Research

With generous support of Dr. Raj Mittra, the Mittra Antenna, RF and Microwave Integrated Systems Laboratory is dedicated today. Dr. Mittra, a Courtesy Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a world-renowned scholar in EM.

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.

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.

UCF undergraduate Grant Hernandez is featured in an interview that may air on CNN talking about the security of the Nest thermostat, which can be seen in the following link