Friends and Colleagues,
Greetings from the Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering (I-SENSE). We hope that your fall semester is off to a productive and enjoyable start.
FAU’s Sensing and Smart Systems pillar is growing stronger each day. In this newsletter, we share some exciting updates about our faculty, our community programs, our projects, and our most recent class of undergraduate researchers. As I’ve written in each of these newsletters, it’s an exciting time to be at FAU, and to be working in sensing and smart systems.
If you are working in sensing and smart systems or the internet of things, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out by email, drop by for a visit, or help us welcome a distinguished visitor as part of the Pillar Seminar Series. If you’d like to invite and host a visitor, please let us know; we still have dates available in the schedule for the 2019-20 series.
FAU is building the future of sensing and smart systems. We invite you to build it with us.
Best wishes,
Jason O. Hallstrom,
Director, I-SENSE@FAU
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I-SENSE Welcomes New Team Members
The I-SENSE team is continuing to grow.
Be sure to welcome Xiaolei (Emily) Guo, left, a software engineer, and Traci Johnson, right, a drone specialist, to the team.
Guo received her master’s degree in computer science from FAU in June 2018. She has nine years of software development experience in software design, coding and testing. Before FAU, she worked for IBM China for three years. Since joining the I-SENSE team, she developed gateway software. She is currently working on a project focused on mobile app development.
Johnson is an engineering graduate student at FAU who used to fly cargo planes. She is retired form Broward Sheriff’s Office Fire Rescue where, for the last two years, she helped establish a drone program for the Law Enforcement and Fire Rescue departments. She now brings her expertise to I-SENSE, where she will work on several drone-related projects.
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I-SENSE / COECS Joint Seed Funding Initiative
The I-SENSE and the College of Engineering and Computer Science sought proposals to support the establishment of multi-disciplinary collaborations that lead to externally funded research programs. The goal is to enable proposing teams to engage in proof-of-concept designs, preliminary studies, infrastructure building, and other activities that set the foundation for new research programs to attract significant external funding and national recognition. Successful proposals are distinct from existing, well-established research activities. The total funding available under this program is $200,000, and eight submissions were awarded funding. Congratulations to awardees!
Title: Development of Flexible Wearable Sensors to Predict Heart Failure Decomposition and Reduce Hospital Admissions
PI: Waseem Asghar, Ph.D., Morton H. Leavitt, M.D., Imadeldin Mahgoub, Ph.D., Sarah E. Du, Ph.D.
Amount: $25,000
Title: Real Time Harmful Algal Bloom Detection and Monitoring: Testing a Novel Automated Classification Algorithm in Holographic Imagery
PI: Aditya Nayak, Ph.D., Georgios Sklivanitis, Ph.D., Dimitris Pados, Ph.D.
Amount: $25,000
Title: Rapidly Growing Robotic Bones with Liquid Metal Nerves Innervating Soft Robotic Fingers
PI: Erik Engeberg, Ph.D., Bing Ouyang, Ph.D., Kunal Mondal, Ph.D.
Amount: $25,000
Title: Reinforcement Learning for Navigation and Coordination of a Bioinspired Underwater Vehicles in Close Formation
PI: Siddhartha Verma, Ph.D., Oscar Curet, Ph.D., Yufei Tang, Ph.D., Georgios Sklivanitis, Ph.D., Dimitris Pados, Ph.D.
Amount: $35,000
Title: A Hybrid Nanosheet-Hydrogel Drug Delivery System for Enhanced Stem Cell Therapy
PI: Kevin Yunqing Kang, Ph.D., Deguo Du, Ph.D., Jang Yen Wu, Ph.D.
Amount: $25,000
Title: Quantification of Probability of Nanoparticle Attachment on Erythrocytes and Subsequent Influence on the Aggregation, Endolethial Adhesion, and Deformability of Erythrocytes
PI: Peng Yi, Ph.D., Sara Du, Ph.D., Andrew V. Oleinikov, Ph.D.
Amount: $25,000
Title: Privacy Preserving Protocols for Big Data Analytics
PI: Mehrdad Nojoumian, Ph.D., Xingquan Zhu, Ph.D., Elias Bou-Harb, Ph.D.
Amount: $25,000
Title: Sensor-based System for Remote Therapy Managements of Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease
PI: Behnaz Ghoraani, Ph.D., James Galvin, Ph.D., Sameea Husain Wilson, Ph.D.
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I-SENSE Welcomes Talented Undergraduate Students for REU Program
For three years, I-SENSE has continued to host the sensing and smart systems Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. This summer, I-SENSE provided 10 students from across the country the opportunity to gain hands-on experience and participate in research. Each student was mentored by an I-SENSE-affiliated faculty member. For nine intensive weeks, students worked alongside FAU faculty, postdoctoral associates, graduate students and staff in the labs.
The program has continued to attract more and more applicants each year. This year, approximately 200 students applied for the 10 positions.
Kayleigh Taylor, a student from the University of Maryland, spent the summer working on the Hybrid Aerial/Underwater Robotic System (HAUCS) project with Jason Hallstrom, Ph.D. “The goal of the project is to create a completely automated data collection system that will measure and maintain the dissolved oxygen levels of aquaculture,” Taylor said. “Being able to work on this project not only gives me great experience, but allows me to have a positive impact on the environment.”
Makaylah Cowan, a student from Colby College, spent the summer working on the cognitive reconfigurable radio architectures for connected autonomous maritime vehicles, with Georgios Sklivanitis, Ph.D. “This project in particular was interesting to me because of its very practical applications including observation of marine ecosystems, oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, and other maritime surveillance applications,” Cowan said. “Since I’m studying both computer science and environmental science, I recognize just how valuable technological studies are pertaining to other disciplines, so working on a project that applies this idea was very appealing to me.”
The program culminated with the students giving final presentations to faculty, staff, students, friends and family, followed by an award ceremony for best research and best presentation.
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I-SENSE Graduate Student Successfully Defends Dissertation
Congratulations to Prasanth Ganesan for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation, “Development of an Algorithm to Guide a Multi-Pole Diagnostic Catheter for Identifying the Location of Atrial Fibrillation Sources,” and fulfilling requirements for his doctoral degree. His supervisory committee included Behnaz Ghoraani, Ph.D., Zvi Roth, Ph.D., Borko Furht, Ph.D., and Ali Zilouchian, Ph.D.
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I-SENSE Faculty Fellow Receives Collaborative Seed Award
Yufei Tang, Ph.D., left, an assistant professor in the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and I-SENSE fellow, and Junjian Qi, Ph.D., right, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Central Florida, received a collaborative seed grant from the Florida Center for Cybersecurity. The $75,000 grant will fund a one-year project titled, “Enhancing Cyber-Physical System Security for Large-Scale Integration of Distributed Energy Resources by Big Data and Deep Learning.”
In order to secure Florida’s place as the national leader in distributed energy resources, the researchers will collaborate with each other to reduce the cybersecurity risks for DER integration by addressing the major challenges and developing effective attack prevention, detection, and response strategies.
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I-SENSE Faculty Fellow Receives NSF Award for Personalized Health Monitoring Research
Behnaz Ghoraani, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and I-SENSE faculty fellow, was awarded $322,347 from the National Science Foundation for a project titled, “CCSS: Discovery of Individualized Disease Features for Personalized Health Monitoring.” The three-year project aims to deliver publicly-available algorithms and a software toolkit for long-term health monitoring that can support early detection of a disease outside clinical settings. The broad and far-reaching impact of these algorithms in the context of sudden cardiac death, Parkinson Disease and Alzheimer disease will be highly transformative to health outcomes.
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I-SENSE Researchers Receiving Funding for Autonomous Interference Avoiding Networks
Dimitris Pados, Ph.D., right, an I-SENSE Faculty Fellow and Charles E. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in Engineering, and Georgios Sklivanitis, Ph.D., left, an assistant research professor with I-SENSE and the Center for Connected Assured Autonomy, received a one-year award from GE Aviation. The $225,000 project titled, “Autonomous Interference Avoiding Networking on the Mxxx GE Platform,” will enable the researchers to design a unified software framework for modeling, simulation, and emulation of software-defined cognitively reconfigurable drone networks.
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K-Rain Funds New Phase of I-SENSE Project
Jason Hallstrom, Ph.D., right, I-SENSE director and professor, and Jiannan Zhai, Ph.D., left, a research assistant professor for I-SENSE, received $260,375 from K-Rain Manufacturing Corporation to fund Phase III of their project, titled, “Project Genesis.”
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I-SENSE Graduate Student Receives NSF Travel Award
Murtadha Hssayeni, left, a graduate student working under Behnaz Ghoraani, Ph.D., right, received a travel award from the National Science Foundation to attend and present his research at the IEEEE Biomedical Health and Informatics Conference, held at the University of Illinois at Chicago on May 19 to 22. The competitive travel award covered some of Hssayeni’s travel costs to present his paper titled, “Symptom-based, Dual-channel LSTM Network for the Estimation of Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale III.”
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I-SENSE and Donna Klein Jewish Academy Celebrate Second Year of Partnership
I-SENSE celebrated the second year of its partnership with the Donna Klein Jewish Academy, a K-12 school in Boca Raton, Florida. Through this partnership, students enrolled in the academy’s engineering program at Claire and Emanuel G. Rosenblatt High School, visited research laboratories, attended seminars, and engaged with current I-SENSE students and faculty members on FAU’s Boca Raton campus. Each student worked on a research and development project. On May 22, they showcased their project on campus to faculty members, students, family and friends.
A certificate of completion and academic excellence in the Donna Klein Jewish Academy Engineering Program was presented to students who completed both a full year in the I-SENSE program and required engineering and computer sciences courses at Rosenblatt High School.
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I-SENSE Engineer Receives Master’s Degree
Congratulations to Chancey Kelley, a computer and electrical engineer on the I-SENSE team, for receiving his master’s degree in computer science from FAU in August. Way to go!
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I-SENSE Seminar Series
I-SENSE is gearing up another season of its seminar series. Please be sure to check i-sense.fau.edu or email MaryJo Jackson at
mrobin72@fau.edu for information about our upcoming events.
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