President Jonathan Holloway has announced that Professor Waheed Bajwa  has been selected to receive a Presidential Outstanding Faculty Scholarly Award for 2021-22. This award is bestowed in recognition of Waheed's outstanding teaching and scholarly accomplishments in his years at Rutgers, as documented in the evaluation that has led to his recent promotion to Full Professor. The award carries with it a grant of $1000 from the Trustees to assist his academic efforts in the coming year. The award will be presented to Waheed at a reception to be held at the President’s Tent located on College Avenue Campus on Thursday, May 5, 2022.

ECE Associate Professor Salim El Rouayheb is the recipient of a new NSF RINGS award for the project titled "Walk For Resiliency & Privacy: A Random Walk Framework for Learning at the Edge."  Dr. El Rouayheb is the PI on this  three-year $999,999.00 collaborative effort between Rutgers and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Rutgers’ share of the award is $330,162.00.

In this project, Dr. El Rouayheb and his team aim to advance Random Walk learning algorithms  for the joint design of distributed learning and networking algorithms for Next Generation (NextG) wireless systems.  The rigid centralized infrastructure of current systems can limit the full potential of achieving resiliency and privacy in NextG systems. Random walk algorithms enable a fluid architecture where centralization and full decentralization constitute two corner points. The proposed work will focus on major challenges and opportunities specific to the applicability of random walk learning in NextG, namely: (i) Adaptability to the heterogeneity of the data and the heterogeneity and dynamic nature of the network; (ii) Resiliency and graceful degradation in the face of failures via coding-theoretic redundancy methods; (iii) Model distribution across nodes and random walking snakes; and (iv) Privacy of the locally owned data.

More details on the project can be found on the NSF page here.

Congratulations Salim!

President Jonathan Holloway has announced that Associate Professor Chung-Tse Michael Wu  has been selected to receive a Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence as one of the university's most distinguished young faculty members. This award is bestowed in recognition of Michael's  outstanding scholarly accomplishments in his years at Rutgers, as documented in the evaluation that has led to his recent promotion to Associate Professor. The fellowship carries with it a grant of $1000 from the Trustees to assist his academic efforts in the coming year. The award will be presented to Michael at a reception to be held at the President’s Tent located on College Avenue Campus on Thursday, May 5, 2022.

This is a wonderful recognition of Michael's scholarly achievements. It is also a matter of great pride for the ECE department and the second such recognition of a young faculty member's scholarhsip in ECE in the past two years. Dr. Anand Sarwate was a recipient of this honor in 2020.

We are happy to announce that the Board of Governors has approved Dr. Waheed Bajwa’s  promotion to Professor with tenure effective July 1, 2022.  Congratulations on this well deserved accomplishment Waheed!

We look forward to your continued success!

Recently, the Rutgers IEEE VEXU robotics team competed in Fairmont, West Virginia, and Salisbury, Maryland. The team earned both the Judges’ Award as well as the Design Award for excellent performance both in the competitions and in the design process. After becoming a finalist in the Salisbury competition and earning 2nd place in the Skills Competition, the team earned a spot in the 2022 VEXU World Championship held in Dallas, Texas.