Faculty

Congratulations to ECE Professor Ron DeMara (PI) and his UCF collaborators Laurie O. Campbell and Florencio Eloy Hernandez for receiving their NSF grant.

Assistant Professor Fan Yao has recently received two research grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

This three-year half-million project aims to develop disruptive learned I/O architectures for today’s big learning applications. The research will use the testbed of a big-data and GPU cluster purchased under the DURIP instrument program W911NF-17-1-0208.

Congratulations to Amro Awad and Mingjie Lin for their new grant from DARPA/SPAWAR to investigate novel secure processor architectures. This three-year $1.12M project aims to explore efficient implementations of novel secure architectures through hardware prototyping.

Congratulations to Murat Yuksel for his two new research awards from National Science Foundation (NSF). The first award (https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1836741) aims to design and build multi-element Visible Light Communication (VLC) modules for mobile devices.

UCF and Siemens unveiled a new collaboration around smart infrastructure. In addition to the existing Siemens’ Digital Grid Lab, the newly expanded partnership establishes the Smart Infrastructure Data Analytics Lab in ECE. Software and hardware installed in the lab aims at improving the performance and efficiency of buildings and the energy grid by harnessing the power of data. The full release can be viewed at: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181019005078/en/

Congratulations to Ronald F. DeMara and his collaborators Baiyun Chen and Richard Hartshorne for receiving the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) Effective Practice Award for “Elevating Participation and Outcomes with Digitized Assessments in Large-Enrollment Foundational STEM Curricula: An immersive development workshop for STEM faculty.” Details of the award is available at https://onlinelearningconsortium.org/about/2018-olc-effective-practice-award-winners-2/ The Evaluation and Proficiency Center, spearheaded by Professor DeMara, was established by ECE Department in 2014 to integrate self-paced tutoring, asynchronous testing, and rapid post-test remediation. Since then, it has expanded into seven engineering degree programs as plus physics.

Congratulations to Dr. Fallah whose work on connected and automated vehicle technologies has been recognized and featured in the IEEE ITS magazine’s “ITS people” column. The article features Dr. Fallah’s accomplishments and the recent contributions of his work at UCF to developing standards and solutions for vehicle safety and vehicular communications. For more information, see the article at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8421108/.

Congratulations to Nazanin Rahnavard and Ronald DeMara for their new NSF project entitled “Cross-layer Adaptive Rate/Resolution Design for Energy-Aware Acquisition of Spectrally Sparse Signals Leveraging Spin-based Devices.

Congratulations to Amro Awad for his two new research grants on tackling security, privacy and isolation in future computer systems. The first award is from Navy-Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) at Dahlgren to support isolation in virtualized systems, and the project aims to enable running mission-critical and time-constrained applications on cloud systems. The second award is from National Science Foundation (NSF), and the research is to improve the security of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) systems through hardware/software co-design. His current project funded by Sandia National Labs explores the use of NVM for building Disaggregated Memory Systems, which leads to considerable energy cost-savings in building future data centers.