Dr. Issa Batarseh received Florida, International Recognition. He was recognized by both the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame and the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan recently.

http://spacecoastdaily.com/2017/11/video-university-of-central-florida-scientist-issa-batarseh-receives-florida-international-recognition/

Professor Wasfy Mikhael received a lifetime service award for his leadership as the chair of the MWSCAS Steering Committee and for the success of IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS) over several decades.

IEEE Women in Engineering Committee (WIEC) has selected Parveen Wahid as the winner of the 2017 WIE Inspiring Member Award! The purpose of this award is to recognize a professional member of IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) who has made an outstanding contribution to WIE, their community and the engineering community, through dedication and involvement in projects or activities directed toward fulfilling one or more of the WIE goals and objectives. Parveen has clearly embodied this purpose and they am pleased to recognize Parveen "for exemplary service to enriching the diversity and technical experiences of female members and students around the globe."

The team consists of researchers from UCF ECE, NREL, HNEI, Siemens, GE, Duke and OPAL-RT, and it is led by Professor Zhihua Qu. Their proposal, entitled "Scalable/secure cooperative algorithms and framework for Extremely-high penetration solar integration (SolarExpert)" aims at designing and developing a scalable architecture and a set of algorithms for distributed control and optimization. These solutions will be highly scalable, data-driven, and capable of fully optimizing power system operation and planning. More details can be found at https://energy.gov/eere/sunshot/enabling-extreme-real-time-grid-integration-solar-energy-energise

Congratulations to Yier Jin for his DoE Early Career Award. His project, entitled "Resilient and Robust High Performance Computing Platforms for Scientific Computing Integrity," aims at developing a secure high performance computing (HPC) platform that ensures the application results are correct in the presence of errors/faults/attacks and sensitive data will not be leaked. This research, if successful, will offer solid solutions to improve the levels of performance, reliability and security of HPC.

The research aspirations of University of Central Florida engineering student Heather Lawrence, who wants to discover ways to teach computers to analyze and fend off cyber attacks to reduce the burden on human defenders, will advance with some help from a scholarship awarded to only seven student veterans in the nation. http://today.ucf.edu/73278-2/

Congratulations to Mingjie Lin for receiving an NSF CAREER award. His project, entitled "iMPACT: Metaphysical and Probabilistic-Based Computing Transformation with Emerging Spin-Transfer Torque Device Technology," aims at developing an alternative, non-Boolean, non-CMOS computing paradigm capable of penetrating the digital CMOS computational efficiency barrier posed by quantum-related device physics. This research, if successful, will offer one solid solution to tackle the upcoming �zettabytes� data explosion.

ECE Ph.D. student Ricardo Lovato (advised by Xun Gong) received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for a 3-year period. Congratulations! For the 2016 competition, NSF received close to 17,000 applications, and made 2,000 award offers.

Congratulations to Dr. Yuan! At the founders' day, he has received the 2016 Pegasus Professor Award, highest academic honor of excellence at UCF. Pegasus Professors are chosen from senior faculty members who have achieved noteworthy research, teaching and creative activity of national and international impact. The Pegasus Professor Award is presented with a $5,000 stipend and a $5,000 research grant.

ECE Ph.D. student Ricardo Lovato (advised by Xun Gong) received the Student Paper Competition Honorable Mention award (as well as $1,000 travel funds) in 2016 IEEE AP-S International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation which will be held at Fajardo, Puerto Rico, 6/26/16-7/1/16. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Dr. Xun Gong on receiving the Research Initiative Award (RIA) and Reach for the Star Award in 2016

ECE Ph.D. students Tianjiao Li and Mahmoud Shirazi (advised by Xun Gong) received the best student paper award in 2016 IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT) which was held at Cocoa Beach, FL, 2/29/16-3/2/16. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Dr. George Atia for receiving an NSF CAREER award for his proposal entitled "Inference-Driven Data Processing and Acquisition: Scalability, Robustness and Control." His project aims to explore new approaches for data processing and acquisition that hold promise to bring about stunning speedups in the processing of massive data and to uncover unifying principles for the design of efficient control policies for a host of controlled inference problems in emerging cyber-physical systems. Gorge already received several grants from NSF and DARPA, and his CAREER award is an important milestone for his continuing successes.

The IoT Security competition in the CyberSEED was a research challenge that focused on the "Internet of Things." Students Orlando Arias, Khoa Hoang and Jacob Wurm authored a paper that explored the vulnerability of smart electrical meters and proposed a solution. The students, who are advised by Yier Jin and Samuel Richie, faculty members in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, won second place and $7,500.

A longer version of the story can be found at http://today.ucf.edu/ucf-students-win-25500-at-cybersecurity-competition/.

Dr. Linwood Jones is featured on the WFTV 2015 hurricane special (please add the following link). Prof. Jones and his team developed a new microwave sensing package that can capture 50-mile wide wind data on a single pass, and the package is being used for hurricane monitoring and forecasting.

http://www.wftv.com/videos/news/2015-hurricane-safety-report/vDX5nS/

Dr. Xun Gong receives a DoD DURIP award of $400,000 to purchase equipment for studying and measuring microwave components and antennas. The award aims at the development of multi-band and reconfigurable antenna arrays and ultra-wideband antenna arrays that are used in high-speed data transmission, medical imaging, short-range radars and other applications.

Congratulations to Dr. Ronald DeMara, Steven Pyle, Vignesh Thangavel, and Stephen Williams, whose paper "Self-Scaling Evolution of Analog Computation Circuits with Digital Accuracy Refinement" received the best paper award of the conference at the 2015 NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS-2015, IEEE Indexed) ; citation "Best Design Paper."

Congratulations to Dr. Yier Jin, whose team's paper titled "HAFIX: Hardware-Assisted Flow Integrity Extension" was selected as a recipient for the Design Automation Conference (DAC 2015) Best Paper Award. This paper was written by Dr. Jin's group and collaborators from TU Darmstadt, Germany. Dr. Jin's students, Dean Sullivan and Orlando Arias, are also co-authors of this paper.

Congratulations to Dr. Kalpathy Sundaram, who will soon be awarded the 2015 Dielectric Science and Technology Division Thomas D. Callinan Award at the ECS 227th Meeting in Chicago. This prestigious award was established by ECS in 1967 to encourage excellence in dielectrics and insulation investigations, as well as recognize outstanding research contributions in the field. More information about the award is available here: http://www.ecsblog.org/announcements/awards/kalapathy-sundaram-receives-dielectric-science-and-technology-award/.

Congratulations to Amanda Ross, Mariah Kenny, Benjamin Gafoor, and Phillip Dunlop, whose ECE Senior Design Team's project about Pressure Reactive Stepping Stones was featured on Smithsonian.com. More information about the seven projects featured on Smithsonian.com can be found here.

Congratulations to Dr. Jiann-Shiun Yuan on receiving the College Excellence in Research at the full Professor level and UCF TIP Award this year.

ECE Ph.D. student Michael Trampler (advised by Xun Gong) received the best student research presentation award in 2015 IEEE Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference (WAMICON) which was held at Cocoa Beach, FL, 13-15 April, 2015. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Dr. Jun Wang, who received a 2015 UCF Reach for the Stars award. In order to receive the Reach for the Stars award, faculty must have achieved noteworthy research and/or creative activity of national impact.

The Coherence Multiplexed SAW Sensor system developed at UCF made the 2014 list of NASA's hot 100 technologies. More information can be found here: http://www.techbriefs.com/component/content/article/29-ntb/features/technologies/21143-nasa-s-hot-100-technologies-sensors?start=1.

Congratulations to Dr. Kalpathy Sundaram, who has been selected as the winner of 2015 Thomas Callinan Award given by the Dielectric Science & Technology Division of the Electrochemical Society (ECS). The award will be presented at the 2015 Spring Meeting in May in Chicago.

Congratulations to Yier Jin and the rest of the UCF Team for their performance in this year's Embedded Security Challenge at NYU-Poly. This is the most famous hardware security competition, and approximately 40 teams attended the first phase from which 10 teams were selected for the final on-site competition. The UCF team was selected for the final round with three graduate students, Dean Sullivan, Yu Bi, and Kaveh Shamsi, and come in second place.

Congratulations to Dr. Juin J. Liou, the recipient of this year's IEEE Education Award for promoting and inspiring global education and learning in the field of electron devices. This is a prestigious award bestowed to an individual who has demonstrated exceptional contributions to education in the field of electrical engineering.

It is with great sadness that we report Professor Alireza Seyedi, Division of Electrical and Computer Engineering, passed away unexpectedly Saturday, October 4, 2014. A memorial service to celebrate Dr. Seyedi's life was held on Friday, October 17th at 3:30 pm at the University of Central Florida. In attendance was Dr. Seyedi's wife, Dr. Azadeh Vosoughi, other family members, faculty, staff and his students. Attendees were given the opportunity to express their fondness and appreciation for Dr. Seyedi during this celebration-of-life reception. Through their words and testimonies it is clear that Dr. Seyedi was a respected and loved member of our academic family.

Professor Alireza Seyedi joined the University of Central Florida in the fall of 2012. Prior to that he worked at the University of Rochester and at Philips Research North America. Alireza Seyedi received his PhD and MS degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2004 and 2000 respectively and his BS degree from Sharif University of Technology (Iran) in 1997, all in Electrical Engineering. Dr. Seyedi was a Senior Member of IEEE and member of IEEE Communications, Control and Signal Processing societies. He was also a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi honor societies. He served as an Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters, an NSF panelist, and Co-Chair of 2013 IEEE International Workshop on Energy Harvesting for Communications.

Dr. Seyedi made many solid contributions to the department and to his research field. He enjoyed teaching, loved his students, developed and taught a new course at UCF on stochastic control. In September 2014 he was selected by NAE as one of the 77 nation's most innovative, young engineering educators to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's sixth Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium. Dr. Seyedi's research in networked control, communication and energy harvesting was innovative and funded by NSF. As one of the core members of the Foundations for Engineering Education for Distributed Energy (FEEDER) Consortium on renewable energy and smart grid, he made significant contributions to FEEDER research and educational activities.

Alireza was a gentle, intelligent and generous person, and he is remembered as an excellent educator dedicated to his students. He will be sorely missed by all who had the great pleasure of knowing him.

Prof. Alireza Seyedi has been selected as one of seventy-seven of the nation's most innovative, young engineering educators to take part in the National Academy of Engineering's sixth Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium. FOEE, to be held at the National Academies' Beckman Center in Irvine, CA this October, will bring together some of the most engaged engineering educators in order to recognize, reward, and promote effective, substantive, and inspirational engineering education through a sustained dialogue within the emerging generation of innovative faculty. During the 2 and 1/2 day conference, they will share ideas, learn from research and best practice in education, and leave with a charter to bring about improvement in their home institution. "The Frontiers of Engineering Education program brings together top university faculty to explore preparing engineers for the world's great engineering challenges," said NAE President Dan Mote. "It is a no-holds-barred look at the front-edge of engineering education."

Congratulations to Ahmed Aldhahab, George Atia, and Wasfy Mikhael for receiving a Top 10 Student Paper Award for presentation of the paper, "Supervised Facial Recognition Based on Multi-Resolution Analysis and Feature Alignment" at the 57th International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

Congratulations to Charna Parkey and Dr. Wasfy Mikhael for receiving the Best Paper award for their paper, "Linearized Adaptation of Non-Linear Post Conversaion Correction for TIADCs: A Behavioral Model Study" At IEEE AUTOTEST 2014.

At the IEEE 57th Midwest Symposium on Circuit and Systems (MWSCAS) held at College Station, Texas in August 2014, Prof. Wasfy Mikhael received an award that recognizes his outstanding service and contributions to the success of MWSCAS.

On August 7th 2014, NSF awarded a new Industry/University Collaborative Research Center (I/UCRC) on Multi-functional Integrated System Technology (MIST). The MIST Center, co-directed by Prof. Toshikazu Nishida at UF and Peter Jiann-Shiun Yuan at UCF, is to facilitate integration of novel materials, processes, devices, and circuits into multi-functional systems through research partnerships between university, industry, and government stakeholders. The research mission of MIST Center is to innovate More than Moore technologies for smart systems in the Internet of Things era. The 5-year Phase-I MIST Center funding consists of $1,000,000 from NSF and $3,000,000 from industry. At UCF, the interdisciplinary collaboration team consists of faculty members from ECE, MAE and MSE.

UCF undergraduate Grant Hernandez is featured in an interview that may air on CNN talking about the security of the Nest thermostat, which can be seen in the following link: http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2014/08/07/t-nest-thermostat-hack.cnnmoney/

This is based on work by Grant and UCF ECE professor Yier Jin.

Congratulations to Dr. Kalpathy Sundaram for receiving the "IEEE 2013 Outstanding Student Branch Counselor Award" for outstanding commitment to the educational, personal, professional, and technical development of students in IEEE.

Dr. Juin J. Liou received $600,000 from Analog Devices Inc. for his innovative research on the subject of electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection. His project, entitled "Failure Criteria Metric under ESD Stress Conditions" focuses on developing and implementing novel and effective methodologies for determining the safe operating regions of semiconductor devices and integrated circuits under different ESD stresses.

Congratulations to Mr. Kevin Joslyn, a senior BSEE student, who received a 2013-2014 IEEE Power and Energy Systems Scholarship.

Marwan A. Simaan, Florida 21st Century Chair and Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has been elected to the 2014 College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He was officially inducted during AIMBE's Annual Meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 2014.

This is a well-deserved recognition for one of our distinguished UCF faculty members whose work in bioengineering is focused on improving the quality of life for patients with heart disease, said Zhihua Qu, the SAIC Professor and Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCF.

According to the AIMBE website, AIMBE's College of Fellows comprises a select group of about 1,500 individuals who are recognized as outstanding bioengineers in academia, industry and government and have distinguished themselves through their contributions in research, industrial practice and/or education. Fellows are nominated each year by their peers and represent the top 2% of the medical and biological engineering community. Fundamental to their achievements is the common goal of embracing innovation to improve the health care and safety of society.

Dr. Simaan was elected for his outstanding contributions to the technology of Left Ventricular Assist Devices for patients with congestive heart failure. A member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) since 2000, Simaan joins 112 other NAE members who are also Fellows of AIMBE.

Dr. Xun Gong received $655,937 from DARPA for his innovative research of developing reconfigurable slot-ring antennas. His project, entitled ``Customizable Antenna Array Using Pixelated and Reconfigurable Slot-Ring Antennas," focuses on an advanced design of compact antenna arrays whose novel switching control mechanism enables continuous frequency tuning, higher efficiency, and adaptable characteristics.

Each year, the Science Olympiad National Tournament is hosted by a major university, and this year UCF is taking the lead! And we need volunteers!

For more information on Science Olympiad National Tournament and Volunteer Opportunities, please go here.
To help us out please contact Charlese Hilton-Brown at chilton@ucf.edu.

Team UCF Knights, comprised of ECE Undergraduate students Dean Sullivan, Brandon Frazer, Jeff Biggers, Ryan Dixon, Henry Chan, and Victor Medina, received second place at the 2013 Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) Embedded Systems Challenge held from Nov. 14-16th in Brooklyn, New York at The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly). The competition challenged the students' knowledge in one of the newest and most difficult fields within cyber security: testing and protecting electronic hardware. The UCF team was the only undergraduate team among eleven international collegiate teams that were chosen to compete in the final round. Dr. Yier Jin from the EECS Department served as the UCF team's faculty advisor working with students on projects to prepare them for the competition in UCF's Trusted Hardware Lab. The 2013 CSAW ESC finalists were:

1. Team Nighthawk, University of Texas at Dallas-Tianyu Chen and Liwei Zhou; mentor: Professor Y. Makris
2. UCF Knights, University of Central Florida-Dean Sullivan, Ryan Dixon, Victor Medina, Brandon Frazer, Jeff Biggers, and Henry Chan; mentor: Professor Yier Jin
3. Iowa State Cyclones, Iowa State University-Matthew Hinrichsen; mentor: Professor J. Zambreno
4. NYUAD attackers-NYU Abu Dhabi-Samah Mohamed Ahmed Saeed, Muhammad Yasin, and Chandrakumar Holenarasipursuresh; mentor: Professor Sinanoglu
5. Intruders, University of Connecticut-Kan Xiao; mentor: Professor M. Tehranipoor
6. Team Nanoscape Trojan, Case Western Reserve University-Yu Zheng and Abhishek Basak; mentor: Professor S. Bhunia
7. Team Esisar, Grenoble INP - Esisar, France-Riff David, Conti Raphael, Zeroual Mouad, Coffe Jean-Charles, and Roux Baptiste; mentor: Professor D Hely
8. Ninja Tyler Trojans, The University of Texas at Tyler-Mukesh Reddy Rudra, Varun Nagoorkar, Lagadapati Yamuna Sri, Lakshman Raut, Rajeshwar Rao Pinninti, Vrunda Tony Chitavaduta, Elizabeth Minu Joseph, Shyam Sai Prashanth Haran, Nimmy Anna Daniel, Mani Kumar Bikkumalla, and Dinesh Veramachineni; mentor Professor D. Hoe
9. MoMA Avengers, NYU-Poly-Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos and Charalambos Konstantinou; mentor. Professor M. Maniatakos
10. Team NarMOS, University of South Florida-Matthew Lewandowski, Christopher Bell and James Muldoon; mentor: Professor S. Katkoori
11. Team UTSA, University of Texas at San Antonio-Milad Maleki and Juan Portillo; mentor: Professor B. Li

UCF has been awarded $3.2 million to lead one of four national consortia to develop distributed technologies, to increase engineering capacity, and to prepare for a national shift from traditional sources of electricity to renewables such as solar and wind. Read the whole story on UCF Today.

Through the Grid Engineering for Accelerated Renewable Energy Deployment (GEARED) program, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at Department of Energy has awarded a total of $12M to 4 national-network Distributed Technology Training Centers (DTTCs) and 1 national network administrator (NNA). University of Central Florida (UCF) is selected as one of the DTTCs, while Interstate Renewable Energy Council / Solar Electric Power Association is selected as the NNA. Led by ECE at the University of Central Florida, the FEEDER (Foundations for Engineering Education for Distributed Energy Resources) center is a consortium of 7 universities, 2 national laboratories, 8 utilities and 7 industrial companies. FEEDER, funded by $3.2M from DoE and $1.6M industry/university match over the next five years (2013-2018), is to accelerate the deployment of distributed power systems technologies through innovative research, cross-institutional highly-collaborative education of the current and future workforce, partnering with public and private entities in energy systems and smart grid, and leveraging well-designed and complementary research, development, test, analysis, and evaluation.

DoE GEARED program

FEEDER center

Today, the Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) announced the 2013 selections of National, Regional, and Tier-1 University Transportation Centers (UTCs). The University of Central Florida, together with its partners of University of Hawaii and Tuskegee University, was selected as one of Tier-1 UTCs. The UCF proposal, entitled Electric Vehicle Transportation Center (EVTC) and jointly submitted by FSEC, CECE and ECE, aims at transforming this county's transportation network into a fully integrated "smart" electric vehicle deployment system coupled with a "smart" electric grid. The UTC at UCF is funded for $1.4M per year for the next two years.

DoT award link: http://grants.ost.dot.gov/public/ViewMessage.cfm?MsgID=ku4oto0cf2
DoT UTCs link: http://www.rita.dot.gov/utc/

At the IEEE 56th International Midwest Symposium on Circuit and Systems (MWSCAS) held at Columbus Ohio in August 2013, Prof. Wasfy Mikhael received an award that recognizes his sustained contributions to the success of MWSCAS.

In recognition of his scholarly research and significant contributions to the Department and College of Engineering and Computer Science, Prof. Juin J. Lious is today named the Lockheed Martin St. Laurent Professor. This professorship is one of the four endowed professorships in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at UCF.

Haitao Cheng, a Ph.D. student working with Professor Xun Gong, is part of a UCF engineering team that has developed an antenna capable of surviving a record temperature of 1,300 degrees Celsius, a potential boon to manufacturers of high-performance turbine engines. Read the UCFTODAY article by clicking here.

Congratulations to Prof. Kalpathy Sundaram for being elected as a Fellow of The Electrochemical Society (ECS). His citation will be announced at the Plenary Session of The Electrochemical Society’s 224th Meeting in San Francisco, California, USA, on October 28, 2013.

ECE Ph.D. students Kalyan Karnati and Tianjiao Li (both advised by Xun Gong) received the student paper competition honorable mention award (out of 139 participants) in 2013 IEEE AP-S International Symposium. Congratulations!

In the 2014 US News & World Report rankings, UCF's Electrical Engineering program was ranked 55 out of 134 ranked programs, and UCF's Computer Engineering program was ranked 58 out of 94 ranked programs.

Work of our own Dr. Marshall Tappen on computer vision algorithms to "accurately track the nesting routes of endangered sea turtles," is described in an article in UCF Today. This is a grant from the Florida Space Institute that is joint with "UCF Biologist John Weishampel and UF engineering professor Peter G. Ifju." See http://today.ucf.edu/eradicating-space-dust-and-saving-sea-turtles-get-boost-from-space-agency/

The New Scientist has an article about a storytelling program, written by CS professor Ladislau Bölöni, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628945.700-storytelling-software-learns-how-to-tell-a-good-tale.html The program has the ability to digest stories (such as "Little Red Riding-Hood") and tell a story about what will happen by predicting events and associating them with memories. The article says that the program: "demonstrates a first step towards computers that can invent stories. It also signals a new approach to designing a more human-like artificial intelligence." A paper with more details is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.5643.

On September 20th from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Ford will demonstrate a state-of-the-art vehicle simlator that uses virtual reality. Click here for more information.

UCF's own Dr. Joseph LaViola is interviewed about the future of user interfaces that use guestures, based on his participation in a panel at ACM SIGGRAPH: http://www.livescience.com/22157-gesture-control-could-transform-video-games.html

Camp Connect, which was held at UCF from August 16th - August 23rd, introduced high school students to the various Engineering programs. Click here for more information.

ECE Ph.D. student Ya Shen (Co-advised by Xun Gong and Parveen Wahid) was selected in the top 26 finalists (out of 351 participants) of the student paper competition in 2012 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium which was held at Montréal, Canada, 17-22 June, 2012. During the conference, she competed with other excellent finalists and won the Honorable Mention Award (1 first place, 1 second place, 1 third place, and 7 honorable mention). Congratulations!

“A Unified Approach to Evolving Plasticity and Neural Geometry,” a paper by Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley, won the Best Student Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN-2012) in Brisbane, Australia.

UCF's student chapter of the ACM won the ACM's Student Chapter Excellence Award for Outstanding Community Service 2011-2012. The ACM Student Chapter Excellence Awards Program recognizes chapters that display considerable initiative during the academic year. Winning chapters in each of these five areas receive $500 and a "best of" icon to proudly display on their chapter's Web page. These chapters are featured on the ACM Web site and in ACMMemberNet. The UCF ACM chapter won in the category of Outstanding Community Service. The award recognizes their work on several projects, including campus-wide events such as "Knights Give Back – UCF’s Day of Service", help with the Florida Science Olympiad, and the "Robots R.O.C.K!" project that introduces robotics to elementary school children. For more details see http://www.acm.org/chapters/students/essay-contest/outstanding-community-service-2011-2012.

The TLE TeachLivE mixed-reality teaching environment, which supports teacher practice, won an honorable mention in the 2012 National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education's Leveraging Excellence Awards. This project is joint work with Professor Charles Hughes (of the CS division) and his students and collaborators.

The University of Central Florida will host more than 7,000 students, educators and parents from all 50 states during the 28th Annual Science Olympiad National Tournament on May 18-19, 2012. For the full article on UCFTODAY, click here.

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Ya Shen for receiving the best student research presentation award in 2012 IEEE Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference (WAMICON) held at Cocoa Beach, FL on April 16-17, 2012. She is co-advised by Drs. Xun Gong and Parveen Wahid.

Congratulations to Drs. Joseph LaViola and Marshall Tappen. Their tenure and promotion to associate professor cases were approved by the president and provost and will be effective in August!

The UCF Programming Team (including Matt Fontaine, Travis Meade and Antony Stabile) finished fifth in the University of Chicago Invitational, completing 7 of the 10 problems posed in the 5 hour contest. They were only beaten by Waterloo, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. The team is heading to compete in the World Finals in May.

Peter Tonner, an undergraduate research student, won second place in the Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence (SURE) of 2012 under the Engineering and Computer Science II category.

The research of Dr. Shaojie Zhang, an assistant professor in the Computer Science division of EECS, was described in Genome Technology magazine. The article (http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/using-new-software-researchers-identify-rna-structural-motifs) describes Dr. Zhang's software that helps researchers find "structural motifs" in the RNA of a sample. The article quotes Dr. Zhang as saying "RNA structural motifs are the recurrent substructures formed by the non-canonical base pairs with conserved geometries and functionalities." The software builds on a previous program from Dr. Zhang and his group. Such structural motifs may be important for finding new understanding and treatment of disease. The article quotes Dr. Zhang as saying: "The RNA structural motifs are critical for many cellular functions and the dysfunction of these RNA structural motifs is likely to result in many diseases."

Congratulations to Emily Sassano on being awarded an NSF fellowship. Emily is one of our recently admitted PhD students working with Dr. Sumit Jha.

Prof. Donald C. Malocha was selected as Pegasus Professor, the highest UCF honor. President Hitt presented the award at the Founder's Day celebration. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Dr. Gita Sukthankar, who is the recipient of the 2012 Award for Faculty Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students in the Engineering, Physical Sciences, and Life Sciences category.

UCF won First in the recently concluded IEEE Southeastcon 2012 Software competition. Students in the group include John Boswel, Patrick Fenelon, and Michael Gallett.

Congratulation to Dr. Shaojie Zhang's student, Peter Tonner, who won the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) Poster Award. The title of the poster is "Transcriptomic Profiling of Ribosomal Protein Pseudogenes in Diverse Human Tissues". This is a joint work between UCF (Peter Tonner and Shaojie Zhang) and UAB (Vinodh Srinivasasainagendra and Degui Zhi).

Congratulations to PhD student Zhao Wang (advised by Aman Behal) for winning the 2011-2012 University Award for the Outstanding Master’s Thesis. He will be honored at the Graduate Awards Breakfast on Friday, April 13, 2012.

The US News and World Report published its 2013 rankings of Best Graduate Schools. Our CpE program is ranked #57 out of 99 schools, and out EE program is ranked #62 out of 124 schools.

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Ya Shen (Co-advised by Xun Gong and Parveen Wahid) for being selected in the top 26 finalists (out of 300+ participants) of the student paper competition in 2012 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium which will held at Montréal, Canada, 17-22 June, 2012. She will compete for the awards in the conference. It is a significant achievement to be among the finalists in the best conference in IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.

The Texas Instruments (TI) workshop, recently held at UCF, was an excellent way for our students to learn from and interact with practicing engineers at TI. Click here for photos of the workshop.

The Dept. of EECS is proud to support UCF as it hosts the 2012 Science Olympiad National Tournament on May 18-19, 2012. Science Olympiad has received national recognition; most recently four outstanding Science Olympiad champions were honored by President Obama during the White House Science Fair on Feb. 7, 2012. On Feb. 29, 2012 Science Olympiad was endorsed on the floor of the US House of Representatives. Please click here for more information.
2012 National Science Olympiad

Congratulations to Dr. Lotzi Boloni for receiving $7804 in new funding from General Dynamics for a grant titled: "RCTA -FY 2011 H10 Dynamics of Operating within Social Environments"

UCF CS Ph.D. student Cuncong Zhong, a biologist from Indiana University, Justen Andrews, and UCF Assistant Professor Shaojie Zhang received the best paper award for their paper "Discovering Non-coding RNA Elements in Drosophila 3' Untranslated Regions" at the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and Medical Sciences (ICCABS), held in Las Vegas, Nevada. According to Dr. Zhang, the "paper is about trying to find non-coding RNA (ncRNA) elements in fly (Drosophila melanogaster) 3'-untranslated regions (3'-UTRs). The ncRNA elements in the 3'-UTRs are known to participate in the genes' post-transcriptional regulation. In this work, we proposed an improved RNA structural clustering pipeline that takes into account the length-dependent distribution of the structural similarity measure. We have identified many ncRNA clusters from fly's 3'-UTRs. Among the clusters we have rediscovered the well-known histone ncRNA families. We also discovered an RNA family that contains genes that are preferentially expressed in male fly. We also found many supporting evidences from fly in-situ hybridization experiments that further reveal their characteristic `cup' or `comet' localization patterns in fly testis."

UCFTODAY published an article about Dr. Shaojie Zhang's work on using a complex computer program to analizy RNA motifs. You can read the article here.

Congratulations to Dr. John Shen, who was selected as the winner of the IEEE Region 3 Outstanding Engineer Award. Region 3 encompasses over 30,000 IEEE members across nine states in the southeastern US and Jamaica. This award is given in recognition of his contributions in very high density DC-DC power converters.

Congratulations to Dr. Mubarak Shah for receiving the 2012 College Excellence in Research Award. Dr. Shah’s name will also be forwarded to the University Committee for the university level award, and he will receive a college certificate at the Founder’s Day Honors Convocation on April 4th, 2012.

Congratulations to CS division lecturer Arup Guha, who is receiving the 2012 College Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. Arup is also in the running for the University level award.

Congratulations to Jonathan Cazalas who is receiving the College's 2012 Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching Award Nomination. This nomination is being forwarded to the College of Graduate Studies. The Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching Award is for excellence as an "instructor of record" with "independent classroom responsibilities." Jonathan has taught several undergraduate courses for the CS division, including Computer Science I and Internet Applications.

The cover story of the next issue of Nucleic Acids Research is a story by two UCF EECS CS division authors: Cuncong Zhong and Shaojie Zhang. The cover can be seen at http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/3.cover-expansion and the paper itself at http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/3/1307. Nucleic Acids Research is one of the top 100 most influential journals in medicine and biology. The paper itself is about "RNA structural motifs" which are use to build more complex structures in RNA. The paper makes contributions towards understanding the structure and function of such motifs. The paper presents "a clustering approach for de novo RNA structural motif identification" and applies it to both identify known motifs "with higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art clustering method" and to identify "a number of potential novel instances of various motifs" and "several novel structural motif families".

Kristjan Arumae, a student in Computer Science studying for his bachelor's degree, won second place for his essay in BrainTrack's Computer Science Scholarship. Kristjan's essay, which was awarded $500, offered creative and helpful guidance for current and future Computer Science students. His essay gives advice about studying, entering a Computer Science program, and preparing for a Computer Science career. His complete essay can be read here: http://www.braintrack.com/college-student-stories/articles/bachelor-computer-science-university-of-central-florida-1111. A press release with additional details can be read here: http://www.braintrack.com/press/articles/computer-science-scholarship-winners-fall11-2012-01-23.

The work of Dr. Mubarak Shah and several collaborators and students on finding threats in crowds from video is featured in an article in UCF Today's Science and Technology section. According to the article "Shah’s team includes Brian Moore, an assistant professor of mathematics at UCF; Saad Ali, a UCF Computer Vision Lab alumnus and a computer scientist at SRI International in Princeton, N.J., and Ramin Mehran, who completed his Ph.D. last month at UCF and is joining Microsoft in January.

Congratulations to Justin Luther (advisor: Xun Gong) on receiving the student paper competition 2nd place award in 2012 IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS) held at Santa Clara, CA during Jan. 15-18, 2012

Congratulations to the IEEE PES Scholarship Winners: David Wade, Homa Amini Manesh, Fevri Tokouete, and Jing Zou.

The cover story in the Dec. 2011 issue of Communications of the ACM is "Visual Crowd Surveillance through a Hydrodynamics Lens" (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2043174.2043192). This is coauthored by Brian Moore (UCF Math), Saad Ali (SRI), Ramin Mehran (UCF CS), and Mubarak Shah (UCF CS). Ramin Mehran is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Vision Lab run by Dr. Mubarak Shah, Agere chair professor of Computer Science. The article describes how to use inputs from video cameras to monitor "crowds of hundreds or thousands" of people. The goal is to "cue security personnel to individuals or events of interest in crowded scenes."

Congratulations to Dr. John Shen on receiving the 2011 IEEE Florida Council Outstanding Engineer Award.

Congratulations to Dr. Chatterjee and his group for receiving the Best Paper Award at the recently concluded IEEE PIMRC conference, held in Ottawa, Canada. The title of the paper is "Performance based Channel Allocation in IEEE 802.22 Networks" and is co-authored by Dr. Chatterjee's students Saptarshi Debroy and Shameek Bhattacharjee.

Congratulations to Ricky Elias for being selected as one of the L-3 Engineers of the Year for 2011. Of the twelve thousand engineers eligible for this recognition, thirty-nine nominations were down selected for final consideration by the council. Of those, 12 selectgions were made, including Ricky.

Dr. Mubarak Shah, Agere Chair Professor in the CS division, won the College of Engineering and Computer Science Advisory Board's "Faculty Award." This award recognizes Dr. Shah's distinguished accomplishments as a teacher, researcher, and leader. At the award ceremony, held on November 4, 2011, the Chair of the advisory board's awards committee J. Greg Hanson praised Dr. Shah's accomplishments in all these areas, noting that Dr. Shah is very active in mentoring students at all levels, from postdocs to high school students. He also pointed out that Dr. Shah is the 22nd most frequently cited researcher in the world in the area of computer vision. He also noted Dr. Shah's leadership in funding in the college and the large number of Ph.D. students he supervises. Dean Marwan Simaan added that wherever he goes, people know about Dr. Shah and his research. The dean stated that Dr. Shah is a great asset to the University and to our college and added that he was very proud to recognize Dr. Shah's many accomplishments.

Congratulations to Dr. Mubarak Shah for receiving the College advisory board's award for his outstanding research, teaching, and service.

Tiffani Williams, a Ph.D. graduate from UCF in Computer Science, was awarded the 2011 Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award. The award was presented at the 2011 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The citation recognizes her research in the area of bioinformatics and high performance computing, and also recognizes her commitment to the advancement of women and members of underrepresented groups in computing. See http://gracehopper.org/2011/conference/2011-award-winners/#denton for more details.

Congratulations to Dr. Joe LaViola's group. Their paper "Teach Me to Dance: Exploring Player Experience and Performance in Full Body Dance Games" was accepted to the 8th Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2011) and won best paper award. This paper was authored by Miko Charbonneau, Andrew Miller and Dr. LaViola. 124 papers were submitted and 32 were accepted.

Congratulations to Dr. John Shen on receiving the 2011 IEEE Orlando Section Outstanding Engineer Award

Congratulations to Shuyu Chen (advised by Dr. Jiann-Shiun Yuan), Haitao Cheng and Ya Shen (advised by Dr. Xun Gong) on receiving 2011 IEEE Orlando Section Graduate Student Scholarships.

Congratulations to Dr. Damian Dechev's student, Steven Feldman, whose poster submission made it to the finals of the NSF International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge and will be published by the journal Science.

A partnership between CECS's Shaojie Zhang, Ph.D., Computer Science assistant professor, and Ranjan Perera, Ph.D., an associate professor at Sanford - Burnham Medical Research Institute at Lake Nona (Sanford - Burnham), could lead to better treatments for people with melanoma -- a deadly skin cancer. (Click here for more information.)

Dr. Mubarak Shah was recommended unanimously for this important award by the Board’s Awards Committee and was selected to receive the 2011 CECS Advisory Board Award for Faculty Excellence. The CECS Advisory Board Award for Faculty Excellence recognizes one CECS faculty member each year who has demonstrated outstanding performance during the three to five previous academic years. Consideration is given to meritorious recognition by peers at the national level, outstanding accomplishments in research and/or education, or superb administrative performance.

Congratulations to Dr. Ken Stanley, who has just been named an ACM Distinguished Speaker. More information about this program is available here.

Congratulations to Dr. Ken Stanley, who has just been named an ACM Distinguished Speaker. More information about this program is available here.

Check out the UCF ISUE lab, which is featured on Microsoft's CODING4FUN Web site. Click here.

Congratulations to Ken Stanley on receiving a patent: Rosario, M. and Stanley, K. O. (Patent Granted June 21, 2011). System and Method for Evolving Music Tracks. United States Patent 7,964,783.

Congratulations to Niels da Vitoria Lobo on a patent that was just issued, titled: "Self Correcting Tracking of Moving Objects in Video", US patent 7983448 B1.

Dr. Anwar Sadat, a UCF graduate in 2004, has been promoted to Analog Design Manager at Texas Instruments Incorporated, Dallas. Anwar Sadat received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UCF under Dr. Yuan's supervision.

Dr. Jia Di, a UCF graduate in 2004, has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Jia Di received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UCF under Dr. Yuan's supervision.

Additional funding in the amount of $38,437 awarded from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a project titled "Non-Linear Characterization of the Stretch Reflex Arc and its Neuromodulation"

Prof. Joe LaViola and PhD students Arun Kulshreshth and Miko Charbonneau are featured in a video about the Sony Move.Me interface: Click Here

Summer Research Programs Give Students Taste of Careers, UCF. Read more

Congratulations to Dr. Kenneth Stanley, Amy Hoover, and Paul Szerlip for receiving the Best Paper Award for their paper titled, "Interactively Evolving Harmonies through Functional Scaffolding" in the Digital Entertainment Technologies and Arts track at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2011) in Dublin, Ireland. GECCO was held this year from July 12th to July 16th

Dr. Thomas Wu was invited to teach a short course on Synchronous Machine at the Air Force Research Laboratory from July 11 to 13, 2011"

Congratulations to Dr. Thomas Wu on his promotion to Professor, and to Drs. Xun Gong and Jun Wang on their promotions to Associate Professor."

Dr. N. Deo is giving a keynote titled, "Finding Communities in Web-like Complex Networks". The keynote address at the International Conference in Applied Computer Science (ACS), Sept. 15-18, 2010, Malta"

Dr. N. Deo is giving a keynote titled, "Local Search for Indentifying Communities in Large Random Graphs" Plenary Lecture at Statistics 2011 Canada/IMST2011 Conf., July 1-4, 2011, Montreal

Dr. Mubarak Shah is invited to give a keynote speech titled, "COCOA System for the Analysis of Airborne Videos" at the 8th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems in Inria Sophia Antipolis, France, in September 2011.

Speeding past 53 other schools, the University of Central Florida's Robotics Club placed second in the 19th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition last weekend. More information can be found here.

Dr. Kenneth Stanley gave an invited talk on "How Letting Go of Objectives Helps Creativity and Discovery" at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI, on April 22, 2011.

Dr. Mubarak Shah gave a keynote address titled, "An Overview of Visual Tracking in EO and IR Imagery" at the SPIE Biometric Technology for Human Identification VIII Conference in Orlando, FL on April 25, 2011.

Dr. Mubarak Shah gave a keynote address titled, "Visual Crowd Surveillance is Like Hydrodynamics" at the SPIE Biometric Technology for Human Identification VIII Conference in Orlando, FL on April 25, 2011.

Dr. Mubarak Shah gave a keynote address titled, "Airborne Video Surveillance" at the SPIE Biometric Technology for Human Identification VIII Conference in Orlando, FL on April 25, 2011.

Dr. Mubarak Shah gave a keynote address titled, "Video Analytics and Activity Recognition" at the SPIE Biometric Technology for Human Identification VIII Conference in Orlando, FL on April 25, 2011.

Dr. Hassan Foroosh gave a keynote with the title of "Tracking and Predicting Solar Magnetohydrodynamic Activities". It was at the Fifth Solar Image Processing Workshop, which took place in Les Diablerets, Switzerland, in September 2010.

Dr. Damla Turgut won the CECS award for Excellence in Professional Service for 2011.
Dr. Gita Sukthankar won the CECS award for Excellence in Research.

Rui Peng, Alex Aved, and Kien A. Hua's paper,"Real Time Query Processing on Live Videos in Networks of Distributed Cameras", which was published in the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Telecommunications and Networking, Vol. 2, Issue 1, 2010, pp. 27-48 won the journal's award for "Best Published Article" for 2010.

Prof. Don Malocha is an invited speaker at the June 21st National Academies Symposium on NASA's SBIR Community."

Congratulations to Ken Stanley, Pawel Wocjan, and Cliff Zou, for receiving tenure and their promotion to Associate Professor.

A paper by Amruth Dakshinamurthy and Damian Dechev, titled Automatic Extraction of SST/macro Skeleton Models" made it to the finals of the Student Research Competition of the 25th ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS 2011), Tucson, AZ, May 31 - June 4, 2011. Amruth is a second year MS student in computer science working with Dr. Dechev.

Congratulations to Lisa Soros and Anthony Wehrer for being selected to receive the Hillman Fellowship!!! There were nine nominations altogether. CS Graduate committee members ranked them independently. The highest two ranked were selected to receive the award, which includes $5,000 monetary scholarship. Both Lisa and Anthony are admitted to our PhD program to start in Fall 2011.

"How Letting Go of Objectives Helps Creativity and Discovery." Invited talk at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI.

Dr. Avelino Gonzalez won the UCF award for excellence in graduate teaching.
Dr. Ronald Dutton and Dr. Amar Mukherjee were awarded Emeritus Professor status for their distinguished service to UCF.
Dr. Mostafa Bassiouni, Dr. Sheau-Dong Lang, Dr. Fernando Gomez, and Dr. Donald Malocha were given 30-Year service awards and Dr. Issa Batarseh received a 20-Year service award.
Steven Braeger was the runner-up for the UCF Outstanding Thesis in Sciences, Engineering, and Technology, for his thesis: A Framework for Blind Signal-Correction Using Optimized Polyspectra-Based Cost Functions," directed by Charles Hughes, EECS.

Kien Hua's paper "Real-Time Query Processing on Live Videos in Networks of Distributed Cameras has been recognized as the Best Published Journal Article in the International Journal of Interdisciplinary Telecommunications and Networking for 2010. See the paper here.

UCF Computer Engineering grad student developed a software that turns a smart phone into a mobile microscope to detect malaria from a digital photo of a blood sample. Click here for further information.

Please join us in congratulating our Ph. D. student, Justin Luther, for receiving an Honorable Mention in the 2011 IEEE AP-S/URSI International Symposium Student Paper Competition. Mr. Luther competed with 113 other students in the field and will be presenting his paper, A Microstrip Patch Phased Array Antenna with Parasitic Elements and Reactance-Tuned Coupling," in July at the symposium in Spokane, Washington.

Congratulations to Dr. Kalpathy Sundaram for receiving the IEEE Region-3 Outstanding Service Award

Congratulations to Dr. Linwood Jones for receiving the 2011 award for Faculty Excellence in Menroting Doctoral Students" in the disciplinary grouping of "Engineering, Physical Sciences, and Life Sciences."

Students Jason Bender and Thomas Conner started a company, Gotootie. The company was launched at the International CTIA Wireless Conference at the Orange Country Convention Center March 22-24, 2011. FOX NEWSran a special on the company: click here.

US News and World Report announced 2011-2012 rankings of graduate programs. UCF's College of Engineering and Computer Science ranked 70th, and the college's specialty programs in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering ranked 54th and 66th, respectively. Read more.

Follow the UCF EECS Computer Science Division on Twitter by clicking here.

Congratulations to Dr. Gonzales for receiving the University Excellence in Graduate Teaching award at the UCF Founder's Day celebration.

This video is an invited keynote talk by Dr. Kenneth Stanley, given at the SPLASH 2010 conference. The talk is titled "Searching Without Objectives: To Achieve our Highest Goals, We Must Be Willing To Abandon Them." It discusses ways in which we might be able to achieve truly ambitious goals. Dr. Stanley describes "novelty search" that can achieve such ambitious goals, by trying to do new things without evaluating what is achieved with respect to any particular goal.

Congratulations to Dr. Sumit Jha who won the best paper prize at IEEE ICCABS (International Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and medical Sciences). The paper is titled: "Exploring Behaviors of SDE Models of Biological Systems using Change of Measures". Sumit and Chris Langmead are co-authors. An extended version of the paper has also been invited to the popular journal BMC Bioinformatics.

Congratulations to Sumit Jha who won the best paper prize at IEEE ICCABS (International Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and medical Sciences). The paper is titled: Exploring Behaviors of SDE Models of Biological Systems using Change of Measures". Sumit and Chris Langmead are co-authors. Sumit also notes that an extended version of the paper has also been invited to the popular journal BMC Bioinformatics

Congratulations to PhD student Jonathan Cazalas and Prof. Ratan K. Guha for receiving the best paper award for the paper "GEDS: GPU Execution of Continuous Queries on Spatio-Temporal Data Streams" presented at 2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing, Hong Kong, China, Dec 11-13, 2010.

Congratulations to Dr. Kien Hua, who was made an IEEE Fellow (in 2009), one of the IEEE's most prestigious honors. The award recognizes Dr. Hua's contributions, especially in the area of video streaming.

IBM in conjunction with GROUP Business Software is offering our students a great opportunity to attend IBM's Lotusphere event in Orlando Florida on January 31, 2011 for FREE! Lotusphere and it is attended annually by over 6,500 business professionals from around the world. Social Media and the rise of the Social Business" is a major theme for the event this year. As a kick off to this 4-day event, IBM is offering students a free one day pass because they know organizations are looking to attract new types of employees - people like you - that can help them get ahead of the curve and become a social business. So don't delay and reserve you spot now. The pickup from UCF will be at 7am, the event will run from 8am until 4pm, and the bus will return attendees to UCF at 5pm. Go to www.gbs.com/college to register. Click here for more information.

Congratulations to Drs. John Shen and Juin Liou, who have been elevated to IEEE Fellow, one of the society's most prestigious honors.

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The Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science established two divisions within the Department of EECS: the Electrical and Computer Engineering Division and the Computer Science  Division. Dr. Zhihua Qu was named the Interim Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Division, and Dr. Gary Leavens was named the Interim Chair of the Computer Science Division. Dr. Leavens is also currently serving as the Interim Chair of the Department of EECS.

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Our colleague Dr. Charlie Hughes is featured in a USA Today article for his work on improving teacher training. Read More...

Obsidian Software is pleased to provide numerous educational scholarships for students to attend the Annual Microprocessor Test and Verification Conference in Austin, TX...Read More...

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Galactic Arms Race, a video game created by recent EECS Ph.D. graduate Erin Hastings and Dr. Kenneth Stanley to demonstrate novel content-generating AI technology, was chosen as a finalist in the Indie Game Challenge.