Media & News
UCF Channel on YouTube: Math Comes to Life | Chris Iannello - Rocket Man | Knightrider - Robotic Car | Hybrid Car Debut
Years: 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 |
Dr. Tappen's Work Featured on UCF Today
Friday, December 21,2012
Work of our own Dr. Marshall Tappen on computer vision algorithms to "accurately track the nesting routes of endangered sea turtles," is described in an article in UCF Today. This is a grant from the Florida Space Institute that is joint with "UCF Biologist John Weishampel and UF engineering professor Peter G. Ifju." See http://today.ucf.edu/eradicating-space-dust-and-saving-sea-turtles-get-boost-from-space-agency/
The New Scientist
Monday, December 10,2012
The New Scientist has an article about a storytelling program, written by CS professor Ladislau Bölöni, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628945.700-storytelling-software-learns-how-to-tell-a-good-tale.html The program has the ability to digest stories (such as "Little Red Riding-Hood") and tell a story about what will happen by predicting events and associating them with memories. The article says that the program: "demonstrates a first step towards computers that can invent stories. It also signals a new approach to designing a more human-like artificial intelligence." A paper with more details is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.5643.
On Campus: Experience a Virtual Reality Car
Monday, September 17,2012
On September 20th from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Ford will demonstrate a state-of-the-art vehicle simlator that uses virtual reality. Click here for more information.
Dr. Joseph LaViola Interviewed at ACM SIGGRAPH
Friday, August 10,2012
UCF's own Dr. Joseph LaViola is interviewed about the future of user interfaces that use guestures, based on his participation in a panel at ACM SIGGRAPH: http://www.livescience.com/22157-gesture-control-could-transform-video-games.html
Camp Connect
Tuesday, July 24,2012
Camp Connect, which was held at UCF from August 16th - August 23rd, introduced high school students to the various Engineering programs. Click here for more information.
Congratulations to ECE Ph.D. Student, Ya Shen
Monday, June 25,2012
ECE Ph.D. student Ya Shen (Co-advised by Xun Gong and Parveen Wahid) was selected in the top 26 finalists (out of 351 participants) of the student paper competition in 2012 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium which was held at Montréal, Canada, 17-22 June, 2012. During the conference, she competed with other excellent finalists and won the Honorable Mention Award (1 first place, 1 second place, 1 third place, and 7 honorable mention). Congratulations!
Congratulations to Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley
Thursday, June 14,2012
“A Unified Approach to Evolving Plasticity and Neural Geometry,” a paper by Sebastian Risi and Kenneth O. Stanley, won the Best Student Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN-2012) in Brisbane, Australia.
Congratulations to UCF's Student Chapter of the ACM
Tuesday, June 05,2012
UCF's student chapter of the ACM won the ACM's Student Chapter Excellence Award for Outstanding Community Service 2011-2012. The ACM Student Chapter Excellence Awards Program recognizes chapters that display considerable initiative during the academic year. Winning chapters in each of these five areas receive $500 and a "best of" icon to proudly display on their chapter's Web page. These chapters are featured on the ACM Web site and in ACMMemberNet. The UCF ACM chapter won in the category of Outstanding Community Service. The award recognizes their work on several projects, including campus-wide events such as "Knights Give Back – UCF’s Day of Service", help with the Florida Science Olympiad, and the "Robots R.O.C.K!" project that introduces robotics to elementary school children. For more details see http://www.acm.org/chapters/students/essay-contest/outstanding-community-service-2011-2012.
TeachLivE Mixed-Reality Teaching Environment
Thursday, May 10,2012
The TLE TeachLivE mixed-reality teaching environment, which supports teacher practice, won an honorable mention in the 2012 National Consortium for Continuous Improvement in Higher Education's Leveraging Excellence Awards. This project is joint work with Professor Charles Hughes (of the CS division) and his students and collaborators.
Congratulations to Ph.D. student Ya Shen
Wednesday, April 18,2012
Congratulations to Ph.D. student Ya Shen for receiving the best student research presentation award in 2012 IEEE Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference (WAMICON) held at Cocoa Beach, FL on April 16-17, 2012. She is co-advised by Drs. Xun Gong and Parveen Wahid.
CS Division Faculty Promotions
Wednesday, April 18,2012
Congratulations to Drs. Joseph LaViola and Marshall Tappen. Their tenure and promotion to associate professor cases were approved by the president and provost and will be effective in August!
Congratulations to the UCF Programming Team
Monday, April 16,2012
The UCF Programming Team (including Matt Fontaine, Travis Meade and Antony Stabile) finished fifth in the University of Chicago Invitational, completing 7 of the 10 problems posed in the 5 hour contest. They were only beaten by Waterloo, Harvard, Stanford and Princeton. The team is heading to compete in the World Finals in May.
Congratulations to Peter Tonner
Thursday, April 12,2012
Peter Tonner, an undergraduate research student, won second place in the Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence (SURE) of 2012 under the Engineering and Computer Science II category.
Dr. Shaojie Zhang's Research
Tuesday, April 10,2012
The research of Dr. Shaojie Zhang, an assistant professor in the Computer Science division of EECS, was described in Genome Technology magazine. The article (http://www.genomeweb.com/informatics/using-new-software-researchers-identify-rna-structural-motifs) describes Dr. Zhang's software that helps researchers find "structural motifs" in the RNA of a sample. The article quotes Dr. Zhang as saying "RNA structural motifs are the recurrent substructures formed by the non-canonical base pairs with conserved geometries and functionalities." The software builds on a previous program from Dr. Zhang and his group. Such structural motifs may be important for finding new understanding and treatment of disease. The article quotes Dr. Zhang as saying: "The RNA structural motifs are critical for many cellular functions and the dysfunction of these RNA structural motifs is likely to result in many diseases."
Congratulations to Emily Sassano
Friday, April 06,2012
Congratulations to Emily Sassano on being awarded an NSF fellowship. Emily is one of our recently admitted PhD students working with Dr. Sumit Jha.
Congratulations to Dr. Donald Malocha
Wednesday, April 04,2012
Prof. Donald C. Malocha was selected as Pegasus Professor, the highest UCF honor. President Hitt presented the award at the Founder's Day celebration. Congratulations!
Congratulations to Dr. Gita Sukthankar
Monday, April 02,2012
Congratulations to Dr. Gita Sukthankar, who is the recipient of the 2012 Award for Faculty Excellence in Mentoring Doctoral Students in the Engineering, Physical Sciences, and Life Sciences category.
IEEE Southeastcon 2012 Software Competition
Wednesday, March 21,2012
UCF won First in the recently concluded IEEE Southeastcon 2012 Software competition. Students in the group include John Boswel, Patrick Fenelon, and Michael Gallett.
Congratulations to Peter Tonner
Tuesday, March 20,2012
Congratulation to Dr. Shaojie Zhang's student, Peter Tonner, who won the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) Poster Award. The title of the poster is "Transcriptomic Profiling of Ribosomal Protein Pseudogenes in Diverse Human Tissues". This is a joint work between UCF (Peter Tonner and Shaojie Zhang) and UAB (Vinodh Srinivasasainagendra and Degui Zhi).
Congratulations to PhD student Zhao Wang
Friday, March 16,2012
Congratulations to PhD student Zhao Wang (advised by Aman Behal) for winning the 2011-2012 University Award for the Outstanding Master’s Thesis. He will be honored at the Graduate Awards Breakfast on Friday, April 13, 2012.
2013 Rankings of Best Graduate Schools
Thursday, March 15,2012
The US News and World Report published its 2013 rankings of Best Graduate Schools. Our CpE program is ranked #57 out of 99 schools, and out EE program is ranked #62 out of 124 schools.
Congratulations to Ph.D. student Ya Shen
Monday, March 05,2012
Congratulations to Ph.D. student Ya Shen (Co-advised by Xun Gong and Parveen Wahid) for being selected in the top 26 finalists (out of 300+ participants) of the student paper competition in 2012 IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium which will held at Montréal, Canada, 17-22 June, 2012. She will compete for the awards in the conference. It is a significant achievement to be among the finalists in the best conference in IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.
TI Workshop
Monday, March 05,2012
The Texas Instruments (TI) workshop, recently held at UCF, was an excellent way for our students to learn from and interact with practicing engineers at TI. Click here for photos of the workshop.
2012 Science Olympiad National Tournament
Thursday, March 01,2012
The Dept. of EECS is proud to support UCF as it hosts the 2012 Science Olympiad National Tournament on May 18-19, 2012. Science Olympiad has received national recognition; most recently four outstanding Science Olympiad champions were honored by President Obama during the White House Science Fair on Feb. 7, 2012. On Feb. 29, 2012 Science Olympiad was endorsed on the floor of the US House of Representatives. Please click here for more information.
2012 National Science Olympiad
Congratulations to Dr. Lotzi Boloni
Tuesday, February 28,2012
Congratulations to Dr. Lotzi Boloni for receiving $7804 in new funding from General Dynamics for a grant titled: "RCTA -FY 2011 H10 Dynamics of Operating within Social Environments"
Congratulations to Dr. Shaojie Zhang
Sunday, February 26,2012
UCF CS Ph.D. student Cuncong Zhong, a biologist from Indiana University, Justen Andrews, and UCF Assistant Professor Shaojie Zhang received the best paper award for their paper "Discovering Non-coding RNA Elements in Drosophila 3' Untranslated Regions" at the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and Medical Sciences (ICCABS), held in Las Vegas, Nevada. According to Dr. Zhang, the "paper is about trying to find non-coding RNA (ncRNA) elements in fly (Drosophila melanogaster) 3'-untranslated regions (3'-UTRs). The ncRNA elements in the 3'-UTRs are known to participate in the genes' post-transcriptional regulation. In this work, we proposed an improved RNA structural clustering pipeline that takes into account the length-dependent distribution of the structural similarity measure. We have identified many ncRNA clusters from fly's 3'-UTRs. Among the clusters we have rediscovered the well-known histone ncRNA families. We also discovered an RNA family that contains genes that are preferentially expressed in male fly. We also found many supporting evidences from fly in-situ hybridization experiments that further reveal their characteristic `cup' or `comet' localization patterns in fly testis."
Dr. Shaojie Zhang Featured in UCFTODAY.
Friday, February 17,2012
UCFTODAY published an article about Dr. Shaojie Zhang's work on using a complex computer program to analizy RNA motifs. You can read the article here.
Congratulations to Dr. John Shen
Wednesday, February 15,2012
Congratulations to Dr. John Shen, who was selected as the winner of the IEEE Region 3 Outstanding Engineer Award. Region 3 encompasses over 30,000 IEEE members across nine states in the southeastern US and Jamaica. This award is given in recognition of his contributions in very high density DC-DC power converters.
Congratulations to Dr. Mubarak Shah
Tuesday, February 07,2012
Congratulations to Dr. Mubarak Shah for receiving the 2012 College Excellence in Research Award. Dr. Shah’s name will also be forwarded to the University Committee for the university level award, and he will receive a college certificate at the Founder’s Day Honors Convocation on April 4th, 2012.
Congratulations to Arup Guha
Tuesday, February 07,2012
Congratulations to CS division lecturer Arup Guha, who is receiving the 2012 College Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. Arup is also in the running for the University level award.
Congratulations to Jonathan Cazalas
Tuesday, February 07,2012
Congratulations to Jonathan Cazalas who is receiving the College's 2012 Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching Award Nomination. This nomination is being forwarded to the College of Graduate Studies. The Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching Award is for excellence as an "instructor of record" with "independent classroom responsibilities." Jonathan has taught several undergraduate courses for the CS division, including Computer Science I and Internet Applications.
Nucleic Acids Research Cover Story
Tuesday, February 07,2012
The cover story of the next issue of Nucleic Acids Research is a story by two UCF EECS CS division authors: Cuncong Zhong and Shaojie Zhang. The cover can be seen at http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/3.cover-expansion and the paper itself at http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/3/1307. Nucleic Acids Research is one of the top 100 most influential journals in medicine and biology. The paper itself is about "RNA structural motifs" which are use to build more complex structures in RNA. The paper makes contributions towards understanding the structure and function of such motifs. The paper presents "a clustering approach for de novo RNA structural motif identification" and applies it to both identify known motifs "with higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art clustering method" and to identify "a number of potential novel instances of various motifs" and "several novel structural motif families".
New Automated Way to Spot Threats in Crowds Pioneered at UCF
Friday, January 27,2012
The work of Dr. Mubarak Shah and several collaborators and students on finding threats in crowds from video is featured in an article in UCF Today's Science and Technology section. According to the article "Shah’s team includes Brian Moore, an assistant professor of mathematics at UCF; Saad Ali, a UCF Computer Vision Lab alumnus and a computer scientist at SRI International in Princeton, N.J., and Ramin Mehran, who completed his Ph.D. last month at UCF and is joining Microsoft in January.
Congratulations to Justin Luther
Thursday, January 19,2012
Congratulations to Justin Luther (advisor: Xun Gong) on receiving the student paper competition 2nd place award in 2012 IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS) held at Santa Clara, CA during Jan. 15-18, 2012
Students Buid a Virtual Recreation of the '64 World's Fair
Retirement Reception for Dr. Bernard DeLoach
Dr. Bernard C. DeLoach Jr. receives an award for his twenty years of service as a Courtesy Professor in the Department of EECS.
EECS Moves Dramatically to 57 in Graduate Ranking
The Department of EECS is ranked 57th in Electrical Engineering graduate programs according to the 2010 U.S. News & World Report America's Best Graduate Schools! Last year, EE was 65 on the list and was UCF's highest ranked graduate program. For five straight years, EE has moved up in these prestigious rankings.
Howard Lance, Harris CEO, receives honorary Doctor of Science
Harris Corp. Receives UCF Research Award from EECS
The 2009 Industry Research Sponsor Award from the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science was been presented to long-time partner, Harris Corporation at the School's 2009 EECS Industry Day on April 24. Dr. Issa Batarseh, EECS
Chair, presented Mr. Craig Miller, vice president of research at Harris Corp., with this year's annual award, which recognizes one company for its consistent support of research activities at the school.
"The UCF Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is playing a key role in expanding the technology base of Central Florida and in preparing the highly skilled workforce upon which Harris and other technology companies rely," said Kent Buchanan, chief technology officer of Harris and vice president of Engineering for its Government Communications Systems business. "Harris has had a strong relationship with UCF for many years and some 690 graduates are employed at every level of our organization. We are honored to receive the 2009 Industry Research Sponsor award."
