Congratulations Dr. Sunil P. Khatri and Dr. Xi Zhang for winning the 2020 Outstanding Professor Awards!
This award was presented by the Texas A&M University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in recognition of teaching, research, and service excellence in the betterment of the education of our students and to promote our department.
Thank you for your hard work!
Congratulations to Dr. Nick Duffield, Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor I and Director of Texas A&M Institute of Data Science, for being selected by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) as a 2020 ACM Fellow.
The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee. The accomplishments of the 2020 ACM Fellows have driven innovations that ushered in significant improvements across many areas of technology, industry, and personal life.
Congratulations to Dr. I-Hong Hou and former CESG PhD students Ping-Chun Hsieh and Xi Liu! Their recent paper “Fresher Content or Smoother Playback? A Brownian-Approximation Framework for Scheduling Real-Time Wireless Video Streams” won Best Paper!
MobiHoc is a premier international symposium dedicated to addressing challenges in dynamic networks and computing with a highly selective technical program. The acceptance rate of ACM MobiHoc 2020 is 15%.
The award announcement can be found here: https://www.sigmobile.org/mobihoc/2020/awards.html
Dr. Michel A. Kinsy is our new Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering. He directs the Adaptive and Secure Computing Systems (ASCS) Laboratory and serves as the Associate Director of TAMU Cybersecurity Center. He focuses his research on computer architecture, hardware-level security, and efficient hardware design and implementation of post-quantum cryptography systems.
Dr. Kinsy is an MIT Presidential Fellow and an Inaugural Skip Ellis Career Award recipient. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2013 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Before joining the TAMU faculty, Dr. Kinsy was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University (BU). Prior to BU, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Systems at the University of Oregon, where he directed the Computer Architecture and Embedded Systems (CAES) Laboratory. From 2013 to 2014, he was a Member of the Technical Staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he led the Advanced Computer Architecture Concepts sub-group tasked with exploring future secure computing architectures in critical DoD systems.
Dr. Kinsy is excited and looks forward to collaborating with colleagues and mentoring students in designing secure and trustworthy computing systems.
For more information on Dr. Kinsy, please visit https://cesg.tamu.edu/faculty/michel-kinsy/.
Congratulations to Dr. Sunil Khatri!
The Association of Former Students presented Dr. Khatri with a Distinguished Achievement Award in College-Level Teaching for the Academic Year of 2019.
The Dean of Engineering, Dr. Banks, honored four winner:
– Dr. Sunil Khatri, Electrical and Computer Engineering
– Dr. Kristi Shryock, Aerospace Engineering
– Dr. Aakash Tyagi, Computer Science and Engineering
– Dr. Victor Ugaz, Chemical Engineering
Thank you for contributing to our program Dr. Khatri!
Dr. Jiang Hu received the Texas A&M AgriLife Research 2019 Director’s Award for contribution to the research project on IoT-based intelligent irrigation. This is research in collaboration with AgriLife researchers Dr. Dana Porter and Dr. Thomas Marek.
Agriculture irrigation accounts for the use of two-thirds of the world-wide fresh water resources which is increasingly experiencing shortage due to human population growth and climate change. Technological advances have created numerous bells and whistles that can potentially improve water-use efficiency. However, there lacks a complete solution that makes use of all leverages and provides growers with peace of mind. Jiang Hu and CESG students, Justin Sun, Yanxiang Yang and Hongxin Kong, collaborate with the AgriLife research team to develop a complete solution for intelligent and automatic variable rate irrigation. It integrates spatial data from soil moisture sensors, past water applications and weather forecasts. At the same time, the system must be tolerant of faults and breakdowns. The centerpiece and brain of the system is an intelligent control algorithm. It estimates the amount of water needed for each location according to current soil moisture level and considers the probability of near future precipitation and evapotranspiration. The algorithm uses a machine learning procedure that is sensitive to crop and soil types. The proposed system can simultaneously improve crop yield and reduce water use. A prototyping system has been built in the AgriLife experiment field near Amarillo, Texas and three patents derived from the research have been filed.
Congratulations to the Texas A&M team for winning 3rd place in the 3D Printer Hack Challenge at the CSAW ’19 cyber-security competition held November 7-9, 2019 in Brooklyn, New York.
The Texas A&M team was comprised of Computer and Electrical Engineering students Akash Tiwari, Mutaz Melhem, and Maccoy Merrell under the advisement of professor Stavros Kalafatis.
After progressing from the qualification round where participants were challenged to reconstruct a corrupted .gcode file, the team employed skills in file forensics and reverse-engineering, to decode a file that they sent through a Caesar Cipher decode to obtain instructions for the final competition. They then had to develop a male 3D printer piece that was scaled to fit a female 3D printed piece whose STL file was provided. In addition, the team was tasked to create a STL file and then decode an encrypted Data Matrix code (after determining it was not a QR code) which provided a message that was not decipherable. The team completed the challenge in seven hours and placed 3rd out of five finalist from schools across Canada and the US.
This was the third time the Texas A&M team had entered the competition. Last year, they placed third in a embedded security challenge. They have truly set themselves apart nationally within such a short period.
For more information on the event, go to https://csaw.engineering.nyu.edu.
Dr. Shakkottai joined as an Assistant Professor in 2008 and later became Associate Professor in 2014. As of September 2019, he has been promoted to Full Professor.
Congratulations Dr. Shakkottai for your promotion! And, thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to our program!
Watch the full interview here!
“BRYAN, Tex (KBTX) – “The whole energy and power system is undergoing a revolution, in many ways,” said PR Kumar, the chair of Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. “While this technology is fantastic, it also gives you attack opportunities.”
Professor Kumar and his colleague, Le Xie, are studying how we get power and protect its fragile network. Malware and ransomware are being used to steal data or even shut down power systems
“People are trying to hack into these systems all the time,” said Gary Miller, general manager of Bryan Texas Utilities. He says infrastructure renewal, along with sturdy software and research, is key in keeping the grid up and running.
“We have a robust cyber-security program at the city of Bryan and BTU. All of our software is protected as best we know how,” Miller said.
Professor Le says Texas A&M is poised to lead the field of cyber-security in the future.
“Texas A&M, from a historical perspective, has housed one of the largest energy power programs in North America.” Le said. “We have in this department alone a dozen or so professors working in this general area of power energy systems.”
While the experts work on keeping our grid safe from intruders, Le says there’s something that’s a bigger worry for us, everyday consumers.
You may remember a day in early August where ERCOT asked the state of Texas to conserve as much energy as possible in the afternoon.
“74 gigawatts,” Le said. “imagine the largest nuclear power plant (about 1 gigawatt). Demand two weeks ago was about 74 of those power plants working together at the same time.”
Le says a typical summer day has our homes demanding half the entire demand for power. Half of that? You guessed it. Air conditioning. As the Brazos Valley grows, how do we stay cool in the future?
BTU thinks they have the answer.
“In the near future I think solar will expand considerably,” Miller said. “in fact, BTU has very recently entered into a large solar purchasing agreement from a solar farm in North Texas that will serve a considerable amount of our electrical needs.”
Many would be pleased to hear this news, especially from an environmental perspective. Miller says while that’s a bonus, it’s actually going to be cheaper for you and me.
“It was the most economically beneficial for us.”
While solar and wind are emerging energy sources in the state of Texas, fossil fuels and natural gas are still 60% of our energy source, and experts agree that it will still be needed for the foreseeable future.”
Congratulations to CESG’s Dr. Paul Gratz!
Dr. Gratz’s paper titled “Synchronized Progress in Interconnection Networks (SPIN) : A New Theory for Deadlock Freedom” was selected for The IEEE Micro Top Picks in Architecture for 2018.
This paper proposes a new theoretical approach to deadlock freedom in interconnection networks, based upon reframing the problem as one of coordination among independent actors as opposed to a problem of resource acquisition ordering.
To read more about Dr. Gratz’s research, see Rachel Rose’s ECE article on the department news page in February 2019.
IEEE Micro publishes its yearly “Micro’s Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences” as its May / June 2019 issue. This issue collects the year’s most significant research papers in computer architecture based on novelty and potential for long-term impact.
Get an early look at Dr. Gratz’s paper here:
“IEEE Micro Top Paper Pick 2018 – Gratz Synchronized Progress in Interconnection Networks (SPIN) A New Theory for Deadlock Freedom”.
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