News

Smart Infrastructure Data Analytics Laboratory is opened as the newest research lab in the ECE Department. It focuses upon real-time data analytics, learning and control for such infrastructure systems as smart building management, renewable energy and digital grids, and smart communities. The lab further enhances the existing collaborations among UCF faculty and students, Siemens, UCF Facility, Duke Energy, OUC, and City of Orlando, as well as the larger FEEDER Center. A Siemens-UCF Ideation Workshop was held to kick off R&D activities in the lab.

Congratulations to Nazanin Rahnavard and Ronald DeMara for their new NSF project entitled “Cross-layer Adaptive Rate/Resolution Design for Energy-Aware Acquisition of Spectrally Sparse Signals Leveraging Spin-based Devices.

A team of 6 UCF students from the Collegiate Cyber Defense Club @ UCF won 1st Place in the 2018 Department of Energy Cyber Defense Competition at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, IL. The team was tasked with designing, building, and defending a corporate network including industrial control systems for a fictitious natural gas distribution company. During the competition, the Red Team, a group of professional penetration testers from the Illinois National Guard and Argonne National Laboratory, attempted to breach the student teams’ networks to steal data, deface websites, or entirely delete critical systems. UCF was one of 25 teams invited to compete in the DOE Cyber Defense Competition from a pool of 61 schools who submitted bids to compete this year.

UCF in partnership with EPRI is hosting an OpenDSS workshop on July 26-27. OpenDSS is an open-code power distribution system simulator developed by EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) that is used widely in academia and the power industry. OpenDSS tutorials will be provided and new features such as parallel simulations and graphics user interface will be introduced by Roger Dugan and Davis Montenegro from EPRI, and UCF will present a multi-agent framework of the OpenDSS for DERs and grid-edge controls/optimization.

Congratulations to Amro Awad for his two new research grants on tackling security, privacy and isolation in future computer systems. The first award is from Navy-Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) at Dahlgren to support isolation in virtualized systems, and the project aims to enable running mission-critical and time-constrained applications on cloud systems. The second award is from National Science Foundation (NSF), and the research is to improve the security of Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) systems through hardware/software co-design. His current project funded by Sandia National Labs explores the use of NVM for building Disaggregated Memory Systems, which leads to considerable energy cost-savings in building future data centers.

The department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is accepting applications for Qorvo PhD Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded to the top PhD applicant who will start in the Fall of 2018 and includes a yearly stipend of $20K.

Dr. Issa Batarseh Received Florida, International Recognition November 21, 2017 Dr. Issa Batarseh received Florida, International Recognition. He was recognized by both the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame and the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan recently. http://spacecoastdaily.com/2017/11/video-university-of-central-florida-scientist-issa-batarseh-receives-florida-international-recognition/ More News Stories

Professor Wasfy Mikhael received a lifetime service award for his leadership as the chair of the MWSCAS Steering Committee and for the success of IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS) over several decades.

IEEE Women in Engineering Committee (WIEC) has selected Parveen Wahid as the winner of the 2017 WIE Inspiring Member Award! The purpose of this award is to recognize a professional member of IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) who has made an outstanding contribution to WIE, their community and the engineering community, through dedication and involvement in projects or activities directed toward fulfilling one or more of the WIE goals and objectives. Parveen has clearly embodied this purpose and they am pleased to recognize Parveen “for exemplary service to enriching the diversity and technical experiences of female members and students around the globe.”

The team consists of researchers from UCF ECE, NREL, HNEI, Siemens, GE, Duke and OPAL-RT, and it is led by Professor Zhihua Qu.