ECE Alumnus Dorin Comaniciu, PhD, recognized by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) for leading-edge achievements in artificial intelligence and advanced visualization

Since earning his doctoral degree from the Department  Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2000, Dorin Comaniciu has received numerous awards, including the School of Engineering’s 2016 Medal of Excellence for Distinguished Achievement in Research. Comaniciu, who is senior vice president of artificial intelligence and digital innovation at Siemens Healthineers, was recently elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in recognition of his seminal achievements in artificial intelligence and advance visualization.

As an independent organization of distinguished professionals from fields such as health and medicine and the natural, social, and behavioral sciences, NAM works to address critical issues in health, medicine, and related policy through national and international initiatives.

“We congratulate Dorin Comaniciu on this tremendous honor,” says Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Chair and Distinguished Professor Narayan Mandayam. “Election to NAM is a prestigious acknowledgement of his leadership and many contributions resulting in numerous new clinical products for improving the quality of healthcare in the fields of diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, and precision medicine.”

Comaniciu, who holds 269 U.S. healthcare technology patents and has co-authored 350 peer review publications, is also the recipient of the 2004 Siemens Inventor of the Year Award; the 2010 IEEE Longuet-Higgins Prize for fundamental contributions to computer vision; and the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Thomas Alva Edison Award for patents on 3D heart modeling, anatomical object detection, and personalized valve therapy. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

“The National Academy of Medicine is committed to transforming the delivery of patient care and improving the patient experience,” says Comaniciu, who is a proud Rutgers alumnus. “I am deeply honored to be singled out by my peers for membership in this august organization.”

Interested in computer security? The 4N6 Research Group at Rutgers ECE invites all Rutgers students, to compete in its first computer security competition called "Capture the Drone 2019". The 4N6 Research Group (Forensics Research Group) was founded by  Prof. Saman Zonouz in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. The first competition this Saturday (October 19th 2019) at the HACKRU event at the College Avenue Gym. 

Watch the Capture the Drone video at this link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-Nb_LJxFChlqhnCvaEZ9ihAN_myd9H6M/view

Registration is via the HACKRU app at the following link:

https://hackru.org/#home

Participating and attending the HACKRU and Capture the Drone competition are free.

Victor Abril ENG’21 wants to learn what makes tech tick

As a young child in Ecuador rising junior Victor Abril was fascinated by technology and determined to learn how things worked. “I remember my mom had bought me a toy car and as soon as she gave it to me, I wanted to know how it worked,” he recalls. “I grabbed a screw driver and opened it up. My mom wasn’t too happy about that.”

Abril left Ecuador at age 12 and settled with his family in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Determined to study engineering, he received his associate’s degree in engineering from Essex County College, before transferring to Rutgers School of Engineering as a sophomore last fall. Today, while he is an electrical and computer engineering major, he has also been helping to conduct research in civil and environmental engineering professor Jing (Peter) Jin’s lab since the summer of 2018.

Rutgers leads a consortium of nine schools – including Essex County College – in the Garden State Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (GS-LSAMP) program. Funded by the National Science Foundation, GS-LSAMP works to increase the number underrepresented minority graduates in STEM fields.   

“Essex would send students to other universities for summer research,” Abril explains. “I wanted to be sent to Rutgers and was last summer, where I worked in Professor Jin’s lab. After the program ended, he asked if I wanted to continue to conduct the research. I said ‘yes’ and have been conducting research in his lab ever since.”

From the start, according to Jin, Abril helped build miniature platforms for testing connected and automated vehicles, or CAVs. “Since then, he has become one of the key developers and researchers in my lab on this new alternative testing method for CAVs,” Jin says. “He has significantly upgraded my mini-vehicle platforms and has also helped organize several K-12 educational events at local elementary schools. “

Jin’s Smart Mobility Lab is currently building a miniature smart city to test autonomous and connected vehicles that can drive themselves and communicate with each other. This summer, Abril is part of a team that includes another undergraduate and a summer GS-LSAMP student.

While schools such as the University of Michigan have built real-size platforms for this kind of testing, Abril notes that the Rutgers small-scale platform is easier and less expensive to build and maintain. Because it uses a simulator with a steering wheel and brake and accelerator pedals, there is no need for a human driver – and no risk for liability.

“We’re trying to replicate a city environment and build the platform to enable research,” says Abril. “The platform is divided into three parts, so we’re building a miniature controlled toy, a platform city, and communications network.”

Not surprisingly for someone who took his toy car apart as a child, Abril is working on building the vehicle and will continue this work during the coming academic year.

“In the coming semester, Victor will continue to participate in the research and development for building the ‘digital sibling’ of real-world testing grounds,” says Jin, who is preparing to establish a smart mobility testing ground in New Brunswick later this year.

Abril has been conducting research since he was a freshman at Essex County College, when he worked on a summer artificial intelligence project at Stevens Institute of Technology involving applications of deep learning.

As a Rutgers student, Abril especially values all the research opportunities that are available to undergraduates. “You can do research outside of your department here,” he says. “You can ask professors working on projects outside of your department if you can work on them if they align with your interests.”

Abril ultimately hopes to leverage his Rutgers cross-disciplinary training and experience in electrical and civil and environmental engineering to pursue a Ph.D. “I’d like to work on automation and hopefully obtain a job in the automation industry conducting research on automated robots,” he says.

Photo by Deborah Feingold

Becoming an astronaut is challenging for anyone, but Marissa Navarro’s dream was complicated by an eight-year fight to stay in the United States. Today, however, the Mexican immigrant is one step closer to her goal of reaching outer space.

Navarro, an electrical and computer engineering student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, spent last summer mentored by NASA aerospace engineer Diana Trujillo, who was mission lead on the Mars Curiosity Rover. Navarro also secured a position with HawkEye 360, a space-based global intelligence company, and is slated to graduate next spring with a degree from Rutgers’ School of Engineering.

Navarro ‘s academic journey took three times longer than most students because of immigration hurdles.  “Looking back, I wouldn’t want to be graduating at 30, but because it took this long I value my education in a way that I think other students don’t,” she said.

Navarro first traveled to the United States in 2008 as part of an au pair program that allows eligible immigrants to stay in the country temporarily while they live with host families, performing 40 hours of childcare services a week. She started college in 2007 at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, where she majored in mechanical and electrical engineering. After watching an International Space Station mission on TV, she decided to focus on becoming an astronaut. In 2011, just a year before graduation, she and her husband first tried to move to United States in search of greater opportunities.

“My husband and I tried really hard to move legally and things kept going wrong,” she said. “First, we tried to start a business in New Jersey and then were denied visas and forced to move back. After the visas were denied, my husband landed a great engineering job and we waited in Mexico on the decision for a new visa application, which we were luckily granted, but then I was not allowed to work, so money was tight.”

Navarro, however, could pursue her education, although she would have to start over. “There were so many times I wanted to give up, but I knew I had to keep going,” she said. She quickly earned an associate’s degree from Bergen Community College and in 2017 transferred to Rutgers. 

“I visited the campus for an event at Douglass Residential College and I saw how much they wanted to help women in STEM, and it just felt right,” said Navarro, who joined the Space Technology Association of Rutgers (STAR). “I knew Rutgers was going to give me all the support I needed.” 

Less than a year later, Navarro was selected for the Brooke Owens Fellowship, which links women seeking careers in the aerospace industry with mentors and an internship. She learned about the fellowship through a social media post from Trujillo, one of NASA’s top aerospace engineers.

“Diana Trujillo shared the fellowship on her Twitter and Instagram, and she’s someone I truly admire,” Navarro said. “She’s a Latin immigrant, went through a lot of the same struggles as me and she made it to NASA and helped get the rover to Mars. To me, she’s proof that dreams can happen. I knew it was a long shot, but when I got the fellowship, I asked if there was any way possible for Diana be my mentor.”

Trujillo not only became her mentor but helped her develop a strategic plan on the best path to take to become an astronaut. 

“Bottom line -- Marissa is a woman who knows what she wants and she goes out there and builds a plan to get it. She’s not leaving it up to chance and that’s something not many young people do,” said Trujillo, who is NASA’s Mars 2020 deputy surface phase lead. “I also graduated when I was much older than everyone else because of immigration hurdles, and these hurdles only made us work harder.” 

Navarro completed her fellowship last summer and during her final year at Rutgers, she is working on building an FPGA communications module for spacecrafts with HawkEye 360. She plans to join the U.S. Air Force after graduation to improve her chances of serving aboard a spacecraft one day. She also received her green card, moving her a step closer to becoming a U.S. citizen. 

While Navarro fights for her best chance at becoming an astronaut, the odds are still small. In 2017, NASA received a record number of applicants for their astronaut class at 18,300 and of those, only eight to 14 are chosen to move on to the next round. That’s between a 0.04 percent and 0.08 percent chance of being selected. With odds this small, most astronauts have applied more than 10 times before being selected. Navarro has defeated odds her whole life, and these numbers have not slowed her down.

Trujillo said it is important for aerospace industry recruiters and hiring managers to keep an open mind about applicants.  

“When recruiters look at an application, they might dismiss it immediately because the grades aren’t as high, and they may be wondering why it took this person so long to graduate,” she said. “If they dig deeper, they will find more people like Marissa. Immigrant students have the odds stacked against them, so it can’t all be about performance. It’s also about what they can overcome, and that’s more remarkable than anything on a resume.”

Athina Petropulu, Distinguished Professor of ECE, was elected President-Elect for the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the term 1 January 2020 through 31 December 2021.

This is the first time that the IEEE Signal Processing Society President-Elect was elected directly by the membership.

Founded as IEEE’s first society in 1948, the Signal Processing Society (SPS) is the world’s premier association for signal processing engineers and industry professionals. Its history spans almost 70 years, featuring a membership base of more than 19,000 signal processing engineers, academics, industry professionals and students spanning 100 countries worldwide. The Society organizes numerous conferences around the world every year, focusing on the innovations shaping the future of signal processing and the future of our world.

Signal processing (SP) is the brain of most technologies that have changed the course of history, e.g., the wireless phone, radars, virtual reality, robotics, video streaming, just to name a few. It is in the core of tools that have revolutionized our understanding of the world, such as data analytics, data modeling, machine learning. It is the key enabler in the emerging areas of smart and sustainable cities, biologically inspired systems, e-health, cybersecurity, quantum and other new forms of computing, self-driving vehicles, and advanced manufacturing. While all already in signal processing are well aware of the role SP has played and continues to play, the general public cannot easily relate to SP.

Athina Petropulu campaigned on building a mindshare of Signal Processing as the innovation engine of Science and Engineering and on expanding the talent pool interested in SP, while promoting quality and inclusion.

Congratulations to Athina on this professional recognition and the visibility it brings to the ECE department!

A team of ECE faculty members led by Professor Marco Gruteser (PI) has received a new NSF award for the project titled "Reality-Aware Networks." This is a collaborative research project with Georgia State University and Old Dominion University. This project includes ECE Professors Narayan Mandayam and Kristin Dana as co-PIs at Rutgers as well as ECE alumni Ashwin Ashok and Shubham Jain, who are faculty members at the partner universities. The total award amount for this four-year project is $1.2M.

This project seeks to improve the robustness of wireless sensing and networking technologies through a reality-aware wireless architecture that blends networking and sensing. As wireless sensing and networking technologies make significant strides in today's world, applications such as automated driving or augmented reality are increasingly involving rich sensing of the environment with unprecedented network requirements. Existing approaches that strictly separate the network stack and the perception component face challenges in providing robust perception and high-bandwidth networking. To address this, the project develops and studies a reality-aware wireless architecture that blends networking and sensing components, rather than isolating them. Robust perception and high-bandwidth networking benefit innovations across a diverse spectrum of high-impact areas including mixed-reality, robotics, and automated vehicles. For example, the use of such techniques to enhance driver assistance systems or automated vehicles has the potential to save numerous lives. The proposed architecture will be implemented and evaluated in indoor and outdoor experiments, culminating in a validation on the Platform for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) COSMOS testbed.

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

Congratulations to Marco, Kristin and Narayan!