ECE alum Xiaobo Tan joins Michigan State University faculty
Xiaobo's Ph.D. thesis focused on the modeling and control of hysteresis in smart materials. His faculty advisors were Professor John S. Baras and Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR). Xiaobo was a Systems Fellow at the Institute for Systems Research from 1998 to 2002, and has been a postdoc there since September 2002, working with Dr. Baras on networked control systems. He also has been working with Asisstant Professor Reza Ghodssi on the characterization and modeling of frictional behaviors of linear microball bearings At MSU, Xiaobo plans to continue and further develop his research interests in modeling and control of smart materials, microsystems, and networked systems.
Ramahi, Shahparnia and Mohajer-Irvani publish article on electromagnetic band-gap material in Interference Technology
The article details the novel concept of using electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) structures for the suppression of electromagnetic noice in a variety of applications. By placing EBG structures within power planes, dramatic suppression of switching noices can be realized over a very wide band of frequencies. The University of Maryland's Office of Technology Commercialization is pursuing a patent for this technology. Murphy, Chellappa, students: finalists for 'Invention of the Year' Two ECE faculty members and their students were finalists for the University of Maryland's 17th annual Invention of the Year awards, sponsored by the Office of Technology Commercialization. The awards are presented annually to honor outstanding inventions and inventors from the previous year. Assistant Professor Thomas E. Murphy and his student Reza Salem were finalists for their work in "Technique for Performing Polarization-Independent Optical Cross-Correlations." They developed a polarization-independent form of optical cross-correlation--two-photon absorption (TPA)--which is simple, inexpensive, sensitive and ultra fast. The technology has broad applications in optical signal processing. Near-term applications include optical clock recovery, high-speed optical sampling and optical mixing. Professor Rama Chellappa and student Shaohua Zhou were finalists for their invention, "Probabilistic Face Recognition from Video." This technology uses a time series model to simultaneously resolve the tasks of tracking appropriate forms and of performing recognition analysis. Their model employs a probabilistic framework that allows for immediate recognition decisions without using still frames. It also takes adantage of the temporally encoded series of images which video inputs provide.
Romel Gomez featured in New Scientist story on recovering deleted data In a New Scientist article about recovering data from hard drives, Associate Professor Romel Gomez is quoted about the advanced techniques he has developed to recover deleted data that has been completely overwritten.
TECH 2004 posters now online!
ECEGSA wins University's Golden Geese Award The Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Student Association (ECEGSA) has won the University of Maryland's annual Golden Geese Awards competition. The award is given to acknowledge the work of student groups on campus, according to Johnetta Davis, associate dean for student affairs policy in the Graduate School. Davis, who originated the award, said that it is named for the team behavior of geese. "They fly together, and with their common sense of community, get more done together," she said. The award honors student associations that help and give help to others, embodying shared leadership and teamwork, Davis said. "The award encourages students to help each other." It is the fourth year in a row that the association has won one of the awards. Brinda Ganesh is the current president of ECEGSA.
ECE grad students, professors and alums win business plan competition
The MacroPhage Networks team won the graduate student category. This team consists of Mehdi Kalantari, an ECE Ph.D. candidate, Mehdi Alasti, a 2001 ECE Ph.D., and Professor Mark Shayman, who is CTO and interim CEO. The company offers a novel technology to identify and eliminate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, serious threats to current and next generation networks. MacroPhage will provide a distributed immunity system for the Internet, composed of cells installed at vulnerable points such as edge routers and firewalls. The cells monitor traffic through the network and perform a test that detects the attack flows.
Murphy wins ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty
Horiuchi wins NSF CAREER Award
Alum Jie Chen named IEEE Distinguished Lecturer
Jie Chen heads the Brown BINARY Lab ( Biology, Information science and Nanotechnology Applications and Research laboratorY). His Ph.D. advisor was K.J. Ray Liu.
Alum Ramesh Rao given endowed chair at UCSD
“Ramesh Rao is distinguished not only as an academic and expert in wireless communications, but also as the driving force behind new research and education projects,” said Frieder Seible, Dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. Rao runs the institute's operations on the UCSD campus, and is a principal investigator on several major multidisciplinary projects announced in the past year. They include the National Science Foundation-funded RESCUE (Responding to Crises and Unexpected Events) project, as well as two initiatives funded by the National Institutes of Health: WIISARD (Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters), and StrokeDoc (Multimedia Telemedical Diagnostic System), which harnesses high-speed, multimedia delivery to allow specialists to examine possible stroke victims remotely, to determine whether they are candidates for a drug therapy that can limit the lasting damage from a stroke.
Graduating ECE senior Jennifer Roberts has won both the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Award and the Hertz Foundation award for her upcoming graduate engineering study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These awards will fully support her graduate education through the Ph.D. level. The Hertz Foundation award was granted to only 19 graduating seniors nationwide this year. It focuses on engineering and physical sciences. Jennifer notes that it is oriented towards students who are “interested in applied research that will help humanity within the next 50 years.” Hertz is also interested in students who are public-service minded and want to give back to the community. The Hertz award is a five year fellowship that fully covers tuition and includes a student stipend. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Award covers three years of graduate expenses and can be used over a five-year period. It is awarded to about 900 students a year. As an undergrad, Jennifer worked in Professor Shihab Shamma's Neural Systems Lab, learning about neural engineering. She also has worked with Professor John Baras, taking the honor section of ENEE 322 with him; and has taken classes with Professor Andre Tits. Jennifer is keeping her options open for what research area to focus on in graduate school.Latest US News and World Report ratings lists Electrical Engineering 14th and Computer Engineering 16th in the nation
The A. James Clark School of Engineering as a whole is ranked 16 (10th among public universities), tied with Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles. In engineering specialties, of the Clark School's seven programs, an unprecedented six have been ranked among the top 25. In all cases, the departmental rankings are the highest the college has ever had. | Story at the Clark School web site | View rankings at U.S. News web site | New NSF grant for InP-based MEMS-tunable optical filters and switches
Chellappa, Ghodssi part of new $3 million MURI Two ECE faculty members are part of a new three-year (with option for two more), $3 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award from the Department of Defense. Professor Rama Chellappa and Assistant Professor Reza Ghodssi will be working on "Micro Hovering Air Vehicles: Revolutionary Concepts and Navigation Advancements." This award focuses on the development of revolutionary concepts and navigation advancements in the emerging research area of micro hovering air vehicles. The principal investigator Dr. Inderjit Chopra (AE). In addition to the ISR faculty, other University of Maryland participants include Ella Atkins, James Baeder, Chris Cadou, Roberto Celi, Alison Flatau, Gordon Leishman, Darryll Pines, Frederic Schmitz, Benjamin Shapiro and Norman Wereley from Aerospace Engineering; and S.K. Gupta and Elisabeth Smela from Mechanical Engineering. ECE Alum Naomi Leonard wins MURI ECE alum Naomi Leonard, now a professor at Princeton University, is the Principal Investigator for a Department of Defense MURI for "Optimal Asset Distribution for Environmental Assessment and Forecasting Based on Observations, Adaptive Sampling, and Numerical Predictions." Dr. Leonard's Ph.D. advisor was Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad. Spring 2004 ECE Connections newsletter now available
ECE Connections newsletter archive Gligor named to editorial board of new IEEE publication ECE Professor Virgil Gligor has been appointed to the editorial board of the new MIPS award featured on TV news Professor Steven Tretter's Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) grant was featured on WRC-TV's 5 p.m. local news March 18. The Washington, D.C. NBC affiliate featured a segment on the work being done with TeleContinuity, Inc. of Rockville, Md. to create a seamless, low-cost, network-level solution to restore telephone service to users within minutes of a catastrophic event, PBX failure, fiber cut, fire, flood, or similar circumstance. The interview with I J Hudson, technology reporter for Channel 4, featured Dr. Michael Dellomo, instructor and advisor for the M.S. in Telecom (ENTS) program, and Mr. Roy Pinchot, CEO of TeleContinuity. The solution will integrate Voice over IP (VoIP) with Public Switched Telephone Network technology to create a “hot” standby telephone service. This MIPS contract also earned a recent interview with WTOP Radio's Chas Henry. Grad student Brian Morgan wins ARCS Scholarship
Horiuchi and Krishnaprasad receive award for VLSI-based Bat Echolocation
Shamma wins five-year NIH grant for Spectro-Temporal Plasticity in Primary Auditory Cortex ECE Professor Shihab Shamma is the principal investigator for a new five-year, $1.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. "Spectro-Temporal Plasticity in Primary Auditory Cortex" is sponsored by NIH's National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders. The co-PI is Jonathan Fritz, a post doctoral researcher at ISR. Auditory experience can cause significant and continuous reorganization and receptive field plasticity in the primary auditory cortex (AI). The exact form of this plasticity depends on the details of the behavioral context, and of the spectral and temporal cues in the acoustic stimuli. Recent findings indicate further that neuronal responses in AI of awake behaving animals reflect motor, attention, and reward dimensions, rather than simply encoding the acoustic features of the stimuli. This is consistent with findings in other neural systems and supports the hypothesis that auditory cortical cells may undergo rapid, short-term, and context-dependent changes of their receptive field properties when an animal is engaged in different auditory behavioral tasks. This kind of plasticity would likely involve a selective functional reconfiguring of the underlying cortical circuitry to sculpt the most effective receptive field for accomplishing the auditory task. Shamma's research will explore this hypothesis. Hesham El-Gamal wins CAREER award
His research will focus on antenna diversity techniques, which have received considerable attention due to the significant theoretic information gains promised for multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) fading channels. Hesham hopes to develop a unified algebraic coding theory for point-to-point MIMO fading channels, joint coding and scheduling algorithms for cellular MIMO channels, and cooperative (i.e. antenna sharing) schemes for ad-hoc MIMO channels. He hopes to develop bridges between different branches in algebra and space-time coding. The cross fertilization between these two areas is expected to introduce useful algebraic tools in space-time coding research and formulate new problems of possible interest to the mathematical research community. Hesham also hopes to enhance the understanding of the information and coding theoretic foundations of cellular and ad-hoc MIMO channels. The NSF CAREER program fosters the career development of outstanding junior faculty, combining the support of research and education of the highest quality and in the broadest sense. Hesham's Ph.D. advisor was Evaggelos Geraniotis. Goldsman and Tretter receive MIPS awards Professors Neil Goldsman and Steven Tretter have received new contract awards from the Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program. Tretter will work with TeleContinuity, Inc., of Rockville, Md. to create a seamless, low-cost, network-level solution to restore telephone service to users within minutes of a catastrophic event, PBX failure, fiber cut, fire, flood, or similar circumstance. The solution will integrate Voice over IP (VoIP) with Public Switched Telephone Network technology to create a “hot” standby telephone service. This MIPS contract is receiving much attention in the local media, including a recent interview with WTOP's Chas Henry. ENTS press release Goldsman is working with TRX Systems, Inc., Lanham, Md. on indoor location and emergency alerting technology. He will design and develop technology that will wirelessly track the location of firefighters, police, and other public personnel inside buildings and structures. The MIPS program provides matching funding for university-based research projects that help companies develop new products. MIPS projects must deal with innovative technological or scientific concepts and have direct commercial applications. ECE Professor of the Practice Jeong H. Kim elected to the National Academy of Engineering
Academy membership is among the highest professional distinctions an engineer can attain. It honors those who have made important contributions to engineering theory and practice and those who have demonstrated accomplishment in the pioneering of new fields of engineering, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education. Dr. Kim, who is also Professor of the Practice in the Mechanical Engineering Department, is among 76 new members and 11 foreign associates announced by the President of NAE on Feb. 13 . Two other University of Maryland faculty also were elected to the NAE. They are Dr. Gerald E. Galloway, newly appointed research professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for distinguished leadership in the management of sustainable water resources and education in environmental engineering; and Dr. Gilbert (Pete) Stewart, professor, Computer Science Department, for the development of numerical algorithms and software widely used in engineering computation. ECE senior Jesse Clark co-authors Cryptolog article
Horiuchi, Moss receive $1.6 million NIH grant The grant is for their work in "Dynamic Sensorimotor Control for Spatial Orientation." It will advance understanding of the integration of auditory information with motor programs for spatially-guided behavior in mammals. It will also advance general understanding of auditory information processing and adaptive motor control for spatial orientation. Story Jon Orloff's book receives excellent review in Physics Today
The book is published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Co-authors with Orloff are Lynwood Swanson of FEI Company in Hillsboro, Ore.; and Mark Utlaut, of the University of Portland, Ore. The book is a theory and applications reference on high resolution focused ion beams (FIBs), useful for the user and the designer of FIB instrumentation. It covers the essential topics needed to understand what FIB technology is, how and why it works, and how it is applied. There is a chapter on the physics of the LMIS with practical information on these important ion sources, two chapters that provide an introduction to ion optics, and a "practical" discussion of ion optics as it is used in the FIB system today. Because FIBs are so often used to alter materials, there is also a chapter on the interaction of ions with matter. The final chapter is a comprehensive coverage of FIB applications up to the year 2000. Physics Today subscribers can read the review online. Grad students Tony DeMarco and Hasina Ali win student awards at ISDRS 2003 Two ECE Ph.D. students won awards at the International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium in Washington, D.C., in December. Tony DeMarco won the best student presenation award in the devices category. His submission was titled, "Maskless Fabrication of JFETs via Focused Ion Beams." He is advised by Professor John Melngailis. Hasina Ali won the best student poster award in the materials category for her poster, "Study of ZnO Nanocluster Formation within Styrene-Acrylic Acid and Styrene-Methacrylic Acid Diblock Copolymers on Si and SiO2 Surfaces." She is advised by Professor Agis Iliadis.
In a November issue devoted to microwave weapons, IEEE Spectrum mentions the work of Professor Victor Granatstein on the effects of microwave pulses on integrated electronics. "Computers become more vulnerable as the voltage at which they operate becomes smaller," Granatstein tells Spectrum. "When our opponent was the Soviet Union, the electronics were much more robust because they weren't miniaturized. Now they have very thin oxide layers that can easily break down." Min Wu's work highlighted in Technology Review Assistant Professor Min Wu is featured in the December 2003 issue of MIT's Technology Review magazine. The story spotlights her work in digital watermarking for black and white text documents, which someday could be used in commercial document-verification systems. ECE professors meet with Honeywell Labs
Congratulations to Professor Patrick O'Shea, who has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "for contributions to charged particle accelerators and free-electron lasers." O'Shea is the director of the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics (IREAP). ECE's Marcus, Goldsman and Ph.D. student Dili win best paper award at IEEE 'Frontiers in Education' Two ECE faculty and a Ph.D. student are among the authors of "A New Pedagogy in Electrical and Computer Engineering: An Experimental and Conceptual Approach," which won the Benjamin J. Dasher Best Paper Award at the IEEE "Frontiers in Education" conference the first week of November. The paper's authors are ECE Department Chair Steve Marcus; Professor Neil Goldsman; ECE Ph.D. student Zeynep Dili; Lee Harper, the coordinator of education programs at the Institute for Systems Research; and Janet Schmidt, the university's director of Engineering Student Research. Granatstein quoted about microwave pulses on integrated electronics in IEEE Spectrum ECE Professor Victor Granatstein is quoted in an IEEE Spectrum article on high-powered microwave weapons (HPM), which are being investigated as a way to disable military computers during wartime. One vulnerability is the brittleness of the military's own equipment if such a weapon were used. Granatstein, who is studying the effects of microwave pulses on integrated electronics, is quoted: "Computers become more vulnerable as the voltage at which they operate becomes smaller. When our opponent was the Soviet Union, the electronics were much more robust because they weren't miniaturized. Now they have very thin oxide layers that can easily break down. Wireless networking makes matters worse. Computers and other communications devices now have antennas attached, giving an electromagnetic pulse a direct pathway to its guts." Read the story at IEEE Spectrum
ECE Professor Rama Chellappa gave his Distinguished Scholar-Teacher lecture on Monday, Nov. 3. His talk was titled, "Machine Perception of Humans and their Activities: Opportunities and Challenges." The University of Maryland selected Dr. Chellappa as a 2003-2004 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher earlier this year. The Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Program honors faculty members who have demonstrated outstanding scholarly achievement along with equally outstanding accomplishments as teachers. The honor includes public presentations, activities for the university and funds to support professional activities. It is sponsored by the Office of Academic Affairs and administered by the Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. Franklin and Zahran win best paper award at ICCD 2003 ECE Associate Professor Manoj Franklin and 2003 ECE Ph.D. Mohamed Zahran have won the best paper award at the International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD 2003) held this month at San Jose, Calif. The conference is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society, and provides a technical program for Computer Systems Design, Processor Architecture, Logic and Circuits, Tools and Methodology, and Verification and Test. Franklin and Zahran won for their paper titled: "Dynamic Thread Resizing for Speculative Multithreaded Processors."
The face recognition work of the Center for Automation Research, as well as other high-tech surveillance methods, is profiled in the November 2003 issue of National Geographic Magazine. The online preview at National Geographic's web site includes a video on face recognition in both RealMedia and Windows MediaPlayer formats. Rama Chellappa, Amit Roy Chowdhury, Narayanan Ramanathan and Nathan Koterba worked on this project. ECE grad student Marcel Pruessner receives scholarship in Supreme Court ceremony
The awards are sponsored by the Metropolitan Washington Chapter of the ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation, Inc. Pruessner's research focuses on optical switching and III-V MEMS. He is advised by Assistant Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR), who also attended, and notes that as an added bonus, "Marcel's first generation of Optical MEMS Switches worked for the first time" that very week. Davis, Smolyaninov, Pilevar, Edinger and Atia
The patented method of forming the probe includes a first step of coating an optical fiber having a tapered tip with a metal layer. Next is a step of milling the tapered tip and metal layer such that an aperture is formed through the metal layer at the tapered tip. The milling step includes focused ion-beam milling the tapered tip and metal layer. The focused ion-beam milling can be done by raster scanning the focused ion-beam in a rectangular pattern at an apex of the tapered tip. Also, the fiber probe made through the above outlined method is used in near-field scanning optical microscopy. ECE Alum Saswati Sarkar wins NSF CAREER award
The NSF CAREER program fosters the career development of outstanding junior faculty, combining the support of research and education of the highest quality and in the broadest sense. ECE Alum Gordon England returns
England was executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation from 1997 until 2001 and was responsible for two major sectors of the corporation: Information Systems and International. Previously he had served as executive vice president of the Combat Systems Group, president of General Dynamics Fort Worth aircraft company (later Lockheed), president of General Dynamics Land Systems company producing land combat vehicles and as the principal of a mergers and acquisition consulting company. Shamma, Horiuchi featured in Neuroscience Symposium at University of Maryland's Bioscience Day
Tony Ephremides giving invited talks, participating in NSF future research directions workshops
K.J. Ray Liu elected to IEEE SPS Board of Governors
Engineering College Clean Room opens for use
The steering committee includes ECE faculty John Melngailis and Reza Ghodssi, and Mechanical Engineering faculty members Don DeVoe and Elisabeth Smela. Story ECE alum Mingyan Liu wins NSF CAREER Award
The NSF CAREER program fosters the career development of outstanding junior faculty, combining the support of research and education of the highest quality and in the broadest sense. Her Ph.D. advisor, Professor John S. Baras (ECE/ISR), writes that Mingyan is special because she started in the Institute for Systems Research's MSSE program, where she excelled. "Then she became a PhD student our ECE Dept, where she also excelled. Since joining the University of Michigan I have been hearing only about her successes, and this one is a major win." Story ECE alum Naomi Leonard tests autonomous underwater vehicles
Leonard is a 1994 Electrical Engineering Ph.D. Her advisor was Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad. | Read more in this feature story from the Princeton Weekly Bulletin | Research results at Dr. Leonard's Autonomous Ocean Sampling Network page | Three National Science Foundation ITR grants awarded to ECE faculty ECE faculty members are the principal investigators for three new NSF Information Technology Research grants. New Technology for the Capture, Analysis and Visualization of Human Movement is a five-year, $2.56 million grant that will lead the development of the next generation distributed video sensing systems for understanding human movements. The principal investigator is Professor Rama Chellappa. Novel models of human movement and structure will be used for modeling the movements of singe-joint and whole bodies with applications to animation, biomotion, and gait analysis for diagnosing and treating movement-related disorders. The project entails a broad spectrum of interests, including biomechanics, computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, and kinesiology. The research will enable novel approaches for realistic animation and the detection of subtle variations in movement, leading to better diagnostic tools and personalized programs for rehabilitation of movement disorders. Parallel Random-Access Model (PRAM)-On-Chip is a five year, $700K grant that addresses the concrete open problem, "Can a breakthrough high-end parallel computer be built, through truly designing a machine that can look to a programmer like a PRAM?" ECE Professor Uzi Vishkin is the principal investigator. The co-PIs are Associate Professors Bruce L. Jacob and Manoj Franklin, and Assistant Professors Gang Qu and Rajeev Barua. All are members of the ECE Department. The magnitude of the algorithmic knowledge base that has been developed for the PRAM (Parallel Random-Access Model, or ``Machine'') algorithmic model makes it a serious alternative to the serial algorithmic theory. Eluding a solution for several decades, the problem of building a general-purpose parallel computer that is significantly faster than its serial counterpart has been a major open problem for computer science since the inception of the field. This research will provide the backbone in the development of a holistic computation framework, called Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) that seeks to resolve this long-standing problem. ITR: Distributed Smart Cameras: Algorithms, Architectures, and Synthesis is a five year, $1.68 million award that will develop novel techniques and methodologies for distributed smart camera networks through an integrated exploration of distributed algorithms, embedded architectures, and software synthesis techniques. The principal investigator is ECE Associate Professor Shuvra Bhattacharyya. His co-PIs are ECE Professor Rama Chellappa and Wayne H. Wolf (Princeton University). The research will develop new architectures and tools designed to tackle modern video processing algorithms. The algorithms will leverage distributed architectures for efficient implementations. The researchers will investigate a series of complex smart camera algorithms drawn from surveillance and biometrics applications. Specifically, they will be investigating efficient implementations of algorithms for self-calibration of distributed cameras, view-synthesis using image-based visual hulls, and human identification using face and gait. Chi Lee named Professor Emeritus Affirming the recommendation of his colleagues here in the ECE Department, University of Maryland President Dan Mote has appointed Dr. Chi Lee Professor Emeritus. Lee joined the College Park faculty in 1968, and retired at the end of June this year. Mote noted that he has enriched the community through his distinguished record as an administrator, scholar and teacher. Chi is continuing his strong research program, including his funded research as a principal investigator. He also will continue to supervise graduate students. He is a member of IREAP and heads up the Ultrafast Optoelectronics Lab.Dr. Lee's research interests lie in picosecond optical electronics, lasers and nonlinear optics, millimeter-wave technology, ultrafast phenomena. ECE faculty part of new National Science Foundation SENSORS award ECE faculty are key players in a new three-year, $1.2 million National Science Foundation award. "SENSORS: Optical Wireless Sensor Networks for Critical Infrastructure Surveillance" will extend research in optical wireless and other technologies to provide a robust, advanced sensor-communication network. This will include the development of autonomous, solar-powered optical wireless transceivers that can point and track, handle continuous or bursty data, and function in a dynamic, self-configuring network environment. The goal is to advance the development of portable, secure, reconfigurable and high availability networks for surveiling roads, water, electrical, rail and other infrastructure systems as well as for first responders in various kinds of incidents. These networks will be rapidly deployable and provide an instant communications infrastructure. The principal investigator is Stuart Milner, senior research scientist at the Institute for Systems Research. Co-PIs are ECE Professors Christopher Davis and Uzi Vishkin, along with Professor Gregory B. Baecher, chair of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, and Philip J. Tarnoff, director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Techonology. Espy-Wilson receives Honda Initiation Grant
MERIT program winners announced Maryland Engineering Research Internship Teams (MERIT) is an 11-week summer research program for undergraduates administered by the ECE Department and supported by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Laboratory. This year, 34 students from colleges and uinversities across the country participated. MERIT combines cutting-edge, team-based research with technical and educational seminars, visits to local industry and government organizations, and meetings with leaders in the field. There are three different technical focuses:
The "MERIT Fair" is held at the end to showcase of the research conducted during the summer. Winners are determined in each technical focus area. This year's winners were:
and
Congratulations to all of the MERIT students and their faculty mentors for a job well done! Makowski interviewed on WMAL radio On August 19, WMAL news radio interviewed ECE Professor Armand Makowski and Clark School Adjunct Eugene Keating about the telecommunications impact and causes of the August 14 power outage that affected much of the Northeast U.S. and eastern Canada. Mathematical Models of Hysteresis is new book by Isaak Mayergoyz
The book is part of the Elsevier series in electromagnetism, of which Dr. Mayergoyz is the editor. New issue of Connections available online
Baras receives Certificate of Appreciation from ARL ECE Professor John Baras recently received the United States Army Research Laboratory Certificate of Appreciation for his outstanding support of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) 2nd Annual Collaborative Technology Alliances Conference this spring. The certificate reads, "Your personal efforts and contributions helped make the conference an overwhelming success." The certificate was signed by ARL Director John M. Miller. Davis, Melngailis, Smolyaninov awarded $1.2 million NSF grant for NIRT ECE Professor Christopher Davis is the principal investigator for a new National Science Foundation award, "NIRT: Nanofabricated All-Optical Computing, Switching, and Signal Processing Devices Based on Single Photon Tunneling." This is a four-year, $1.2 million award. Co-PIs are ECE Professor John Melngailis and Assistant Research Scientist Igor Smolyaninov. They are joined by Co-PIs Alexei A. Maradudin from the University of California, Irvine; and Andrei V. Stanishevsky from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Story Ephremedies named Cynthia Kim Professor in Information Technology
John Baras, John Melngailis and K.J. Ray Liu to work on new MIPS awards The Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program announced its latest round of contract awards this week. Professor K.J. Ray Liu will be working with InTank, Inc., of Laurel, Md., on the new project, "Ultrasonic Nondestructive Inspection of Tanks." This project will develop an effective and efficient ultrasonic testing system for use in robots that inspect commercial storage tanks such as gasoline, fuel oil, and chemicals. Professor John Melngailis will be working with Mad Dog Control, Inc., of Frederick, Md., on a focused ion beam bar coding microelectronics project. They seek to develop a low-cost, highly efficient method for writing the identity of a radio frequency tag chip in devices for inventory control, as well as for products such as car door locks, smart cards, and cell phones. Professor John Baras will be working on a Phase II MIPS project with Hughes Network Systems on "Broadband Internet Applications over Satellite," which will develop new and innovative Internet applications exploiting the increased bandwidth of forthcoming high-data-rate satellite constellations for HNS's DIRECWAY product. Grad student Angela Hodge Miller profiled in 'Black Issues in Higher Education' ECE Ph.D. student Angela Hodge Miller received a feature story for her work in creating chemical sensors capable of performing selective determination of compounds in fluids such as blood, urine and saliva in Black Issues in Higher Education. In addition to being useful in the clinical analysis process, Miller's array of biosensors will be capable of performing on-chip, real-time self diagnostics. Read the story online at the University of Maryland news page. Miller was also featured in Maryland Research magazine this spring. Min Wu and K.J. Ray Liu are PIs for new AFRL fingerprinting award ECE Assistant Professor Min Wu and Professor K.J. Ray Liu are the principal investigators for a new Air Force Research Laboratory Digital Data Embedding Technologies (DDET) award. The initial one-year grant is for $220,000. Their research, "A Collusion-Resistant Multimedia Fingerprinting Framework for Information Forensics," is focused on designing efficient and effective digital fingerprints for plain text and multimedia content that can withstand collusion attacks, allow for gathering forensic evidence of guilt and identify colluders. Co-PIs for the project are Z. Jane Wang, a research associate with the Institute for Systems Research, and ECE alumnus Wade Trappe, a former student of Dr. Liu who is now an assistant professor in Rutgers University's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and WINLAB. David Barbe wins ASEE Outstanding Entrepreneuership Educator Award ECE Professor David Barbe, Executive Director of the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (MTECH) was awarded the American Society of Engineering Education's Outstanding Entrepreneurship Educator Award. This is the first year of the establishment of this award. Dr. Barbe received this award in recognition of his leadership and innovation in engineering and high-technology entrepreneurship education and for the breadth and impact of these programs which include the Hinman CEOs, the Business Plan Competition, the Technology Start-up Boot Camp and the VentureAccelerator Programs. Manoj Franklin receives IBM Faculty Award Congratulations to Associate Professor Manoj Franklin, who has been selected to receive a 2003 IBM Faculty Award. The $20,000 award recognizes the quality of Dr. Franklin's work and its importance to industry. Patent to Davis, Pilevar, Fielding and Portugal for optical fiber evanescent field excited fluorosensor
ECE Professor Christopher Davis, Saeed Pilevar (a former postdoc of Dr. Davis), Alexander Fielding (a former Ph.D. student of Dr. Davis) and Frank Portugal were issued U.S. Patent 6,558,958 on May 6 for an “optical fiber evanescent field excited fluorosensor.” In this sensor, an optical fiber is tapered, preferably adiabatically, and has a material coated on it for chemical bonding with fluorophores. When the fluorophores couple with the material, evanescent radiation generated fibers cause the fluorophores to fluoresce, and the fluorescence is coupled back into the fiber. IEEE recognizes Professor Kawthar Zaki as honored pioneer in microwave engineering
Dr. Zaki is also organizing a special NSF session at the IEEE International Microwave Symposium in Philadelphia, June 10. Dr. Zaki
awarded patent. In addition, Dr. Zaki was recently awarded U.S.
Patent 6,535,083 for the "Embedded Ridge Waveguide Filter."
Dr. Zaki's co-inventors are Michael Hageman,
John Gipprich and Daniel Stevens, Jr. The patent is assigned to
Northrop Grumman Corp. Grad student Tao Jiang receives Department of the Army coin for her exhibit on 'Trust Evidence Distribution in Ad Hoc Networks'
John Miller, director of the Army Research Laboratory, presented Tao Jiang with a special coin in recognition of her outstanding exhibit, "Trust Evidence Distribution in Ad Hoc Networks." The display of her work and the presentation of the coin came at the 2003 Collaborative Technology Alliances (CTA) Conference, May 1. ECE faculty and students participate in CTA, an initiative of the Army Research Laboratory, linking government, academia and industry. Its research is focused on the transformation of the Army in advanced sensors, advanced decision architectures, communications and networks, robotics, and power and energy. ECE grad student Om Deshmukh wins Best Paper Award in Speech Communication
Reza Ghodssi and Zoltan Safar receive awards from ISR ECE Assistant Professor Reza Ghodssi, who holds a joint appointment with the Institute for Systems Research (ISR), won ISR's Outstanding Faculty Award for 2003. In addition, Professor K.J. Ray Liu's student Zoltan Safar won ISR's George Harhalakis Outstanding Systems Engineering Graduate Student Award. Both awards were presented at a May 21 ceremony. You can read the full stories on these award recipients at ISR's awards ceremony site. ECE undergrads receive outstanding research awards Two ECE graduating seniors are winners in the Clark School of Engineering's Spring 2003 Engineering Honors Awards. Jon Shalvi won the Most Outstanding Research Award. His advisor is Assistant Professor Min Wu. Alan Pressman received the Honorable Mention Award in the same category. His advisor is Professor Julius Goldhar. Congratulations to these two students! Cheely and Horiuchi win Best Paper in Sensory Systems Track at ISCAS 2003 Graduate student Matthew Cheely and Assistant Professor Timothy Horiuchi's (ECE/ISR) paper, "A VLSI Model of Range-Tuned Neurons in the Bat Echolocation System," was selected as the Best Paper of the Sensory Systems Track at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2003. It was selected out of some 65 papers. Horiuchi also was recently interviewed by the New York Post for an article about a new robotic vacuum cleaner that uses sonar to detect obstacles. Baras, Davis speak at Charles and Helen White Symposium
The
event was followed by the Clark School of Engineering's virtual
groundbreaking ceremony for the new Jeong
H. Kim Engineering and Applied
Sciences Building, being built across the street from the A.V.
Williams Building, where the ECE In the photo at left, Clark School Dean Nariman Farvardin thanks ECE Professor of the Practice Jeong H. Kim for his generous endowment support for the building.
Sennur Ulukus receives NSF grant for wireless networks; wins Marconi Paper Prize Award
The goal of this project is to understand and determine the ultimate capacity limits of wireless communication networks, and develop techniques and algorithms to achieve or approach them. Developing principles and guidelines for the design of future wireless networks will be an important consequence of this research. Dr. Ulukus will design and develop algorithms for the physical and medium access control (MAC) layers of multiple-transmitter multiple-receiver vector multiple access networks in asynchronous and dispersive channels with inter-symbol-interference (ISI) and fading. Dr. Ulukus and her students will study the development of feedback--and measurement-based, highly-adaptive, distributed and iterative algorithms for the construction of network-wide optimum transmit strategy ensembles. In addition, Dr. Ulukus, along with Chris Rose and Roy Yates of Rutgers University, has won the 2003 IEEE Marconi Paper Prize Award in Wireless Communications for the paper, "Wireless Systems and Interference Avoidance." This research appeared in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 415-428, July 2002. The award is given by the IEEE Communications Society and will be presented at Globecom 2003 in San Francisco this December. Richard La, Pamela Abshire win NSF CAREER Awards
Richard La has been selected for his project, "Networking Modeling and Resource Allocation." La will build an integrated networking research and education program focusing on network modeling, performance evaluation and algorithm designs. This will include developing stochastic and deterministic network models for congestion control, designing procing schemes between end users and service providers and between domains, investigating the integration of the physical and overlaid logical network management, and designing opportunistic wireless scheduling algorithms for next generation cellular networks.
Dr. Abshire will study the blowfly, an insect marvel that uses minimal energy to maximal advantage in an autonomous system where resources are precious. Having already mapped this visual process and made a comparative study of a silicon photosensor's information efficiency, Dr. Abshire is at the forefront of devising the rigorous methodology and data necessary to analyze fundamental limits in performance and efficiency while at the same time, tackling practical innovative microelectronic system design that uses that analysis to push limits as far as possible. The objectives
are to narrow performance gaps between empirical and theoretical
silicon as well as between biology and silicon; quantify task-specific
performance; enhance performance limitations and architectural tradeoffs
stemming from practical noise sources; analyze and implement feedback,
adaptation and learning strategies; and investigate signal representation
tradeoffs. The NSF CAREER program fosters the career development of outstanding junior faculty, combining the support of research and education of the highest quality and in the broadest sense. Grad student Linda Wasiczko wins AAUW Selected Professions Fellowship
Dagenais and Heim win Award for Entrepreneuership ECE Professor Mario Dagenais and Peter Heim, co-founders of Quantum Photonics, received the new Award for Entrepreneuership at the University of Maryland's annual Invention of the Year Reception. Quantum Photonics is a Maryland start-up company that recently merged with Coden Corp., to form Covega Corp. Professor Dagenais and Mr. Heim, a former research associate at the university, started the Jessup, Md.-based company in 1998 to develop lower-cost, high-performance optoelectronic components to facilitate the flow of data through fiber optic networks. The base technologies were invented in Dagenais and Heim's university lab and transferred to the company by the university's Office of Technology Commercialization through an exclusive technology licensing agreement. The award is sponsored by the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). In addition, ECE Professor Isaak Mayergoyz, Chun Tse, Charles Krafft and Dragos Mircea were finalists in the physical science category for their invention, "High-Speed Massive Magnetic Imaging on a Spin-Stand." this is a new technique for the imaging of magnetic materials. Hard disk drive components and parameters, such as heads, disks, the speed of the spindle and the frequency and pattern of the writing signal can be modified and analyzed with this device. ECE alums Buno Pati and Brian Hinman honored at University of Maryland alumni awards gala Two ECE alumni were honored at the University of Maryland's Fourth Annual Alumni Association Awards Gala on Saturday, April 12, 2003. Y.C. Buno Pati received the Clark School of Engineering 2003 Distinguished Alumnus Award for his contributions to the field of engineering and the advancement of technology. He received all three of his degrees in Electrical Engineering from our department; earning his Ph.D. in 1992 under Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad. Brian Hinman
received the Ralph J. Tyser Medallion for providing unique and significant
service to the university. In 1999, Hinman's $2.5 million gift to
the University of Maryland established the Hinman Campus Entrepreneurship
Opportunities (CEOs) program. This program offers a residential
setting for upperclassmen where they can grow their ideas for starting
a business in an experiential learning environment. Hinman graduated
with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Maryland in 1982.
Full story at the Clark School of Engineering web site Yavuz
Oruc to serve on the editorial board of IEEE Congratulations to Professor Yavuz Oruc, who has been invited to serve on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, a research-oriented publication of the IEEE Computer Society that document the state of the art in parallel and distributed systems. ECE students win best poster prize at MEMS Alliance symposium |
ECE alum Xiaobo Tan is joining Michigan State University's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department as an Assistant Professor this fall. 
ECE-affiliated professor 
ECE's two entries in the University of Maryland's 2004 Business Plan Competition have both won their categories. 
The test algorithm is based on "Code division multiple access Aggregate Perturbation method" (CAP), a patented technology. This state-of-the-art algorithm detects attack traffic almost immediately (about 30 seconds after start of an attack) and provides an opportunity for the ISP to suppress the illegal flows proactively, before the attack traffic turns into a flood that causes congestion or denial of service. The MacroPhage immunity system is an evolutionary approach that does not require changes in architecture, hardware, software or network protocols. It can be deployed incrementally to provide safety and security for Internet servers and hosts.
The Maryland Data Recovery team won the alumni category. This team includes Chun Tse, ECE Ph.D. 2003; ECE Professor Isaak Mayergoyz; and Senior Engineer Charles Krafft, Laboratory for Physical Sciences.
ECE Assistant Professor 
ECE alum 
ECE alum Ramesh Rao (Ph.D. 1984) has been appointed the first holder of the QUALCOMM Endowed Chair in Telecommunications & Information Technologies, an endowed chair in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego. Rao is professor and directs the San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology Cal-(IT)². He is a specialist in network protocols, performance analysis, and energy-efficient communications. His Ph.D. advisor was Tony Ephremides.
ECE senior Jennifer Roberts wins Hertz and NSF fellowships 
The most recent issue of U.S. News & World Report's "America's Best Graduate Schools" ranks Electrical Engineering 14th (8th among publics) and Computer Engineering 16th (9th among publics) in the nation.
A PDF version of our department's new spring newsletter is now available for downloading. It includes a tribute to Professor Emeritus Chi Lee, a story on the NSF ITR grants won by Professors Vishkin, Bhattacharyya and Cellappa, news of six alumni who have recently won CAREER awards, and more. 
ECE Ph.D. 
ECE Professor of the Practice Jeong H. Kim has been elected to the 
Graduating Computer Engineering senior Jesse Clark recently had an article published in the Winter 2004 Cryptolog, a magazine for US Naval Cryptologic veterans. The article is entitled "The Enigma Machine Goes Hi-Tech: Implementing an Enigma Machine in a Computer Science Course." Jesse co-authored the paper with Dr. Bunny Tjaden of the Computer Science Department while interning for Dr. Tjaden. The paper describes his research of the Enigma and his particpation in the design and implementation of the code for a sequence of 4 projects for CMSC214 in the winter of 2003.
ECE Assistant Professor 
Professor Jon Orloff's book, 
Granatstein quoted on computer vulnerability to microwave weapons in IEEE Spectrum
ECE Professor 
Leonard writes, "We ran experiments with groups of gliders including rigid and deforming (contracting) formations, and with gliders coordinated with other sensor platforms (towed sensor array from ship and propeller-driven AUV) for evaluating our ability to estimate gradients in temperature, salinity, etc. The gliders themselves were truly remarkable; they were almost perfectly reliable and they stayed in the water for weeks at a time. It was an amazing demonstration of the power of feedback control to see the really autonomous behavior of the gliders."
ICE
Program
PEER
Program
RITE
Program
Patrick
Knapp from Syracuse University and Jesse Clark from the University
of Maryland for their project, "An Echolocating BatMobile."
Their faculty advisor was Assistant Professor Timothy Horiuchi.
ECE
Professor 
A
new issue of Connections, the ECE newsletter, is hot off
the press. Read about Pamela Abshire and Richard La, the department's
latest NSF CAREER award winners. Go behind the scenes of the innovative
ENEE 408G "Capstone Design Project in Multimedia Signal Processing"
course with K.J. Ray Liu, Min Wu and grad student Guan-Ming Su.
Find out why the university recently named Rama Chellappa a Distinguished
Teacher-Scholar. Plus, a roundup of recent major awards; faculty,
student, and alumni news; and more. View or download the newsletter
ECE
Professor Kawthar Zaki was recently recognized as an honored pioneer
in microwave engineering at the IEEE-sponsored Mediterranean
Congratulations
to ECE graduate student Tao Jiang, a student of Professor
Om
Deshmukh, an ECE graduate student supervised by Associate Professor
ECE Professors
Professor
Department
resides. 
ECE Assistant
Professor 
Two
ECE assistant professors have won 
ECE
graduate student Linda Wasiczko has been awarded a