ECE Research Day 2019, held on Friday, December 6, was a great success. This event was a great opportunity for ECE students, PostDoc Associates and visiting students to present their research projects, share their creative ideas, and network with their peers. 61 posters were presented by graduate and undergraduate students (including summer research, internships, and co-ops), covering a diverse range of research topics. Also, two Fall 2019 Capstone teams had a chance to showcase their senior design project: "Drone Object Detection and Tracking" advised by Prof. Jorge Ortiz and "Resistor Sorter" advised by Prof. Hana Godrich. The event was well-received by faculty, students and industry representatives. The special thanks to Prof. Laleh Najafizadeh for coordinating this important event that showcases the exciting research in our department!

Tahiya Chowdhury has been selected to attend the Computing Research Association Committee on Widening Participation workshop to be held on April 16-18 in New Orleans. Tahiya will participate in the Grad Cohort for Women workshop. CRA will fully support travel and related expenses.

At the Grad Cohort for Women, attendees will spend two days interacting with about 20 senior female computing-related researchers and professionals, who will share pertinent information on graduate school survival skills, as well as more personal information and insights about their experiences. The workshop will include a mix of formal presentations and informal discussions and social events. By attending Grad Cohort attendees will be able to build mentoring relationships and develop peer networks that will form the basis for ongoing activities during their graduate career and beyond.

Tahiya is a Ph.D. student working with Prof. Jorge Ortiz and a member of Cyber Physical Intelligence Lab. Her current research focuses on time series segmentation and change point detection using unsupervised learning for limited training data scenarios. She received an MS in Computer Engineering from Rutgers University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Tahiya served as President of the Society of Women Engineers Rutgers Graduate Chapter in 2018 and was a Rutgers Predoctoral Leadership Fellow in 2018-2019. Her long term research goal is to build intelligent tools to facilitate smarter and reliable interaction between human and machine predictions.

Sukhjit Singh, an undergraduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University, has won the Best Outreach Efforts award in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE) 2019 NSF REU Student Poster Competition. He also received a travel grant to attend the competition, which took place in November in Salt Lake City.

Singh is a member of a research group led by Dr. Aaron D. Mazzeo, an associate professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University. The research team is composed of Sukhjit Singh, Dr. Ramendra K. Pal (Postdoctoral Associate), Emily Gruber (Undergraduate, ECE), Sowmya Balakrishnan (Undergraduate, ECE), and Mark Orzeszko (Graduate Student, MAE). The poster presents the team’s work on Portable Electrochemical Sensing and the Internet of Things (IOT) for Wearable Papertronic Sensors. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant #1653584.

“Studies have demonstrated that flexible biosensors are capable of detecting biofluids such as wound fluid and blood, which can convey critical information about one’s physiological state. However, few biosensors can analyze the chemical composition of sweat (Ex: Lactate, Cortisol, etc.) and lack the technology needed to process the signals from these sensors,” says Singh. “We address this issue by introducing a small lock-in amplifier that can be incorporated into a flexible wearable potentiostat to allow for noise-free sweat analysis. Applications of such a device include monitoring the health of athletes, soldiers, astronauts, and animals.”

The 2019 ASME IMECE Track 16-2 NSF REU Student Poster Competition is a student-centered IMECE-wide poster session for research funded by the National Science Foundation.

Singh says his research goal is to develop new devices to continuously monitor the health of users and lower the cost of healthcare.

A Rutgers student team led by ECE PhD student Mehdi Rahmati shared the first prize in the 2019 IEEE Communications Society (COMSOC) Student Competition for their project titled "LICOT: Litter-Information-Centric Ocean of Things.” LICOT provides a novel sensing framework to tackle marine pollution. The other members of the team include MS graduate student Archana Arjula (ECE), and undergraduates Agam Modasiya (MAE), Karun Kanda (CS), and Mohammad Nadeem (ECE). The team's advisor was Professor Dario Pompili who directs the Cyber-Physical Systems Lab in ECE. The Rutgers team tied for first place with two other teams from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Peking University.

Dedicated to the future leaders in communications and networking, IEEE COMSOC holds an annual student competition, encouraging communications engineering students to expand their knowledge, test and showcase new skills, and inspire innovation.The competition, Communication Technology Changing the World, recognizes students or teams of students who demonstrate the capacity to improve the lives of people, through the application of communication technology and the development of projects that meet the human needs of people. Team leader Mehdi Rahmati will be recognized with a $2000 cash prize and a plaque at the 2019 IEEE Globecom conference in Hawaii. You can find the team's paper on LICOT here and an associated video here.

Congratulations to the team on this outstanding recognition!