Anastasios Dimas is a first-year PhD student working with Prof. Athina Petropulu in the Communications and Signal Processing Laboratory.   Anastasios obtained his undergraduate Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras and his Master's degree in Communications Engineering from the Technical University of Munich, in Greece and Germany respectively. During the course of his PhD, his research will focus towards understanding the underlying working principles of the human brain, by interpreting the measured data obtained with the help of techniques borrowed from signal processing, machine learning, and information theory. After his PhD, he intends to pursue a career in academia as an expert in the field of bio-electrical engineering, and looks forward to co-operating with other researchers & industrial partners in order to better understand the function of such complex biological processes, hopefully improving healthcare outcomes.

Professor Shantenu Jha is a co-PI on a US Department of Energy (DOE) Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) award. These highly competitive awards enable access to processor hours on the TITAN Supercomputer. Dr. Jha's award is for 65 Million processor hours for the project entitled "Unraveling autoimmune diseases with adaptive protein simulation” in collaboration with Rice University (lead), Freie Universitat Berlin and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Using the most powerful academic supercomputer in the US, this project will support the investigation of proteins using advanced statistical and sampling techniques at computational scales that have not been attempted before.

Congratulations Shantenu!

A detailed abstract of the project is below:

The team will explore the molecular basis of autoimmune defects by employing adaptive molecular dynamics and Markov state modeling techniques on leadership supercomputing hardware. The adaptive immune system is responsible for recognizing antigens, which are parts of harmful substances (e.g., toxins, viruses, bacteria), and then neutralizing these substances. Understanding and being able to manipulate the function of the immune system is of utmost importance for society.

Despite its complexity, the immune system is governed by the interactions between only a few key proteins. Out of these, the MHCII is of prominent importance, as it is associated with more diseases than any other region of the human genome. In particular, specific MHCII mutants are responsible for autoimmune diseases, such as arthritis or diabetes. There is experimental evidence that the conformational dynamics of MHCII are key to the understanding of the
molecular mechanism of antigen recognition. Furthermore, it appears that allosteric switches govern the binding of antigens, providing a template for the rational design of drugs for autoimmune diseases.

Understanding molecular mechanisms and conformational transitions is an ideal problem for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Previous simulations of this system have been on the 100 nanoseconds time scale. In a preliminary award on Titan, the team has generated simulation data of _300 _s. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the above aims and already reveals interesting yet preliminary biological insights. They now propose to explore conformational transitions of MHCII on timescales of tens of milliseconds. Their scientific results will comprise (1) the molecular mechanism of MHCII as it moves from its “ground state” conformation to antigen-presenting conformations, (2) the molecular mechanisms in dysfunctional and pathological MHCII mutants, and (3) suggestions to interfere with such dysfunction e.g. by the use of drugs that bind to allosteric sites. These results can significantly advance the field of immunology. In addition, we will achieve technological results such as establishing and further developing adaptive sampling and Markov state modeling methods.

ECE Professor Wade Trappe, in collaboration with Rutgers alumni Rob Miller and Daniel DuBravec of LMI (an agency focused on government policy strategy) have published a blog on the challenges facing the healthcare industry as it struggles with Protected Health Information (PHI) and HIPAA regulations. The article found here illustrates the risks associated with personal information being leaked on legacy technologies that are still be used by many in the health industry. By highlighting such security holes and the fact that many security problems have easy, readily-available solutions, the authors hope to inform public policy and quickly raise the security bar for our personal health information.

Professor Shantenu Jha is the PI of a Department of Energy (DOE) ASCR award to Rutgers, along with Brookhaven National Laboratory (lead), Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Texas for the project titled, "Workflow Management on Titan for High Energy and Nuclear Physics and for Future Extreme Scale Scientific Applications”. The 2 year project is funded at $2M, and Rutgers will receive $565K and be responsible for research into workload management and placement. Working with the ATLAS experiment — one of two major experiments at CERN in Geneva, this project will investigate new and scalable high-performance and distributed computing methods to federate DOE leadership computing facilities with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) Grid. The research outcomes and solutions from this project are likely to guide the design and implementation of future computing infrastructure that CERN will employ as it plans for Run 3 and Run 4 of the LHC, producing thousands to million times greater volumes of complex data.

Congratulations on yet another high profile project Shantenu!

A detailed abstract follows:

Scientific priorities in High Energy and Nuclear Physics continue to serve as drivers of integrated computer and data infrastructure. The lack of scalable and extensible workload management capabilities across heterogeneous computing infrastructure, however presents a barrier to the scientific progress.

Our approach will demonstrate integration of non-traditional, data-intensive, high-throughput workloads and traditional
compute-intensive workloads within leadership computing facilities, and yield important physics simulations and data analysis that would otherwise be impossible or far too slow for the rapidly increasing pace of data collection at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The proposed solution will provide an important model for future exascale computing, increasing the coherence between the technology base used for high-performance, scalable modeling and simulation and that used for data-analytic computing. This work represents important conceptual advances and novel capabilities for workload management.

This project will translate the research artifacts into OLCF operational advances and enhancement. We propose to deploy and bring into production BigPanDA workflow management techniques on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) Titan supercomputer. This will significantly impact scientific communities in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, and beyond, for current and future leadership computing facilities.

Laleh Najafizadeh received $250,000 from DARPA for the project titled "Leveraging Multi-Modal Multi-Layer Functional Networks for Next Generation BMIs".

The objective of this project is to push the limits of existing Brain Machine Interfaces in terms of “universality”, “degrees of freedom” and “detection time” via a combined theoretical-experimental approach.

Professor Dario Pompili (right) and ECE PhD student Parul Pandey (left) have won the 2016 Googol T-ASE Best Applications Paper Award, for their IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE) article titled "Dynamic Collaboration between Networked Robots and Clouds in Resource-Constrained Environments." The article is co-authored with Dr. Jingang Yi from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers. The authors received the award, which included a certificate and 500 USD prize, at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), held in Fort Worth, TX.

More info about the award and previous winners of the award can be found here:
http://www.ieee-ras.org/awards-recognition/publications-awards/69-awards...

The paper abstract is below:

Abstract: Underwater mobile sensor networks such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) or robots are envisioned to enable applications for oceanographic data collection, environmental and pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, and distributed tactical surveillance. These applications require running compute- and data-intensive algorithms that go beyond the capabilities of the individual AUVs that are involved in a mission. To execute these task-parallel algorithms in resource- and time-constrained environments, dynamic and reliable collaboration between local networked robots (e.g., AUVs) and remote public Clouds is needed. To this end, the heterogeneous sensing, computing, communication, and storage capabilities of local and remote resources are exploited to form a "loosely coupled" mobile Cloud, and a novel resource provisioning engine that dynamically takes decisions on “what” and “where” the tasks should be executed in the mobile Cloud is introduced. Comparison of benefits of collaboration between local and Cloud resources with purely local and centralized approaches are presented through exhaustive computer simulations.

Congratulations Dario and Parul!

Dorin I. Comaniciu, Ph.D., vice president of medical imaging technologies at Siemens Healthcare, was presented the Distinguished Alumnus in Research award by Rutgers electrical and computer engineering professor Peter Meer.

The Medal of Excellence, the school’s highest honor awarded to an alumnus for superior, lifetime achievements that honorably reflect the school.

Pictured in the photo above, from left John DiCiurcio, Prof. Peter Meer, Dorin Comaniciu, and SOE Dean Thomas Farris.

For more photos and information, please click 2016 Medal of Excellence Awards

A team from WINLAB received the best paper award for their paper "Visible light based activity sensing using ceiling photosensors" at the ACM Workshop on Visible Light Communication Systems (VLCS) held with the ACM MobiCom 2016 conference in New York, in October 2016. The team comprising graduates students Viet Nguyen*(ECE), Mohamed Ibrahim*(CS), Siddharth Rupavatharam (ECE) and Minitha Jawahar (ECE) was advised by Professors Marco Gruteser and Rich Howard.
* joint first authors

The work in the paper explores the feasibility of tracking motion and activities of humans using visible light sensors embedded in ceiling lights. It employs communication among light bulbs to coordinate signaling and sensitive difference measurement techniques to detect and infer motion from shadows cast on the floor.

Congratulations Marco, Rich and the rest of the team!

WINLAB has been asked by the NSF to host a remote CloudLab cluster, as part of a supplementary grant to the University of Utah aimed at enhancing CloudLab capabilities to support wireless/mobile experiments. Ivan Seskar and his team will receive funding of about $360K to acquire a CloudLab computing cluster and integrate it with CloudLab services as well as the ORBIT and GENI testbeds. The CloudLab project is led by Prof. Rob Ricci at Utah, and more information can be found at:https://www.cloudlab.us/ 

This project is synergistic with an ongoing NSF CRI grant at WINLAB aimed at adding “cloud radio access network (CRAN)” capabilities to ORBIT, and will enable researchers to conduct reproducible experiments on the emerging topic of mobile edge cloud where the computation is distributed at the edge of the network instead of being centralized at a traditional data center.

Congratulations to Ivan and his team!

The 2016 Faculty Recognition Award ceremony was held on Thursday September 22nd in the courtyard of the Engineering Building D-Wing. Four ECE Faculty were recognized in this year's event - Professors Patel, Dana, Godrich, and Lindqvist.

Click here to see more photos of the event.