FERSAT: Characterizing Light Pollution Using a Cubesat

— Assoc. Prof. Dubravko Babić University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, Croatia

Abstract
This presentation will summarize the efforts in space technology education at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Zagreb with a focus on the development of the FERSAT nanosatellite.... FERSAT is a 1U CubeSat with target launch year in 2022 and includes three payloads: a platform for measuring global light pollution, an on-board camera for imaging the Earth, and an onboard 10GHz transmitter for high-speed data download. The payload development is being primarily carried out by students. Read more

Biography
Dubravko Babić was born in Zagreb, Croatia. He received his Dipl. Ing. Degree from University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, in 1982, and his M. Sc. and Ph. D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, Santa Barbara in 1984 and 1995, respectively....
Between 1982 and 1985 he worked as a graduate student on the measurement of AlGaAs/GaAs heterojunction band-offsets by capacitance-voltage profiling with prof. Herbert Kroemer at UC Santa Barbara. From 1985 to 1989 he worked at Avantek, Inc. (Santa Clara, California) as a Design Engineer, on the development of microwave switching and limiter diodes (10 GHz and 40 GHz), and hyperabrupt varactors for 3 GHz voltage-controlled oscillators.
In 1989, he joined the Ultrafast Optoelectronics Group at UC Santa Barbara, as a graduate student to work with professors John E. Bowers and Evelyn L. Hu on the development of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) where in 1995 he demonstrated the world’s first room-temperature continuous-wave operating long-wavelength (1550 nm) VCSEL. From 1995 to 1999, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (Palo Alto, California) working on long-wavelength VCSEL development using wafer bonding technology.
In 1999, he founded Alvésta Corporation, manufacturer of 10Gb/s multichannel fiber-optic modules, where he served as the company's first Chief Executive Officer and then in 2001 as Chief Technical Officer. He managed the company through first product sale and raised $20M in venture capital for its funding (Alvesta was acquired by Emcore Corporation in 2002). Between 2003 and 2008, he assisted Clariphy Communications, Inc, (Irvine, California) developing optical equalization technology, as a member of the company's technical advisory board (Clariphy was acquired by InPhy in 2017), and XLoom Communications, Ltd (Israel) as Vice President US operations managing the development of 20Gbps multichannel optical modules in Tel Aviv, Israel (XLoom was acquired by Mellanox in 2014).
Between 2008 and 2013 he managed the development of RF and millimeter-wave amplifier modules based on GaN-on-diamond technology as Vice President RF Electronics and co-founder of Group4 Labs, Inc. (Fremont, California), where in 2009 his team demonstrated the world’s first GaN-on-Diamond X-band power amplifier module (Group4 Labs was acquired by Element Six, Ltd). After Group4 Labs he co-founded and served as Vice President RF Devices in Eridan Communications, Inc. (Santa Clara, California), a start-up company developing polar modulators based on GaN-technology for wireless communications. In 2012 he joined the faculty of University of Zagreb, Croatia, and in 2017 was elected to Associate Professor.
Since 2003, dr. Babić has also served as an expert witness in multiple intellectual property litigation cases (2003-2015 USA, 2017 Croatia). He has sold and licensed intellectual property, assisted a number of start-up companies with intellectual property issues, and has been writing utility patent applications for selected clients including writing more than half of his own patents. Dr. Babić’s research interests include high-speed communications-component technology (semiconductor lasers and detectors, microwave amplifiers and other semiconductor devices) and optics. He has over 140 publications presented at conferences and in peer-reviewed journals, thirty-five US granted patents, and one book chapter. His Web of Science h-index is 27 and Google Scholar h-index is 31.
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Development of Adaptive Traffic Signal Control Systems for Urban Environments

— Assoc. Prof. Edouard Ivanjko University of Zagreb, Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences, Croatia

Abstract
With the increase of population in urban environments, safety issues and congestion in road traffic occurred. The first traffic light was introduced in 1868 in front of the British parliament in London to solve the safety problem. It was invented by the railway engineer J. P. Knight, it was humanly operated and used two colored plates to control the traffic. ...With the first three-colored traffic light and corresponding controller, a new era of Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) started with the ability to solve congestion-related problems also. A constant change of signal programs according to the current traffic situation was potentially possible from that moment. While the control devices from the first generation (1GS) of ATSC systems could only change between several predefined signal programs in predefined periods during the day (morning and afternoon peak period, selected non-peak periods), the second generation (2GS) dynamically adjusted the parameters of the signal timing scheme (signal period, green signal ratio, and phase difference) in a centralized control architecture.
The third generation (3GS) added a distributed control architecture that required very limited fine-tuning to achieve optimal behavior. Further development resulted in the fourth generation (4GS) featured with an integrated traffic management and control system containing dynamic process models of combined traffic assignment and control with different signal updating strategies. Nowadays, the fifth generation (5GS) is being used with the main characteristic that the ATSC system learns the traffic control knowledge independently and reduces the computational burden of decision optimization intelligently. With the application of cloud computing, all available traffic state-related measurements (inductive loops, cameras, GNSS trajectories of buses, taxis, and emergency vehicles) and information (public transport, emergency services, social media) are integrated and signal programs optimized on the global level of an urban area.
The optimization of signal programs also includes public transportation and emergency vehicles priority, forecast of the occurrence of possible traffic problems, detection and prevention of traffic rules violation, and informing about optimal routes resulting in significant improvement of the throughput of the managed road network. With the application of artificial intelligence, i.e., learning capabilities, the question now arises, will the traffic controller perform well also in situations it has not encountered in its learning process? Because methods based on machine learning (fuzzy logic rules optimized using the genetic algorithm, (self-organizing) neural networks, (deep) reinforcement learning) can guaranty optimal control behavior only for traffic situations successfully solved during the learning process. Human supervision and intervention in new unforeseen circumstances to guide the learning process is still and will be necessary. Read more

Biography
Edouard Ivanjko is an Associate Professor at the Department of intelligent transport systems on the Faculty of Transport and Traffic Sciences University of Zagreb. His research interests are related to Intelligent Transportation Systems, modeling, and simulation of road traffic, road traffic control systems based on machine learning, forecast of road traffic parameters, autonomous vehicles, and the application of computer vision in road traffic...
He participated as a senior researcher on various national and international projects like IPA project Computer Vision Innovations for Safe Traffic (VISTA), FP7 project Intelligent Cooperative Sensing for improved traffic Efficiency (ICSI), national scientific project Development Methodology of Integrated Adaptive Transport-logistic Systems, COST action TU1102 Towards Autonomic Road Transport Support Systems (ARTS), COST action IC1406 High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet), and EU structural fund project System for route optimization in a dynamic transport environment (SORDITO).
Currently, he is a member of the Croatian Centre of Research Excellence for Data Science and Advanced Cooperative Systems and participating in the corresponding project Advanced methods and technologies in Data Science and Cooperative Systems (DATACROSS), the EU structural fund project Skipping Boundaries with Internationalization (LoMI), and the project Software Sensor Augmentation at Environmental Data Analysis Laboratory (SSA@EDAL) financed by the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ). Additionally, he is also working as a consultant in evaluating research and development innovation projects financed by Croatia’s national and EU structural fund programs. He is a member of ITS Croatia, IEEE, and KOREMA.
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