Electrical andComputer Engineering

Spring 2007

Message from the ChairMessage from the ChairBack to back titles in basketball and current national champions in football - It’s great to be a Florida Gator!

Excellence is not limited to the athletic department, however. We continue to do great things here in ECE.

We will break a record for the number of Ph.D.’s graduated this year and this is the third straight year we’ve broken our previous record. We will rank among the top programs in the country this year in Ph.D. graduations / faculty. We should exceed $10,000,000 in research expenditures this year. Last year, we published over 500 refereed articles. We’re home to a new National Science Foundation (NSF) center in reconfi gurable computing headed by Dr. Alan George. Our proposal and award levels remain high so the future looks bright. Inside you can also read about a novel project to detect breast cancer.

Our faculty continue to win awards for excellence. Dapeng Wu won an prestigious NSF CAREER award for young faculty. Liuqing Yang won an Offi ce of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. Several students have won best paper awards - details are inside. We have been interviewing candidates this spring. We have four openings this year we are looking to fi ll and have interviewed 10 candidates. We hope to have many of these new faculty in place by the end of the calendar year. Look for profi les in the fall newsletter. With this group, we will have as many as eighteen untenured faculty in the department this fall. The department continues to get younger. These new faculty challenge the existing faculty and students with new ideas, approaches, and research areas.

Our student groups continue to do well. The IEEE student chapter won several awards at the IEEE Southeastern Conference. I’m sure you remember the national championship SubjuGator covered in the last issue. We also won several awards at the engineer’s fair this year - including the best overall exhibit, and more details are inside.

Unfortunately, not all things are rosy. Following the national trend, our undergraduate enrollment is down. We have started several efforts aimed at improving retention this year and are evaluating the most successful techniques. We’ve started two new courses at the lower division. One is focused on a robot platform and introduces students to several concepts through guided projects. The other focuses on ethics, professional issues, and includes a hands-on lab where students can build a radio. We’ve also added a new course to the curriculum designed to help students master some of the math skills necessary for success in our courses. Hopefully, we can rebound the undergraduate enrollment.

The faculty, staff, and students of the department continue to do great things. We hope you are as proud of us as you are of our national championship sports teams. Go Gators!

Engineer’s Fair 2007Engineer’s Fair 2007

The Engineering and Science Fair is one of the largest events held during Engineers’ Week. It’s purpose is to edu-cate university students, local primary-education students, alumni and the general public about the achievements of all engineering disciplines and their practical applications in society and to ultimately inspire students to pursue an engi-neering education.

Prof. John Harris and his students from the Computational Neural Engineering Lab (CNEL) presented an exhibit called Do You Hear What I Hear? that explored the issues in hear-ing and hearing loss based on collaborative research with the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department.

With four different booths, they educated the public about hearing loss as well as had fun in the process.

The highlight of their exhibit was a KEMAR mannequin which was used to measure the sound pressure levels of visitors who were wearing iPODs or other mp3 players or video games.

Their exhibit won the trophy for the 1st Place Overall Outstanding Exhibit and also for the Best Audience Involvement! “Much thanks goes to many people who helped but especially Dr. Alice Holmes in CSD, the audiol-ogy students help man the booth and the ECE department

for fi nancial support”, said Harris. More information and pictures about the exhibit can be found at: www.cnel.ufl .edu/hybrid/efair2007.html

Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), the Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society, created an innovative display entitled The Nintendo Wii: Transforming Technology into Fun to teach primary school students how one of their favorite toys works. By showcasing the popular game console, they were able to show the young students that engineering is a fun and exciting part of their lives. It proved to be a valuable opportunity to emphasize the importance of an education with a strong foundation in math and science and was one of the most popular exhibits at the fair.

HKN won the UF Engineering Bowl 2007. The top four societies, determined by a preliminary round, faced off in a Jeopardy-style science bowl. This year, the E-bowl was once again hosted by the extremely humorous Dr. Fazil Najafi , professor of Civil and Coastal Engineering. Questions ranged anywhere from what UF’s engineering curriculum is all about to anything from calculus, statics, and physics to a few surprises.

The Machine Intelligence Laboratory (MIL) also participat-ed. Featured at the event were robots as diverse as the two-time and defending world AUVSI champion submarine (SubjuGator), a Mars Rover, and an autono-mous lawnmower.

Brian Sapp explains to Alachua Elementary School fourth grader Christopher Beaty

how the Nintendo Wii works.

Assistant Professor Dapeng Wu received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, the NSF’s most presitgious award for new faculty members.

Wu received the CAREER award for his proj-ect “CAREER: Delay-Constrained Wireless Networking: Where Shannon Meets Erlang.”

The grail of next-generation wireless networks is providing real-time services for delay-sensi-tive applications. Delay sensitive applications such as voice-over-IP, require that the wire-less networks provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees, e.g., data rate, delay bound, and delay bound violation probability. However, the unreliability of wireless channels makes it par-ticularly challenging to design QoS provision-ing mechanisms for wireless networks.

In wireless networking, the area of providing QoS assurance with an emphasis on delay constraints is usually called delay constrained wireless networking. This project is concerned about provisioning statistical delay guarantees. The problem is challenging since both delay-

bound violation (caused by queueing) and bit errors (due to channel noise) need to be addressed. To address this chal-lenge, research is conducted in three aspects: 1) theoretic performance limits -- developing a joint coding and queueing

approach to addressing the challenging issue of quantifying the probability of both physi-cal-layer bit errors and link-layer delay bound violation, 2) algorithm design -- developing an observer-controller model and a joint estima-tion/control approach to designing QoS pro-visioning mechanisms that explicitly provide statistical delay guarantees, and 3) experimen-tation -- developing a software-radio-based testbed, then implementing and evaluating the algorithms over the testbed.

The joint coding and queueing approach will not only yield important principles in design methodologies for delay-constrained wireless networking, but also advance the union of

information theory and queueing theory. The research will have a big impact on supporting delay sensitive applications such as mobile TV. The research fi ndings will be dissemi-nated through conferences and journals.

ECE Junior Faculty Member Receives ECE Junior Faculty Member Receives NSF Career AwardNSF Career Award

A book, co-authored by Dr. William Eisenstadt, entitled Microwave Differential Circuit Design, has been released.

Changzhi Li, PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr. Jenshan Lin, received the

2007 IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium Best Student Paper Award at the January 9-11, 2007, meeting in Long Beach, California.

Dr. Dapeng Wu received the National Science Foundation Career Award for his pro-prosal, “CAREER: Delay-Constrained Wireless Networking Where Shannon Meets Erlang,” in January 2007.

The paper co-authored by graduate student Hongqiang Zhai and Dr. Yuguang Fang, entitled “Impact of Routing Metrics on Path Capacity in Multi-rate and Multi-hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks” re-ceived the Best Paper Award at the 14th IEEE

International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP’06), at its meeting November 12-15, 2006.

Dr. Liuqing Yang was selected as a winner in the 2007 Offi ce of Naval Research Young Investigator Program competition.

Dr. Vladimir Rakov received the 2006 Editor’s Citation for Excellence in Refereeing “for outstand-ing service to the authors and readers of Geophysical Research Letters”, American Geophysical Union.

Faculty NewsFaculty News

Contrast Enhancement for Thermal Acoustic Breast Cancer Contrast Enhancement for Thermal Acoustic Breast Cancer Imaging via Resonant StimulationImaging via Resonant Stimulation

Drs. Henry Zmuda and Jian Li are involved with an interdisci-plinary research plan to develop enhanced contrast thermal

acoustic imaging (TAI) technology for the detection of breast cancer by combining amplitude-modulated electromagnetic (EM) fi eld excita-tion, resonant acoustic scattering, and advanced signal processing techniques.

EM-induced TAI combines the merits of both EM stimulation and ultrasound imaging, while over-coming their respective limitations. EM imaging provides excellent contrast between cancerous and normal breast tissue, but the long

wavelengths provide poor spatial resolution. Conventional ultrasound imaging possesses very fi ne millimeter-range spatial resolution but poor soft tissue contrast.

The effectiveness of X-ray mammography has been ques-tioned in recent years and is currently under debate. Breast tissues of young women typically possess a higher dense-to-fatty tissue ratio. Mammography presents its major limita-tion in the sector of the population of highest public health interest and criticality.

Health care facilities and institutions often carry a signifi cant fi nancial burden from providing care to the female population via implementation of screening programs, especially in rural

and remote regions. This, added to the inherent limitations of mammography, has been the driving force behind efforts to develop alternative technologies for the early detection of breast cancer.

There is an urgent need for new inexpensive detection techniques, which should be non-invasive, inexpensive, widely available, easy to apply, and objec-tive and consistent in providing results that are easy to interpret, and yet have low health risk, minimal discomfort, high sensitivity to tumors and high specifi city to malignancies. EM-induced TAI is an imaging modality with the potential to address all of these requirements.

Working with them on the project are Drs. Mark Sheplak and Lou Cattafesta from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Dr. Huabie Jiang from Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. Manuel Arreola from Radiology.

MAE graduate students Benjamin A. Griffi n and Alina K. Soderholm demonstrate the apparatus to be used to verify the fundamental theory of the project.

Student Chapter NewsStudent Chapter News

The IEEE Student Chapter attended the annual IEEE Southeastern Conference from March 22-26 in Richmond, Virginia. This conference is attended by over 40 different universities from the Southeastern regions of the United States. UF competed in four competitions and placed 3rd in Ethics, 2nd in T-shirt design, and 2nd in Software. The stu-dent chapter also received the Exemplary Student Branch Award from the Southeastern Region. Overall the student chapter represented the university very well, and added more accolades to what has already been an exciting year here at the University of Florida.

WE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOUWE WOULD LIKE TO HEAR FROM YOU

Your contributions are needed so that we can continue our academic programs at or above their present levels. All contributions are tax deductible and will be applied to the improvement of the department. Please specify that your contributions is for the ECE Department and make your check payable to the University of Florida Foundation.

YES! I want to fi nancially help support the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UFYES! I want to fi nancially help support the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UF. I am enclosing $___________ for the Department to be used for:

Teaching ProgramsScholarships and FellowshipsResearch ProgramsStudent Chapter ActivitiesOther, please specifi y ________________________________________________

My employer has a matching gift program. I will arrange for a matching gift.I would like information on making a large gift ($5,000 or more).

I would like information on establishing an estate gift.

I’d also like to be listed as an ECE Career Networker/Mentor for our students.

Tell us about yourself!Tell us about yourself!Your fellow alums would like to know what you are doing. Use the form below (or attach additional pages) to send us news about your current position, title, company, publications, recognitions, etc. or email us at: ecenews@ece.ufl .edu

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