Watch Again | IEEE WIE UKI Ambassadors’ Scheme Early Career Talk 10 – An Inspirational and Empowering Webinar for Women in Engineering

IEEE WIE in Engineering is an initiative with the goal to facilitate the recruitment and retention of women in technical disciplines globally. We envisage a vibrant community of IEEE women and men collectively using their diverse talents to innovate for the benefit of humanity.

Speaker: Eng Tasneem Yousif

Area of career: Industry and Academia

Research interest: GNSS Receivers, Digital Signal Processing, Reconfigurable Computing using FPGA, Machine Learning

Talk title: GNSS Applications in Space

Summary: Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) Receivers have been widely used in several applications that have civilization purposes and military purposes. GNSS receivers are used in agriculture, transport, military, mapping, surveying, mining, etc. Recently, GNSS has been used in different space applications. These GNSS Space applications such as navigation solutions, GNSS-Reflectometry (GNSS-R), lunar mission, HydraGNSS mission, etc.

One of the main challenges of GNSS receivers is they have a very weak power signal (158.5 dBW) due to the far distance of sending the GNSS signals to ground stations. Therefore, GNSS receivers are susceptible to different kinds of intentional and unintentional interference.

Biography: Eng Tasneem Yousif, is currently a PhD researcher candidate at the Electrical and Electronics Department at the University of Nottingham. She was working as a Senior System Engineer at The BENEFIT Company in Bahrain. Besides, she is working as a part-time lecturer at the University of Technology Bahrain. She has five years of work experience in software and hardware engineering. Her research areas are IoT, GNSS receivers, and Reconfigurable computing using FPGA. Known for her multiple awards such as being one of the scholars of the Developing Solutions Masters Scholarship at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

She graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2019 achieving distinction and obtaining the second highest-class mark. She is one of the winners of the Richard E. Merwin Student Scholarship in 2022. Also, she received the Grace Hopper scholarship awarded for active women in technical fields, which provides recipients the opportunity to meet successful women at an event organized by the AnitaBorg institute in the United States. the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) by Anitga. Moreover, she has been nominated to be the student representative during her MSc degree. During her undergraduate studies in Bahrain, she achieved Excellence and second honours GPA and best senior project. She is the current vice chair for IEEE Young Professional Affinity Group in Bahrain, and she is a corresponding member of the IEEE R8 Young Professional Affinity Group. Furthermore, she has been a speaker for different conferences and summits such as One Young World in Colombia, IEEE GCC Congress in Bahrain, IEEE R8 SYP Congress in Portugal. Finally, she is currently working as a volunteer IT teacher at Salman Culture Center and Talented Students Center.

Speaker: Dr Soumyajyoti Maji

Area of career: Academia

Research interests:

1) novel circuit design solutions to improve human health and well-being with particular emphasis on the design of wearable sensing systems for the measurement of physiological parameters (e.g. ECG, EEG, EMG, etc.) and quantification of human sensation threshold (e.g. tactile, temperature, pain, etc.) to improve rehabilitation.

2) metrological characterisation of available technologies for non-invasive measurement in the field of biomedical instrumentation and sensor development. My work focuses on building highly integrated hardware/software sensing systems using my expertise in low-power hardware design, sensing, and signal processing.

Field of work: Biomedical Instrumentation & Measurement, Low-power medical electronics, wearable devices for physical & physiological monitoring and neuro-assistive devices.

Talk title: Design of a Micro-power ECG Pre-amplifier for Dry Textile Electrodes

Summary: This talk will present analytical studies and bench experiments which highlight how electrocardiographic recording equipment which adheres to current international standards can still introduce distortion and affect the recorded signal. Most performance specifications are applicable to standard adhesive electrodes and therefore will not be met in recordings scenarios using un-gelled electrodes.

It will highlight the current international performance standards IEC60601 pertaining to electrocardiographic equipment and the shortcomings in this standard. The talk will conclude with presenting a novel low-power, low-noise single supply ECG amplifier that can be interfaced with textile-based un-gelled electrodes for ambulatory monitoring of the human electrocardiogram.

Biography: Soumyajyoti Maji (Graduate Member, IEEE) graduated with the B.Tech. degree in electronics and communication engineering from the West Bengal University of Technology, Kolkata, India in 2015. He obtained the MEngSc. degree from University College Dublin, Ireland in 2016. He received the PhD degree from the University of Dublin, Trinity College, Ireland in 2021. After working in Intel R&D Ireland for about a year (2020-2021) as a Product Development Engineer, he returned to academia as a Postdoc Research Fellow (2021-2023) in Harvard University, USA. Thereafter, he joined the University of Galway, Ireland as a lecturer in medical electronics.

His current research focuses on low-power bioinstrumentation for continuous health monitoring, flexible sensor development for physiological monitoring and assistive devices for neurorehabilitation. Dr. Maji won the Best Graduate paper and the Travel Grant Award at the 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Medical Measurements and Applications (MeMeA), Rome, Italy. He was the Technical Chair (Organiser) of a special session entitled ‘Wearable Devices for Physiological Monitoring’ at the 2020 IEEE International Workshop on Metrology for Industry 4.0 & IoT. He also serves as a reviewer in the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation & Measurement (TIM) Journal, IEEE Sensors Journal and Biomedical Physics & Engineering Physics (IOP).

Speaker: Eng Farnaz Fahimi Hanzaee

Area of career: Academia

Research interests: Bioelectronics and Organic Electronics

Talk title: A Low-Power Recursive I/Q Signal Generator and Current Driver for Bioimpedance Applications

Summary: Farnaz’s current work is on designing a power-efficient circuit for multi-sensing wearable electrical impedance tomography (EIT) systems for non-invasive and radiation-free monitoring of neonatal lung function. To that end, she would like to present her recent IEEE TCAS-II Brief that describes the design of a low-power and small-area quadrature signal generator and current driver application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for bioimpedance measurements.

She will detail the performance of the chip that was fabricated in TSMC 65 nm technology occupying an area of 0.21 mm2 with the current driver generating up to 0.7 mAp-p current up to 200 kHz and consuming 2.7 mW power using ±0.8 V supplies.

Biography: Farnaz received her BSc degree in electronic engineering from the Iran University of Science and Technology, Iran, in 2014, her M.Sc. degree in bioengineering from the Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Iran, in 2018, and an MRes degree in neurotechnology from Imperial College London, UK, in 2019. Since then she has been pursuing her PhD degree in electronic and electrical engineering with the Bioelectronics Group at University College London.

Speaker: Dr Yuanyuan Fan

Area of career: Academia

Research interests: Renewable integration

Talk title: Sustainability – what are the technological roadblocks?

Summary: The talk will cover the urgency of climate actions, an overview of the current sustainable options and the importance of interdisciplinary expertise.

Hydrogen and fuel cells are one of the most promising, if not only, energy carrier and storage technologies to solve or mitigate climate change. This talk will look at the challenges associated with hydrogen applications such as fuel cell electric vehicles. With the vision of smart grids considering all types of generation and storage systems, the talk will address how machine learning will play a critical role.

Biography: Dr Yuanyuan Fan is from an electrical background with her Bachelor, Master and PhD degrees all in electrical engineering. She holds certificates in Python and machine learning. Dr Fan is now working as a Course Coordinator and Lecturer at the Engineering Institute of Technology. She has always attached significance to social and environmental impacts in her everyday work and research. She believes the future lies in the efficient utilisation and management of renewable energy sources; where smart grids, which incorporate technologies such as green hydrogen production and usage, will become practical and cost-effective. Dr Fan has extensive engineering teaching experience and her applied research has resulted in an array of publications covering power system analysis, machine-learning engineering practices, and education.

For a sustainable energy future, she believes electrical engineers need to proactively broaden their knowledge and collaborate with data communication and automation engineers, data scientists, and policy makers. Dr Yuanyuan Fan is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Chartered Engineer in electrical engineering.