The ECE Department is proud to announce that the Board of Governors has approved Dr. Shantenu Jha's promotion to Professor with tenure effective July 1, 2020. Congratulations on this well deserved accomplishment Shantenu!

We look forward to your continued success!

A team of researchers led by ECE Assistant Professor Sheng Wei has won the Best Paper Award at the ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys 2020) for their paper titled "QuRate: Power-Efficient Mobile Immersive Video Streaming”. ACM MMSys is one of the major conferences of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM). It provides a forum for researchers to present and share their latest research findings in multimedia systems. This work was conducted by Prof. Wei and his PhD student Nan Jiang, in collaboration with researchers from both academia and industry (SUNY Binghamton, WPI, SUNY Buffalo, Adobe Research, and UNL).

In addition to the Best Paper Award, the paper also won the DASH-IF Excellence in DASH Award (3rd place) presented at ACM MMSys 2020. This award acknowledges papers substantially addressing MPEG-DASH (i.e., the international standard for adaptive video streaming over HTTP) as the presentation format and are selected for presentation at ACM MMSys 2020. Preference is given to practical enhancements and developments which can sustain future commercial usefulness of MPEG-DASH.

Congratulations to Sheng and his team on this recognition!

The abstract of the award winning paper is below:

Smartphones have recently become a popular platform for deploying the computation-intensive virtual reality (VR) applications, such as immersive video streaming (a.k.a., 360-degree video streaming). One specific challenge involving the smartphone-based head mounted display (HMD) is to reduce the potentially huge power consumption caused by the immersive video. To address this challenge, we first conduct an empirical power measurement study on a typical smartphone immersive streaming system, which identifies the major power consumption sources. Then, we develop QuRate, a quality-aware and user-centric frame rate adaptation mechanism to tackle the power consumption issue in immersive video streaming. QuRate optimizes the immersive video power consumption by modeling the correlation between the perceivable video quality and the user behavior. Specifically, QuRate builds on top of the user's reduced level of concentration on the video frames during view switching and dynamically adjusts the frame rate without impacting the perceivable video quality. We evaluate QuRate with a comprehensive set of experiments involving 5 smartphones, 21 users, and 6 immersive videos using empirical user head movement traces. Our experimental results demonstrate that QuRate is capable of extending the smartphone battery life by up to 1.24X while maintaining the perceivable video quality during immersive video streaming. Also, we conduct an Institutional Review Board (IRB)-approved subjective user study to further validate the minimum video quality impact caused by QuRate.

Choosing to attend Rutgers School of Engineering was an easy decision for Mohammed Nadeem, who graduated in May as a computer engineering major in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “I knew the research opportunities were pretty good – that was the main attraction,” he says.

From the start, the Cherry Hill, New Jersey native wanted to study technology and electronics. “I really like software engineering and machine learning,” he explains. Even more important, “I liked the fact that undergraduates could do research with whatever professor they wanted to, as ECE professors are pretty open to that idea.”

As a result, in his junior year, Nadeem joined the Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory (CPS Lab) run by ECE professor Dario Pompili, where he was exposed to – and engaged in – graduate-level research.

Nadeem recalls that after receiving an email saying the lab was looking for people to work on a new project, he looked into it. “The project was very interesting, as it worked with programming an underwater robot to perform autonomous tasks. I thought that would be pretty cool. There are self-driving robots, cars, and drones – but nothing underwater, which made this a really unique project.”

As part of the research team, Nadeem programmed the remotely operated underwater vehicles to take adaptive sampling for near-real-time water-quality assessments. The samples would be able to be stored for subsequent retrieval for analysis.

Pompili recalls, “He finished his spring semester research by designing a distributed sampling algorithm that used consensus to determine which vehicles should sample which areas. Afterward, the research expanded into using multi-agent reinforcement learning to conduct adaptive sampling.”

Nadeem gained first-hand experience in publishing when he co-authored a research paper under the guidance of Pompili and ECE doctoral students. The paper, which presented CPS Lab research regarding optimized sampling, was published in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference on Underwater Networks and Systems (WUWNet) in October 2019.

“I like working on interesting problems,” says Nadeem. “The CPS Lab gave me the ability to do that while also working in so many different areas of engineering. The work I’ve done has really broadened my knowledge and given me a lot of experience.”

It is experience and knowledge that earned Nadeem and fellow team members First Prize – tying with students from MIT and Peking University – in a prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer’s competition last fall. “We basically used the underwater vehicles to create a network able to monitor marine pollution,” he explains.

In addition to research opportunities, Nadeem has enjoyed the freedom and flexibility to take different classes in different departments and gain new knowledge. He is convinced that this is one of the biggest advantages of being a Rutgers student.

He also enjoyed the experience of serving on a planning committee for the Muslim Student Association (MSA) during his sophomore year, as well as being a member of ECE Honor Society, Eta Kappa Nu – and encourages new students to be active in extra-curricular activities right away.

Nadeem is eager to start a year-long software engineering residency with Google in New York City come summer. “I’ll receive two months of training in Google products and tools before doing a rotation through two teams for five months each,” he explains. Residents in this highly desirable program are likely to be hired after the year is up.

Taking a longer view, Nadeem also looks forward to giving back to the school. “I benefited from scholarships – and it would be really nice if in the future I could donate some money and help someone else with their tuition.”

The 2020 Undergraduate and Graduate Award Ceremony was held online on Wednesday June 3rd.
A copy of the presentation slides is available here.

Opening remarks were made by ECE Chair Narayan Mandayam, Dean Thomas N. Farris, and ECE Undergraduate Director Wade Trappe.

ECE Faculty presented Undergraduate Leadership / Service Awards to:

           Timothy Petersen
           Angie Flores
           James Pasko
           Eric Kraut
           Soo Min Kwon
           Sagar Shah

The George and Ilsa Goubau Memoria Awards for Academic Excellence and Strength in Electromagnetics were presented to:

            Lori Cheng
            Alexander Laemmle

The Rutgers Engineering Society Outstanding Undergraduate Awards were presented to:

           Shantanu Laghate
           Varun Ravichandran

Graduate awards introductory remarks were given by Graduate Director Zoran Gajic. The ECE Graduate Program had 28 doctoral graduates in the 2019/2020 school year.

The following doctoral graduates are the recipients of the ECE Graduate Program Academic Achievement Awards:

          Jian Liu (advisor Prof. Chen)
          Zahra Shakeri (advisor Prof. Bajwa)
          Hafiz Imtiaz (advisor Prof. Sarwate)
          Mehmet Atkas (advisor Prof. Soljanin)
          Tashina Sanam (advisor Prof. Godrich)
          Muhammad A. Lodhi (advisor Prof. Bajwa)

The Teaching Assistant Award for the Spring 2019 semester were presented to:

         Amir Behrouzi Far
         Batoul Taki
         Fangzhou Yu

The Teaching Assistant Award for the Fall 2019 semester were presented to:

         Muhammad Khizar Anjum
         Hua Deng
         Pengfei Xie

The Graduate Leadership / Service Award was given to:

         Diksha Prakash

The Professor Narindra Puri Memorial Endowed Scholarship awards were presented to:

         Intessar Al-Iedani
         Lingyi Xu

The Paul Panayotatos Endowed Scholarship was awarded to:

        Tong Wu 

IEEE Communications Society Phoenix ISS Awards were presented to:

         Wuyang Zhang
         Mohammad Yousefvang

Prof. Narayan Mandayam, the ECE Department Chair gave closing remarks.

ECE Graduation Congratulations Video. Watch congratulations video from Dr. Mandayam, Dr. Godrich, and Dr. Trappe.

Expand the article by clicking on the link above and then click on the 

Watch ECE Graduation Congratulations video link

Please join the ECE Undergraduate and Graduate Award Ceremony on Wednesday June 3rd at 5:00 PM. 

You can join the event by clicking on the link below.

https://rutgers.webex.com/rutgers/onstage/g.php?MTID=ecc088c66515564d39b...

The event password should be already populated, but if prompted please use the password "2020" without the quotes.