August 2015 edition – Vol.7 no.7

CASS & ReSMiQ Innovation Day – RID2015
You are invited to participate in this annual event to be held on October 15th at Polytechnique Montréal. For this 4th edition, ReSMiQ join forces with IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) to lead this important event. This activity is organized by our center with a complementary financial support of the IEEE CASS to provide visibility to the research work of students from the province of Quebec in the field of microsystems. Both undergraduate and graduate students will demonstrate their scientific and technical expertise through a life demonstration contest before a panel of recognized experts. The three best projects in each category will be awarded cash money and certifcates. The call for projects generated many submissions that resulted in the selection of 13 projects, counting 5 from undergraduate students and 8 from graduate students. RID 2015 will also be an excelent opportunity to attend keynote presentations by three renown speakers who are Viktor Gruev, from University of Washington, Andreas G. Andreou, from John Hopkins University and Giancula Setti, from University of Ferrara in Italy. We thank all of the students who submitted their project. We invite you to regularly visit our web portal for more details. Call for project and preliminary program

The 17th Canadian Semiconductor Science and Technology Conference (CSSTC)
The 17th Canadian Conference on science and semiconductor technologies (CSSTC) was held in Sherbrooke, from August 16 to 21, 2015. Initiated in 1982, this conference covers many subjects such as materials, devices and applications. It allowed this community to network around topics of interest such as the manufacture of micromechanical devices and microelectronics, from nano and biotechnologies to the detectors used in medical imaging. The 138 participants, including 62 students, assisted at 3 plenary sessions, 14 invited presentations, 13 oral presentations, 40 posters, and 8 tutorials. These participants came from Canada, China, the US, France, and Germany. Visits were organized at C2MI and 3IT. The ReSMiQ sponsored the awards for best student presentations. Steffi Woo, from McMaster University, was awarded 1st place for its presentation entitled “Spontaneous Formation of Atomic Ordering in InGaN Alloys Nanowire Heterostructures Within”; Oleksandr Bubon, from Lakehead University, was awarded 2nd place for his presentation entitled “Measured Electron-Hole Pairs in Amorphous Selenium Energy Creation (a-Se) at High Electric Fields using Pulsed-Height Spectroscopy Method”; Gabriel Droulers, from the Université de Sherbrooke was awarded 3rd place for his presentation entitled “Planar Tunnel Junctions: A Time Stability Study”. Réjean Fontaine and Luc Fréchette, from the Université de Sherbrooke and members of ReSMiQ, were in the organizing committee of the conference in charge of the student awards.

The 9th NAMIS international summer school
The 9th NAMIS graduate school was held from 29 June to 3 July 2015 at Polytechnique Montréal. It hosted more than 50 participants from 9 countries and more than 20 speakers. The mornings were devoted to lectures on microsystems covering subjects in the fields of materials, energy, microfabrication processes, optics, biomedical applications, and electronics. The afternoons were dedicated to poster sessions, flash presentations, hands-on workshops, as well as a team competition and laboratory visits. On monday evening, a welcome reception was held at Polytechnique Montréal and a dinner barbecue was held on Wednesday night. Thursday evening, all participants were able to attend the Montreal Jazz Festival.
NAMIS_2015_s

The 4th golf tournament of the Quebec electronic industry
On June 18th the Table de concertation de l’industrie des systèmes électronique du Québec (CISEQ, RIE, C2MI, AMEQ, CIMEQ et ReSMiQ) organized the 4th edition of its annual golf tournament. During this activity, industry representatives perform a life demonstration of a new and innovative product. Participants attended to the presentation of recent innovations such as the Jaco Kinova articulated arm, and the biometric and smart clothing by OM Signal. The day ended with a golf tournament during which people in the industry met in an atmosphere of relaxation and conviviality. ReSMiQ was represented by Prof. Daniel Massicotte and the industry liaison representative Louis Bélanger.
golf_s

 NEWS FROM OUR MEMBERS

Exposure
– Dr. Sawan from Polytechnique Montréal offered 2 invited talks: At the launch of Noos in Montréal on July 28, and at the Catholic university of Leuven in Belgium, during the month of June.
Details for Noos

Achievement
– Dr. Tahar, from Concordia University, have one of his recent articles recently selected to be publish in ITeNews of the IE Society.

– Dr. Gosselin, from Université Laval, received an ENGAGE grant from NSERC with the company Hexoskin.
More details

– Dr. Gosselin, from Université Laval, and Dr. Sawan from Polytechnique Montréal have one of their recent articles published in the IEEE Trans. on industrial Engineering featured in the Innovation spotlight of IEEE Xplore. More details

– Dr. Tahar from Concordia University supervise Ibtissem Seghaier who received the award for best paper at the IEEE International Symposium on VLSI held in Montpellier (France) last July.

Involvment
– Dr. Peter from Polytechnique Montréal organized NAMIS 2015 in Montreal, from June 29 to July 3rd.

– Dr. Martel and Dr. Sawan from Polytechnique Montréal, Dr. Izquierdo and Dr. Blaquière de l’UQAM, Dr. Fréchette from Université de Sherbrooke, presented lectures at NAMIS in Montréal, from June 29 to July 3rd.
More details

Plate_J_Innovation-2015_27_03_15

RESMIQ’S ACTIVITIES

Scholarship competition
Scholarships for graduate students
ReSMiQ Scholarship and supplementary scholarship
APPLICATION DEADLINE: September 8, 2015
More details

Scholarship for post-doctoral fellow
APPLICATION DEADLINE: September 8, 2015
More details

Financial support for graduate students
APPLICATION DEADLINE: October 19, 2015
More details


SIGNAL is the main monthly information medium of the Microsystems Strategic Alliance of Québec (ReSMiQ). This newsletter aims to be an active link between the members of ReSMiQ and all individuals who have an interest in research and innovation in microsystems. We commit ourselves to promote in it our members’ research and increase ReSMiQ’s visibility.

ReSMiQ is a group of researchers in an interuniversity research center that can count on the support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT) and ten (10) Quebec universities involved in microsystems research.

Posted in Uncategorized

UPCOMING CONFERENCES

2023 International Conference on Microelectronics (ICM)
from December 17 to 20, 2023, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
More details

2023 IEEE 11th International Conference on Systems and Control (ICSC)
from December 18 to 20, 2023, Sousse, Tunisia.
More details

2024 37th International Conference on VLSI Design and 2024 23rd International Conference on Embedded Systems (VLSID)
from January 6 to 10, 2024, Kolkata, India.
More details

2024 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC)
from February 18 to 22, 2024, San Francisco, California, USA.
More details

2024 IEEE 15th Latin America Symposium on Circuits and Systems (LASCAS)
from February 27 to March 1, 2024, Punta del Este, Uruguay.
More details

2024 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC)
from April 21 to 24, 2024, Denver, Colorado, USA.
More details

2024 IEEE 6th International Conference on AI Circuits and Systems (AICAS)
from April 22 to 25, 2024, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
More details

2024 9th International Conference on Integrated Circuits, Design, and Verification (ICDV)
from June 6 to 7, 2024, Hanoi, Vietnam.
More details

2024 61st ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)
from June 23 to 27, 2024, San Francisco, California, USA.
More details

2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME)
from July 15 to 19, 2024, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
More details

MEMBER PROFILE

Prof. M.N.S. Swamy
Concordia University
Member of ReSMiQ since 2001

Swamy_sM.N.S. Swamy received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He is currently a Research Professor and holder of Concordia Tier I Chair with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is the founding Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, and was the Dean of Engineering and Computer Science. He has also taught at other Canadian institutions such as the Technical University of Nova Scotia, the U. of Calgary, and the U. of Saskatchewan. He was made an Honorary Professor at National Chiao Tong University, Taiwan. He was a Founding Member of Micronet, a Canadian Network of Centers of Excellence. Prof. Swamy has published extensively in scientific journals and conferences, is the co-author of six books and three book chapters and holds five patents. He serves on numerous international committees, and was the President of IEEE-CASS. He has also served as Associate Editor or Editor-in-chief of specialized journals in the fields of number theory, circuits, systems and signal processing. Prof. Swamy is the recipient of many awards including the Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada, several IEEE-CAS Society awards including the Education Award, the Golden Jubilee Medal and the Guillemin-Cauer Best Paper Award. In honor of his many contributions, several awards and labs have been named after him in Canada and India. Recently, the Journal Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing has instituted a Best Paper Award in his name. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and other professional institutions in Canada, U.K., and India. More information

Below is a selection of publications in recent years followed by representative work.

S. Bouguezel, M.O. Ahmad and M.N.S. Swamy, ‘Binary Discrete Cosine and Hartley Transforms’, IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems-Part I, Vol. 60, April 2013, pp. 989-1002.

Ola El Bakry, M.O. Ahmad and M.N.S. Swamy, ‘Inference of Gene Regulatory Networks with Variable Time Delay from Time-Series Microarray Data’, IEEE/ACM Trans. On Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Vol. 10, May/June 2013, pp. 671-687.

Dalei Wu, W.P. Zhu, and M.N.S. Swamy, ‘The Theory of Compressive Sensing Matching Pursuit Considering Time-domain Noise with Application to Speech Enhancement’, IEEE Trans. on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Vol. 22, March 2014, pp. 682-696.

M.Z. Bhotto, M.O. Ahmad and M.N.S. Swamy, ‘Robust Shrinkage Affine-Projection Sign Adaptive Filtering Algorithm for Impulsive Noise Environments’, IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, Vol. 62, July 2014, pp. 3349-3359.

M. Lankarny, W.P. Zhu and M.N.S. Swamy, ‘Joint Estimation of States and Parameters of Neuronal Hodgkin Huxley Model using Kalman Filtering’, Neurocomputing, Vol. 136, 2014, pp. 289-299.

M.A.A. Dewan, M.O. Ahmad and M.N.S. Swamy, “A method for automatic segmentation of nuclei in phase-contrast images based on intensity, convexity and texture”, IEEE Trans. On Biomedical Circuits and Systems, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 716-728, October 2014.

M. Al-Shatnawi, M. O. Ahmad, and M.N.S. Swamy, “Prediction of Indel flanking regions in protein sequences using a variable-order Markov model,” Bioinformatics, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 40-47, Jan 1, 2015.

J.-F. Gu, W.-P. Zhu, and M.N.S. Swamy, Joint 2-D DOA Estimation via Sparse L-shaped Array,” IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 63, no. 5, pp. 1171-1182, Mar 1, 2015.

J.-F. Gu, W.-P. Zhu, and M.N.S. Swamy, “Fast and efficient DOA estimation method for signals with known waveforms using nonuniform arrays”, Signal Processing, vol. 114, pp. 265-276, Sept, 2015.

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS

Joint estimation of states and parameters of Hodgkin–Huxley neuronal model using Kalman filtering

Fitting biophysical models to real noisy data jointly with extracting fundamental biophysical parameters has recently stimulated tremendous studies in computational neuroscience. Hodgkin–Huxley (HH) neuronal model has been considered as the most detailed biophysical model for representing the dynamical behavior of the spiking neurons. The unscented Kalman filter (UKF) has been already applied to track the dynamics of the HH model. In this paper, we extend the existing Kalman filtering (KF) technique for the HH model to another version, namely, extended Kalman filtering (EKF). Two estimation strategies of the KF, dual and joint estimation strategies, are derived for simultaneously tracking the hidden dynamics and estimating the unknown parameters of a single neuron, leading to four KF algorithms, namely, joint UKF (JUKF), dual UKF (DUKF), joint EKF (JEKF) and dual EKF (DEKF) (see Fig. 1). Detailed derivations of these four methods and intensive simulation studies are provided. Our main contribution is in the derivation of the EKF-based methods, JEKF and DEKF, for tracking the states and estimating the parameters of the HH neuronal model. Since these EKF-based methods are faster than UKF-based versions, they can particularly be employed in dynamic clamp technique, which connects artificial and biological neurons in order to assess the function of neuronal circuits.

Vol-7-N7_1
Fig. 1. Tracking the dynamics of HH neuron model using (A) JUKF, (B) DUKF, (C) JEKF and (D) DEKF. For each method, voltage V, n, m, h, gNa, gK and gL are drawn. Black solid and red dashed lines indicate the true (original) and the estimated values. The observation noise standard deviation is σ=21.81 mV (SNR=0 dB). From these results it is clear that the intracellular voltage (v), the hidden states (m, n and h) and the unknown parameters (gNa, gK and gL) have been reconstructed with excellent accuracy from the noisy observation.