The Rutgers Board of Governors appointed Shriram Ramanathan as the first holder of the Rodkin-Weintraub Chair in Engineering. The chair was established in 2018 through a gift from the Rodkin Family Foundation and a matching gift by an anonymous donor.

Ramanathan, who will join the faculty at Rutgers School of Engineering in the fall of 2022 from Purdue University, is widely recognized for his scholarly contributions and leadership in metastable semiconductors and device physics for artificial intelligence, robotics, brain-machine interfaces and adaptive electromagnetic materials and devices.

A professor in the School of Engineering at Purdue, Ramanathan received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and was a research staff member at Components Research Labs at Intel for over three years. He then served on the applied physics faculty at Harvard University for nearly a decade. Their group conducts research in oxide semiconductors for neuromorphic computing, optoelectronics and haptic intelligence, and collaborates with a broad set of research groups across engineering and natural sciences.

Ramanathan has a strong record of securing external funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and from the National Science Foundation, publishing more than 195 peer-reviewed articles in major research journals. He has delivered numerous invited talks and plenary addresses at international conferences, and has been invited to attend workshops organized by the United States National Academy of Sciences Keck Futures Program and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium and has served as a Kavli Fellow Lecturer for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Guosong Yang has joined the ECE Department as a new Assistant Professor. Guosong received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Chanpaign, IL in 2013 and 2017, respectively. His research interests include switched and hybrid systems, networked control systems, learning in games, and their applications to cyber-physical systems and network security. His work has won the ACM SIGBED HSCC Best Paper Award in 2019. 

Daniel Burbano Lombana has joined the ECE Department as a new Assistant Professor. Daniel received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II, Italy in 2015, and his M.S.c degree in Industrial Automation from the National University of Colombia in 2012. His research interests include dynamical systems and control theory with an emphasis on distributed network systems, collective animal behavior, swarm intelligence, and robot autonomy.

Professor Waheed Bajwa will serve as the ECE Graduate Director for a period of 3 years (2022-2025). We feel grateful that Waheed stepped up to take on this important role for our department. Waheed has a very strong background in research, teaching and student advising. We look forward to working with Waheed closely to bring our graduate program to a new level in the coming years. 

Associate Professor Chung-Tse Michael Wu will serve as the ECE Associate Undergraduate Director for AY 2022-2023. We are grateful that he has stepped up to take on this role. Going forward, on top of his excellent research work and equipped by his rich mentoring/advising experiences in both undergraduate and graduate students, Michael will serve as the interface between the university/SoE and ECE to coordinate student tours,open houses, and various related events.

Dario Pompili and Tuyen X. Tran (Rutgers PhD. 2018) have won the  IEEE Vehicular Technology Society 2022 Jack Neubauer Memorial Award recognizing the best systems paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology for their paper entitled "Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Multi-Server Mobile-Edge Computing Networks".  The award consists of a certificate and $1,000 divided equally among all authors.   The award will presented tat the upcoming VTC2022-Fall conference in London, September 26-29, 2022. 

Tuyen Tran recieved his PhD. from Rutgers in 2018 and is currently a Senior Inventive Scientist with AT&T Labs Research in Bedminster, NJ.

Congratulations to Dario (pictured left) and Tuyen !

ECE Professor Yingying Chen is the recipient of a new award from the National Science Foundation under the Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) program for the project "A General Framework for Accelerating AI on Resource-Constrained Edge Devices.” This is a three-year $600,000 research project.

This project aims to develop a novel framework that can efficiently design neural-network architectures suitable for execution on edge devices. The upward trend of the pervasive usage of edge devices provides excellent opportunities for on-device intelligence in future mobile and IoT applications, including mobile augmented reality (AR)/Virtual reality (VR), smart manufacturing, mobile healthcare, and autonomous vehicles. While these edge devices have complete software/hardware stacks to execute machine-learning models, they usually have constrained computing resources. They cannot afford to execute the machine-learning models directly. The proposed framework develops network architectures that simultaneously balance memory cost, computing efficiency, and prediction accuracy, which can advance on-device AI applications with low-latency and high-efficiency requirements. The new deployment optimization methods can generally benefit neural-network implementation and deployment on heterogeneous commodity computing platforms without customized hardware.

More details on the project can be found at the NSF page here: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2211163&HistoricalAwards=false

Congratulations to Yingying!