Electrical Engineering

Research Summary

Afshin Abdollahi received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1997 and 2000 respectively and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 2006. His research interests are Quantum computation and quantum circuit synthesis, Nano-circuit fabrics and nano-technology, Logic synthesis and verification and low power design CAD methodologies. He is the recipient of a number of awards including the Best Paper Award in Design Automation Conference (DAC), Anaheim, CA, 2005 and Silver Medal in the 34th International Mathematics Olympiad, Istanbul, Turkey, 1993. He served as the organizer of the Young Student Support Program (YSSP) in the Design Automation Conference in 2005. He has published several articles and served as reviewer for a number of IEEE, IEE and ACM transactions and conference proceedings.

Research Summary

Electronic materials, nanostructures and devices. Research topics include nanophononics, hybrid bio-inorganic nanostructures, thermal management of nanoelectronic devices, noise phenomena, GaN and ZnO materials and devices, thermoelectric devices.

Prior to joining UCR Dr. Balandin worked as a Research Engineer at UCLA from 1997 until 1999. Currently, he is a leader of the Nano-Device Laboratory (NDL), which conducts nanoelectronics research in projects funded by NSF, ONR, SRC, DARPA, CRDF and industry. Dr. Balandin is a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award (2002), NSF Faculty CAREER Award (2001), UC Regents' Faculty Award (2000), and Merrill Lynch Award for "commercially valuable engineering research" (1998). He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Nanoelectronics and Optoelectronics (JNO) and an editorial board member of the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (JNN).

Research Summary

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS), transportation and emissions modeling, vehicle activity analysis, electric & hybrid electric vehicles, mobile robot navigation, active computer vision, panoramic sensing techniques, and distributed vision. Dr. Barth is currently directory of UCR's CE-CERT. At CE-CERT, he has a Transportation Systems Research Laboratory, consisting of several full-time staff members as well as undergraduate and graduate students. He is active in several Transportation Research Board committees, IEEE, and ITS America's Energy and Environment Committee.

Research Summary

1) Swarm intelligence, with emphasis on theory of self-organizing autonomous robots; 2) Multimedia for educational technology, with emphasis on 3D animation of communicative gestures; 3) Financial Engineering, with emphasis on asynchronous iterative methods. Prof. Beni was the co-founder of the Journal of Robotic Systems (1982-). In 1982 he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for his work in Theoretical and Applied Physics, and in 1999 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his multidisciplinary research contributions in Robotics and Multimedia Systems.

Research Summary

Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Multimedia and Spatial Databases, Image Processing, Graphics and Visualization, Robotics, Sensor Networks, Biological Image/Video Processing, and Intelligent Systems. As founding Chair of Electrical Engineering at UCR, Dr. Bhanu was responsible for the development of the undergraduate and graduate teaching and research aspects of the degree programs. Dr. Bhanu has been the principal investigator of various programs from NSF, DARPA, AFOSR, ARO, NASA, Sony, Ford and other sponsors. Dr. Bhanu has 11 patents and more than 250 reviewed publications in his research area. Dr. Bhanu is a Fellow of IEEE, AAAS, IAPR and SPIE.

Research Summary

System identification; robust and robust adaptive control; linear multivariable system theory; nonlinear control; optimization and complexity theory; active control of noise and vibration, and magnetic bearing systems. Dr. Chen is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He has recently published a book titled "Control-Oriented System Identification: An H-infinity Approach" (Wiley Interscience, 2000). His awards include a NSF Career Award, 1995 and a UC Regents Fellowship, University of California, 1995. He has served on numerous programs committees of international conferences and held several guest and visiting appointments.

Research Summary

Error-correcting coding for data transmission and storage; decoding algorithms; nonbinary codes; concatenated design; and defect-correcting codes. Dr. Dumer's awards include the Royal Society Guest Research Fellow (Manchester, UK, 1992-93), and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow (Essen, Germany, 1993-94). His results include: feasible decoding algorithms for concatenated codes; near-maximum likelihood decoding with the least known complexity; efficient nonbinary double-error-correcting codes and optimal defect-correcting codes for data storage.

Research Summary

1) Learning Control Systems - Investigating approximator properties and conditions for stability of both the state and approximator parameters with the goal of guaranteeing good repeatable performance; 2) Autonomous Vehicles and Intelligent Transportation Systems - increasing high way throughput and safety through increases in vehicle autonomy; and, 3) Global Position Systems - developing a differential GPS/INS system to provide high rate full six degree of freedom vehicle state information with centimeter level position accuracy. Dr. Farrell has been Associate Editor for two IEEE Transactions, Program Chair for the 1996 IEEE ISIC, and Finance Chair for the 1995, 2001, and 2003 IEEE CDCs.

Research Summary

Dr. Haberer's research interests include biologically-mediated assembly of materials for electronic, optoelectronic, and energy applications; nano-structured hybrid materials; and novel top-down and bottom-up assembly techniques.

Prior to joining the faculty at UC Riverside, Dr. Haberer was a postdoctoral researcher in the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara where she explored viral-based assembly of nano-structured materials for low-cost solar cell applications. Her doctoral work developed a novel semiconductor etching technique used to fabricate low-threshold GaN microdisk lasers. Her professional affiliations include IEEE, MRS, AIChE SBE, and SWE.

Research Summary

Science and technology policy, distributed asynchronous signal processing and cellular robot systems. Dr. Hackwood has published over 140 technical publications and holds 7 patents. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and the AAAS and holds honorary degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and DeMontfort University, UK. As founding dean of engineering at UCR, she oversaw the development of all research and teaching aspects of five degree programs.

Research Summary

Signal Processing, Wireless Communications and Networking, Sensor Networks, and Intelligent Systems. He is an author and coauthor of more than 260 refereed articles published in international journals and conferences. He is an Editor of two book volumes on Wireless and Mobile Communications with Prentice-Hall and another book on High-Resolution and Robust Signal Processing with Marcel Dekker. He has served on Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Signal Processing (EURASIP), and IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. He is a former member of IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Committees for Underwater Acoustic Signal Processing, Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing, and Signal Processing for Communications and Networking. He is a Fellow of the IEEE since 2002.

Research Summary

Nanomagnetic devices to advance the state of the art in computing, medical and energy harvesting applications.

Research Summary

Single-electronics (physics and device applications including single-electron ogic and memory), electron transport in nanostructures, noise analysis, quantum measurements in quantum computing, and quantum feedback. He has published 86 journal papers, 26 proceedings, and 9 book chapters. His papers have been cited over 1,500 times.

Research Summary

Theory of electron transport through nanostructured, disordered and amorphous materials; modeling semiconductor devices from the atomistic, to the device, through the circuit level; theoretical and computational electronics and opto-electronics; ultra-scaled devices and device physics; high frequency and transient quantum device simulation; and novel materials, devices and architectures. Dr. Lake is a Member of the American Physics Society and the IEEE. His awards include a Semiconductor Research Corporation Fellowship, 1988-92.

Research Summary

Image Processing and analysis, medical image processing, pattern recognition, artificial neural networks, signal processing pattern formation in distributed systems, and multimedia and human-machine interface. Dr. Liang is an associate editor of the journals Pattern Recognition, and Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing and the author of more than 50 publications in refereed journals and conferences proceedings. He is a Senior Member of IEEE. His honors include 1997 DOE/AWU Faculty Fellow, 1997 Air Force Summer Faculty Fellow and two outstanding conferences paper awards.

Research Summary

Semiconductor materials and devices. Current research topics include molecular beam epitaxial (MBE) growth of ZnO and SiGe semicondutor materials and nanostructures; Other oxide materials; ZnO and SiGe nanostructures and nanodevices fabrication via self-assembly and advanced lithography; Flash memory and single electron memory; Spintronics; Low-dimensional thermoelectrics and devices; Solid state lighting and sensing.

Research Summary

Fiber-optic and free-space optical communications, optical satellite systems, coherent optical receivers, optical propagation through atmospheric turbulence, and DSP-based equalization techniques. Prior to joining the UCR faculty, Dr. Lyubomirsky worked at CIENA Corp. on research and product development of UDWDM transmission systems. Dr. Lyubomirsky is a Member of the Optical Society of America and IEEE. His honors include a Hertz Foundation Fellowship at MIT, and Best Thesis in Engineering Award at UMCP.

Research Summary

Dr. Mourikis' research interests lie in the areas of vision-aided inertial navigation, multi-robot systems, distributed estimation in mobile sensor networks, simultaneous localization and mapping, and structure from motion. Specifically, his research has focused on analytically predicting the estimation accuracy of localization algorithms, as well as on developing methodologies for optimal resource utilization, in localization systems with limited resources.

Anastasios Mourikis has been awarded the 2007 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of Minnesota (UMN), as well as the UMN Computer Science Department's 2005 and 2006 Excellence in Research awards..

Research Summary

Dr. Mihri Ozkan is the principle investigator of Biomedical Science and Nanotechnology laboratory. Her research interests include hybrid organic/inorganic systems where recent advances in nanotechnology are applied for the fabrication of future electronics, photovoltaics and biosensors. In addition, her laboratory applies hybrid systems for cancer diagnosis and therapeutics. Dr. Ozkan is the recipient of number of awards including Army’s Young Investigator Award (2006), Distinguished Engineering Educator of the Year Award by the National Engineers’ Council (2006), Regents Faculty Excellence Award (2006, 2004, 2002), Emerging Scholar Award by the American Association of University Women (2005), Invited participant to the National Academy’s Keck Future Initiatives Conference (2005), Visionary Science Award by the BioMEMS and Biomedical Nanotechnology Conference (2003), “Achievement in Technical Ingenuity” Award by the Inland Empire Economic Partnership (2003).

Research Summary

Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury's research interests are in the broad areas of image processing and analysis, computer vision, video communications and statistical methods for signal processing, pattern recognition and machine learning. His current research projects include distributed scene analysis and control in camera networks, physics-based mathematical modeling of image appearance, activity modeling and recognition, face and gait recognition, biological video analysis and multi-terminal video compression. The work is supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, DARPA and private industries. He is an author of the book titled "Recognition of Humans and Their Activities Using Video". He received a Best Paper Award at ICASSP 2006, the premier conference in signal processing. He has been on the program and organizing committees of many of the major conferences in computer vision and image/signal processing and is a regular reviewer for the main journals in these areas. He is an Associate Editor of the IAPR journal Machine Vision and Applications.

Research Summary

His research interests include several aspects of design automation for VLSI integrated circuits – high performance power/ground distribution network design and optimization, simulation and synthesis of mixed-signal/RF/analog circuits, embedded system design based on FPGA platforms and signal integrity issues in VLSI physical design (crosstalk analysis, substrate noise analysis and optimization).

Dr. Tan is the recipient of NSF CAREER Award in 2005. He also received the UC Regent’s Faculty Fellowship in 2004. Dr. Tan received a Best Paper Award Nomination from 2005 IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, Best Paper Award from 1999 IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference. He also co-authored book "Symbolic Analysis and Reduction of VLSI Circuits" by Springer/Kluwer 2005. He is a technical program committee member of ISCAS'04, ASPDAC'05, ISCAS'05, BMAS’05, ASPDAC’06, ISQED’06, ISCAS’06.

Research Summary

Information theory; multi-terminal source and channel coding with emphasis on multiresolution and sensor networks; data compression for efficient content-based retrieval from high-dimensional static and streaming databases; fundamental limits of content-based retrieval performance. Dr. Tuncel is a Member of the IEEE.

Research Summary

RF/Analog/Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits (IC), Reliability & ESD (Electrostatic Discharge) Protection design for ICs, SoC (System-on-a-Chip), IC CAD and Modeling, Emerging Semiconductor and Nano Devices.

Wang is author of the book, "On-Chip ESD Protection for Integrated Circuits" (Kluwer, 2002) and 150+ peer-reviewed papers. He holds several U.S. patents. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2002), the Sigma Xi Award for Excellence in University Research, Illinois Institute Technology (2003), and the ChunHui Outstanding Overseas Scholar Award, Ministry of Education, China (2006). Wang is an Editor for IEEE Electron Device Letters and Guest Editor for IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. He served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I, Guest Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Guest Editor for IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II. Wang is Vice President for IEEE Electron Devices Society. He has been IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for both the Electron Devices Society and the Solid-State Circuits Society. He is committee member for the SIA International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductor (ITRS), the IEEE EDS VLSI Technology and Circuits Committee and the IEEE CAS Analog Signal Processing Technical Committee (ASPTC). He has been serving as Program co-Chair, Organization co-Chair, Steering Committee Member, TPC Member, Subcommittee Chair and Session Chair for numerous IEEE conferences, such as, CICC, ISCAS and RFIC, etc. Wang is IEEE Fellow.

Research Summary

Wireless communications, networking, and signal processing. They include multiuser spread spectrum, impulse radio, ultra-wideband, atmospheric and underwater ultraviolet communication, visible light communication, geolocation, navigation, intelligent transportation, ultraviolet imaging and sensing, hybrid radio frequency and optical communication, sensor and ad hoc networks.

Dr. Xu has served as an associate editor and guest editor for various IEEE journals in communications, vehicle technology, or signal processing. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, and an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Technical Committee on Signal Processing for Communications. He has served as a session chair technical program chair, and technical program committee member for many international conferences. He received the Outstanding Student Award and the Motorola Scholarship from Tsinghua University, and the Peskin Award from Stevens Institute of Technology. He also received the Academic Senate Research Award and the Regents' Faculty Award from the University of California, Riverside.