ECE Researchers receive NSF Grant for Design of Secure IoT Devices

A team of ECE faculty members led by Assistant Professor Chung-Tse Michael Wu (PI) have received an Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award from the NSF for the project titled "Directional Modulation Non-Contiguous OFDM Retrodirective Communication for Secure IoT." This project includes Associate Professor Waheed Bajwa and Distinguished Professor Narayan Mandayam as co-PIs. The total award amount for this two-year project is $300,000.

This project aims to address a critical security issue in IoT applications that are susceptible to malicious spoofing attacks via an innovative PHY solution combining Non-Contiguous Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (NC-OFDM) transmission and a directional modulation retrodirective array. As compared with traditional OFDM transmissions, NC-OFDM transmissions take place over a subset of active subcarriers to either avoid incumbent transmissions or for strategic considerations. On the other hand, retrodirective antenna arrays are well known to be able to respond to the interrogator by sending a signal back to the interrogator location without a priori knowledge, which is particularly useful in a multipath-rich environment. One way to realize the directional modulation functionality is to use time-modulated antenna arrays, in which the aliasing effects resulting from the time-modulation frequency are used to distort the signals in the undesired directions. Furthermore, the project will establish that the unique integration of NC-OFDM and directional modulation enabled by a time-modulated retrodirective antenna array whose modulation frequency is the NC-OFDM subcarrier can potentially lead to an unprecedented level of PHY hardware security against spoofing attacks by an adversary, even when the adversary is equipped with sophisticated Machine Learning based attack techniques.

Congratulations to Michael, Waheed and Narayan!

Mohammad Yousefvand and Wuyang Zhang win IEEE Comunications Society Phoenix ISS Awards

ECE Graduate students Mohammad Yousefvand and Wuyang Zhang were selected as the recipients of IEEE Communications Society Phoenix ISS Award for 2019-2020 academic year. The IEEE Communications Society Phoenix ISS Award was established to encourage engineering student to participate in professional activities. Awards are to be given to full-time or part-time students to cover expenses for students to attend the International Switching Symposium, or other IEEE Communications Society Conferences. Awards will provide: 1) One year’s membership in IEEE Communications Society 2) The student’s registration fee at the Conference 3) Travel and living expenses for the Conference. Preference for the awards is given to students submitting papers to an approved Conference within the United States or internationally.

This year's winners are Mohammad Yousefvang and Wuyang Zhang

Mohammad Yousefvand received the award to cover expenses incurred to present the paper titled "Learning-based Resource Optimization in Ultra Reliabe Low Latency HetNets" at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) December 2019, Big Island, Hawaii.

Abstract

In this paper, the problems of user offloading and resource optimization are jointly addressed to support ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC) in HetNets. In particular, a multi-tier network with a single macro base station (MBS) and multiple overlaid small cell base stations (SBSs) is considered that includes users with different latency and reliability constraints. Modeling the latency and reliability constraints of users with probabilistic guarantees, the joint problem of user offloading and resource allocation (JUR) in a URLLC setting is formulated as an optimization problem to minimize the cost of serving users for the MBS. In the considered scheme, SBSs bid to serve URLLC users under their coverage at a given price, and the MBS decides whether to serve each user locally or to offload it to one of the overlaid SBSs. Since the JUR optimization is NP-hard, we propose a low complexity learning-based heuristic method (LHM) which includes a support vector machine-based user association model and a convex resource optimization (CRO) algorithm. To further reduce the delay, we propose an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based solution to the CRO problem. Simulation results show that using LHM, the MBS significantly decreases the spectrum access delay for users (by ∼ 93\%) as compared to JUR, while also reducing its bandwidth and power costs in serving users (by ∼ 33\%) as compared to directly serving users without offloading.

 

Wuyang Zhang received the award to cover expenses to present the paper titled "Hetero-Edge: Orchestration of Real-time Vision Applications on Heterogeneous Clouds" at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM) April 2019, Paris France.

Abstract

Running computer vision algorithms on images or videos collected by mobile devices represent a new class of latency-sensitive applications that expect to benefit from edge cloud computing. These applications often demand real-time responses (e.g., <;100 ms), which can not be satisfied by traditional cloud computing. However, the edge cloud architecture is inherently distributed and heterogeneous, requiring new approaches to resource allocation and orchestration. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a latency-aware edge computing platform, aiming to minimize the end-to-end latency for edge applications. The proposed platform is built on Apache Storm, and consists of multiple edge servers with heterogeneous computation (including both GPUs and CPUs) and networking resources. Central to our platform is an orchestration framework that breaks down an edge application into Storm tasks as defined by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and then maps these tasks onto heterogeneous edge servers for efficient execution. An experimental proof-of-concept testbed is used to demonstrate that the proposed platform can indeed achieve low end-to-end latency: considering a real-time 3D scene reconstruction application, it is shown that the testbed can support up to 30 concurrent streams with an average perframe latency of 32ms, and can achieve 40% latency reduction relative to the baseline Storm scheduling approach.

 

Congratulations to Mohammad Yousefvand and Wuyang Zhang.  We look forward to your continued success!

Tong Wu receives the 2020 Paul Panayotatos Endowed Scholarship in Sustainable Energy

The 2020 Paul Panayotatos Endowed Scholarship in Sustainable Energy was awarded to ECE graduate student Tong Wu. Tong Wu is a PhD student working with Professor Jorge Ortiz in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Tong is a member of Prof. Jorge Ortiz' lab – the Cyber-Physical Intelligence lab – where researchers focus on designing new machine learning techniques on sensors in smart environments. One of the main application domains is in smart buildings.

Conserving energy and reducing energy consumption has been a major topic during recent years. A variety of energy monitoring systems have been designed and deployed on facilities such as buildings, server clusters and mobile phones to provide users with consumption information. It collects time-series data which shows how much energy they are using and how it is used in a period. Some advanced systems can provide further analysis and insights to identify unexpected excessive usage. Typically, these analyzes are based on pre-defined constant thresholds, regardless of the diversity and non-stationary characteristics of the normal pattern. In the context of big data and Internet-of-Things, there have been much more data collected by smart meters and sensors which makes it possible to develop machine learning algorithms that can differentiate between normal pattern and anomalous behavior.

Tong's current work is on designing interactive anomaly detection algorithms that use feedback from experts to find anomalies in building data. The data consists of sequences of readings from sensors that compromise the building management system (BMS); a supervisory control system that allows a building manager to centrally observe and respond to the operational state of building-related sub-systems – such as the Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and lighting.

To address these challenges, Tong and Prof. Ortiz introduced a new algorithm called RLAD. It combines reinforcement learning with active learning and label propagation to learn an anomaly detection model that generalizes and can adapt and improve dynamically through getting feedback reward on observing new data. With active learning, our model selects samples with most information and asks an expert to label them as ground truth. Our model is able to learn with historical data using very few labeled examples and directly adapt to the real-time applications without any additional parameter tuning. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to combine deep reinforcement learning for anomaly detection with active learning. In the early experiments, we outperform all state-of-art methods, both unsupervised and semi-supervised on precision, recall and F1-score.

Prof. Puri Scholarship Awarded to Intessar Al-Iedani and Lingyi Xu

The 2020 Professor Narendra Puri Scholarship was awarded to Intessar Al-Iedani and Lingyi Xu. Dr. Narendra Nath Puri was a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers for 38 years. He was dedicated to excellence in Electrical Engineering and countless students, faculty and alumni have benefited from his efforts. Dr. Puri passed away on December 4, 2015 at the age of 82. Dr. Kamal Puri, the wife of Dr. Puri, has generously donated this scholarship in honor of her husband and his work.

This year's award was given to Intessar Al-Iedani and Lingyi Xu, both PhD students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  Here are their bio's.

 

                       

Intessar Al-Iedani received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Department of Computer Engineering, University of Basra, Iraq, in 2003 and 2006, respectively. She worked as an assistant instructor at the Department of Computer Engineering, University of Basra, Iraq, from 2007 to 2012. After receiving a Graduate fellowship from the Higher Committee for Education Development in Iraq (HCED) in 2012, she started pursuing her PhD study at Rutgers University. Intessar received a Graduate Fellowship from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University for the academic years of 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. She is currently a candidate Ph.D. student studying under the guidance of Prof. Zoran Gajic. Intessar’s research focuses on the order reduction of large-scale wind energy systems with double fed induction generators (DFIG) using the balancing and singular perturbation methods.

Lingyi Xu is an MS student working with Dr. Zoran Gajic as her advisor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University. Her research is focused on control systems, computer vision and robotics. Lingyi recently received her MS at the  University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in May 2017. Her thesis was titled, “Monocular Visual Measurement for Mobile Robot.”

Congratulations to Intessar Al-Iedani and Lingyi Xu for winning the Dr. Narendra Puri Scholarship !

Message from new ECE Graduate Director Yingying Chen

Dear ECE Graduate Students,
 
I'm honored to take the responsibility of the ECE Graduate Director effective today. I'm proud that our department has a great graduate program, which has been growing quickly in the past years. Going forward, with the support and efforts from all of you, I will try my best to have our graduate program not only sustain these unusual time periods but also become more and more attractive to students with different needs from various backgrounds. I hope every student who graduated from our program will be well-trained both technically and socially and will embrace a bright future. 
 
There is so much that I could learn from Dr. Zoran Gajic's 17 years experience of managing the ECE Graduate Program. He has made significant milestone achievements in the program while trying to take care of every student in the program. I always respect him. Dr. Gajic and I will work closely during the summertime to conduct a smooth transition of the job. 
 
If you have any suggestions or thoughts about the graduate program that you would like to discuss, you are very welcome to email me or call me. To more effectively serve the program, I will use ecegraddirector@soe.rutgers.edu to communicate. 
 
Looking forward to working with all of you!
 
Best regards,
Dr. Yingying (Jennifer) Chen
ECE Graduate Director
 

Announcing Yingying Chen as ECE Graduate Director

Dear ECE Colleagues and Students: 

Yingying Chen will serve as the ECE Graduate Director beginning today for a period of 3 years. Yingying has been an outstanding contributor to the department's mission as Associate Undergraduate Director while leading an extremely successful and highly visible research program and also playing an important leadership role at WINLAB. I am grateful that she has stepped up to take on this increasingly challenging role in our department as we navigate these uncertain times. Please join me in welcoming Yingying.

I'd like to express my gratitude and thanks to the outgoing Graduate Director, Zoran Gajic for his 17 years of dedicated service to the ECE department. Zoran leaves a lasting legacy in the department as he has been a key player in the establishment of successful partnerships such as 3+2 programs with international University partners. He has also been a great advocate for our graduate student body and overseen many changes that led to the ECE graduate program growing to become one of the largest in the School of Graduate Studies. Please join me in thanking Zoran for his service.

Narayan Mandayam, ECE Department Chair

James J. Slade Scholars Program Online Showcase 2019-2020

The James J. Slade Scholars Program offers self-motivated engineering seniors who are passionate about experimentation the opportunity to perform an independent research project. Over the course of the program, scholars will write a thesis in preparation for graduate education and will receive guidance from professors, alumni mentors, and peers. The program will culminate in a research symposium where the scholars will have the opportunity to present their findings. The credits that scholars obtain through the program, can be applied towards a 5-year Masters degree in the Rutgers School of Engineering. This year, due to the recent challenges related to COVID-19, we have chosen to commemorate the JJ Slade Scholars through an online Symposium.

You can visit the 2019-2020 JJ Slade online Symposium by clicking here 

Congratulations to two outstanding ECE students Shantanu Laghate and Soo Min Kwon!

SOE/ECE Summer Virtual Tours

Summer Virtual Events

Learn about Rutgers Engineering from the comfort of your home or mobile device this summer.

Live Information Sessions

Includes: Dean's Overview, Engineering Student Panel, and Department Presentation

When: Every Tuesday and Thursday between June 16 and August 13
Time: 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Agenda:
2:30 pm to 2:50 pm School Overview
2:55 pm to 3:45 pm Department Presentation
3:55 pm to 4:30 pm Student Panel of Diverse Majors

ECE RUAA Webinar "How to Graduate in a Crisis and Pivot for Sucess", Virtual Event for Students June 25th, 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM

 

ECE alumnus, Soham Thacker, is going to be featured in a RUAA virtual event on June 25 at 10:30 AM and students are the target audience.

Webinar:  How to Graduate in a Crisis and Pivot for Success

Please use the provided links for more information:

This is the main website link: https://alumni.rutgers.edu/get-involved/events/webinar-how-to-graduate-i...

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