Hello! My name is Jonathan Becker. I am a Ph.D. Research Engineer in the ECE Department's Bicoastal Ph.D. Program at Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, I am at the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Campus located in the NASA Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, CA).

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, I was a Wireless Consultant in the wireless industry. Prior to being a consultant, I led radio interference cancellation system design projects and Threat Analysis Technique Development (TATD) for IED jammers at EDO Communications and Countermeasures systems (now part of ITT). I was an RF Engineer at that company. Prior to joining EDO, I worked as a Hardware Interface Design Engineer at Teradyne. I earned multiple group patents while developing high-performance hardware interfaces between Teradyne's next-generation VLSI / Memory tester and customer IC probers.

To date, I completed my first semester at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. I completed two courses: Statistical Discovery and (Machine) Learning, and Mobile and Pervasive Computing. I am very excited to say that I submitted a group conference paper detailing the work that my group (Including fellow Ph.D. Research Engineers Aveek Purohit and Zheng Sun) did for our machine learning course. Our group paper that I submitted for the ASME 2010 Conference on Innovative Virtual Reality is titled "Controlling a Simulated Robot Using Machine Learning Techniques." I hope that my group's paper will be accepted into this conference, as it would be very exciting for my group to present the results of our course project to our peers.

In addition, the ECE Ph.D. program is not just about taking courses, it is about completing research projects that expand the Electrical and Computer Engineering field. Currently, I am working on two research projects with my CMU SV advisors Professors Jason Lohn and Ted Selker:

1. Dynamically Reconfigurable Antenna Arrays for Anti-Jamming and High-Performance Applications.

2. Converting Light Spectra into DC Electricity Using Solar Antennas: Technology Development and Applications.

My first project is exciting because I am using machine learning techniques (similar to those that Professor Lohn used in creating evolved antennas) to dynamically control the phase and attenuation of each antenna to steer nulls in directions of jamming signals. In addition, I find my second research project to be very exciting not only because it has the potential to create solar technology that is more efficient and cheaper than current photovoltaic technologies, but because my advisors and I are exploring several novel and ground-breaking ways of developing solar antennas.

In closing, I chose Carnegie Mellon University for several reasons. First, Carnegie Mellon has a great reputation as an ECE and Computer Sciences research university. Second, Carnegie Mellon University has a bicoastal Ph.D. program that allows me to share my time between the main campus in Pittsburgh and the Silicon Valley Campus. I especially enjoy doing my coursework and research projects in the Silicon Valley where I am exposed to the plethora of technology companies that literally surround me. Third, Carnegie Mellon has a wide variety of exciting research projects and areas for me to complete my studies. As a Ph.D. Research Engineer and Student, I am not pigeon holed into one specific specialty. Instead, I can take courses and perform research in multiple areas including RF / wireless hardware, machine learning, mobile computing, robotics, and solar technologies. Fourth and finally, I chose Carnegie Mellon University because its professors are open to new ideas, and they are available to discuss all kinds of ideas related to courses and research projects.