EECS COVID-19 Update
Please refer to any department update in this link.
From the Chair
First, I would like to thank you for taking the time to read our newsletter. A lot
of exciting things have happened in EECS in the recent past and even more is expected
to come. This quick reflection is not meant to be a thorough description of everything
that has happened, it is merely a highlight on a few of our happy moments. In 2019,
we got richer by four new faculty members: two assistant teaching professors for our
computer science curricula (Dr. Huabo Lu and Dr. Sourabh Bose), an Assistant Professor
focusing on biometrics, machine learning, and computer vision (Dr. Ajita Rattani),
and an Associate Professor who is leading our Data Science efforts (Dr. Dukka K.C.).
Our Graduate Certificate in Information Assurance and Cybersecurity has received an “NSA National Center for Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education” certification through 2024 (with Dr. Sergio Salinas’ leadership). We had two faculty members participating in Air Force Research Lab faculty research programs which has also helped Dr. Hyuck Kwon (and Dr. Yanwu Ding) bring in significant research funding for our communications research program. Dr. Rémi Chou’s early work on information theoretic security was picked up by the National Science Foundation for funding. Our faculty continue to engage our students in high quality publications, including many “Transactions” papers but also papers in “extreme tier” journals, like Bioinformatics (Dr. Ali Eslami). Through the heavy and long-prolonged engagement of our Power Systems faculty with industry, Evergy Inc., has donated significant funds to create a renewable (solar) research and teaching infrastructure as well as creating an endowment to benefit our students through one of our faculty. This endowment was named after Dr. Ward Jewel due to his long standing service to our power systems teaching and research efforts. We are also collaborating more and more closely with local industry, whether it is teaching specific classes for their employees, working on projects together, or helping them with their research efforts.
Some of our current efforts are focused on restructuring our graduate degrees, focusing on an M.S. degree in Computing (that will allow professionals from other science and engineering fields to become trained at the graduate level in applied computing), and a potential M.S. degree in Data Science. Both of this degrees will be able to use stackable graduate certificates (such as, Cyber Security, Computer Networking, Data Science) as graduating options.
Finally, on a personal side, I am happy to announce two more members to our EECS family. Wendy Brooking started to work in our front office focusing on our undergraduate students and helping make the department run smoother. The other family member is literal: Dr. Preethika Kumar and Dr. Ali Eslami recently became parents of their newborn baby boy Khosro.
Dr. Gergely Zaruba
Chair, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
WSU College of Engineering
A BSEE Senior receives IEEE PES Scholarship Award
Mohd Abrar Rahman, an EECS senior has received the 2020 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Scholarship Plus Initiative award. This award recognizes undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering branch, who
contribute to the power and energy field.
In addition, he is selected as the top-ranked student in IEEE Region 5 (Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and parts of New Mexico, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Illinois) based on the academic excellence, campus engagaement, and service to the professional society. Based on these criteria, he was awarded the John W. Estey Outstanding Scholar award. He is the first student from a Kansas insitution to achieve this honor.
Congratulation Abrar!!
Dr. Sinha to lead the AI research in a national research institute
Dr. Kaushik Sinha will lead the research on machine learning in the newly formed AI Institute for Foundations
of Machine Learning (IFML), at the University of Texas, Austin.
The primary objective of this institute is to solve fundamental questions related to machine learning and artificial intelligence. The team will comprise researchers from the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Washington, and Microsoft Research.
Read the full story
A WSU Alumnus Entrepreneur’s Initiative against COVID-19
Dharma Teja Nukarapu, a computer science graduate from Wichita State University, founded Vera Smart Healthcare in 2019. He is also the CEO of the company. Vera Smart developed a COVID-19 Monitoring System App, which is deployed in the state of Telangana, India to identify, track, monitor, and provide real-time analytics to the governor and
the state health department. This technology is based on IoT (Internet of Things),
GPS, and Geotag and the features track the home quarantined person, to not breach
the rules of quarantine. The app is helping by providing effective tracking and collating
critical data in one-click. Such an initiative is certainly effective to combat COVID-19
in a highly dense region.
1st Place in NCL
Dexter Gerig (BSCS) achieved the first place in the Individual Event of the National
Cyber League (NCL). This is an impressive accomplishment since the NCL brings students
from hundreds of universities in the country.
Congratulation Dexter!!
Welcome to our EECS
Dr. Dukka KC, pictured with his family. Joined Wichita State University in August
2019.
Dr. Huabo Lu joined WSU In January 2019.
WuLug
WuLUG members participated in the National Cyber League. There were 3 teams, and one
of the teams was able to score the 10th position. This season, over 700 teams and
6000 members participated in the NCL. This season has been far more competitive, difficult,
and rewarding than any other season in the past.
National Cyber League is a capture the flag style competition which helps students prepare and test themselves against cybersecurity challenges they are likely to face in the workforce.
WuLUG members were invited to a mock CCDC by Dakota State. Dakota State is a regular finalist in NCCDC. We were able to score first. We're very proud of this result as this our first CCDC competition.
The format of the mock competition closely mirrors the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC), which is the premier cyber defense-style competition in the US. In the competition, each team receives a scenario where they act as the IT administrators for a faux company, also called the ‘blue teams.” The objective of the blue teams is to defend their network from an adversarial team staffed by the organizers, also called the ‘red team,’ while completing various system administration tasks and maintaining services for the faux organization. This lets students experience a trial by fire initiation into privilege escalation, firewall management, incident logging and even providing “manager friendly” situation reports without any provided guidance.
Workshops this semester:
Linux Essentials
Linux Essentials aims to teach basic Linux techniques to those who have some computer experience but would like to dive deeper into a more interesting operating system. This workshop goes from the origin and the history of Unix and Unix like operating systems and then diverges into Linux topics such as the CLI using bash, User Management, Permissions, Processes, Packages, Filesystem, and permissions. We also dive into Linux Containers, chroot environment, and automation through Python.
Web Development
This workshop teaches frontend development from ground up. We go through HTML, CSS, and JS using bootstrap and angular to make beautiful web apps.
Python Programming
This workshop deals with translates what's taught in CS 211, 311 and 400 to Python. We go over imperative, and object-oriented programming in python, and play with data structures, while working on a real-world project.
Cybersecurity Essentials
One of our more advanced workshops, this workshop teaches how to make your binary exploits. We learn how to use tools such as Immunity Debugger, Metasploit, learn how to reverse engineer binaries, bootstrap C from scratch, and prepare for Capture the Flag stayed competitions such as the National Cyber League.
For more information on WuLug email wulug@wichita.edu
PhD Students
Award and Honors
- Suvagata Chakraborty, Arun-Kaarthick Manoharan and Anton Hettiarachchige Don, Best Student Paper Award, 3rd Place, North American Power Symposium
- Arun-Kaarthick Manoharan, Best Student Poster Award, PSERC IAB Meeting, December 2019
- Srikanth Gampa, Best Paper Award, IEEE UEMCON 2019
- Suvagata Chakraborty, Elevator Pitch Competition, 3rd place, North American Power Symposium
- Anton Hettiarachchige-Don, Recipient of 2018 IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Individual Achievement Award
- Nimanthi Nandasiri iREDEFINE Professional Development award at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) annual conference, March 2019, Tucson, AZ
- Anton Hettiarachchige-Don, Recipient of 2019 College of Engineering Wallace Graduate Teaching Assistant Award
- Suvagata Chakraborty, 2019 EECS Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award Recipient
- Md Rakib Ur Rahman, a finalist at the 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) competition hosted by the Wichita State University Graduate School
- Suvagata Chakraborty, a finalist at the 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) competition hosted by the Wichita State University Graduate School
- Hui Li, “In-Hand Perception of Object Characteristics for Dexterous Manipulation,” GRASP 2019, Wichita State University
- Fujian Yan, “Symbolic reasoning and learning of spatial relationships for robotic comprehension,” GRASP 2019, Wichita State University
- Arun-Kaarthick Manoharan, Maha “Maggie” Sawan Fellowship, Office of International Education, Wichita State University, 2019-2020
Prof. Ramanan at Google
Prof. Ramanan worked as a Software Engineer at Google, Mountain View, CA from
May 2018 to Jan 2020. He returned to WSU at the start of the Spring
2020 semester.
Baby Khosro
Baby Khosro Joseph Eslami was born on Sunday 21st July 2019 at 10.44 am.
Faculty and Research
- Dr Ajita Rattani has been selected as an IEEE Biometrics Council's rep to the IEEE Young Professionals. This IEEE program is meant to be the training ground of future leaders.
- Hyuck M. Kwon (PI), $207,362 (My Share), 08/20/2019-08/19/2021, “Future W/V-Band Satellite Communication Systems,” US Air Force Research Laboratory, Grant Award Number FA9453-19-2-0003, Awarded.
- Hyuck M. Kwon (PI), $150,000 (My Share), 05/01/2020-0430/2021 (variable), “Smart On-Board Satellite AGC Loop with Anti-jamming Capability for Spread Spectrum Frequency Hopping Systems,” US Air Force SBIR Grant Award Number FA9453-19-P-0555, Awarded.
- Hyuck M. Kwon (PI) and Yanwu Ding (Co-PI), $25,000 (My Share), 05/01/2020-12/31/2020 (variable), “Single Satellite Rapid Geolocation of Satellite Communications (SATCOM) Electromagnetic Interference (EMI), DoD 2019 SBIR Solicitation AF193-015, Awarded.
For contributions to the Newsletter please email wendy.brooking@wichita.edu