UCI EECS: YEAR IN REVIEW 2020-21 by UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering

EECS: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

2020-21

Y E A R I N REVIEW

( MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR ) Welcome to the 20202021 EECS: Year in Review magazine that brings you news from the UC Irvine Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. As I write this letter, we are slowly emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic. We are back on campus in person, with vaccination rates in the upper 90% and most of our activities finally getting back to (the new) normal. Reflecting back on the academic year, I don’t think it is an understatement to say that it was unprecedented. We operated almost entirely online for the overwhelming majority of our classes, administrative functions and research efforts, while performing essential activities under strict safety protocols. I am thankful to our faculty, staff and students for their resilience and resourcefulness, which allowed us not only to serve our mission during the last year, but also to come out of the pandemic as a stronger and more efficient team. I’m pleased to share that our EECS department continues to grow. On the hiring front, we are happy to welcome Maxim Shcherbakov (nanotechnology, optics) previously at Cornell, Sitao Huang (embedded systems, programming languages) coming from University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and Changho Suh (information theory and machine learning) joining us from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. We are especially thrilled to welcome Magnus Egerstedt (control theory and robotics), coming from Georgia Tech, as a new faculty member in our department as well as new dean of the Samueli School of Engineering.

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On the fundraising front, we had approximately $13 million in research expenditures from extramural grants alone. Also during the past year, the much-anticipated Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building opened and hosts collaborations between faculty in engineering and other schools on campus. Our faculty continued to collect accolades, including the W. Bode Lecture Prize for Pramod Khargonekar, the IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition for Hamid Jafarkhani, the IEEE Electronics Packaging Technical Field Award for Chin Lee, the IEEE TCCPS Early Career Award for Yasser Shoukry, the NSF CAREER award for Zhou Li, two new IEEE Fellowships and many more. Our students also were recognized for research, including the ACM SIGHPC Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award 2021. We are happy to have undergraduate students back on campus as well as several international graduate students, who were waiting for their visas, finally able to join us in person. Going forward, we are leveraging the lessons learned and the efficient practices we collectively developed. We are all now more aware and appreciative of the privilege and responsibility that comes with being part of our wonderful academic community. Please read on to learn more about what the EECS department has been up to in the academic year 2020-21. I look forward to seeing you, hopefully in person, soon!

—Athina Markopoulou, Ph.D. Professor, Chancellor’s Fellow, and Chair Nicolaos G. and Sue Curtis Alexopoulos Presidential Chair, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine

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Contents

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26 30 34

Facts and Figures Faculty Accolades Meet Magnus

EECS: Year in Review is published annually by the UCI Samueli School’s communications staff for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Highlights Putting Humanity in IoT Student Achievements Future Pathways Alumni

Chair: Athina Markopoulou, Ph.D. EECS Dept. CAO: Julie Strope Editor-in-Chief: Shelly Nazarenus Art Direction: Michael Marcheschi, m2dg.com Publisher: Mike Delaney, Yebo Group

Faculty Directory

2020-21 Year in Review

( FACTS AND FIGURES ) The UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has two key goals:

HISTORY

• Advance the minds of future leaders by providing the finest education to our students

More than 30 research groups focus on areas as diverse as embedded systems, computer networks, middleware, real-time systems, micro-electro-mechanical systems and nanotechnology, communication systems, machine intelligence, and neural and soft computing. Mathematical and natural sciences are applied to the theory, design and implementation of devices and systems for the benefit of our society.

Department expands to include computer science

1983

• Consistently meet industry needs by developing cutting-edge technology

EECS, home to nearly one-third of the engineering student body, has internationally renowned faculty who are top experts in their fields. The department is committed to an integrated view of the electrical engineering field – ranging from microscopic (and even nanoscale) devices all the way to architectures, communications and software design – everything from electrons to programs.

1990

Department of Electrical Engineering founded

STUDENT POPULATION

321

Graduate Students

1,136

M.S., Ph.D. degrees

Undergraduate Students B.S. degrees

Electrical and Computer Engineering Master of Embedded and Cyberphysical Systems ComputeR Engineering

Electrical Engineering

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Computer Science and Engineering

Networked Systems

Research Thrusts Circuits and Devices

RESEARCH AND EXPENDITURES

Computer Engineering Electrical Engineering Systems

World-class Center Affiliations

$12.86M

Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility Center for Pervasive Communications & Computing

2020-21 RESEARCH EXPENDITURES

Chancellor’s Fellow

NSF CAREER Awardees

Emeritus Faculty

Full-time Faculty

Center for Embedded and Cyber-physical Systems

National Academy of Engineering Members

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California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology

FACULTY AND RECOGNITION

National Academy of Inventors Fellows

Endowed Chairs

Distinguished Professors

Royal Society of London Fellow

Affiliated Faculty

Presidential Young Investigator Awardee

Chancellor’s Professors

Fellow of the Academy for the Advancement of Science 2020-21 Year in Review

( FACULTY ACCOLADES ) Pramod Khargonekar, Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science and vice chancellor for research, was awarded the 2021 IEEE Control Systems Society’s Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize.

Assistant Professor Zhou Li won a five-year, $527,416 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Computer and Network Systems.

The Bode Lecture Prize annually recognizes distinguished contributions to control systems science and engineering. In addition to technical merit, IEEE also recognizes the broader impacts of contribution toward the benefit of society and IEEE CSS’s diversity and inclusiveness goals.

Li’s research focuses on internet system security, specifically data-driven security analytics, internet measurement, sidechannel analysis and Internet of Things (IoT) security. His CAREER funding will help advance his efforts to debug a fragmented domain name system (DNS) infrastructure.

Khargonekar is highly regarded for his research in systems and control theory, as well as applications to renewable energy and smart grid, manufacturing and neural engineering. He was honored with the IEEE Control Systems Award in 2019 for his outstanding contributions to robust and optimal control theory. He played an essential role in creating a state-spacebased theory for H-infinity optimal control, which is considered one of the major achievements in the field of control theory in the last 40 years. Recently, he has started exploring novel research directions at the confluence of machine learning and control. Khargonekar also was named to the California Council on Science and Technology’s board of directors. The council is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization established to respond to the governor, the legislature, and other state entities who request independent assessment of public policy issues affecting the state of California relating to science and technology.

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DNS translates user-friendly names like www.google.com to computer-friendly IP addresses. Although it has been designed as a highly reliable infrastructure, it often fails – sometimes as a result of cyberattacks or censorship, other times because of software bugs – leading to user disruption and network outages. “We see more than trillions of requests on a single day processed by DNS, and the volume will keep rising, given that COVID-19 keeps pushing offline activities to online,” Li said. Li’s preliminary work found that 27.9% of DNS requests from one country to Google were intercepted by network adversaries. His project seeks to develop novel platforms, techniques and tools that enable holistic debugging of the entire DNS infrastructure, both at the network layer and software layer. Li plans to make public the results of his research by releasing data, code, methods and tools through open sources to democratize DNS and network debugging in general for researchers, industry partners and the public.

The IEEE selected Henry Samueli as the 2021 recipient of its Founders Medal in recognition of his leadership in research, development and commercialization of broadband communication and networking technology with global impact. Samueli is a UCI distinguished adjunct professor in electrical engineering and computer science. “I am very honored by this wonderful recognition from the IEEE,” said Samueli. “The prior recipients of the Founders Medal are a Who’s Who of technology industry pioneers so I am deeply humbled to be included in such an esteemed group of entrepreneurs.” Samueli, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from UCLA, began his career at TRW, Inc., where he was responsible for the development of military broadband communications systems. In 1991, while teaching at UCLA, he co-founded Broadcom Corp. with one of his Ph.D. students, Henry Nicholas. The company became a global leader in providing semiconductor technologies for wired and wireless communications. Samueli’s pioneering advances in the development and commercialization of analog and mixed signal circuits for modern communication systems led to the explosive growth of the consumer broadband industry. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of IEEE, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Samueli School’s Hamid Jafarkhani received the 2020 IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award. Jafarkhani, Chancellor’s Professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was recognized for fundamental contributions to MIMO wireless communications. MIMO – or multiple-input and multiple-output – is used in billions of wireless devices to increase capacity and improve communications reliability. Employed in cellular networks, Wi-Fi, telemetry and other common applications, MIMO uses multiple antennas to advance transmission and receiving capabilities. Jafarkhani is an expert in communications theory, with an emphasis on coding. His work in this area has greatly influenced the fundamental advancement of the theories of space-time processing and MIMO for wireless communications. Specifically, his research on different aspects of MIMO communications includes the invention of space-time block coding, differential modulation for MIMO, quantized/limited feedback beamforming, distributed space-time coding, network beamforming and cooperative communications. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the IEEE, Jafarkhani is author of the book “Space-Time Coding: Theory and Practice.” He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and the recipient of numerous awards. Of his most recent IEEE accolade, he said, “It is nice to be recognized by the wireless communications research community and I appreciate the certitude of my colleagues.”

Chin C. Lee, who retired in July 2020 after 40 years on the UCI electrical engineering and computer science faculty, received the 2021 IEEE Electronics Packaging Award for meritorious contributions to the advancement of components, electronic packaging or manufacturing technologies. Lee, professor emeritus, is an IEEE Life Fellow. He was recognized specifically for his contributions to “new silver alloys, new bonding methods, flipchip interconnect and education for electronics packaging,” by the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society through the Technical Field Awards Council of the IEEE Awards Board. Lee’s research focused on the use of silver-based alloys in electronic applications and packaging, and he and his team developed new bonding methods and interconnection processes and technologies. His work uncovered surprising physical and chemical properties of these silver alloys, including anti-tarnishing qualities, anti-electrochemical migration and high thermal stability, which opened the door for the electronics packaging industry to adopt them for next-generation electronics. The IEEE citation called Lee’s work “integral to developing high-temperature and high-power electronics,” adding that his research resulted in “a wider process window, lower cost and higher yield in packaging components.”

2020-21 Year in Review

( FACULTY ACCOLADES ) Maxim Shcherbakov, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was a finalist for the 2021 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists in the physical sciences and engineering category.

UCI electrical engineering and computer science professors Athina Markopoulou and Peter Burke were named 2021 IEEE Fellows in recognition of their outstanding research achievements. The fellow designation is awarded by the board of directors to no more than one-tenth of one percent of the organization’s voting membership – those considered to have extraordinary records of accomplishment. This brings to 19 the number of UCI electrical engineering and computer science active faculty recognized as IEEE Fellows. Markopoulou is a professor, Chancellor’s Fellow and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science who joined the Samueli School in 2006. IEEE recognized her for her contributions to network coding systems and network measurement; her research also focuses on computer network privacy and transparency, mobile and social networks, and Internet of Things. She leads the UCI Networking Group and serves as the principal investigator of the NSF-funded ProperData Center, which addresses the need for protection of personal data flow on the internet by combining computer science and engineering methodologies with economic policy. Burke, professor of electrical engineering and computer science was recognized for his contributions to active and passive microwave devices. Burke’s research into carbon nanotubes and graphene has made significant contributions to quantum electronics, quantum information science and high-speed semiconductor devices, and revolutionized ideas about how electromagnetic waves propagate along one-dimensional quantum wires. His current research focuses on designing and using nanoelectronicbased instrumentation to probe, measure and analyze electrical activity in live mitochondria. This can lead to a better understanding of the pathways used by disease, including cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s and heart disease.

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Sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation with guidance from the New York Academy of Sciences, the awards honor outstanding postdoctoral scientists from academic research institutions across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Shcherbakov was nominated by Cornell University, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher before coming to UCI this fall. Shcherbakov is an optical physicist who works with a special class of artificial materials, known as semiconductor metamaterials, that manipulate light. He has used common semiconductor materials, like silicon and germanium, to engineer metamaterials that display new optical properties. With discoveries including the first experimental observation of photon acceleration that changes the frequency of light, Shcherbakov’s research will impact technologies from telecommunications to quantum computing. As a finalist, Shcherbakov will receive $10,000. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 Blavatnik Regional Awards winners and finalists will be honored at the 2022 New York Academy of Sciences Annual Gala.

EECS Welcomes New Faculty in Academic Year 2021-22 Payam Heydari, recently named a Chancellor’s Professor, received the 2021 Innovative Education Award from the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. The award, which comes with a plaque and a $5,000 honorarium, recognizes SSCS members who have made significant contributions to education in the field of solid-state circuits using innovative approaches that have a broad impact. Heydari, an IEEE fellow, was acknowledged for worldwide contributions to education and dissemination of knowledge in the area of microelectronics, specifically impact on research and education in radio-frequency and millimeter-wave integrated circuits. He has delivered more than 100 distinguished lectures to higher education institutions, IEEE chapters and high-tech companies; and has presented keynote speeches, webinars, tutorials and short courses at premier IEEE solid-state circuits conferences.

Magnus Egerstedt, Professor (July 2021) Research Interests: control theory and robotics, control and coordination of complex networks, multirobot systems, mobile sensor networks and cyberphysical systems Education: Ph.D., KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden Joining us from Georgia Tech, where he was a professor and chair of ECE

Sitao Huang, Assistant Professor (January 2022) Research Interests: hardware accelerators, programming languages and compilers for accelerators, high-level synthesis, heterogeneous computing Education: Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Joining us from UIUC, where he just completed his Ph.D. in ECE

Maxim Shcherbakov, Assistant Professor (July 2021)

He was one of 11 experts who presented the first massive open online course (MOOC) on key circuit concepts and trends in 2014-2015; the introductory course became a model for subsequent MOOCs.

Research Interests: nanotechnology, nonlinear and quantum optics, optics-based telecommunications and computing, laser physics

Heydari also won a best paper award from the 2021 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, a flagship conference of the IEEE SSCS. Heydari’s single-author paper, “Transceivers for 6G Wireless Communications: Challenges and Design Solutions,” was announced as the Outstanding Invited Paper at the conference’s closing ceremony in April. The innovative transceiver architectures presented in his paper will bring about new, emerging applications such as wireless communications at speeds that are two orders-of-magnitude higher than the recently deployed 5G.

Education: Ph.D., Lomonosov Moscow State University Joining us from Cornell, where he was a postdoctoral associate in applied engineering and physics

Changho Suh, Assistant Professor (January 2022) Research Interests: information theory and machine learning, graph theory, channel capacity, channel coding, stochastic processes, broadcast channels, channel allocation, computational complexity Education: Ph.D., UC Berkeley Joining us from KAIST in Korea, where he was an associate professor in EE

2020-21 Year in Review

MEET MAGNUS New dean and EECS professor

Tonya Becerra and Lori Brandt

enthusiastically steps into his leadership role

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Steve Zylius

2020-21 Year in Review

Magnus Egerstedt took up his post as the new Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering at the UCI Samueli School in July. He comes to Irvine from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where he had served as the Steve W. Chaddick Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Egerstedt is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, as well as a fellow of the IEEE and the International Federation of Automatic Control. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and linguistics from Sweden’s Stockholm University, a master’s degree in engineering physics, and a doctorate in applied mathematics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. A highly respected robotics and control systems researcher, Egerstedt, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, will continue his research, including the development of a hyper-energy-efficient environmental monitoring robot called the SlothBot, in his new lab in the UCI Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Building. SlothBot is a slowmoving and energyefficient robot that can linger in the trees to monitor animals, plants and the environment below. Egerstedt and his team installed it for testing in the Atlanta Botanical Garden. (Photo: Rob Felt, Georgia Tech)

Q. After 20 years with Georgia Tech, why did you decide to uproot and come to UCI? I recently found myself at a point in my career where I was increasingly drawn to questions that require a significantly larger footprint and approach than what any individual lab can provide. I started looking for a place that was ambitious, hungry, and had outstanding faculty, students and staff. UCI is firing on all those cylinders, and it is clear that the Samueli School of Engineering is a place where one can make big things happen. At the same time, the school’s overall mission aligns very well with my own values, with a focus on diversity, social mobility and impactful research.

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Q. What are your plans/vision for the Samueli School of Engineering? I am convinced that “people is policy,” meaning that we should double down on our efforts to recruit the best and most diverse faculty, students and staff. But it does not end with recruiting. We need to have a supportive and collaborative culture where we go after large-scale, high-impact/high-risk projects together – and where we celebrate each other’s successes and achievements. I am also very interested in student experiences outside of the classroom, and I hope to help enhance our entrepreneurship pathways, international opportunities, undergraduate research programs and makerspaces. But the first order of business is to get out of the dean’s office and into our classroom and labs, listening to our stakeholders – internal as well as external – to learn as much as I can about the Samueli School and what makes this place tick.

Q. Tell us about your research. My research focuses broadly on how to make large teams of robots come together and solve tasks in a collaborative manner, the way schooling fish or flocking birds can produce intricate geometric patterns and formations. This is an area known as swarmrobotics, and the fundamental problem is how to structure the algorithms so that individual agents can make decisions, learn from their experiences, and act in such a way that useful patterns and strategies emerge at the team level even though no individual robot has complete knowledge of the world. The applications I have pursued include platoons of autonomous vehicles, robots for precision agriculture, environmental monitoring robots and mobile sensor networks. I have also made a number of connections between robotics and the arts, including robotic marionettes, dancing robots that improvise with human dancers, robots that paint, and robots that respond to musical moods and melodies. Q. Your higher education path was broad and interdisciplinary. How did you land at engineering? At heart, I like to solve problems that matter. And that is what engineering is all about. So, in some sense, I have always been an engineer even though I came to that realization in a rather roundabout way. My educational journey went from philosophy and linguistics, via engineering physics and applied mathematics, to a research and teaching career in robotics. These detours may have given me a slightly unusual outlook on the engineering discipline and curriculum, and I am a big supporter of flexible and customizable educational paths through our programs. My journey has certainly also influenced how I think about the engineering discipline as a force for good in the world. At their best, engineers are fearless innovators who can enhance the human experience through rigorous problem-solving and creative applications of a wide range of scientific disciplines.

Q. What role will diversity and inclusion have in your plans for the school’s future? If you look at the big, defining questions of our time, like “How do we feed a growing planet?” “How do we protect our environment?” “What does the future of work look like?” or “How do we achieve effective healthcare for everyone?,” engineering plays a key role in all of them. But these questions require a collaborative approach where diversity is key. Simply put: Diversity and inclusion make us better engineers. But not only that. Public universities have a responsibility to serve our local communities and to act as an engine for social mobility. To that end, we want to be a place where people from all backgrounds and groups are not only welcome, but where everyone feels like they belong and can thrive professionally and personally. As such, diversity and inclusion are very important to me as dean, and I am impressed with the efforts currently underway in the Samueli School of Engineering.

2020-21 Year in Review

Q. Who or what inspires you? That’s an easy question. By far my most important source of inspiration is my students. Working with students is the most fun and rewarding aspect of being a professor, and I consider it a privilege to be allowed to play a small part in their intellectual journey. And I just love being surrounded by talented, passionate and driven students who keep me on my toes intellectually and make sure I keep growing, not just as a researcher and educator, but also as a human being. Q. As a student of philosophy, do you have a motto or creed by which you follow? I really don’t have a creed nor anything particularly profound that I follow. But before I take on a new project, I always ask myself two questions: “Does it matter?” and “Is it fun?” Unless the answer to both questions is “yes,” I tend not to pursue the project. For sure, if the answer to both questions is “no,” then it is a non-starter. Q. What do you like to do for fun? If you asked me at age 10 what I wanted to do with my life, the answer would undoubtedly have been soccer player. At age 20, the answer would probably have been rock star. Alas, neither of those two career paths materialized, but I still very much enjoy playing soccer (I have already found a pickup game in the University Hills area) and playing the guitar. I also enjoy hiking and lately I have become enthralled with the “ultralight” movement, where the aim is to take as little as possible on backpacking trips and still enjoy the experience. But my main source of joy and fun is my daughters. They are accomplished aerialists – think Cirque du Soleil – and I have really enjoyed spending the last decade as a circus dad.

Q. What’s on your reading list these days? I tend to read multiple books at the same time. And they typically are rather different. Currently I am reading “The Culture Code” by Daniel Coyle, which looks at how successful and innovative organizations are structured (Hint: The number of meetings or the email volume have nothing to do with it); Delia Owens’ beautiful story “Where the Crawdads Sing”; and “Tigana” by Guy Gavriel Kay, which represents the sci-fi/fantasy genre that is my guilty pleasure. Q. How are you and your family feeling about moving to Orange County, California? Overall, we are very excited about the many opportunities here. As a family that likes being outdoors, Southern California is hard to beat. But after 20 years in Atlanta, a move like this is always bittersweet. To make matters a bit more complicated, my twin daughters, Annika and Olivia, are currently seniors in high school, so the rest of the family will actually stay back in Atlanta for a year while they finish up high school. Who knows where they will end up after that? California is certainly a possibility. My wife, Danielle, is a poet and she will move here next year to join UCI, teaching in the Department of English. Q. Is there anything else you would like to add? I am excited about taking on the role of Stacey Nicholas Dean in the Samueli School of Engineering, and I am looking forward to getting to know everyone in the school. I am not planning to become an abstraction hidden away in the dean’s office, but to spend as much time as I can in the classrooms and labs to really get to know the school. It is fortunate that I get to join the Samueli School as we are (hopefully) coming out of a pandemic and people are itching to get back together to make big things happen. I particularly look forward to playing my part in that.

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“I enjoy taking a broader view of the academic profession – beyond the footprint of my own research lab – to help support, empower and promote the people around me,” says Egerstedt. (Photo: Gary Meek, Georgia Tech)

2020-21 Year in Review

( HIGHLIGHTS ) Taking a Novel Approach to What Has Become a Billion-Dollar Problem Two Samueli School electrical engineering and computer science researchers – Zhou Li and Yanning Shen – are tackling the issue of spear-phishing in collaboration with Microsoft. Spear-phishing is a type of cyberattack that sends personalized emails to targeted individuals and organizations attempting to convince the victims to perform some action, such as transferring money, logging into a website or sharing data, which the attacker can then use illicitly. Li and Shen, both assistant professors, are developing a new system to automatically detect spear-phishing emails, so the damage to an individual or organization can be contained. They are supported by a $150,000 Microsoft Security Research Artificial Intelligence Award and will work with the company to test their new system. The researchers are taking a novel approach to what has become a billion-dollar problem. “We will model the email communications between senders and recipients as a social graph and apply graph-learning models to classify the emails,” said Li. “To keep our models adapted to the new benign and malicious email patterns that emerge in an organization, we’ll also apply online learning, a very efficient method to update the model.” In spear-phishing, the attacker usually writes an email tailored to the background and roles of the victims and sends it to a small

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number of recipients, a more stealth approach than other email-based attacks like spam, which is sent to a large number of recipients without customization. The attacker often impersonates someone the victim knows, using a similar email address and a compromised email account. Because of such impersonation, the email is more likely to be read and processed by the victim. These emails are often evasive and difficult to capture with existing approaches that are based on malware detection, sender/domain blacklisting, among others. “To address this problem, we will explore how to adapt state-of-the-art graph learning algorithms,” said Shen. “Machine learning over graphs is an area I am very excited about as it provides algorithmic and theoretical tools for understanding and learning from data collected in networked systems. We expect this project to have a profound impact on email security and research in graph learning.” “We are thrilled to be selected as one of the only two winning teams for this award,” said Li. “This is also a great opportunity for our research to make realworld impact and protect numerous email users.”

Researchers Develop Wireless Platforms to Promote Sustainable Factory Processes UCI’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology joined the Cybersecurity Manufacturing Innovation Institute, a national organization focused on improving cybersecurity and energy efficiency in American manufacturing. In November 2020, the University of Texas at San Antonio formally launched CyManII, a $111 million public-private partnership funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, to engage in collaborative research and development that will help U.S. manufacturers become more resilient against cyber threats. UTSA will lead the consortium of 59 proposed member institutions. U.S. manufacturers are among the top targets for cyber criminals and nation-state adversaries, impacting the production of energy technologies such as electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines. Integration across the supply chain network and an increased use of automation applied in manufacturing processes can make industrial infrastructures vulnerable to cyberattacks.

professor of electrical engineering and computer science. UCI scientists and engineers seek to develop wireless digital transformation platforms to help U.S. manufacturers become more competitive while fighting climate change and continuing to sustain their growth. These digital approaches can transform small- and medium-sized manufacturers in business and technical practices related to improving work productivity; reduce energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and waste; enhance logistic and supply chain management; and protect proprietary information and privacy – all while creating a happy, healthy working environment. As part of its national strategy, CyManII focuses on four priority areas where collaborative research and development can help U.S. manufacturers: securing automation, securing the supply chain network, improving energy efficiency, and building a national program for education and workforce development. “Our target group of manufacturing companies are small and medium size. Upgrading their efficiency by leveraging data will allow for a surge of demand from internal markets,” Li said. “At the same time, we want to ensure cybersecurity and provide energy efficiencies that support the nation’s goal to combat climate change and its impact.”

To protect American manufacturing jobs and workers, CyManII will transform U.S. advanced manufacturing and make manufacturers more energy efficient, resilient and globally competitive. “Our role is to align smart manufacturing with cyber-secure manufacturing and renewables to provide truly sustainable solutions,” said CALIT2 Director G.P. Li,

2020-21 Year in Review

( HIGHLIGHTS ) EECS Engineers Part of Federally Funded Effort to Boost Broadband Connectivity in Rural US UCI electrical engineering and computer science researchers are part of a rural wireless connectivity research project that received $8 million from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The funds will help the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program establish a new facility in central Iowa dedicated to driving innovation and improving broadband connectivity in sparsely inhabited regions of the U.S. Systems working group principal investigator Ozdal Boyraz, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science, will lead a team focusing on free-space optical backbone technologies associated with the initiative. FSO uses infrared laser beams to transmit digital data – including internet messages, video, computer files and radio signals – across vast distances without using fiber-optic cables. “It would be cost-prohibitive to hardwire every location in the nation’s vast

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rural regions with broadband fiber, so one solution is to use line-of-sight light beam transmitters and receivers to cover the territory,” Boyraz said. “The challenge for our team is to develop technologies that are robust and highly reliable.” Academic researchers in the Iowa hub, called ARA: Wireless Living Lab for Smart and Connected Rural Communities, will work with representatives from an industry consortium of 35 wireless companies to build a programmable infrastructure across Iowa State University, the city of Ames, and nearby farms and communities. The systems will provide a technological backbone for precision agriculture and livestock operations and, potentially, autonomous vehicles and drones. Said Boyraz: “This project aims to improve the quality of life in rural America through better internet access, benefiting sectors as diverse as agriculture, business, healthcare, education and culture.”

NSF CRII Grant Funds Research on Personalized and Fair Computing Elmalaki’s research focuses on enabling fairness-aware, privacy-preserving, society-in-the-loop, personalized Internet of Things systems by providing frameworks, tools and methodologies that understand their fundamental properties and guide their systematic design. “This research will have a far-reaching impact, as it will evolve the IoT systems from a one-size-fits-all approach to a personalized process in which learning and adaptation agents are tailored toward humans’ individual needs,” she explained.

Salma Elmalaki, UCI electrical engineering and computer science assistant professor of teaching, was awarded the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant. Considered an early career award, NSF CRII grants honor new professors with the goal of initiating and encouraging independent research. Elmalaki recieved $175,000 for two years for her research titled “Society-in-the-Loop Personalized Computing”. “As an early career academician, this award provides validation to my research ideas and the required support for my Ph.D. students,” said Elmalaki.

“This macroscopic view of the design of personalized systems to enhance societal-level fairness without compromising the individual-level privacy will contribute toward understanding and building such human-technology relationships, considered to be one of the NSF’s 10 big ideas.” NSF CISE’s mission is to enable the U.S. to uphold its leadership in computing, communications, information science and engineering; promote understanding of the principles and uses of advanced computing, communications and information systems in service to society; support advanced cyberinfrastructure that enables and accelerates discovery and innovation across all science and engineering disciplines; and contribute to universal, transparent and affordable participation in an information-based society.

2020-21 Year in Review

( HIGHLIGHTS ) Donor’s Gift Advances UCI Research for Tinnitus Treatment A $1 million gift to UCI from Brian Fargo, founder and studio head of inXile entertainment, will advance efforts to develop a treatment for tinnitus, commonly described as “ringing in the ears.” According to the American Tinnitus Association, an estimated 50 million people in the U.S. suffer from the condition, which can interfere with the ability to work, socialize and sleep. A UCI multidisciplinary research team, led by Dr. Hamid Djalilian, professor of otolaryngology, includes Michael Green, professor of electrical engineering and computer science; Fan-Gang Zeng, professor of otolaryngology; and Harrison Lin, associate professor of otolaryngology. The researchers found that electronic stimulation of the inner ear can alleviate tinnitus. Based on the success of their initial studies – which involved inserting

a miniature electrode in the ear canal and through a small opening of the ear drum – the team has recently been developing an innovative implantable device that is placed behind the ear drum. Patients use a compact hand-held controller to turn electric stimulation on and off as symptoms occur and subside. “Anyone who has the condition knows the frustration of dealing with the general lack of hope for a cure. Coming to UCI was a real breath of fresh air in a world of pessimism,” said Fargo, who is a patient of Djalilian. “I spent years researching and traveling the world looking at different solutions. One of the things that was abundantly clear was the lack of money being put into solving this problem. That’s why I’ve decided to step up and help accelerate the doctor’s work.” Fargo’s gift is a $1 million challenge. He will match all donations one-on-one until $2 million is raised to fund the next phases of research and, ultimately, bring a device to market. Although the exact cause of tinnitus is unclear, medical experts believe that inadequate stimulation of the cochlea – the organ in the inner ear that senses sound – or the cochlear nerve, which carries signals, causes over-sensitization of the auditory cortex, which is located in the brain’s temporal lobe and is responsible for processing sound. The result is hearing sound when there is no actual external noise. “Outcomes so far have been very exciting, and Brian’s generous gift will help us continue this important work,” Djalilian said. “Our implantable electronic stimulation device shows great promise for bringing a life-changing breakthrough to millions of people.”

18 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

AI-based Platform Accurately Analyzes MRIs of Children with Heart Defects learning algorithms that can automatically and efficiently analyze cardiac MRIs for this growing group of patients. “Our learning-based framework provides an automated, fast and accurate model for left ventricle and right ventricle segmentation, and its outstanding performance in children with complex CHDs implies its potential to be used in clinics across the pediatric age group,” said Dr. Arash Kheradvar, professor of biomedical engineering.

A UCI engineering-led team has developed an artificial intelligence method to analyze the MRI scans of pediatric patients with congenital heart defects, and in a new study, they’ve demonstrated that the platform performs as accurately as physicians in analyzing the scans. Their research was published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance. Saeed Karimi-Bidhendi, a doctoral candidate in EECS, is the article’s first author. Karimi-Bidhendi works in the lab of Chancellor’s Professor Hamid Jafarkhani, who is also a member of the research team. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, is the method of choice for assessing heart function and anatomy in children with complex congenital heart diseases (CHD). Segmenting and analyzing individual heart chambers in these children are essential steps toward understanding their conditions. But hearts in children with CHD differ from those in healthy children and adults, and analyzing their MRI data is highly challenging, timeconsuming and prone to variability in interpretation by physicians. The research team’s artificial intelligence platform is based on deep

Compared to the existing automated approaches, UCI’s platform does not make any assumption about the image or structure of the heart, but instead performs segmentation while learning features of the image on its own, fully automating the process without requiring any predefined input. This makes its results more reliable than those from commercially available platforms. The researchers trained and validated their algorithm on a dataset of 64 pediatric patients with complex cases of CHD from Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. They found no significant statistical difference in accuracy between the advanced AI method and manual segmentation. “A major challenge in AI-based segmentation and analysis of cardiac MRI of children with congenital heart disease is lack of a diverse dataset. To mitigate that, for the first time, we employed a novel deep-learning method that synthetically generates new segmented MRI data from noise,” said Karimi-Bidhendi. “This means that machines can segment and analyze the cardiac MRI data of these patients as well as a pediatric cardiologist,” said Kheradvar. “Eventually machines will be able to perform the analyses, replacing physicians. This paper indicates one more step toward fully automating the diagnostic imaging.” 2020-21 Year in Review

20 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

PUTTING HUMANITY IN IoT

Assistant professor of teaching seeks to design computer systems that are fair, socially accessible and privacy aware Tonya Becerra

Debbie Morales

The burgeoning field of designing systems for smart homes, smart cars and smart phones – the Internet of Things – is exciting. But it also creates difficult challenges for respecting privacy, providing accessibility and adaptability, and fairness. Salma Elmalaki, UCI electrical engineering and computer science assistant professor of teaching, works to ensure our humanity doesn’t get lost in IoT.

“My research focuses on designing systematic approaches and building machine-learning models to learn how to adapt to humans, how we can put humans in the loop, and how we can design the algorithms to do that, while addressing many privacy and fairness concerns – not for a specific application but in general,” she says. “After I develop the ideas, algorithms and models, I apply them to different applications to prove the concept. I do applications on driver-assisted systems, smart homes, mobile computing and smart cities. All these applications serve the big vision of a more inclusive and fair smart society.

2020-21 Year in Review

Salma Elmalaki, EECS assistant professor of teaching, publishes single-author paper on fairness in IoT while teaching twice the regular course load.

“It’s quite a challenge, and I like that,” she adds. “There’s a lot of future in there, and I would like to be part of it.” Elmalaki explains her research further in her first single-author paper, “FaiRIoT: Fairness-Aware Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning for Harnessing Human Variability in Personalized IoT,” published by the 2021 Cyberphysical Systems and Internet of Things Week conference held May 18-21, 2021. The annual event combines five top conferences in the field, and this year, the paper acceptance rate was 25 percent. Elmalaki’s was the only single-author paper published. Before joining the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in October 2019, Elmalaki earned a bachelor’s in computer and systems engineering from Ain Shams University in Egypt and a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from UCLA, where she was affiliated with the Networked and Embedded Systems Lab. Elmalaki also worked as a computational methods engineer for the Janelia Research Campus at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and spent three years as a research and development engineer in the embedded systems industry. Elmalaki received the Microsoft Research Fellowship (2016-2018) and the Best Paper and the Best Community Paper awards from the International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom) in 2015. She was selected as a Grace Hopper Scholar to celebrate women in computing in 2016. “Salma combines the best of all worlds: She is a top researcher, a committed teacher and a great citizen in the department, leading curriculum innovation and serving in a range of roles,” says Athina Markopoulou, professor, Chancellor’s Fellow and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I don’t know how she manages it all: She

22 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

is a doer, has tons of positive energy and holds herself to high standards. We are lucky to have her!” The key to Elmalaki’s achievements and positive energy comes from within. During the first two years of doctoral studies, Elmalaki struggled with the program’s rigors and balancing her home life, so she paused for a self-assessment. “When I realized that I don’t have to compare myself to people who don’t have the same situation or the same priorities, I was at such peace,” she recalls. “When I realized that I don’t have to be the best at everything, my progress doubled. I was able to focus, I was grounded and I was enjoying what I was doing. I didn’t have to race anyone. My Ph.D. went on a completely different track. I got best paper awards, published in top-tier conferences and got fellowships because I stopped comparing myself to others.” She loved the UC system where she collaborated with other researchers from UCI and UCSD while at UCLA. The assistant professor of teaching position drew Elmalaki to UCI. “I have passion for both research and pedagogy,” she says. “What attracted me to UCI was this position, which combines teaching and research. It’s not just focusing on research and maybe teaching is a second priority. Both are of very high importance. It was something that I didn’t find at other universities.” Elmalaki is one of eight professors of teaching in the Samueli School of Engineering. UCI has a total of 102 professors of teaching, also called teaching professors at other UC campuses. Although the regular course load is three classes per academic year, Elmalaki has been teaching six. What inspires her to teach double the regular workload? “I love teaching,” she says. “I really enjoy it.”

educational levels. For graduate classes, she tries to stimulate their critical thinking by giving them different topics and encouraging them to learn outside a particular curriculum. However, many undergraduates come directly from high school, and she works to make the transition smoother. “These are my hardest classes,” she says. “I put a lot of effort into them and try different techniques. I believe in hands-on tools. Unless you actually try something yourself and are challenged by it, then it’s hard to learn it, especially with engineering.” Adding COVID-19 to the mix, Elmalaki admits, “It was a really tough time to be honest. It took a toll on all of us.” But throughout the pandemic, racial injustices and other issues that were affecting her students, Elmalaki strove to provide reassurance and comfort. “I tried to understand how they were feeling. As an instructor, it’s not only my job to teach. I feel responsible. If I’m stressed one percent, they’re stressed 100 percent. I could not change a lot of things, but at least they felt that I cared.” Ultimately, Elmalaki says, “I hope students leave my classes passionate about engineering. “I’m a woman, I’m an immigrant, I didn’t get my bachelor’s degree from here, I have a family, I have kids and I was able to be a professor and do research. I had a lot of hiccups in the process, but also, I received a lot of support from my family and friends. If I can be a model to others that I can be a professor and that engineering is not a scary field to enter, even if you’re a minority, then I’ve done my job.”

Elmalaki designs adaptive machine learning models that capture the interaction between human and advanced driver-assistant systems (ADAS) application.

“ When I realized

that I don’t have to be the best at everything, my progress doubled. I was able to focus, I was grounded and I was enjoying what I was doing.

”

Elmalaki tailors her teaching approach to each class and her students’

2020-21 Year in Review

( STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS ) Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for Supercomputing Communication Helping supercomputers communicate efficiently was the aim of Rohit Zambre’s doctoral dissertation, which won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing 2021 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Zambre’s dissertation is titled “Exascalable Communication for Modern Supercomputing.” It analyzes the problem of supercomputing applications’ slow multithreaded communication and eliminates the communication bottleneck by bridging the two ends of the HPC stack – message passing interface library developers and domain experts – that typically do not directly talk to each other. “My research focused on enabling applications to utilize the capabilities of modern network hardware since communication between the nodes of a supercomputer occupies a significant portion of an application’s runtime at scale,” said Zambre. “The technologies from this research have been incorporated into the most widely used communication library in supercomputing.” Zambre earned his doctorate in computer engineering and currently works at AMD Research as an HPC architecture researcher in Washington.

Researcher Wins International Design Award Judit Giró Benet was awarded the James Dyson International Award for her biomedical device innovation, The Blue Box, a breast cancer detection system. Giró Benet, a recent graduate of the UCI master’s program in embedded cyberphysical systems beat out more than 1,800 entries to win the international competition, which awarded her $35,000. The Blue Box, which Giró Benet expects to cost about $80, is reusable and user friendly. The pain-free, non-irradiating, point-of-care system for home use includes a device – a small blue box – and a corresponding cell phone app. Users slide a urine sample into a drawer in the device, which then uses eight chemical sensors to scan it for specific biomarkers associated with breast cancer. The information is sent to a cloud-based server, where software uses an artificial intelligence algorithm – modeled on a dog’s sensory system, which has successfully sniffed out cancer – to assess it. Results are sent directly to the user’s cell phone. Giró Benet conducted research at UCI’s Center for Embedded Cyberphysical Systems with EECS Professor Fadi Kurdahi. 24 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Recent Graduate Recognized for Innovation in Navigation The Institute of Navigation awarded Samueli School recent graduate Kimia Shamaei the 2020 Bradford Parkinson Award for her doctoral dissertation, “Exploiting Cellular Signals for Navigation: 4G to 5G.” The annual award recognizes outstanding graduate students in the field of positioning, navigation and/ or timing whose dissertations represent significant innovations in the technology, application or policy of modern navigation systems. Shamaei graduated with her doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science and her dissertation research addressed the challenges of exploiting cellular signals for navigation purposes, specifically longterm evolution and 5G signals. She currently works as a software engineer at Apple Inc.

Engineering-led Team Designs Energy Solutions for Department of Energy Competition

EECS Grad Student Presents at FTC’s PrivacyCon 2021 Janus Varmarken, doctoral student in the networked systems program, was invited to present his research on “Smart TV Tracking & Advertising” at the Federal Trade Commission’s flagship event PrivacyCon 2021. The online presentation included work completed through the ProperData Frontier project directed by Professor Athina Markopoulou, EECS department chair. Varmarken’s work aims to increase privacy and transparency in smart homes in general and smart TVs in particular. Varmarken analyzed network traffic from residential gateways and found smart TVs connect to platform-specific advertising and tracking devices. By examining two popular platforms, Roku and Amazon Fire TV, he found evidence that some apps send the advertising ID alongside static personally identifiable information values, effectively eliminating the user’s ability to opt out of ad personalization.

A group of UCI graduate students took second place in the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2021 Solar District Cup. Organized by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the collegiate design competition requires student teams to design an optimized energy system for a campus or urban district. This year, 59 student teams from 57 different colleges participated, and 35 teams were selected as finalists. Weixi Wang, a doctoral student in electrical engineering with a focus in energy distribution systems, led the team who designed distributed photovoltaic and energy storage systems for the University of Central Florida. The goal of the challenge was to maximize photovoltaic self-generation and to strategically deploy battery storage to enable higher penetrations of solar power. Team UCI came up with a solution composed of rooftop, carport and ground mount photovoltaic systems. As finalists, they presented their solution to a panel of judges at the event’s virtual conference.

Undergrad Shines in Association for Computing Machinery Student Research Competition Undergraduate student Armand Ahadi-Sarkani earned top honors at the Association for Computing Machinery SIGBED Student Research Competition held May 21, 2021. The competition was part of the Cyberphysical Systems and Internet of Things Week sponsored by ACM and Microsoft. Ahadi-Sarkani won the Gold Award for his project, “ADAS-RL: Adaptive Vector Scaling Reinforcement Learning for Human-in-the-Loop Lane Departure Warning.” Its goal is to improve existing advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) by incorporating the human factor into the loop of computation to provide a personalized experience. Ahadi-Sarkani graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. He worked with Salma Elmalaki, EECS assistant professor of teaching, on the research. They published their findings in CPS-IoT Week, and Ahadi-Sarkani is the first author.

2020-21 Year in Review

26 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

FUTURE PATHWAYS

Privacy and IoT workshop offers opportunities for underrepresented undergrads

Tonya Becerra

A single workshop can open up the world. This is especially true for students who might not

easily have access to such resources. Around 60 undergraduate students from underrepresented communities around the country had such an opportunity to expand their views and learn about cybersecurity research at the “Research Exploration Workshop on IoT and Privacy” held virtually last May. Conducted by the UCI Stacey Nicholas Office of Access and Inclusion, the new outreach workshop was co-sponsored by a competitive Google exploreCSR (computer science research) award and UCI’s new NSF-funded ProperData center. Its goal was to encourage students from underrepresented groups to pursue graduate studies and research careers in computing. These groups include women, Latinx, African Americans, Native Americans, persons with disabilities and those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Sharnnia Artis, then assistant dean for access and inclusion and director of the Stacey Nicholas Office of Access and Inclusion, and Athina Markopoulou, Samueli School professor and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, co-organized the effort.

2020-21 Year in Review

“

There is an urgent need for opportunities to attract and retain a critical mass of women and Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) in computing research.

”

and listened to panelists of industry leaders from Google and faculty from community colleges and four institutions: UCI, UC Davis, USC and Northeastern University. “It was rewarding to work with this cohort of students,” notes Markopoulou. “We hope to continue to engage them in research on privacy and security in the future, through undergraduate research, mentoring and professional development opportunities. I would personally like to see several of them apply to graduate school.”

exploreCSR Workshop undergraduate participants like Kaycee Stiemke from UCLA gained insight into graduate school and more.

“There is an urgent need for opportunities to attract and retain a critical mass of women and Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) in computing research,” says Artis. “The purpose of the workshop is to introduce students to Internet of Things and privacy research, provide them hands-on experience through projects, and expand their network by connecting them with faculty, graduate students and STEM professionals in computing.” The participants were selected from more than 200 applicants, learned about cutting-edge research on privacy, gained experience using Raspberry Pi and Python,

28 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Participants were mentored by faculty and graduate students from the ProperData Center, directed by Markopoulou. One such mentor was Evita Bakopoulou, a graduate student in networked systems and founding president of Women in CyberSecurity Student Chapter at UCI (WiCyS), which promotes women’s education, participation and leadership in cybersecurity. She noticed the students were highly engaged during the workshop, especially during a virtual scavenger hunt. “They were very creative and social/ friendly to each other,” she says. “In the technical sessions, they seemed to be very interested in privacy and how computer networks work by asking the right questions. Some of the questions they explored are currently being considered by researchers in the field.”

According to student feedback, the exploreCSR Workshop was a success. Here are a few of the comments: A graduate student panel offered firsthand information about graduate school, its challenges and how much people can grow in the process. Participants asked for advice on how to get accepted, read papers efficiently and whether it is better to do a master’s before a doctorate and more.

“My favorite part of this whole workshop was learning about the different experiences of the panelists and the graduate students. It gave me a better sense of what obtaining a graduate degree would be like and what it entails.”

“We were extremely fortunate to have undergraduate and graduate students to serve as tech mentors in this program,” Artis explains. “The near-peer mentorship really helps participants envision pathways for their future. I hope they walked away with knowledge about computing research in IoT and privacy, how to get involved in computing research, and a community of support as they pursue their careers in computing.”

– Ani Magerdichian, UCI

“My favorite part of the program was the hands-on experience and receiving a refresher on cybersecurity to care more about data collection.” – Abel Agular, USC

“I really appreciated how accessible this workshop was. You know, I never really felt like I truly fit into CS. I just learned so much more about graduate school. It was kind of on my radar, but not really, and I’m thinking about it a little bit more now. So I want to thank everyone for the panels and all the information.”

Markopoulou adds that OAI was critical to the event: “OAI is a true asset to UCI. We wouldn’t be able to launch such events without the experience and infrastructure provided by Sharnnia and her team. The workshop program was split between technical hands-on experience and career advice from researchers at different levels of their careers. I particularly appreciated the enthusiasm and volunteering of our graduate students, especially the WiCys members and OAI ‘graduates,’ who helped run the workshop and created a blueprint for future such events.”

– Alison Gridley, UCI

“It was nice to hear from people [grad panel] who weren’t necessarily confident pursuing computer science, but did it anyway despite feeling discouraged. That is something that resonates with me right now as I take computer science classes because I do feel discouraged sometimes.” – Kaycee Stiemke, UCLA

“What I liked most was actually meeting everyone because it’s kind of rare that you have a ton of people interested in security, all in one space. One thing I learned was that having or working toward a Ph.D. is a prerequisite for research positions and most companies... that puts things into consideration whether I want to make that decision later on in life.” – Emily Gao, Northeastern University

left: Graduate student presenters like Evita Barkopoulou shared their experiences with undergrads.

“The most important aspect of this program was that it opened my eyes to the possibility of graduate school and doing a Ph.D. Previous to this, I had never really seen myself going for a Ph.D. I never had the opportunity to sit down, talk and listen to people share their experiences of earning a doctorate.”

right: Undgrads across the country like Daniel Ferguson of UCLA participated in the exploreCSR Workshop.

– Osbaldo Gonzalez, Pasadena City College

2020-21 Year in Review

( ALUMNI )

Duffy earned his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science while working full time at Rockwell International’s Autonetics Divison. He and his wife were lifelong learners who valued education. Kelly Richardson, pictured right, is an air force veteran who is working toward his doctorate in chemical and biomolecular engineering. He is the first recipient of the Duffy fellowship. 30 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

LIFE-CHANGING SUPPORT New graduate fellowship established by alumnus estate A gift from the family trust of UCI alumnus John Duffy ’88, and his wife, Joanna, has established a new graduate fellowship at the Samueli School of Engineering. John Duffy, Ph.D.

electrical engineering and computer science, and Joanna bequeathed $600,000 to establish the Samueli School John and Joanna Duffy Graduate Student Fellowship. Duffy, who passed away in 2006 and his wife, who died on Easter last year, were lifelong learners who always valued education, according to their daughter Linda Duffy. The couple, who married in 1962 and had three children, were longtime supporters of the Engineering Annual Fund and the Chancellor’s Club for Engineering, and they wanted to ensure that their philanthropic efforts would continue. Duffy earned his doctorate while working at Rockwell International’s Autonetics Divison, where he spent his entire 30-year-plus career. He led a team of software engineers in a variety of aerospace projects, including some related to the space shuttle program, his son, John Duffy, recalls. “Each year Autonetics would have a family day where we got to see firsthand some of the projects he was working on. He and his team were at the forefront of computer engineering.” “My dad was very pleased to get his Ph.D. from UCI. What we believe they wanted, and what we want, is to provide opportunities for others, especially older

adults who are going back to school later in life,” Linda Duffy says. “It’s much harder when you already have a family to support, a job, and other responsibilities. We hope to make it easier on people like that to afford an education.” Samueli School Interim Dean Michael Green said the fellowship will have an ongoing impact on engineering graduate students, especially now. “Graduate fellowships are more powerful than ever during the challenges brought on by COVID-19,” Green says in a letter to the Duffy children. “With many students facing a decrease in resources and income, this support can be life-changing, not only for the individual who will receive the funding but also by the large community who may benefit from the research performed by our grad students. “We are honored to receive this gift and are appreciative of the ways it will promote discovery and learning, and contribute to the success of our students for years to come.” The first of those students is Kelly Richardson, a doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering, who recently was selected to receive the inaugural Duffy fellowship. A disabled veteran who served four years in the Air Force, Richardson began community college after his discharge. He ultimately transferred to UCI, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. Richardson now works with his adviser, Ali Mohraz, and mentor Han Li to research the use of biological cells as catalysts for producing chemicals from renewable resources. “When I graduated from high school, the opportunity for higher education was

Anna Lynn Spitzer

not an option; joining the military was a way for me to achieve the means to pursue a life beyond the socioeconomic limitations that I faced as a young adult,” says Richardson, who added that his return to civilian life was challenging, and that his education has helped him cope. “Higher education has provided me with a means to set positive goals for myself and channel my focus on achieving something meaningful and productive.” He expressed enormous gratitude to the Duffy family for their support. “My pursuit of a graduate degree has been challenged by financial limitations,” he says. “John and Joanna Duffy have made the opportunity for me to continue my research and further my academic career a reality. I am eternally grateful to them, and I aim to make them proud of their investment in me.” Richardson was nominated for the fellowship, which includes one year of student fees and tuition as well as an $18,000 stipend, by Associate Professor Han Li, to whom he also expressed appreciation. “Her continued support and mentorship have been a guiding light for me, and she is an inspiration for my pursuit of research.” “Our parents would be thrilled with the choice of Kelly for the inaugural award,” says the Duffy’s daughter Diane. “Not only did both support active service members and veterans, but helping someone return to school later in life is exactly what they envisioned with the Samueli School John and Joanna Duffy Graduate Student Fellowship. We all three wish Kelly all the best with his pursuit of his graduate degree.” 2020-21 Year in Review

( ALUMNI )

A Virtual Celebration Engineering educator named to Samueli School Hall of Fame Lori Brandt

UCI electrical engineering and computer science alumnus Ed Hernandez ’91 was one of three engineering alumni inducted virtually into the 2021 Hall of Fame in May by then Interim Dean Michael Green. A teacher and director of the Tustin High School T-Tech Academy of

32 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Technology & Engineering, Hernandez is a first-generation college graduate who is now using his experiences to help a new generation of college hopefuls achieve their goals. After graduating with his bachelor’s degree from UCI, Hernandez worked in the semiconductor industry for 13 years before becoming an educator. “I still loved technology but I no longer felt passionate about my work,” he explains. “I began pursuing my master’s in education at night and quit my job to do my student teaching. It was definitely a leap of faith, but it has proven to be the

previously unavailable at most public schools. His methods include introducing relevant technology skills like 3D modeling, material science, electronics, fabrication methods, coding and more. Many of his students also take part in engineering summer internships to gain an authentic tech industry experience at places like Boeing, UPS, EON Reality, Edwards Lifesciences, Medtronic and others. Hernandez has also been instrumental in the development and implementation of interscholastic engineering competitions throughout Orange County like the OC Maker Challenge, UCI’s Energy Invitational vehicle competition, and STEM on the Sidelines in cooperation with UCI and the LA Chargers football team. According to Grant Litfin, assistant superintendent of the Tustin Unified School District, “Ed not only has used his electrical engineering and computer science degree from UCI to contribute professionally to the field, but he has also taken direct action to impact engineering and the world in the strongest way possible. He teaches and motivates students to be engineers on a grand scale. He has undoubtedly made a ripple-effect that has changed hundreds of lives for the better.”

right move – I look forward to going to work every day; not everyone can say that.” Soon after becoming a math teacher at Tustin High School, Hernandez was asked to lead the development of a new engineering academy model, meant to introduce students to multiple engineering and computer science disciplines. Four years later, he switched completely to engineering and became lead instructor of the academy. Over the subsequent 12 years, hundreds of his students have benefited from a handson, immersive technology education

In the 16 years since becoming an educator, Hernandez has been recognized with numerous awards, including Tustin High School’s Teacher of the Year, Orange County’s Engineering Teacher of the Year, OC Parenting Magazine’s High School Teacher of the Year and California’s Career Technical Education Teacher of the Year. The T-Tech Academy has been named Orange County’s Best High School Engineering Program by the Orange County Engineering Council and was also selected as a winner of the Golden Bell Award by the California School Board Association. “I am a proud UCI alum and this recognition means so much to me,” says

Hernandez. “UCI was a huge challenge to get into and an even bigger challenge to get out of with my degree. This really means the world to me.” Hernandez arrived in the United States at the age of 12 and was the first in his family to graduate from high school and college. He credits his time at UCI as the most formative experience of his life and constantly shares advice and stories from his time in college with his students. Today, his immigrant success story, industry experience and passion for learning make him uniquely qualified as a teacher and role model for the next generation of engineers and scientists. “I am super proud of my role in inspiring students, but sometimes it is the unexpected successes that stand out,” he says. “A few years ago, I got an email from a former student thanking me for inspiring him to pursue a career in aerospace. He is now working for NASA. Wow!” Hernandez has guided many students to pursue engineering at all Cal State and UC campuses, including UCI, and many of the country’s top private universities. Today, you’ll find graduates from his program working for companies like Boeing, NASA, Google, UPS, JPL and SpaceX. As a Hall of Famer, Hernandez is now part of the group of exceptional UCI engineering graduates who have been recognized for making a significant impact in their profession or for bringing distinction to engineering and their alma mater. Fifty-five people have now been named to the engineering alumni Hall of Fame since it was established in 2015 to coincide with UCI’s 50th anniversary. “I was proud to induct these engineers into the school’s alumni Hall of Fame,” says Green. “Each is deserving of this honor as they all are contributing to making the world better in some way.”

2020-21 Year in Review

( FACULTY DIRECTORY ) Hamidreza Aghasi, Ph.D.

Peter Burke, Ph.D.

Rainer Doemer, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: analog circuit design, mm-wave and terahertz integrated circuits, high resolution integrated sensing and imaging, neuromorphic computation, emerging device technologies Email: haghasi@uci.edu

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Materials Science and Engineering Research Interests: nano-electronics, bionanotechnology Email: pburke@uci.edu

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: system-level design, embedded computer systems, design methodologies, specification and modeling languages, advanced parallel simulation, integration of hardware and software systems Email: doemer@uci.edu

Mohammad Al Faruque, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: biosensors and bioelectronics, cardiovascular engineering, neural engineering Email: hungcao@uci.edu

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Emulex Career Development Chair Research Interests: cyberphysical systems, Internet of Things, embedded systems, cyberphysical systems security Email: alfaruqu@uci.edu

Ender Ayanoglu, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: communication systems, communication theory, communication networks Email: ayanoglu@uci.edu

Nader Bagherzadeh, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Computer Science Research Interests: parallel processing, computer architecture, computer graphics, memory systems, 3D integrated circuits, heterogeneous computing, low-power processing Email: nader@uci.edu

Ozdal Boyraz, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: integrated optics, silicon photonics, optical communications systems and microwave photonics Email: oboyraz@uci.edu

Hung Cao, Ph.D.

Filippo Capolino, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: optics/electromagnetics in nanostructures and sensors, antennas/ microwaves, radio frequency and wireless systems Email: f.capolino@uci.edu

Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: high-performance computing, domain-specific compilers, algorithm-architecture co-design, data analysis, scientific computing Email: amowli@uci.edu

Quoc-Viet Dang, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Teaching, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: e-learning, data analysis, autonomous vehicle racing, cyberphysical systems Email: qpdang@uci.edu

Franco De Flaviis, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: microwave systems, wireless communications, electromagnetic circuit simulations Email: franco@uci.edu

34 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Magnus Egerstedt, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering Research Interests: control theory and robotics, control and coordination of complex networks, multirobot systems, mobile sensor networks and cyberphysical systems Email: magnus@uci.edu

Salma Elmalaki, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Teaching, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: mobile computing, pervasive autonomous systems, personalized computing, and Internet of Things Email: salma.elmalaki@uci.edu

Rahim Esfandyarpour, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: nanotechnology & nanoscience, microelectromechanical systems & nanoelectromechanical systems, flexible electronics & wearables, sensors & microfluidics, microelectronics circuits & systems, internet of things biodevices, personalized medicine, pointof-care diagnostics. Email: rahimes@uci.edu

Daniel Gajski, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: interdisciplinary research in embedded systems, technology and knowledge transfer for the benefit of the individual and society Email: gajski@uci.edu

Jean-Luc Gaudiot, Ph.D.

Hamid Jafarkhani, Ph.D.

Guann-Pyng Li, Ph.D.

Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: parallel processing, computer architecture, processor architecture Email: gaudiot@uci.edu

Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Conexant-Broadcom Endowed Chair Research Interests: communication theory, signal processing, coding, wireless networks, medical image segmentation Email: hamidj@uci.edu

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Research Interests: micro/nanotechnology for sensors and actuators, Internet of Things, smart manufacturing, biomedical devices and millimeter-wave wireless communication Email: gpli@uci.edu

Michael Green, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: analog/mixed-signal integrated circuit design, broadband circuit design, theory of nonlinear circuits Email: mgreen@uci.edu

Glenn Healey, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: machine learning, data science, sabermetrics, physical modeling, computer vision, image processing Email: ghealey@uci.edu

Payam Heydari, Ph.D. Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: design and analysis of analog, radio-frequency, millimeter-wave and terahertz integrated circuits Email: payam@uci.edu

Sitao Huang, Ph.D. (January 2022) Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: hardware accelerators, programming languages and compilers for accelerators, high-level synthesis, heterogeneous computing Email: sitaoh@uci.edu

Syed Jafar, Ph.D. Chancellor’s Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: wireless communication and information theory Email: syed@uci.edu

Pramod Khargonekar, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: systems and control theory, learning and intelligent systems, applications to renewable energy and smart grid, neural engineering and economics, leadership and creativity, technology and society Email: pramod.khargonekar@uci.edu

Stuart Kleinfelder, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: circuits and systems for visual imaging, X-rays, electron microscopy, particle physics and other applications Email: stuartk@uci.edu

Fadi Kurdahi, Ph.D.

Zhou Li, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: data-driven security analytics, internet measurement, side-channel analysis, Internet of Things security Email: zhou.li@uci.edu

Kwei-Jay Lin, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Computer Science Research Interests: real-time systems, distributed systems, service-oriented computing Email: klin@uci.edu

Athina Markopoulou, Ph.D.

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Computer Science Research Interests: embedded and cyberphysical systems, very-large-scale integration system design, design automation of digital systems Email: kurdahi@uci.edu

Professor, Chancellor’s Fellow, and Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Nicolaos G. and Sue Curtis Alexopoulos Presidential Chair Research Interests: networking, including network protocols, network measurement and analysis, mobile systems and mobile data analysis, network security and privacy Email: athina@uci.edu

Henry Lee, Ph.D.

Henry Samueli, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc Research Interests: photonics, fiber optics and compound semiconductors Email: hplee@uci.edu

Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: digital signal processing, communications systems engineering, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor integrated circuit design for applications in high-speed data transmission systems Email: engineeringdean@uci.edu

2020-21 Year in Review

( FACULTY DIRECTORY ) Terence Sanger, M.D., Ph.D.

Yasser Shoukry, Ph.D.

Peter Tseng, Ph.D.

Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Vice President, Chief Scientific Officer, CHOC; Vice Chair of Research for Pediatrics, UCI School of Medicine, Staff Physician CHOC Department of Neurology Research Interests: computational neuroscience, machine learning, failure models of biological network computing, robotic models of neurological disorders, dystonia, childhood movement disorders, biological signal processing, adaptive control, stochastic systems Email: tsanger@uci.edu

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: resilience, safety, security and privacy of artificial intelligence, controlled cyberphysical systems, Internet of Things, and robotic systems Email: yshoukry@uci.edu

Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: microelectromechanical systems, wearable technology, materials-bydesign, bioelectromagnetism, nanotechnology Email: tsengpc@uci.edu

Maxim Shcherbakov, Ph.D Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: nanophotonics, nonlinear and quantum optics, nanotechnology, ultrafast phenomena, biophotonics Email: maxim.shcherbakov@uci.edu

Yanning Shen, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: machine learning, data science, network science and statistical-signal processing Email: yannings@uci.edu

Phillip C-Y Sheu, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Computer Science Research Interests: semantic computing, robotic computing, biomedical computing, multimedia computing Email: psheu@uci.edu

Keyue Smedley, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: power electronics, renewables, energy storage and grid stabilization Email: smedley@uci.edu

Changho Suh, Ph.D. (January 2022) Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: information theory and machine learning, graph theory, channel capacity, channel coding, stochastic processes, broadcast channels, channel allocation, computational complexity Email: TBD

A. Lee Swindlehurst, Ph.D. Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: signal processing, estimation and detection theory, applications in wireless communications, geo-positioning, radar, sonar, biomedicine Email: swindle@uci.edu

Chen Tsai, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: integrated microwave magnetics, ultrasonic atomization for nanoparticles synthesis, silicon photonics Email: cstsai@uci.edu

36 UCI Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Zhiying Wang, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: information theory, coding theory for data storage, compression and computation for genomic information Email: zhiying@uci.edu

H. Kumar Wickramasinghe, Ph.D. Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Henry Samueli Endowed Chair Research Interests: nanoscale measurements and characterization, scanning probe microscopy, storage technology, nanobio measurement technology Email: hkwick@uci.edu

Homayoun Yousefi’zadeh, Ph.D. Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Research Interests: communication networks Email: hyousefi@uci.edu

INDUSTRY ADVISORY BOARD The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Industry Advisory Board was formed in 2007 and is comprised of industry representatives from a variety of electrical engineering and communications technology companies. The board meets quarterly to advise and assist academic leadership on curriculum development, student internships and design review, and to serve as a liaison to local industry. Khaled AbouZeid

Kevin Mori

Fausto Andrade

Ken Neeld

William Cassidy

Hoa Nguyen

Mentor Graphics Apple

Orange County Sanitation District

Ting Li Chan Marvell

Ray Clancy Movandi

Dan Cregg Insteon

George Di Papa

OSI Optoelectronics

George Eaton ThingKus

Pete Fiacco

Executive Technology Consulting

Sangram K. Gaikwad VTI Instruments

Oleksandr Goushcha Luna Optoelectronics

Jeff Greenberg

Tech Coast Works

Mingying Gu

Western Digital

Charles J. Kim

Southern California Edison

Mazda North American Delphi Display Systems OK International

Stephen Palm Broadcom

Jerome Quinsaat Northrop Grumman

Michael Rakijas

Thales Raytheon Systems

Raffi Sakabedoyan Garmin

Darryl Sato

Beryl Technologies

Dan Schumann

Becton, Dickinson & Co.

Neema Shafigh

Inphi Corporation

Royce Slick Canon

Sumit Tandom Mathworks

Rob Valle Mazda

Steve Way

Northrop Grumman

Jeff Ludwig

Tahiti Capital

2020-21 2017-18 Year in Review

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Invest in a brilliant future. Be an EECS supporter. We believe in meeting tomorrow’s technological challenges by providing the highest quality engineering education and research rigor today. We invite you to invest in the future of UCI’s electrical engineering and computer science programs. It is through private donations like yours that we can continue to provide outstanding opportunities for our students and researchers. Your contribution, regardless of amount, makes a difference toward what EECS can accomplish. To find out more about supporting the advancement of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, please visit engineering.uci.edu/alumni-friends/ways-give. If you want to support a specific initiative, please contact Angelique Andrulaitis, senior director of development, at aandrula@uci.edu or (949) 824-3977. To learn more about the EECS Department, please visit engineering.uci.edu/dept/eecs.

UCI EECS: YEAR IN REVIEW 2020-21

Articles inside

Facts and Figures

Highlights

Student Achievements

Putting Humanity in IoT

Faculty Accolades

Alumni

Meet Magnus