GILEAD TADMOR

Gilead Tadmor received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and a Ph.D., in mathematics (systems and control theory), in 1977, 1979 and 1984, from Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel. Dr. Tadmor joined the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Northeastern University in 1989, where he is currently an Associate Professor. Previously he held research and faculty positions at Tel Aviv University, Brown University, the University of Texas (Dallas) and at M.I.T. During 1998/9 he visited SatCon Technology Co., Cambridge, MA, and during the summer of 2001 he was a Faculty Fellow at the U.S. Air Force Research Lab, at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Dr. Tadmor's background is in the areas of robust and optimal control, and mathematical systems theory. His recent active interests include nonlinear control, with applications in power electronics, power systems, electric motor drives, mechanical systems, fluid flow control and active computer vision. His research has been supported by NSF, ARO, SatCon Technology Co. and the C. S. Draper Laboratory. He has consulted at SatCon Technology Co., United Technologies Research Center, Corning Applied Technologies, and at LiveData Inc., in areas ranging from power electronics & motor control, power distribution, aeroengine control, fluid flow, and electro optics. Dr. Tadmor is a Senior member of IEEE and currently serves as an Associate Editor with the Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board.

The development of High Tech Tools & Toys Laboratory (HTT&TL) has been, and will continue to be a major POE innovative activity with which I am involved. This on going project realizes my view of the critical role of hands on, problem-solving challenges, with clear, exciting, state of the art, practical relevance, as vehicles for serious learning and as strong motivators. In that particular lab, the freshman introduction to programming and computers through drill and dull textbook examples, is replaced by the design and implementation of control and signal processing software for a sophisticated 3D, underwater ultrasonic imaging system. The key to this concept is to be able to create a scaled down version of similar systems, used in hospitals and industry, in a way that will make it accessible to the novice, and yet without losing its immediate and clear relevance. First acquaintance with a variety of important laboratory hardware, an introduction to an array of important concepts (e.g., feedback control, measurement noise, sampling rates, thresholds, etc.), and to the challenges and joys of meaningful and not-that-easy problem solving, are side benefits. HTT&TL has been used in a two year pilot run of two sections of the short (2QH) freshman course GE1102. Lessons learned and, indeed, the success of the first two years of pilot runs, are the basis for current work towards a full scale semester course, merging the current GE1102 and GE1101. That course will serve as the main freshman engineering intro to computers and programming (with an emphasis on C programming), and will incorporate the use of a computer equipped classroom and the HTT&TL. A pilot of the 4QH GE1101 in the Spring of 2003 is intended to be used as a spring board and testbed for the formation of the integrated semester course.