Professor Emina Soljanin has been selected as the 2023 recipient of the Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award. This award is given by the IEEE Information Theory Society to honor an individual who has shown outstanding leadership in, and provided long-standing, exceptional service to, the Information Theory community. The selection committee was particularly impressed with the diversity of Emina's service activities, especially her mentorship of young researchers.

We had a very successful ECE Capstone EXPO yesterday with a record number of 71 teams (274 students). A panel of 60 judges from industry and academia joined us to select the top 10 projects. In addition, three special awards (best in research, best in impact, and best in commercialization) and three Galbiati Entrepreneurial awards were selected by the judges.  

Speaking with the judges, I can report that they were very impressed with the quality of the capstone projects and the enthusiasm with which the students presented their work.  Many thanks to our panel of judges for their effort and the time taken from their busy schedules to support and celebrate our students’ achievements. 

Special thanks to the ECE Staff:  Pam, Arletta, John, Kevin and Chris for helping to make this year’s EXPO such a success! This would not have been possible without their hard work and dedication, and months of planning. My special thanks also to Demetrios Lambropoulos who has worked tirelessly from Fall 2022 to help and support the Capstone program.  Many thanks also to all the students who volunteered in this event! 

I would like to congratulate this year’s senior students who participated in the ECE capstone program and their advisers from inside and outside Rutgers ECE who helped guide their projects. Your help and support of our students are essential to the success of the Capstone Program!  

2023 ECE Capstone Google Photo Album

Here is the list of award recipients and their advisors: 

Top ten projects: 

ECE Distinguished Professor Athina Petropulu received a new grant from the Army Research Office for a project entitled "Dual Function Radar Communication Systems for Efficient and Secure Spectrum Utilization". This is a 3-year project and was funded at $480K.
For a long time, the fields of wireless communication and radar sensing have been advancing independently of each other. With today's technology, radio frequency (RF) front-end architectures are basically the same in radar and wireless communication systems. Further, by constantly seeking access to more bandwidth, wireless systems have been shifting to high frequency bands, which have been traditionally occupied by radar systems. Recently there has been a lot of interest in capitalizing on the hardware and frequency convergence to design  integrated sensing and communication systems (ISC), i.e., systems that can perform sensing and communication out of a single hardware platform.  Dual Function Radar-Communication (DFRC) systems are ISC systems that use the same waveform as well as the same hardware platform for both sensing and communication, thus providing high spectral efficiency in addition to hardware and power savings. However, several challenges need to be overcome before the full potential of DFRC systems can be realized. Firstly, DFRC systems must be able to efficiently use available bandwidth for both functions, as opposed to current DFRC solutions that are typically communication-focused or sensing-focused. Secondly, compensating for the high attenuation experienced by high frequencies, and also achieving high localization accuracy, requires large arrays that are expensive and consume a lot of power. Thirdly, as communication information is embedded in the probing waveform, DFRC systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping by potential targets.

The proposed project will advance the state-of-the-art of DFRC systems by developing bandwidth efficient systems that can flexibly trade-off bandwidth for communication performance. Novel hybrid analog-digital architectures will be developed for achieving good performance with reduced hardware and energy cost. Novel physical layer security methods for system design will be developed that can address mobile user scenarios and intelligent eavesdroppers. The systems to be developed  will have profound impact on applications such as autonomous driving vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, surveillance, search and rescue, and networked robots in advanced manufacturing applications that rely on communications and sensing.

Congratulations to Athina!
 

The Board of Governors has approved Dr. Sheng Wei's promotion to Associate Professor with tenure effective July 1, 2023.   Congratulations on this well deserved accomplishment, Sheng!

We look forward to your continued success and contributions to the department, SoE and the university.