The Solid State, Microelectronics and Electro-Optics research thrust areas in the department have successfully focused their cutting-edge research in the area of nanotechnology developing and characterizing new nano-materials and devices. Wireless communication, networking and multimedia information processing have been one of the key areas of research within the ECE Department. The research focus in wireless communications and networking has grown steadily over the past four years with institutional and industrial collaborations receiving more than $10 million in external research grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, US Army, ONR and other agencies. The research focus on Intelligent Systems has moved forward with grants from NSF and US Department of Defense on Micro-robotic DNA Analysis and Smart Weapon Technology that stops the unauthorized use of guns. The research area of Computer Architecture with Embedded and Distributed Systems took a new initiative on developing new efficient systems for power grid simulations through grants from the US Department of Energy.

Research grant awards of over $8 million were received in the ECE Department from a number of sources including the National Science Foundation Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Lab, US Army CECOM, the US Air Force, the US Navy; National Institutes of Health, the State of New Jersey; and major industries including Mitsubishi, IBM, AT&T, Inter-Digital and SEMATECH. The ECE Department research enterprise includes a multidisciplinary collaborative paradigm with a number of research projects involving well-known researchers, investigators and students with several research centers and laboratories including the Center for Communications and Signal Processing, Center for Wireless Networking and Internet Security, Microelectronics Research Center, Center for Electronic Imaging, Laboratory for Integrated Nano-Structures, The Ion Beam and Thin Film Laboratory, Advanced Networking Laboratory, Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing Laboratory, and the Device and Material Characterization Laboratory.

ECE Department Receives Presidential Strategic Investment Plan Award and Establishes a Ying Wu Endowed Chair Position in Wireless Networking

The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering received the NJIT Strategic Investment Program Award for the strategic growth and development of research focused on wireless communications and networking and security.

The applications of wireless communications, networking and security system technologies include a wide spectrum of priority and strategic areas defined by the national federal funding agencies (NSF, US Army, DoD, NSA, NIH) and leading industries (AT&T-Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Telecordia, Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, MITRE Corp, Northrup Grumman and SAIC). The application areas include mobile communications, e-commerce, health care, medical telemetry, military, and homeland security. These activities in developing core and application technologies link several faculty members from ECE and other departments (Computer Science, Information Systems and Physics) at NJIT.

The ECE Department received a gift of $1.5 million from Mr. Ying Wu, founder of a highly successful telecommunications firm. The gift was used as an endowed fund and linked with the Presidential Strategic Investment Plan to develop a Ying Wu Endowed Chair position in Wireless Networking. The endowment fund will provide fellowships for graduate students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Born in China, Wu came to America in the late 1980s with just $27 because China limited the amount of money he could take out of the country. Wu managed to make his way from San Francisco to the east coast, where he worked at various menial jobs before enrolling in the Master's degree program in Electrical Engineering at NJIT. He completed his degree in 1988. After graduating from NJIT, Wu worked at the former AT&T Bell Labs (now Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies). He later left Bell Labs and in 1991 co-founded Starcom Network Systems Inc., a New Jersey-based developer of intelligent network systems. In 1995, he merged the company with Unitech Telecom, Inc., a California-based developer of digital and wireless transmission systems, and became the executive vice president and the vice chairman of the board of directors of the new UTStarcom, as well as the founder and CEO of its China-based subsidiary UTStarcom (China) Ltd. UTStarcom has become one of China's major telecom equipment providers. Finance Asia magazine recently named UTStarcom one of Asia's top ten companies. While the company's operations in the United States are devoted to high-level R&D and international marketing, Wu has focused his energies on developing and installing advanced wired and wireless products based on American technology.

Dr. Roberto Rojas-Cessa Receives Major NSF Funding

Dr. Roberto Rojas-Cessa was the recipient of two grant awards by the National Science Foundation to perform research on extended quality-of-service in the next generation networks, and to support integrative research on networking. These awards, totaling $500,000, will be used to support experimental and theoretical research in services with traditional differentiated classes, security, and reliability. The projects’ objectives are to enhance the understanding, to support the evolution, and to simplify the deployment of emerging services that will be provided in next generation networks, and to transfer advanced knowledge in different aspects of computer networks to students. Dr. Rojas-Cessa’s main research interests are in high-speed networks, feasible high-performance switching, implementation of QoS networks, VLSI, concurrent fault-detection and reliability.

Dr. Rojas-Cessa has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NJIT since September 2002. He is a member of IEEE and IEICE, and has pioneered in the field of high-performance switches using combined buffering strategies. He has been involved with startup companies to support product development and had been an Adjunct Professor at Polytechnic University of NY prior to joining NJIT.

Dr. Leonid Tsybeskov Teams with Intel Corporation in Nano-Technology

Dr. Leonid Tsybeskov, Associate Professor in NJIT’s ECE Department, and Intel Corporation, the world’s leading manufacturer of computer microprocessors, will conduct collaborative research in the area of optical interconnects to overcome current limitations in microchip interconnect delays. This project explores the use of three-dimensional silicon-germanium nanostructures in high efficiency integrated light emitters incorporated into the CMOS environment. This research contract, together with a seed grant from Semiconductor Research Corporation and a Nanostructure Exploratory Research Grant from the National Science Foundation (total of $ 600,000) will help NJIT establish a nationally recognized research initiative on semiconductor nanostructures and their applications in electronic and optoelectronic devices.

Dr. Timothy Chang Awarded NSF Grant

Associate Professor Dr. Timothy Chang received the $640,000 NSF Award Grant for his work on a tool to speed up cancer diagnosis and treatment. "This could make it affordable for every hospital to have the technology to make a diagnosis on-site," Chang said.

Currently a hollow pin picks up about 0.25 microliter of DNA and transfers a small portion onto a slide. The pin touches the slide, splashing the material onto the glass surface. The current technique is imprecise, slow and uses only 20 percent of the sample while wasting most of it. Dr. Chang has proposed replacing the hollow pin with a "smart pin" that uses a position-sensitive sensor that knows how much of the sample to pick up and deposit on the slide. A piezoelectric based microstage, patented by Chang, positions the pin nozzle to a precise gap distance from the target surface. A fiber optics based sensor monitors the formation of spot as well as gap distance so that a precise amount of liquid can be dispensed, without making contact with the surface. In preliminary lab tests of the "smart-pin," its precision is so high that the device can position more than double the normal number of droplets on a slide while cutting down on waste.

Chang's system also would allow researchers to share their results through the Internet, with the goal of better diagnosis and treatment. The project includes NJIT undergraduate and graduate students. Chang also hopes to arrange internships for high school students interested in engineering and the sciences to participate in parts of the research. He said younger students can benefit from exposure to advanced research, possibly stimulating a lifelong interest in science and technology.

Dr. Haim Grebel Receives Grants from NSF and US Army in Nano-Technology

Dr. Haim Grebel heads a Nano-Technology Niche Area proposal with in collaboration with faculty from ECE and other NJIT Departments that was selected for NJIT Presidential Strategic Investment Plan Award. Haim has also established a focused activity with a team of researchers who grow carbon nanotubes in the tiny spaces between the silica spheres that make up synthetic opals. These tiny tubes of carbon atoms, about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, have unusual strength and unique electrical properties, and are extremely efficient conductors of heat, properties that make them potentially useful in extremely small scale electronic and mechanical applications. The team is testing the nanotubes to establish their optical, thermal and mechanical properties for potential use in communications and sensor systems. Dr. Grebel has pubslihed more than 160 resaerch artcles in refreed journals, edited books and conference proceedings.

Dr. Grebel research interests include Non-linear properties of semiconductor nanoclusters; Laser-induced etching and plating of semiconductors and Laser ablation;. Integrated optics; Optical elements and devices. Haim has conducted several studies reagrding non-linear properties of Si and Ge nanoclusters; theoretical and experimental aspects of optical waveguides for optical communication systems; non-linear optical modulators; FM spectroscopy, laser-induced etching and plating of semiconductors; and Spatial Light Modulators for applications in optical signal processing. Dr. Grebel received research grants from NSF, US Army, ARO and NJCST.

Dr. Alex Haimovich Receives Air Force and NSF Grant Awards

Dr. Alex Haimovich received over $263,000 in funding for a two year project from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The grant runs from January 2003-December 2005, during which time Alex will study Advanced Techniques for MIMO Broadband Communications.

Dr. Alex Haimovich, along with Dr. Haim Grebel and Dr. Yeheskel Bar-Ness, was awarded $600,000 for a two year grant to study Multiple Antenna Multiple Appliances Wideband Wireless Networks: A Pervasive Technology for Home and Workplace from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Roy You Receives NASA Summer Fellowship

Assistant Professor Dr. Roy You spent the Summer of 2004 working with the Digital Signal Processing Research Group in the Communications Systems Research Section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab as part of NASA’s Faculty Fellowship Program. The main activities of the Signal Processing Research Group include theoretical analysis and software simulations for innovative receiver technologies and providing technical specifications for the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems. The group developed the prototype receiver for the Deep Space Network and provides a wide range of support to transceiver development for a variety of NASA missions. Dr. You collaborated with Dr. Clayton Okino on developing and applying Hybrid-ARQ techniques to deep space communication systems.

Dr. You was a winner in a very selective process. For the summer of 2004, seven hundred and sixty-two (762) individuals applied for the fellowship, making the selection process extremely competitive. The NASA Faculty Fellowship Program (NFFP) offers hands-on exposure to NASA's research challenges through 10-week summer research residencies at participating NASA research centers for full-time science and engineering faculty at U.S. colleges and universities. Fellowships are awarded to qualified engineering and science faculty members and other related disciplines for work on collaborative research projects of mutual interest to the fellow and the NASA center. Each fellow works with a center colleague and is associated directly with the aeronautics and space program and the concomitant basic research problems

Dr. Constantine Manikopoulos Receives Grants from US Army and NSF in Network Security

Dr. Constantine Manikopoulos received grants from US Army to continue developing a testbed for evaluating wired and wireless network security protocols. Dr. Manikopoulos in collaboration with Drs. Quentin Jones and Roxane Hilts from Computer Science Department, and Symeon Papavassiliou and Sirin Tekinay from ECE Department received a grant from NSF to develop a secured and best connected “Smart Campus”. This project aims to create a mobile, wireless NJIT campus community system that will serve as a dispersed laboratory for the study of online communities with location-based services, in terms of: 1) community building; 2) co-ordination of mobile teams; 3) user privacy; and 4) security. This campus-wide facility will allow the integration of activities across many laboratories and enable anywhere, anytime participation by both students and faculty. SmartCampus will aid the analysis and understanding of the underlying technical and social issues and their interactions, taking into account rising privacy concerns. The latter will be addressed from two perspectives: 1) improving system security and trust with the development of ConexGuard, a novel SmartCampus security-on-demand framework for its heterogeneous environment, and 2) creating privacy-sensitive applications that exploit relevant contextual factors such as properties of people and places, and their relationships.

Dr. MengChu Zhou Receives Outstanding Contribution Award from IEEE

Dr. MengChu Zhou received Outstanding Contribution Award from IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society in 2004; elected as a Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Society of Systems, Man and Cybernetics in 2005; and His “Semiconductor Factory Automation” Technical Committee received the Most Active Technical Committee Award from IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation in 2005. He was the founding General Co-Chair of IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control. He became the Managing Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Part C in 2005. Dr. Zhou has co-authored/co-edited four books and published more than 175 resaerch articles in refereed journals, edited books and conference proceedings. He is the Fellow of the IEEE. Dr. Zhou's research interests focus on Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, Intelligent Automation, Petri Nets, Neural Network for tool wear measurement, Fuzzy Logic for process control, Computer Network and Interface, Discrete Event Control and Simulation, and Flat-Panel Display manufacturing.

Dr. Atam Dhawan was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to optical imaging of skin-lesions and multi-modality medical image analysis. Dhawan has invented an optical instrument, called a Nevoscope, for imaging skin-lesions for early detection of skin-cancer, the citation noted. The Nevoscope has been commercialized by Translite Inc., of Houston, Texas, which is using it to develop a line of products for skin-lesion and vein imaging.

Dr. Dhawan’s research has shown how optical wavelengths can be used for multi-spectral imaging of skin-lesions, which in turn can help with the early detection of skin-cancer. He has also developed several medical image algorithms, which have been used for diagnostic radiological applications, including the enhancement of mammographic images as well as the tissue characterization of brain images. He is an author-coauthor of 3 books, 8 book chapters and over 150 papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings.

Dr. Yun Shi was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to multi-dimensional signal processing. His research interests include visual signal processing and communications, digital multimedia data hiding and information assurance, applications of digital image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition and biomedical engineering, He is an author/coauthor of more than 160 papers in his research areas, a book on Image and Video Compression, three book chapters on Image Data Hiding and one book chapter on Digital Image Processing. He holds two US patents and has eight US patents pending.

Dr. Yun-Qing Shi has been selected to serve as one of the IEEE CAS Distinguished Lecturers for 2002-03. His lectures will be "Robustness Issue in Multimedia Watermarking" and "A New Approach to 2-D/3-D Interleaving and its Application in Digital Image/Video Watermarking"