r_kuc

New Book Offers Context, Applications for Electrical Engineering Classes

04/02/2014

Seventeen years ago, professor of electrical engineering Roman Kuc wrote a book that soon became a standard text for introductory electrical engineering courses—despite the fact that he never intended it to be used that way.

Studying bats to improve sensor design

09/14/2012

Departments: Electrical Engineering

Echolocation, the process bats use to track their prey, is fairly well understood. While looking for targets, a bat emits a high-pitched sound; the sound travels through the air, bouncing off anything in its path. Meanwhile, the bat is listening for the echoes that bounce back, and can figure out the location of a moving target based on how quickly or slowly the echoes return.

Roman Kuc

Website:

Research Page

Professor of Electrical Engineering

Room / Office: Becton 511

Office Address:

15 Prospect Street

New Haven, CT 06511

Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 208284

New Haven, CT 06520

Phone: (203) 432-4291

Email: roman.kuc@yale.edu

Degrees:

Ph.D., Columbia University

Interests:

Brain-Based Devices. BBD’s are sensor-processor-actuator systems that employ features that a biological brain uses to achieve robust performance in the presence of incomplete knowledge, errors and missing data. Optical and sonar sensors use biomimetic configurations and generate spike codes to enhance information content. Processing uses non-statistical principles that incorporate learning and improves model accuracy. Actuators close the loop by providing sensor information that disambiguates conflicts and form optimal trajectories.

The Intelligent Sensors Lab explores problems by starting with available sensing, applying physical principles to achieve perception, and approach autonomous task completion through cognition.

Selected Awards & Honors:

Honorary Doctorate, Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics, Kyiv, Ukraine (2013)
Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences and Mathematics, for Springer Handbook of Robotics, by Professional & Scholarly Division, Association of American Publishers, Inc. (2008)
Elected to Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (2004)
Fellow, Shevchenko Scientific Society (2001)
Order of the Golden Bulldog Award (1999)
Academician (Honorary), Academy of Sciences of Higher Education of Ukraine (1998)
Sheffield Distinguished Teaching Award (1997)
Master of arts, privatim, Yale University (1995)
Speech and Signal Processing Society Paper Award, IEEE Acoustics (1988)
IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society Paper Award (1983)

Selected Publications:

Books:

Electrical Engineering in Context: Smart Devices, Robots and Communications. Cengage Learning Press. 2014.
The Digital Information Age - 2nd Edition. Cengage Learning Press. 2014.
Sonar sensing. (with L. Kleeman) Chapter in Springer Handbook of Robotics - 3nd Edition, B. Siciliano and O. Khatib (Eds). Springer Press. 2016.

Papers:

R. Kuc and V. Kuc. Bat wing air pressures may deflect prey structures to provide echo cues for detecting prey in clutter. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(3), 1776-1779, 2012.
R. Kuc and V. Kuc. Modeling human echolocation of near-range targets with an audible sonar. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 139(2), 581-587, 2016.
R. Kuc. Generating cognitive maps using echo features from a biomimetic audible sonar. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145, 2084, 2019.
R. Kuc. Artificial neural network classification of surface reflectors and volume scatterers using sequential echoes acquired with a biomimetic audible sonar. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147,2357-2364, 2020.
R. Kuc. Brain-inspired sensorimotor echolocation system for confident landmark recognition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 152(3), 1272-1282, 2022.

Presentations:

R. Kuc and V. Kuc. Experimental audible sonar to model echolocation by the blind. 5th Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Acoustical Society of Japan in Honolulu, Hawaii, 2016.
R. Kuc. Audible sonar images generated with proprioception for target analysis. Acoustics '17, 3rd Joint Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the European Acoustics Association, Boston, MA, 2017.
R. Kuc. Biomimetic sonar echo parameters form cognitive maps, 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Louisville, KY, 2019.
R. Mueller, R. Kuc and V. J. Sutlive, The evolution of bat robots, 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Louisville, KY, 2019
R. Kuc. Echolocation: Modeling Blind Human Echolocation with Neural Networks, Seminar, Lviv Polytechnic University, Lviv, Ukraine, March 12, 2020.

Selected Patents:

"Biomedical Magnetism Imaging Apparatus and Method", 5,594,849, 1998
"Adaptive Acoustic Signal Sensing Device and Recognition System", 5,577,006, 1993