Rutgers ECE

The Office of Graduate Student Life and the Graduate Student Association invite all graduate and professional school students to stop by to enjoy food, networking, and learn about Graduate Student Organizations and University Department support services! All graduate students are welcome! A list of university departments and Graduate Student Organizations participating will be posted on September 1st.

Thursday, September 12th, 3 PM – 6 pm
Busch Student Center Multipurpose Room, Busch Campus
Student RSVP: https://rutgers.campuslabs.com/engage/event/10205562

A team of WINLAB researchers led by Professor Aggelos Bletsas (PI) along with co-PIs Distinguished Professor Narayan Mandayam (Director, WINLAB) and Ivan Seskar (Chief Technologist, WINLAB), are the recipients of an award from the National Science Foundation under the Next Era of Wireless and Spectrum (NewSpectrum) program for the project "EFFICIENT: Backscatter Fabric for Multidimensional Spectrum Situational Awareness and Protection". This three-year project funded at $800,000 addresses two emerging topics of increasing interest, namely (i) spectrum situational awareness and (ii) protection from interference.

The next era of spectrum is envisioned to have spatially and spectrally adjacent systems that are dynamic, resulting in frequent cross-system interference. This project addresses both spectrum situational awareness and protection from interference, exploiting ultra-low complexity radio hardware and non-coherent techniques; the basic idea lies at the heart of backscatter radio, which enables a fabric of low-complexity backscatter tags for said objectives.

The proposed fabric offers an intelligent, yet low-cost solution with minimal hardware complexity (due to the adopted backscatter radio tags), limited channel state information (due to the proposed non-coherent algorithms), with the capacity to observe signal strength (power), frequencies and direction-of-arrival (DoA) for a set of in-band, simultaneously operating links. Techniques developed include both model-based, as well as data-driven machine learning (ML) approaches. In addition, this work targets demonstration of the proposed principles in the FR3 band, with a particular focus on the 12.2 − 12.7 GHz band, where next generation cellular, digital video broadcasting and low-earth orbit satellite (SAT) radio applications have the potential to coexist. The creation of the backscatter fabric will contribute to the envisioned Spectrum Era 4 and the ever-expanding problem of meeting increasing wireless data demands.

Meet Ye Tao!

Ye Tao is a PhD ECE student specializing in computational sensing and is working toward graduating in the fall of 2025. Ye worked as an Applied Research Intern at LinkedIn in the summers of 2023 and 2024, and an Applied Data Science Intern in the summer of 2022. Her internship project this year focuses on long-term reward optimization in ads ranking.

Read more to learn about her journey and receive advice on pursuing similar research opportunities!

ECE Professor and Associate Director of WINLAB, Yingying Chen, received a NSF grant for the project "Education on Securing AI System under Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks." This is a three-year $400K research project collaborating with Temple University and New Jersey Institute of Technology. Temple University is the lead, and Rutgers' share is $127,000.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached groundbreaking milestones in recent years. Its usage has spanned critical application domains, such as computer vision, audio perception, and natural language processing. However, these breakthroughs come with substantial security challenges. The machine learning (ML) models serving as the computational cores of AI systems are inherently vulnerable to attacks. By exploiting vulnerabilities in AI systems, adversaries can make the models produce incorrect predictions, leading to serious consequences such as misinterpreting traffic signs for autonomous vehicles or generating incorrect responses in speech recognition systems. Current AI-related educational efforts are limited to teaching the security perspective of ML. To bridge this gap, this project aims to develop comprehensive educational modules to prepare students and future engineers to address these ML security vulnerabilities and achieve trustworthy AI. Educational modules will be developed to study security vulnerabilities and defense solutions in various ML models for vision sensing and voice assistant systems. By creating a practice-in-the-loop learning experience, students can obtain hands-on experiences with the security vulnerabilities of ML models and corresponding solutions. The outcomes of this project, such as software labs and training projects, will enable many undergraduate student training and outreach activities.

More information of the award can be found at:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2414367&HistoricalAwards=false

Jikun Pan from the class of 2022 is an Electronic Component Engineer in the Integrated Component Solution Department at Caterpillar Inc. He started as an intern and became a full-time employee. He is also a second generation employee and has never missed a family day at the Caterpillar Xuzhou facility since 2008.

As a student in the ECE department, he has greatly benefited from the following courses: Electronic Devices in Fall 2018 with Prof. Yicheng Lu, RF Integrated Circuit in Spring 2021 with Prof. Michael Caggiano, and Control System and Theory in Spring 2021 and Applied Control System in Fall 2021 with Prof. Zoran Gajic.

Congratulations to Jikun Pan for his accomplishments at Caterpillar!

Peter Pupalaikis has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering!

Peter Pupalaikis is a distinguished Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) alumni and currently serves on the ECE Industry Advisory Board.

His main achievements were in pioneering digital signal processing techniques for the correction of hardware impairments in high-speed digital oscilloscopes, such as magnitude response, phase response, time-interleaving, as well as bandwidth extension. This culminated in his main set of inventions that combine a microwave front-end and a DSP back-end to double and/or triple the state-of-the-art bandwidth possible in oscilloscopes, which led to LeCroy making the highest bandwidth real-time oscilloscopes for over a decade. This technique was used to produce a 100 GHz bandwidth, 240 GS/s scope in 2015. he also pioneered the design and development of time-domain reflectometry (TDR) based network analyzers.

Learn more about his work: https://www.ece.rutgers.edu/news/ece-alumni-peter-j-pupalaikis-elected-national-academy-engineering

ECE Graduate Program Applications are open for Spring 2025! 🎓

Learn more about how to apply at https://www.ece.rutgers.edu/admissions/graduate📚💻

ECE Professor and Associate Director of WINLAB, Yingying Chen, received a NSF grant for the project "Securing Public Safety with WiFi-based In-baggage Suspicious Object Detection." This is a three-year $1.2M medium research project collaborating with George Mason University and Temple University. Rutgers is the lead, and its share is $400,000.

This project aims to enhance public safety by developing a low-cost, portable system for detecting suspicious objects hidden in baggage using WiFi technology. Public safety has become an increasingly significant issue in the United States due to the potential threat posed by hidden weapons and homemade bombs in public places where extensive security checks are not available. Traditional security systems, such as X-ray machines and CT screening, are expensive and primarily deployed in high-security areas like airports and government buildings. This project proposes to leverage the existing prevalent WiFi infrastructure in many public spaces to enable the widespread deployment of an in-baggage detection system. Toward this end, the project team designs and develops a novel in-baggage suspicious object detection system that utilizes extracted signal features to determine materials and shapes of hidden objects, subsequently identifying suspicious items. The success of this project will revolutionize public safety measures by making advanced security accessible and affordable for a broader range of venues (e.g., public schools, theme parks, sports stadiums, and scenic areas), thereby addressing the urgent need for enhanced safety in everyday public spaces.

More information of the award can be found at:
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2329278&HistoricalAwards=false

Meet Santosh Pandey!

Santosh Pandey is a PhD student working as a Student Researcher at Google for the summer of 2024. He will be focusing on deep learning techniques to accelerate computer architecture simulation. His current work at Google builds on his earlier research, "TAO: Rethinking DL-based Microarchitecture Simulation," published in SIGMETRICS'24. This research not only accelerates the simulation process but also reduces the domain expertise required to build DL-based simulators. Researchers from Google, Microsoft, and Huawei have shown interest in their work.

Read more to learn about his journey and receive advice on pursuing similar research opportunities!

ECE Professor and Associate Director of WINLAB, Yingying Chen, received an ARO grant for the project “Enabling Reliable and Adaptive AI on Security-Critical Applications by Handling Out-of-distribution Data.” This is a three-year $399,625 research project collaborating with New Jersey Institute of Technology. Rutgers is the lead, and its share is $200,000.

Given its transformative potential, AI plays a pivotal role to revolutionize the military and defense sectors, from scrutinizing large volumes of network traffic for real-time anomaly detection to driving autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots in extreme environments without human supervision. However, a core research problem thwarts scaling the use of AI to security-critical applications, particularly those related to cyber-attack detection. Machine learning (ML) models, the computation cores of AI, normally assume the distribution of the testing data is “known” and bears a high similarity to the training data. This assumption can be easily violated in dynamic and hostile military contexts featured with out-of-distribution data. In this project, we aim to collaborate with ARL to investigate the theoretical potential of AI and formulate ML methodologies designed for threat detection in dynamic and hostile military environments. We propose a data-efficient, reliable, and self-learning framework, which can be realized by addressing two critical research problems: (i) reliable multi-label classification and (ii) adaptive and continuous self-learning. This project underscores the significance of integrating theoretical studies with a system approach by validating our proposed framework through algorithm and testbed development.

Congratulations to Prof. Chen!

Our social media department is thrilled to announce an exciting opportunity open to all current and former ECE students to showcase your accomplishments on ECE's social media platforms! 🎉

We want to feature your success stories to inspire others in our community. By sharing your accomplishments, you have the opportunity to get recognized, connect with students and faculty, and build your network.

If you have an achievement that you would like to be featured, we invite you to complete the form linked below.
https://bit.ly/RU_ECESocialMediaForm

For further questions, please reach out to our social media manager through email:
📩[email protected]

We are excited to hear from you and look forward to featuring your accomplishments!

Yesterday, we celebrated the first day of summer with our amazing Ice Cream Social!🍦

Over 100 students, faculty, and staff joined us for this celebration. It was a great opportunity for undergraduates taking courses this summer, ECE interns, WINLAB interns, and graduate students conducting research to network and collaborate.

A huge thank you to everyone who attended and made this event a success! 🙌

ECE alumna Veronica Vergara has been appointed a 2nd Lieutenant into the United States Space Force.

Lt Vergara graduated this May from the Electrical & Computer Eng BS/MS program specializing in Machine Learning. Before joining the Graduate Program, her Capstone Team placed 4th in the 2023 ECE Capstone Expo. During her time in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFROTC) program, her highest distinctions have included the AFROTC Meritorious Service Award and Air & Space Forces Association Award. She has attended cyber trainings with the Air Force Institute of Technology and Air Force Research Lab, and aided construction of houses donated to the Navajo Nation as part of a field engineering training. She was recognized as the AFROTC Detachment 485 Distinguished Graduate for the Class of 2024.

As a Space Force Officer, she is assigned to the Developmental Engineer track and will be responsible for technical projects supporting space operations. Lt Vergara thanks the supportive faculty of the ECE department, and aims to pursue further graduate studies in the future. She aspires to make an impact on the evolution of this newest military branch.

The ECE Department is hosting a First Day of Summer Ice Cream Social on Thursday, June 20th from 12:30 - 2 pm in the ECE Building Lobby.

We look forward to seeing you there for ice cream and conversation with fellow students and professors. Our goal is to provide a place of community to our students who are on campus for research or taking courses this summer. Invite your friends to join too!

We look forward to seeing you then!🍦

Jiazhen Hong has received the TA of the Semester Award for Fall 2023. Jiazhen was a TA for the course: Linear Systems and Signals with Professor Anand Sarwate and his advisor is Laleh Najafizadeh. Within his review, he praised him for his outstanding performance saying, “Jiazhen could be a role model for other TAs because he is organized and methodical in how he balanced teaching and research, and structures his teaching in a way to help remind students of the concepts before diving into problem-solving.”

Jiazhen received his B.Sc. degree in Communication Engineering from Jimei University, China, in 2016. He then obtained his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology in 2018. From 2019 to 2020, He worked as a research student at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. His primary research interests include electroencephalogram (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCI), machine learning algorithms, signal processing, and natural language processing (NLP).

Zhile Li has received the TA of the Semester Award for Fall 2023. Zhile was a TA for the course: Principals of Electrical Engineering I with Professor Sasan Haghani and his advisor is Dario Pompili. Within his review, he praised him for his outstanding performance saying, “Zhile did an excellent job in coordinating TA duties, completing tasks I gave him, was always responsive to my emails and received very positive feedback from students on his performance. He was always available, even with short notice, and I could fully rely on him for the management of the Lab.”

Zhile is currently a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, working with Prof. Dario Pompili in the CPS Lab. He received the BS and MS degrees in ECE from Rutgers University in 2020 and 2022, respectively. He served as TA of Principle of Electrical Engineering I in Fall 2022 and Fall 2023, and Digital Electronics in Spring 2023. His research mainly focus on the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), including the physical and the MAC layer of underwater acoustic communication, the electronic circuits for communications systems, and signal processing for communications.

Nitya Sathyavageeswaran has received the TA of the Semester Award for Fall 2023. Nitya was a TA for the course: Linear Systems and Signals with Professor Anand Sarwate. Within his review, he praised her for her outstanding performance including feedback like "I have several students tell me how much they learned from her. She went above and beyond this year in terms of attending study sessions hosted by HKN, answering student questions in the lab and in particular replying to student questions on the class forum."

Nitya Sathyavageeswaran is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. She completed her Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from RV College of Engineering in 2019. Her research involves studying balancing timeliness and privacy in communication systems.

See photos from the event:
https://www.ece.rutgers.edu/news/photos-ece-awards-ceremony

Happy Commencement Day to the Class of 2024! We are so proud of your achievements and cannot wait to see what the future holds for you. Congratulations! 🎉🥂

Thank you to everyone who participated in Rutgers Day 2024 on Saturday! The event was a tremendous success. Many families turned out to interact with our SOCRATES graduate students and learn about robotics. K-12 students watched with wonder and were inspired by the demos and conversations. Know that you have made an impact!

Socrates was well represented with the following demos:
Faith: Loomo follow-me robot
Ben: Beam telepresence robot
Uriel and Kuba: VR headset navigation
Anis: Rendering with Nerfs
Richard: Campus Guide
Antonio: DofBot manipulator
Yinglong: Mobile robot
Hemali: Memory game

SoE Researchers win Best Paper Award at the 20th IEEE Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT 2024)

ECE Professor Dario Pompili, ECE graduate students Songjun Huang and Chuanneng Sun, and CEE Assistant Professor Ruo-Qian (Roger) Wang have won the Best Paper Award at the 20th IEEE Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT 2024), which was held in April 29–May 1, 2024, in Abu Dhabi (UAE), for their paper titled “Multi-Behavior Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Informed Search via Offline Training”.

The conference intended since its creation to cover several aspects of distributed computing in smartsystems such as high level abstractions and models, systematic design methodologies, signal and information processing, algorithms, analysis and applications. Starting from the 2023 event, DCOSS is broadening its scope beyond sensor networks to smart systems in general as well as the Internet of Things (IoT). The updated name is “Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things” (DCOSS-IoT).

The winners were presented with an award certificate and a plaque. The abstract of the award winning paper is below. This is an excellent example of successful collaborations in SoE. Congratulations to Dario, Roger, Songjun and Chuanneng!

Read more at: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/fkehn8ioy7c5uew1duld8/694400a019.pdf?rlkey=c026w7ne4ventjnglua7l6mek&e=1&dl=0

Khizar Anjum, the 2024 recipient of the prestigious Paul Panayotatos Scholarship, concentrates his research on sustainability by pervasive signal processing on small-scale, resource-constrained devices. In pursuit of this goal, he has delved deep into hardware-software codesign and proposed novel analog architectures capable of implementing neural networks, consuming extremely low power and allowing for real-time data analysis directly on compact devices. These architectures can be used for real-time battery-less EEG analysis and reduce dependency on frequent battery changes or cloud services. Khizar's pioneering approach employs a two-tier wireless sensor network for real-time data processing, applicable to a wide variety of fields like healthcare monitoring, environmental monitoring, drone-based crowd surveillance, and underwater exploration. To communicate findings from harsh acoustic underwater environments, his innovation in underwater image transmission utilizes deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC), which demonstrates remarkable resilience to bit errors and guarantees some, albeit lossy reconstruction—vital for underwater exploration. Khizar’s work not only pushes the boundaries of signal processing but also fosters a more sustainable, eco-friendly approach to technology development.

Umer Hassan and Bo Yuan have been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

We look forward to their continued contributions to ECE, SoE and Rutgers in the coming years!

Yang Sui has received the Paul Panayotatos Scholarship for Spring 2024.

Yang Sui is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, working with Prof. Bo Yuan. His research focuses on Efficient AI, including model compression and efficient training for various AI tasks, such as image classification, and text-to-image generation. The primary objective is to minimize the storage and computational demands of current large-scale AI models with compression techniques, including pruning, low-rank decomposition, and quantization. Meanwhile, he also investigates AI security, focusing on the vulnerability and robustness of AI models against adversarial and backdoor attacks, particularly in generative models. The contributions have been recognized through publications in leading conferences such as NeurIPS, CVPR, AAAI, ISCA, HPCA, DAC, and ICCAD.

Faith Johnson received the Chancellor's Leadership Award at this year's Gala. This award is given to a graduate student who exemplifies excellence and truly embodies a commitment to leadership and involvement on campus and/or in the community.

Read more at: https://www.ece.rutgers.edu/news/ece-graduate-student-faith-johnson-won-chancellors-leadership-award-2024

Mukund Ramakrishnan received a Chancellor's Research Excellence Award during the 9th Annual Chancellor's Student Leadership Award Gala. The Chancellor's Student Leadership Awards honor undergraduate and graduate students who consistently demonstrate collaboration, leadership, and resourcefulness, have a tremendous passion for Rutgers, and go outside their responsibilities to achieve goals.

Mukund was an undergraduate student in Prof. Emina Soljanin's group under this year's James J. Slade Scholars Program. His oral presentation on his thesis was the ECE representative at the JJ Slade symposium. Mukund's NSF GRFP research proposal (based on his JJ Slade thesis) has received an NSF GRFP Honorable Mention. It concerns anonymous Internet communications. Mukund's extracurricular activities are equally impressive. To mention one last week, he conducted his original piece at a conducting class recital.

Mukund will attend graduate school. He has offers from UIUC, Purdue, NYU, and other PhD programs.

Congratulations to Mukund and Emina!

Dr. Michael Caggiano received EGC Students' Professor of the Year Award 2023 - 2024. Rutgers SOE students selected one professor from each department who best exemplified the SOE mission of “Education, Research, and Service” in the 2023-2024 academic year for the Engineering Governing Council (EGC) Students' Professor of the Year Award. The award is decided based on student nominations and voting for each department. This is the second time that Dr. Caggiano won this award. Dr. Caggiano has served as an ECE Lecturer after his retirement from the ECE Department. His enthusiasm and devotion for teaching has not changed a bit after that.

Congratulations to Michael!

Congratulations to our brilliant ECE Seniors for an outstanding Capstone Expo 2024! 🥳 🎉 Thank you to all of the students, staff, and judges that made the entire event possible. Your hard work and dedication are very appreciated! Check out the biggest prize winners above👆

The Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs (EVPAA) awarded a Presidential Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence for the academic year 2023-2024 to Bo Yuan as one of the university's most distinguished young faculty members. This award is bestowed in recognition of his outstanding scholarly accomplishments in his years at Rutgers, as documented in the evaluation that has led to his recent recommendation for promotion to Associate Professor, subject to approval by the Board of Governors. The award will be presented to him at a reception to be held at the University President's house in early May.

We are very proud of Bo for his achievements and high recognition. Congratulations!

The Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs (EVPAA) awarded a Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence for the academic year 2023-2024 to Umer Hassan as one of the university's most distinguished young faculty members.

This award is bestowed in recognition of his outstanding teaching accomplishments in his years at Rutgers, as documented in the evaluation that has led to his recent recommendation for promotion to Associate Professor, subject to approval by the Board of Governors. The award will be presented to him at a reception to be held at the University President's house in early May.

Congratulations to Umer!

Attention all admitted students!🚨 Join us in ONE WEEK to learn about the resources, opportunities, and support available to you as you begin your academic career in the ECE Graduate Program.🧠🤝