About
IEEE-style short bio
Dennis O. Ogbe (S’13, M’20) is a member of the Reprogrammable Signal Processing group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. Prior to joining JPL, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech in Arlington, VA, followed by a stint as a software-defined radio engineer at Lynk in Falls Church, VA. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Tennessee Technological University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University. His research interests are in the fields of communication theory, signal processing, computer engineering, and their application to aerospace engineering problems.
Interests
Basketball
I was a member of the Men's Basketball Team at Tennessee Tech, playing in the Ohio Valley Conference from 2010-2014. According to this source, I appeared in 123 games during this time, averaging about 7 points per game. My senior year I was selected for the CoSIDA Academic All-America Team. I have lots of positive memories from my time at Tech and I could probably fill this entire page with them, but I will keep it short. This is me in my very first college game, playing North Carolina State University in Raleigh on Nov. 12, 2010:
And this is a recap video from this peculiar game against Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, where I had to finish the game bandaged up after getting hit on the head:
Basketball seems to lie in our family: My brother Kenneth finished his college career at Utah Valley University, averaging a fantastic 10.6 points per game with a 3FG percentage of over 40%! Since 2018, he has been playing professionally in the German BBL, which is the highest level of competition in Germany.
Emacs
I consider GNU Emacs an extension of my brain and thus have spent a non-trivial amount of time customizing it. My Emacs configuration is a living and breathing software project and I document its architecture and evolution right here on this website. Feel free to dig in and be inspired by my rather non-traditional setup. Also check out my blog, where I occasionally post Emacs tricks.
Snowboarding
After a long hiatus of 15 years, I picked up snowboarding again. I used to spend Easter holidays in the beautiful Wildschönau ski area where I got my first taste riding down the Schatzberg mountain. These days I like to go to Mammoth Mountain and Big Bear. Here is a picture of me enjoying June Mountain, located in the Inyo National Forest:
HKN
I was inducted into Eta Kappa Nu at my undergraduate institution, Tennessee Tech University (Epsilon Rho Chapter). I have since held multiple officer positions at the world's greatest chapter, Beta Chapter! My most memorable experience as active member of HKN Beta was the 2017 edition of our annual Student Leadership Conference which we organized. It was an absolute blast!
Although I am now "out in the world" and thus no longer active, I consider my participation in various HKN Beta shenanigans over the years as one of my favorite parts of graduate school.
EEWeb Interview (2016)
This website
This website is being held together by mostly spit, duct tape, and a few lines of Emacs Lisp. On my hard drive it starts out as a loose collection of Org-mode files which are then—with quite a bit of massaging—converted to static HTML. This blog post outlines some of the ideas behind this, but some of the text might be outdated at this point. Feel free to send me an e-mail if you want to chat about the set-up.
Update : After my previous hosting provider went belly-up (apparently this is a thing that happens a lot…), I switched to hosting this website using a VPS from RamNode and the free tier of the CloudFlare CDN. I was able to get this up and running in less than an hour after realizing that my hosting provider went down indefinitely, thus I can only recommend this low-cost option. Maybe one day I can get a quick blog post going about how to go about this.
Update : I had a brief email conversation about the way I am building this website with Emacs. If anyone wants to replicate my setup, the following might be useful:
I am actually using an outdated version of org-mode to export my site. The reason for that is that org mode introduced a breaking change in the update to version 9.1 that changed the signature of the sitemap-function. (See here for details). Ever since then, I have been too lazy to update my code to the newer signature. So I would get the same error:
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument listp "Blog") cdr("Blog")
in a recent org mode. (The way I actually handle this right now is that I keep a version of org 9.0 around in my git repo for the website because… reasons…).
Update : I finally (after 4 years!) fixed the
compatibility issue with org-mode > 9.1. See this blog post for an
updated org-sitemap-function.