SPRING 2016
IEEE Students from Florida Tech Win First
Place in Hardware Competition and Exemplary
Student Branch Award at Robotic Competition
Over 50 Southern universities showcased their innovative
problem-solving skills using current technologies at the annual
IEEE South East Conference in Norfolk, VA with hopes of being
labeled the best technology institute in the southern region. The
main event was a robotics competition and students from
Florida Tech took first place. They also won the exemplary
student branch award.
The competition’s challenge was to build an autonomous robot
that can traverse a field containing obstacles resembling a
shipping harbor to pick up blocks of different types from dropoff points and deliver them to a destination. The final round
was performed during the awards banquet with all attendees
and distinguished guest speakers watching via a live broadcast
as the robots from the final four teams performed
simultaneously in a riveting winner-takes-all challenge.
The Florida Tech students who won the competition are (ECE)
branch president, Briana Cantos, Christopher Woodle, Mmusi
Motsumi and James Kearney; (BME) Ronald-Dean Allado; (CS)
Tyler Korte, Nicholas Persing and Michael Stratton.
Faculty Spotlight
Dr. Susan Earles
Susan Earles
received her
Ph.D. in electrical
engineering from
the University of
Florida in 2002.
Dr. Earles is
currently working
on research
related to
improving the
performance of single photon detectors
that operate at around 200K. Her group
is investigating the materials parameters
of InGasAs/InP, device architecture and
the gating and related circuitry for
detection. Her Ph.D. student Ahmed
Kadhim and MS student Ahmad
Azzahrani are currently summarizing
current literature and creating
mathematical models using soliton waves
as gating signals.
Dr. Earles also received a grant from
Helical Communication Technologies of
Rockledge, Florida, to fund a student for
research related to RF modeling and
design. Mano Rahul Pakalapati, whose
thesis work is related to the frequency
limits and temperature effects on
electronics, will begin the project this
summer.
Dr. C. Otero and Undergraduate
Student to Publish Book Chapter on
Sentiment Analysis
Electrical Engineering Ph.D. student Michael
Finch selected to attend 66th Lindau Nobel
Laureate Meeting
Dr. Carlos Otero and co-author Xavier
Merino, an ECE undergraduate student,
will publish a book chapter titled
"Sentiment Analysis" in the upcoming
2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of
Computer Sciences and Technology. This
book chapter provides an overview of
sentiment analysis and explains the
process required to develop, evaluate
and deploy sentiment analysis software.
Michael Finch, a doctoral student in the laboratory of Dr. Brian
Lail, has been selected by the ORAU - Nobel Committee to
attend the 66th Lindau Germany Nobel Laureates Meeting, June
26 – July 1, 2016. The United States delegation comprises
approximately 55 young researchers.
The 66th meeting is dedicated to the field of physics. 30 Nobel
Laureates and Vinton G. Cerf (ACM A.M. Turing Award 2004)
have confirmed their participation. 402 young scientists from 80
countries successfully mastered the application and selection
process. The commitment of Nobel Laureates to foster the
exchange among scientists has been the mainstay of the Lindau
Nobel Laureate Meetings ever since their beginnings in 1951.
To this day, more than 350 recipients of the Nobel Prize have
followed the annual invitation to meet the next generation of
leading scientists at Lindau.
For many Nobel Laureates, the Lindau Meetings have become
an integral part of their yearly schedule. More than 300 Nobel
Laureates have joined the foundation’s Founders Assembly in
the endeavor to support the Lindau Meetings and their outreach
projects.
For young scientists standing at the beginning of their careers,
it is a valuable opportunity to meet these undisputed role
models and mentors, to seek their advice, to exchange
thoughts and views and to discuss current developments in
science and beyond. At the Lindau Meetings, the Nobel
Laureates shape the scientific program with their topical
preferences. As a result, the Lindau Meetings provide the
unique opportunity to experience both the professional and the
personal side of Nobel Laureates.
Supercomputer for Florida Tech Research
The Glacier High Performance Computing System (G-HPC) is a
supercomputing cluster of graphic processing unit (GPU)
servers connected to the FIT network to form a high
performance computing (HPC) infrastructure available to FIT’s
faculty and students for academic and research applications.
This technology was funded on behalf of FIT’s Office of
Sponsored Programs, Research Equipment Program. As a
technical university, this HPC resource has significantly
improved our research capabilities, modernized existing HPC
courses and enabled the development of a new teaching
curriculum. The goal is to keep FIT’s students competitive in
the industry by providing hands-on experience with the most
recent computing technology and to provide faculty with an
asset to support next generation research. Faculty across all
departments now have the physical hardware capabilities to
compete in modern HPC trends like cloud computing and datascience-related analytics.
The cluster includes a total of 11 servers with four GPUs
interconnected with InfiniBand technology and supports direct
GPU-to-GPU communication and is connected with a second
non-GPU system. Both clusters are separated by Blueshark and
their own network switches. Blueshark is the existing computing
system, with the head node that is the gateway between the
nodes and the external users. G-HPC includes the necessary
tools/utilities/libraries to support HPC application development
and execution. The new HPC cluster is one of a few resources
that has broad appeal and applicability to the entire campus.
For more information on G-HPC, please contact the principal
investigator Dr. Anthony O. Smith.
ECE Department to host Research Experience
for Undergraduates
Program sponsored by the
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is sponsoring a 10-week
Research Experience for Undergraduate Students in the area of
Machine Learning at Florida Tech. The program is offered by
the Information Characterization & Exploitation (ICE)
Laboratory in the ECE and SYS departments and aims to form a
diverse, multidisciplinary cohort of nascent researchers for this
summer.
Machine Learning (ML) gradually evolved as a branch of
Artificial Intelligence with its theory and applications positioned
at the juncture of computer science, engineering, mathematics,
statistics and even physics. Nowadays, ML’s role in successfully
addressing hard, real-world technological challenges has
become ever more current and central. Moreover, its presence
and importance now permeates several aspects not only of
cutting-edge technology such as computer vision, stock market
prediction and big data analytics, but also our daily life through
voice-driven searches on our smart phones or movie
recommendations on video streaming services to name only a
few. More information on the Florida Tech effort can be found
at http://www.amalthea-reu.org/.
Social media analytics plays an important
role in today’s Internet-driven society.
The amount of data found in social
media creates a unique opportunity for
those who can mine it to extract
actionable intelligence. This actionable
intelligence is valuable in many domains
such as politics, marketing and security
to name a few. Among the many
analytics techniques used today for
mining social media data, sentiment
analysis has enjoyed considerable
attention. Sentiment analysis is a form of
text classification for predicting attitudes
or dispositions toward objects or
persons. This entry provides an overview
and explains the process required to
develop, evaluate and deploy sentiment
analysis software.
Dr. Saqib Chairs IEEE Conference
Session on Hardware-oriented
Security and Trust (HOST)
Dr. Fareena Saqib, assistant professor of
electrical and computer engineering,
recently chaired a technical paper
session at the 2016 IEEE International
Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust
(HOST) conference in Washington, D.C.
This HOST conference has emerged as a
premier conference in hardware security
and has consistently drawn a large
audience from industry and academia
involved in hardware-based security
research and development from across
the world.
Rapid proliferation of computing and
communication systems with increasing
computational power and connectivity
into every sphere of modern life has
brought security to the forefront of
system design, test and validation
processes. The emergence of new
application spaces for these systems in
the internet-of-things (IoT) regime is
creating new attack surfaces as well as
new requirements for secure and trusted
system operation. Additionally, the
design, manufacturing and the
distribution of microchip, PCB, as well as
other electronic components are
becoming more sophisticated and
globally distributed with a number of
potential security vulnerabilities. The
IEEE HOST conference highlights new
results in the area of hardware and
system security. Relevant research topics
include techniques, tools, design/test
methods, architectures, circuits and
applications of secure hardware.
Dr. Murshid Presides over Frontiers
in Optics/Laser Science Conference
Professor Syed Murshid presided over a
session of Novel Communications
Technologies at the Frontiers in
Optics/Laser Science Conference hosted
by the Optical Society of America in late
2015. Dr. Murshid is continuing to push
the state of the art in optical fiber data
carrying capacity using Florida Tech
patented hybrid optical fiber
communications architectures. He has
added two new degrees of photon
freedom to optical fiber multiplexing
techniques by inventing spatial domain
multiplexing aka space division
multiplexing (SDM) in single core optical
fibers and orbital angular momentum
(OAM) of photon based multiplexing in
optical fibers. These techniques can be
combined to increase the optical fiber
bandwidth by an order of magnitude and
his current endeavors are focused on
combining these technologies for
communication architectures exceeding
10 Tera-bits/sec.
His efforts in these areas are gaining
popularity and orbital angular
momentum based multiplexing is
currently an important topic in the field.
Recently, he has also served as a
member of program committee and
session chair on multiple SPIE and OSA
conferences and was invited to present
seminars at Boeing in Everett, WA and
King Abdul Aziz City of Science and
technology in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
ECE Faculty Travel to China to
Foster Partnership
Rockwell Collins Charitable Corporation to fund
Embedded Systems Integrity Group in ECE
Department
Funding from the Rockwell Collins Charitable Corporation will be
used to create an Embedded Systems Integrity and Firmware
Analysis group within the ECE department to contribute to the
expansion of existing ECE educational opportunities and
resources to increase the production of cybersecurity
professionals. To this end, the group seeks to research
fundamental security threats and vulnerabilities that arise by
reverse engineering firmware in embedded systems. Knowledge gained will be injected back into the ECE curricula
via case studies that can be used as a constructivist approach
to teach fundamental security concepts focused on embedded
(hardware and software) security.
Security breaches such as those at Target, Staples, Experian
and Home Depot are costing companies an average of $3.8
million per breach and are creating an environment of distrust
between customers, companies and the technology that
enables their interactions. To further exacerbate the situation,
recent technological advances are increasing the number of
embedded systems (e.g., garage doors, door locks, interior
switches and power outlets) that connect to the internet, thus
opening the doors to millions more potentially vulnerable
devices. (An embedded system is a computer system designed
with a dedicated function in mind, typically with small-size, lowpower and limited interfaces.)
As this trend continues, security education and awareness
needs to be increased in the ECE curricula; and to be effective,
these efforts need to be tailored to the learning needs of ECE
students. There is a clear need for the creation of specialized
security education material that targets the design of
fundamentally secure embedded systems (both in hardware
and software). These security and technological trends shine a
spotlight on the embedded security problem, revealing not only
that the problem is not going away, but that it is getting worse. Texas Instruments Donates High-performance
Equipment for Laboratory
Texas Instruments donated equipment to outfit a core
undergraduate laboratory in the ECE department. The donation
consists of OMAP-L138 DSP+ARM9™ development kits and
emulators that will enable software and hardware development
that require real-time signal processing and control functions,
including industrial control, medical diagnostics and
communications. A wide variety of interfaces for connectivity
and storage allow students to bring audio, video and other
signals onto the board. Expansion headers for LCD screens and
Leopard Imaging’s camera sensor allow students to extend the
board’s functionality. The equipment will be used for several
courses in both the electrical and computer engineering
programs.
ECE Student Describes experience at Corning
Optical Communications
Julius Chatterjee
As a Ph.D. student, I feel that one of the primary goals of my
education is to gain engineering experience. This would lead to
making better engineering decisions when the need arises. It
would also put me in a better position as an educator in the
future. As a teaching assistant and a doctoral student at FIT, a
lot of that experience can be gained in-house; however, in my
opinion some out-of-university experience should be added to
the kit as well.
As an intern in Corning Optical Communications, a student gets
the opportunity to play a key role in a multinational company
and make real contributions. The tasks are assigned according
to merit and performance. Expert guidance is provided. I was
working under the supervisor of the Test and Qualification Lab
at a fiber-optic cable manufacturing plant and hence gained
knowledge about fiber-optic cable testing in different
environmental conditions. The lab is multidisciplinary, involving
skillsets in automated testing, fiber-optics, optics,
thermodynamics and material science. There was custom
hardware and software designed to efficiently perform very high
volume cable testing under stringent industry compliance
requirements. My work focused on the fiber-optics, dataacquisition and instrument control areas using LabVIEW
applications.
Corning’s main area of products is glass manufacturing and
includes display glass, fiber optics, machinable glass ceramics,
specialty glass and optics for defense and aerospace. Some
products in life sciences deal with specialty plastics as well. The
specialty fiber department treats the glass core, cladding and
protective layer of an optical fiber as a matrix and enables a
customer-focused customization so that specific requirements
can be met. The products for optical sensing include fibers with
hermetic coatings in clear curve and standard varieties, single
mode fibers that are hermetic coated and are not prone to
hydrogen aging. These fibers can be used in hydrogen-rich
environments to transport signals generated by hydrogen
sensors. They may also be coupled with conventional fibers that
are prone to hydrogen aging to make a hydrogen sensor.
Corning offers erbium doped fibers that have significant
advantages in terms of mechanical reliability and also offers
very low splice loss when coupled with fibers like smf 28e+.
Other products such as the Fibrance light diffusing fibers enable
illumination in hard to reach areas. These fibers are designed so
that they allow the light to leak out as it propagates through
the fiber. They are flexible and allow uniform brightness.
All the summer interns were taken through a very informative
orientation that touched on the Corning values Quality,
Integrity, Performance, Leadership, Innovation and The
Individual. Lean principles and safety standards were
introduced. Several online classes were assigned and principles
such as DMAIC and iKaizen were introduced. There were online
classes on safety, invited participation in all employee
communication meetings and a yellow belt certification exam.
In its entirety, this was a rewarding experience and has since
enabled me to better understand industry expectations. I shall
endeavor to use the knowledge gained during this period to do
a better job in my teaching and research assignments here at
Florida Tech.
Drs. Veton Kepuska and Brian Lail
traveled to Wuhan, China, in early
March, serving as instructors for Digital
Systems (Kepuska) and Electromagnetic
Fields and Waves (Lail) for two weeks at
the Hubei University of Education (HUE).
The trip was in support of the FIT
partnership with HUE managed by the
International Partnerships Office at
Florida Tech. This collaborative
arrangement operates in a 2+2 mode,
wherein HUE students can complete the
last two years of the undergraduate
course work at FIT and receive
equivalent degrees at both institutions.
We look forward to the first contingency
of students from HUE arriving at FIT this
summer.
Visiting Scholars Aid Department in
Research Efforts
Dr. Haechul Choi
received the B.S.
degree in
electronics
engineering from
Kyungpook
National
University, Daegu, Korea, in 1997 and
the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
engineering from the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology
(KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in 1999 and
2004, respectively. He is an associate
professor in the Division of Information
Communication Engineering at Hanbat
National University, Daejeon, Korea,
since 2004. Previously, he was a senior
member of the research staff at
the Broadcasting Media Research Group
of Electronics and
Telecommunications Research Institute
(ETRI). His research interests include
image processing, video coding and
mobile platform programming.
Dr. Jihun Cha
received M.S.
and Ph.D.
degrees in
computer science
from Florida
Tech in 1996 and
2002,
respectively. He
is currently a
principal
researcher in the Immersive Media
Section of the Electronics and
Telecommunications Research Institute
in South Korea. His current research
interests are on various broadcasting
media related projects, especially ultraHDTV and image fusion.
In Memoriam
It is with great
sadness that we
share the
passing of Dr.
Barry Grossman,
professor of
electrical and
computer
engineering.
He was an
integral member
of the ECE Department for 30 years and
greatly influenced many student research
projects as the professor for the junior
and senior design sequence. Dr.
Grossman received his Ph.D. in electrical
engineering in 1977 from the University
of Illinois and his principal research
interests were fiber-optic sensor systems
and smart structures and the application
of artificial neural networks for image
and signal processing. Dr. Grossman was
an industry consultant in fiber-optic
sensing and communication,
acoustooptic devices and optical signal
processing.
Prior to joining Florida Institute of
Technology, Dr. Grossman was employed
by Harris Corporation, Electronic Systems
Sector. His recent efforts included a
NASA contract to test and evaluate
hydrogen gas sensors; a Florida
Department of Natural Resources grant
to develop an automatic, real-time neural
network system capable of identifying
bioacoustic signals; an NSF grant; and a
Florida Department of Transportation
contract. Other research includes the
State of Florida funded study
“Embedded Fiber Optic Sensors for
Space Structures, Robotics and
Environmental Sensing” and an Air Force
study, “Subminiature Telemetry Antenna
Study.”
Connect with Fellow ECE
Alumni
ECE LinkedIn Group
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alumna/alumnus
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department,
please join our
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Electrical &
Computer Engineering group on
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join the group as a way to network with
other alumni and stay updated with the
newest developments in our department.
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