Rutgers Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Donate to the ECE Dept:
	Online Giving


Main Menu:
	Home
	Admissions
	Academics
	Schedule of Classes
	Distinguished Lecture Series
	ECE Computer Lab: Hours
	Research
	People
	School of Engineering

Dept ECE:
	ECE Webmail
	Faculty Hiring
	Business Forms

ECE Newsletters


Professional Science Masters Program:
	MBS degree

Find:
	People
	Places
	Events

Search:
	Rutgers Web Sites
	Rutgers INFOdex

Grad. Questions?
Undergrad. Questions?

NSF Awards Rutgers Winlab Research Team $7.5 Million to Develop Mobile Internet
The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year, $7.5 million grant to a Rutgers-led research team to develop a future Internet design optimized for mobile networking and communication.

The team of nine universities and several industrial partners has dubbed its project "MobilityFirst", reflecting the Internet's evolution away from traditional wired connections between desktop PCs and servers toward wireless data services on mobile platforms.

The group will design a "clean-slate" network architecture to accommodate the shift of Internet traffic to smart cellular phones, tablet computers and emerging mobile data services, said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of Rutgers Wireless Information Network Laboratory.

There are more than four billion mobile devices in use worldwide today, and experts predict that by 2015, these wireless devices will significantly outnumber wired devices on the Internet.

"The mobile Internet will do much more than support today's impressive lineup of smart cellular phones. It will simplify peoples interactions with their physical world", Professor Raychaudhuri said. For instance, he said, it will enable location-aware computing, allowing people to find nearby merchants or get driving or public transit directions, even if they don't know their location. It also will support machine-to-machine communications, such as wearable devices that monitor your health and communicate with hospitals or cars that alert other cars to congestion and send split-second commands to each other to avert collisions.

For more information read the complete article at news.rutgers.edu

The ECE Department Welcomes Dr. Shantenu Jha
Dear ECE Colleagues,

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Dr. Shantenu Jha will join the ECE faculty as a tenure track assistant professor, starting in the Spring, 2011.

Dr. Jha has demonstrated the multi-disciplinary expertise and conducted the interdisciplinary research that integrates computer engineering with computational applications in biology, chemistry and physics. His research includes theoretical and conceptual frameworks as well as implementations and applications.

Dr. Jha will bring a unique set of expertise to the ECE Department by enhancing the new synergies and collaborations within ECE faculty and across SOE and Rutgers. He will also bring the new strength to the ECE education program, particularly, in the Computer Engineering areas, including numerical methods and analysis, programming languages, scientific computing, data-intensive computing, cloud computing, etc.

Please join me to welcome Dr. Shantenu Jha to ECE faculty!

Dr. Yicheng Lu, Chair

WINLAB team wins MobiSys 2010 Best Paper Award
Suhas Mathur, Tong Jin, Nikhil Kasturirangan, Janani Chandrasekharan, and Wenzhi Xue, a team of ECE Ph.D., M.S. and undergraduate students together with Professors Marco Gruteser and Wade Trappe have won the best paper award at the ACM/USENIX MobiSys 2010 conference for the paper "ParkNet: Drive-by Sensing of Road-side Parking Statistics".

MobiSys is the premier international conference addressing broad systems research issues in mobile systems, applications, and services. It features a highly selective single-track program with an acceptance rate below 20%. The paper describes a method to create maps and statistics of available parkings spots, the same project was previously also featured in the MIT Technology Review.

Dr. Peter Meer and ECE Alumnus Dorin Comaniciu Win Longuet-Higgins Prize
The Longuet-Higgins Prize is an award given annually by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), for 'fundamental contributions in Computer Vision'.

The award recognizes CVPR papers from ten years past that have made a fundamental impact on computer vision research. The medal is named after theoretical chemist and cognitive scientist H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.

At the 2010 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Professor Peter Meer with the coautors Dr. Dorin Comaniciu, an ECE alumnus (Ph.D., 2000), and Dr. Visanathan Ramesh, both with Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, NJ, received the Longuet-Higgins prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision in the past ten years.

The original paper, "Real-Time Tracking of Non-Rigid Objects using Mean Shift" appeared in 2000 CVPR and used the previously developed mean shift algorithm in a new application for tracking in real-time objects which can also change their shape during the recorded sequence.

Professor Christopher Rose Wins Teaching Award

The Engineering Governing Council awarded the 2009 Excellence in Teaching Award to Professor Christopher Rose for excellence in teaching in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Professor Rose also received this award in 2005 and 2008.

Professor Eduardo Sontag Wins 2011 IEEE Control System s Award

Each year the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recommends a select group of recipients to receive the IEEE's most prestigious honors. This year the IEEE Board of Directors has named Professor Eduardo Sontag, the recipient of the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Award for "fundamental contributions to nonlinear systems theory and nonlinear feedback control".

Dr. Sontag is an IEEE Fellow. His research interests include Control Theory, Systems Biology and Theoretical Computer Science.

Professor Sontag is a member of the ECE Graduate Faculty and eligible to serve as the principal advisor for masters theses and doctoral dissertations in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Fall Ph.D. Qualifying Exam
The Fall Qualifying Ph.D. Exam has been scheduled for the week October 25-29, 2010. The deadline for registration for this exam is Friday, September 3, 2010. Late registrations will not be accepted.

If you plan to take this exam, please complete the registration form and return it to the graduate secretary Mrs. Klimkiewicz, ELE 134b.

Although there is some flexibility in choosing exams, your choices must be consistent with your major area of concentration and must be approved by your adviser or the graduate director before you submit the registration form. Also, please note that all students will be examined on Engineering Mathematics.

All students who started their Ph.D. program in the Fall 2009 term or earlier must take this exam in the Fall 2011 term. This applies equally to full-time and part-time students. Students who are supposed to take the exam and do not so may be dropped from the electrical and computer engineering graduate program by the graduate scholastic standing committee.

ECE Students Compete in Vex Robotics World Championship

from left to right: Nitish Thatte (MAE), Grant Imahara of Mythbusters TV show, Michael Koval (ECE) and Alex Weiner (ECE)

The Vex Robotics College Challenge World Championship is a gathering of top college robotics teams from around the world to celebrate their accomplishments and host a robotics competition. This year's Championship was held in Dallas, Texas from April 22 through April 24.

ECE students Michael Koval and Alex Weiner with MAE student Nitish Thatte travelled to Dallas and competed with 29 other college teams for the title of world champion. After three days of competition, Rutgers had 7 wins and 2 losses placing the team 10th out of 29 overall, and tied for third place if considering only win/loss records.

The Rutgers Team was also awarded the College Challenge Innovate Award for developing the HAX (Hardware Abstraction for Vex) abstraction layer and programming all of the competition software on MacOS and Linux computers.

For more information see the IEEE Robotics Homepage and the IEEE Robotics Vex competition preparation.

Congratulations to Michael Koval, Alex Weiner, Nitish Thatte and the entire IEEE Robotics Club !

The Rise of Autonomic Computing
The goal of autonomic computing, is to build systems and applications which manage themselves by responding to the data. They configure and adapt themselves in real time, analogous to the structure of a self-regulating biological ecosystem.

Today there are many applications of autonomic computing. In a lecture given during the EGEE 5th User Forum last week, Manish Parashar, the founding director of the Center for Autonomic Computing and The Applied Software Systems Laboratory at Rutgers University, said that this approach can also be applied to complex grid infrastructures which are similarly complex, and becoming so intricate that they are not achieving their full potential.

For more information on autonomic computing, click here.

ECE Alumnus Wins NSF Career Award
ECE alumnus, Xiaolin Li has been awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER award for his proposal titled "SMART: Scalable Adaptive Runtime Management Algorithms and Toolkit for Large-Scale Dynamic Scientific Applications," which is focused on integrating computation, communication, data, I/O, and energy considering in managing large scientific applications on high-end computing systems.

Dr. Xiaolin Li graduated from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of Rutgers University with a PhD under the supervision of Dr. Manish Parashar in 2005, and has been with the Computer Science Department of Oklahoma State University since 2005. His proposed SMART toolkit is built on the GrACE/HRMS computational engine developed at Rutgers and further broadens its scope to loosely-coupled parallel and distributed paradigms and enriches it with new holistic algorithms.

ECE Professors Use Wireless Technology To Ease Parking Congestion
As reported in Technology Review a Winlab team of researchers led by Professor Marco Gruteser and Professor Wade Trappe, mounted ultrasonic distance sensors on the passenger side doors of vehicles. Using data collected over two months as the drivers commuted through Highland Park, NJ, the researchers developed an algorithm that translated the ultrasonic distance readings into a count of available parking spaces that was 95 percent accurate. By combining this with GPS data, they also generated maps of which spaces were occupied and which were open that were over 90 percent accurate.

Traffic congestion is a huge problem nationwide, particularly in downtown areas. The problem is so serious that some cities, such as San Francisco, have invested millions of dollars in "smart parking infrastructure".

Read the complete article from Technology Review.

Dr. Burdea and Rutgers Tele-Rehabilitation Institute Publish Landmark Research
The leading article of the Archives on Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Journal (January 2010 issue) describes Rutgers Tele-Rehabilitation Institute's groundbreaking research in collaboration with Indiana University School of Medicine on home tele-rehabilitation for adolescents with cerebral palsy.

Dr. Burdea and the Institute have pioneered the use of the Sony Playstation 3 in hand rehabilitation using a virtual Avatar.

For more information read the complete article "In-Home Virtual Reality Videogame Telerehabilitation in Adolescents With Hemiplegic Cerebral Palsy".

Wolf Zimmass, MERL Chief Engineer, Serves as Mentor
H.W. (Wolf) Zimmass, chief engineer/operations manager of the Microelectronics Research Laboratory is a U.S. Army Vietnam veteran who has been mentoring student veterans at Rutgers and writing casually about some of his experiences in that long and complex war. The Rutgers Oral History Archives is planning to record his memories and thoughts.

For more information read the complete article in the Rutgers Focus.

Center for Autonomic Computing works with Microsoft to Accelerate Applications
Center for Autonomic Computing works with Microsoft to Accelerate Real-World Applications on Windows HPC Server 2008
The Center for Autonomic Computing (CAC) at Rutgers University is collaborating with Microsoft to accelerate real-world parallel and distributed applications on the Windows HPC Server 2008 platform.

For example, as part of this effort, students at at CAC are working with industry partners to enable the rapid parallel processing of large amounts of data, such as molecular data used by pharmaceutical companies, and have developed innovative autonomic solutions that can accelerate Hadoop by up to 250% for these applications.

Additional details can be found at
www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005832.

Xiaojun Tang Wins Best Student Paper Award at VTC'09
Xiaojun Tang, an ECE Graduate Research Fellow and a Ph.D. student supervised by Prof. Predrag Spasojevic at WINLAB, ECE Department, Rutgers University, received the Best Student Paper Award sponsored by Wiley Blackwell Publishing at the IEEE 70th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) in Anchorage, Alaska, USA, September 20, 2009.

VTC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. The paper, entitled "Multi-Cell User-Scheduling and Random Beamforming Strategies for Downlink Wireless Communications" studies the issue of inter-cell interference (ICI) mitigation in multi-cell wireless downlink systems by aligning interference across cells.

The proposed scheme, based on coordinated beamforming and user scheduling, exploits the spatial dimension without joint-cell transmission, and can significantly increase throughputs while requiring minimal intra/inter-cell information exchange in wireless cellular systems.

The paper is coauthored with Dr. Sean A. Ramprashad and Dr. Haralabos Papadopoulos of NTT DoCoMo Communications Labs USA, Inc., Palo Alto, CA.

This work was performed when Xiaojun Tang worked as a research intern at DoCoMo Labs in Summer of 2008. His internship is a result of the collaboration between WINLAB and DoCoMo Labs.

Integrative Graduate Education Research Training Program
Are you interested in nanotechnology and clean energy research?

The Rutgers IGERT Program (Integrative Graduate Education Research Training Program) is seeking motivated graduate fellow for a new interdisciplinary, multi-university graduate training program. Fellows will received a Ph.D. from one of the following departments - electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry or physics. Dissertation research will focus on the scientific, technical and policy issues related to sustainable and affordable energy generation and storage technologies, emphasizing innovations in nanotechnology.

For more information

Aliye Ozge Kaya, Mung Chiang and Wade Trappe Win Best Paper Award
Aliye �zge Kaya, a Rutgers ECE Ph.D. student and a member of WINLAB, Professor Mung Chiang from Princeton University and Professor Wade Trappe from Rutgers ECE and WINLAB have won a best paper award at GLOBECOM 2009, in Honolulu, HI.� GLOBECOM is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society. Their paper, entitled "P2P-ISP Cooperation: �Risks and Mitigation in Multiple-ISP Networks," was selected as the best paper from the Next-Generation Networking and Internet Symposium, a track at GLOBECOM that is focused on the improving the design of the Internet and next generation networks. �The paper develops a mathematical model for exploring the unintended and counter-intuitive behaviors emerging out of P2P-ISP (Internet Service Provider) cooperation.�

Professor Zhao Elevated to IEEE Fellow
Each year the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for one of the Institute's most prestigious honors, elevation to IEEE Fellow.

Professor Yicheng Lu, Chair of our Department announced the honor and said "It is my great pleasure to advise that at its November 2009 meeting, Dr. Jian H. Zhao of our Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, has been elevated to IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2010, for contributions to vertical silicon carbide devices and process technologies".

Professor Lu states "I am sure I can speak for our entire faculty and staff in sending our sincere congratulations to Professor Zhao for this wonderful honor and achievement."

Professor Gruteser Wins NSF Career Award

Professor Marco Gruteser Wins National Science Foundation Career Award

Professor Marco Gruteser has received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER) Award to study techniques to enhance wireless location privacy in client devices such as smartphones.

He will be developing models to estimate location tracking risks in location-based applications and wireless systems. These models complement existing models for transactional database records and can be used to guide system designers or to inform users about their current level of privacy. In addition, the project is expected to provide fundamental insights on physical layer techniques that limit the accuracy with which infrastructure location sensors can locate a transmitting client and techniques that can automatically detect candidate pseudoidentifiers in transmitted messages. He will incorporate these techniques in a privacy guard software component for mobile client devices.

According to the NSF program solicitation, the CAREER Program "offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations."

Congratulations to Dr. Marco Gruteser for winning the prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award !

Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering
94 Brett Road
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8058
Phone: 732/445-3262
Fax: 732/445-2820