School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

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Summer 2006

Mubarak Shah has been elected a fellow of IAPR (International Associate of Pattern Recognition) for his contribution to motion-based recognition and Shape from Shading.
Richard Eastes of FSI was selected to receive the NASA Phase A project (GOLD) for Space Weather Mission and Studies.
Hassan Foroosh received his fist major NSF grant entitled "Network of Surveillance Cameras with Active Zoom and Dynamic Topology" for $107k.
Glenn Semmel (NASA Engineer, Lotzi Boloni's student) received the NASA Software Award. This work was first reported at the AAAI conference in 2005 where their paper received the AAAI Deployed Application award.
Ravi Todi (Sundaram's student) won the IEEE Electron Device Society Graduate Student Fellowship for 2006. The Fellowship Program was established to promote, recognize, and support graduate study and research within the Electron Devices Society's field of interest.
Wasfy Mikhael and Damla Turgut will be UCF's representatives for the newly announced multi-university NSF-ERC proposal entitled Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center (QoLT) (http://www.qolt.org). The proposal was led by CMU and University of Pittsburgh.
Zhibing Ge (S.T. Wu's student ) has won the prestigious IEEE LEOS graduate student award. The award is $5000 plus $2500 for the travel grant.
UCF IEEE Student Chapter was recognized for being the Second Largest IEEE Student branch in Region -3 after Georgia Tech.
Moataz Abdelwahab (Wasfy Mikhael's student) received the 2ND BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARD by IEEE Circuits and Systems.

July 17, 2006
UCF has been classified as Research University (High Research Activity ) by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

July 11, 2006
Dr. Greg Hanson has been selected as the UCF Alumni Association's 2006 Distinguished Alumnus. This is the highest annual award. Dr. Hanson earned his Ph.D in Computer Science from UCF in 1987. He is currently Assistant Sergeant at Arms & Chief Information Officer in the United States Senate.

June 14, 2006
Ravi Todi, a graduate student in the School of EECS, won the prestigious American Vacuum Society (AVS) Graduate Research Award for 2006. In each year, only 2-3 such awards are given by AVS at the International level. This is the first time a graduate student from UCF has received this award.

The Award consists of a $1,000 cash award, certificate and travel grant of $750 to attend the AVS 53rd International Symposium in San Francisco in November 2006, where Mr. Todi will be presented with the award.

May 12, 2006

Mr. Herb Gingold (center) is recognized for his outstanding work as 2005-2006 Chair of the School of EECS Industry Advisory Board and is presented with a plaque by EECS Director Issa Batarseh (left) and 2006-2007 IAB Chair Robert Franceschini (right). Herb Gingold has been instrumental in assisting the School in creating a combined IAB with representatives from CS, CpE, EE and IT companies.

On Friday, May 12, 2006, the School of EECS Industry Advisory Board met at the UCF Fairwinds Alumni Center for its spring meeting. At this meeting, the first of two for the year, the IAB focused on EECS curriculum in preparation for the 2008 ABET accreditation visit and with the goal of considering how to quickly update and improve the curriculum of all four degree programs.

The IAB is led by 2006-2007 Chair Robert Franceschini, who is from SAIC in Orlando. Robert served as co-chair the previous year and now moves up to chair the board. At the meeting, the board elected its '06-'07 co-chair, and Susan Mendez of Progress Energy Florida was selected unanimously for the position. In addition, last year's board chair, Herb Gingold, was honored for his dedication and hard work in 2005-2006, during which time he had the enviable task of merging three different industry boards into one, new IAB. Any UCF alumni or industry representatives interested in becoming a member of the School of EECS Industry Advisory Board may contact Michelle Jordan (michelle@cs.ucf.edu) for more information.

May 8, 2006
UCF Graduate students in the School of EECS - Arun Vijayakumar and Ravi Todi - won First Prize in the Student Paper Contest at the Electrochemical Society Spring Meeting in Denver, Colorado on May 8, 2006. At this international meeting, 62 papers were presented by students from around the world.

The title of the First Place paper was: "Investigation of Reactively Sputtered SiCBN thin Films". The faculty advisor for both students is Dr. Kalpathy B. Sundaram. Each of the winners received a cash prize of $250 and certificate.

April 24, 2006
Congratulations to Dr. Ronald F. DeMara on his promotion to Full Professor!

April 5, 2006

On April 5, 2006, Dr. Mubarak Shah of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science won the University of Central Florida Pegasus Professor Award for 2006 along with Dr. Karen Dow of the College of Health and Public Affairs. The Pegasus Professor is the most prestigious honor for UCF faculty members and was presented to Shah and Dow during UCF’s annual Founder’s Day ceremony. In addition to excelling in their research endeavors, both professors were lauded for mentoring colleagues, working closely with students and for their community service efforts. Shah and Dow are the ninth and 10th winners of the Pegasus Professor Award, which was first given out in 2000 to recognize sustained excellence in teaching, research and service. [MORE]

April 4, 2006
Congratulations to EECS for improved rankings for EE and CompE in the 2007 US News Graduate Rankings:

Computer Engineering ranked for the first time at 67
Electrical Engineering moved up to 69

For Official Press Release, please click here!

April 3, 2006
Congratulations to the UCF IEEE team, who participated at the SoutheastCon 2006 in Memphis, Tennessee. They won the following competitions:

First Place in Undergraduate Research Paper
Second Place in Software Programming contest
Third Place in IEEE Code of Ethics contest

The UCF IEEE team is led by Ravi Todi and consists of 7 EECS students (3 from EE, 2 from CompE, and 2 from CS).

Summer REU, 2006
Research Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Vision
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has designated the Computer Vision Lab, School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, at the University of Central Florida (UCF), as a site for Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) in the area of Computer Vision for 2006-2008. The purpose of the REU is to encourage undergraduate students to pursue graduate school and research careers. This year, ten undergraduate students will participate in this program from across the U.S. The University of Central Florida will serve as a central point for coordination and administration of the program.This year\222s program will start on May 16, 2006, and will last till August 15, 2006.

Research Experience for Undergraduates in Intelligent and Autonomous Robotic Systems
A three-year (2004-2006) site of Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in intelligent and autonomous robotic systems will be held at the University of Central Florida, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Each year, the REU program will expose 12 undergraduate students to research experiences in intelligent and autonomous robotic systems. Undergraduate students who participate in this 10 week program engage in a number of activities that help develop their research skills and ability to conduct independent research work .

March 20, 2006
Professor Amar Mukherjee was awarded the IEEE Computer Society 2005 Technical Achievement Award. The citation reads "For contributions to lossless compression algorithms and compressed domain search-aware pattern matching algorithms for retrieval of text and images."

March 14, 2006
Congratulations to Dr. Mubarak Shah, Agere Chair Professor for receiving the 2006 Pegasus Professor Award. This award recognizes a faculty member who has made a significant impact on the university, has made an extraordinary contribution to the university community, and has demonstrated excellence in teaching, research and service. Dr. Shah is the first ever receiving this award in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. Professor Shah will be formally recognized on April 5 during Founder's day Convocation at 10:00 a.m. in the Pegasus Ballroom of the Student Union. http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~vision/faculty/shah.html

February 16, 2006
Dr. Alan Eustace presents Google: Organizing the World's Information
Google's mission is to organize all the world's information, and make it universally accessible and useful. This talk will describe the hardware and software Google uses to build cost-effective, fault-tolerant solutions to very large scale distributed systems problems. These systems provide elegant abstractions that allow programmers to solve difficult and challenging problems over very large data sets, and provide interesting insights into web usage.

February 15, 2006
The NeuroEvolving Robotic Operatives (NERO) game, created by Assistant Professor Kenneth Stanley while a student at the University of Texas at Austin, won the Award for best game in the Independent Games Festical 2006 Student Middleware Category (see anouncement at http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=7795). NERO was built by a team of over 30 student volunteers over two years at the Digital Media Collaboratory at UT Austin. The award is given to "outstanding student-created independent PC games." NERO exhibits Dr. Stanley's rtNEAT real-time machine learning technology for video games. Dr. Stanley and the NERO team will accept the award in March at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA. NERO can be downloaded at http://nerogame.org.

January 3, 2006
UCF-EECS Team Advances to the "Programming Super Bowl"

The 30th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) has completed its first round (regionals). More than 6,000 teams, representing 1,700 universities from 84 countries, competed at the regionals this year. Only 80 teams (i.e., less than 1.5% of the teams competing at regionals) have advanced to the World Championship round, to be held in April 2006.

UCF competed in the Southeast Regionals which consists of five states. UCF and Georgia Tech solved 9 out of the 11 problems posed in the five-hour contest and, based on their performance, both schools have advanced to World Finals.

September 23, 2005
The School of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have merged and have a new name. It is now the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Dean Gallagher says the merger “will improve visibility and will allow a closer and more productive working relationship.” Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Chair Issa Batarseh will lead the combined units.

September 16, 2005
A self-driving car designed and programmed by University of Central Florida students will compete later this month in the DARPA Grand Challenge, an event designed to help the military build better autonomous vehicles. [MORE]

August 17 , 2005
Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS), an international communications technology company headquartered in Central Florida, has announced a $3 million donation to the College of Engineering & Computer Science. [MORE]