construction management program at ��-Ann Arbor. But some family circumstances led to her deferring her enrollment. As it happened, during the unexpected semester off, she reconnected with a friend from Lebanon who was studying mechanical engineering on the Dearborn campus. He had a lot of good things to say about the college, particularly how the research enterprise was growing quickly, giving graduate students a lot of opportunities. It was enough to pique Ammar’s interest. She got on the ��-Dearborn website, checked out the programs and research labs, particularly those in Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, and set up a meeting with then-College of Engineering and Computer Science Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and current CECS Dean Ghassan Kridli. “Dean Kridli was very generous in giving me some time to talk with him about the programs and all the research that was going on at ��-Dearborn at that time. I decided this was definitely one of the best options,” Ammar says.

The following semester, Ammar decided to go for it — enrolling in the IMSE master’s program at ��-Dearborn in 2018. IMSE is a broad discipline, and Ammar recalls feeling very open to exploring all the possibilities. That first semester, she took a variety of classes and found an early champion in Associate Professor Jian Hu, who specializes in using data analytics and machine learning in risk management applications. “I had a very good math background and knew some programming, but I had no background in that field,” Ammar says. “Professor Hu provided me with all kinds of support, told me which books I should start reading, and gave me time to get accustomed to programming models that we were using. I learned so much and it was a phenomenal experience.” A little later in her master’s program, she crossed paths with Professor Shan Bao, a specialist in human factors who was helping develop a new master’s program in Human-Centered Design and Engineering, a field that roots engineering solutions in deep understandings of human needs. Ammar says a lot of people think of human factors as a psychology-based discipline — and it does draw on psychology and user feedback quite a bit. But with Bao’s work, Ammar saw how the discipline’s deepest potential lay in combining those insights with complex data analytics and even artificial intelligence. “You can’t really develop any product, whether it is something simple or something very complicated, like an automated vehicle, without going into the human factors aspects of it,” she says. “But I saw this isn’t just about psychology. It’s about figuring out ways to quantify the psychology — to measure human preferences and behaviors so you can build models that help you gain insights into those measures.”

Ammar loved working with Bao and chose to continue her journey at Dearborn with a PhD. For her dissertation research, she took on an ambitious multiphase project in transportation safety that explored one of the more fascinating emerging challenges related to autonomous vehicles: How will pedestrians learn to trust and safely interact with vehicles when humans aren’t doing the driving? Ammar says both pedestrians and drivers typically rely on an exchange of visual signals, like eye contact and waving, to negotiate who has the right of way, and absent a human driver, cars will presumably need some way of declaring their intentions. She began her work with a deep dive into road crash data, identifying the factors that lead to the most dangerous situations between pedestrians and human-driven vehicles in order to derive potentially problematic pedestrian-AV scenarios. She then embarked on building a cueing system designed to satisfy pedestrians' needs while interacting with AVs in these evaluation scenarios. That phase of her research led to several interesting conclusions. For example, Ammar discovered that pedestrians tend to favor technologies that closely mimic their interactions with human drivers, e.g. AVs that communicate a symbolic message, like the familiar flashing silhouette used at crosswalks, either directly on the vehicle or via crosswalk infrastructure (or both). She also investigated many fine-grain details, like whether a pedestrian’s age, gender, and driving and pedestrian behavior (conservative versus nonconservative) influenced their preferences for AV cueing. The final stage of her research involved creating a VR simulation, where she observed participants reacting in tricky situations, like an autonomous vehicle quickly approaching a red light before eventually stopping. By measuring how long pedestrians took to leave the curb and using physiological measures like pupil diameter, she could see which safety cues inspired trust or distrust. She’s hoping the results, which have led to several publications, will help other researchers, automakers and civil engineers as they design cueing systems for the era of autonomous vehicles.

Since officially finishing her PhD program, Ammar has switched gears a little bit, and in some ways, it’s a moment when her diverse studies are all coming together. Since August, she’s been working as a data science project engineer with Hottinger Brüel & Kjær, where she focuses on data analytics and machine learning-based solutions for a wide variety of industries. “These skills can be leveraged in any application, including civil engineering-related fields, which have changed a lot even in the short time since I was an undergraduate student,” Ammar says. “Let’s say you had a project and you needed insights about soil mechanics or wanted to predict settlements in the soil over time. In the past, we would have done that with a bunch of physics-based and numerical equations. But now, with more sensors being installed and collected data becoming available, researchers are developing machine learning-based models to answer those questions. That’s where the field is going now, and in the future, most engineering solutions will be built with data collection in mind so these models can keep getting better.”

Ammar now just has one finishing touch to put on her ��-Dearborn career: Walking across the commencement stage in December. She expects it’s going to be a pretty emotional moment. “��-Dearborn has been my home for the last seven years,” she says. “It’s only been a few months since I left, but to see everyone again is going to be very special. I’ve had the opportunity to work with so many different people, and I always felt, sincerely, that every day I spent with them was a chance to learn something new.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

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Mon, 12/16/2024 - 16:44

The recent PhD graduate almost pursued a career in construction management until ��-Dearborn helped her unlock a future in data analytics and artificial intelligence.

Since finishing her PhD, Dania Ammar has been working as a data science project engineer. She'll be putting the punctuation mark on her seven-year ��-Dearborn career on Saturday, when she walks across the commencement stage. Photo by Annie Barker

CECS PhD & DEng Virtual Open House (6.25.25)

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 19:47:25 +0000

CECS PhD & DEng Virtual Open House (6.25.25) Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/11/2024 - 14:47

Want to learn more about our programs and the experience you’ll have as a doctoral student? Join us for our virtual graduate open house to learn more about our programs and the admission process. You'll have an opportunity to speak with faculty and staff and to have all of your questions answered.

Programs: Automotive Systems and Mobility (D.Eng.), Electrical and Computer Engineering (D.Eng.), Computer and Information Science (PhD), Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering (PhD), Industrial and Systems Engineering (PhD), Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (PhD)

2025-06-25T09:00:00-0400 to 2025-06-25T10:30:00-0400

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313-583-6321

umd-graduatestudies@umich.edu

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‘������-Dearborn is a respected institution . . . I feel very lucky to study here’

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Explore Dearborn (2.17.25)

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‘Healing’ batteries with ultrasonics

‘How will you make your mark on the world?’

Faculty Fulbrights bring international partnerships to Dearborn Wolverines

Mercedes Miranda, Egypt

Kristian Stewart, Indonesia

Class of Fall 2024: CECS graduate Dania Ammar

CECS PhD & DEng Virtual Open House (6.25.25)

‘��-Dearborn is a respected institution . . . I feel very lucky to study here’