TH E ECSSE N EWSLETTE R
Department of Electrical, Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering
EMBRY-RIDDLE AERONAUTICAL UNIVERSITY
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Launches
of appropriate courses. If it better fits their
research interests, they may elect a crosscutting course of study that doesn’t align with
any of the master’s degrees.
The first students to matriculate into the
program are Savannah Bell, Ness Hamaoui,
and Robert Koeneke.
Pioneer Ph.D. in EE&CS students. Left to right: Ness Hamaoui,
Savannah Bell, and Robert Koeneke.
This fall, ERAU welcomed its first students in
the new Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science.
The program launched after being approved
by the ERAU Board of Trustees at their spring
2015 meeting. The name spans the range of
technical disciplines offered by the department,
with electrical engineering and computer
science serving as endpoints but with
computer engineering, software engineering,
and systems engineering also included among
areas for doctoral research.
Developed by ECSSE faculty, the program is
research-intensive, requiring 24 credit hours
in dissertation research on top of 18 credits
of coursework past the master’s degree.
The program is also open to exceptional
individuals directly from the bachelor’s degree,
with 48 credits of coursework required plus
the dissertation research. Students entering
from the B.S. degree can be awarded one of
the department’s M.S. degrees—Cybersecurity
Engineering, Electrical and Computer
Engineering, Software Engineering, Systems
Engineering, or Unmanned and Autonomous
Systems Engineering—with completion
Bell earned her B.S. in Computer Engineering
and a Master of Software Engineering
from Embry-Riddle. Savannah has worked
in government and private industry, and
currently works for ERAU as a Middleware
Applications/SharePoint Developer. Her
research interests including brain connectivity
mapping, computational forensics, and colors
in computing and design.
The program
launched after
being approved
by the ERAU
Board of Trustees
at their spring
2015 meeting.
Hamaoui earned his B.S. in Electrical
Engineering from Florida International
University and his M.S. degree in Electrical
Engineering from University of North
Florida. Currently Vice President of FineTest
Inc. (www.finetest.com), Hamaoui has 23
years of experience in automatic testing
equipment involving hardware, software, and
management. He is focusing on power issues
in unmanned aircraft and is also interested in
teaching in a university environment.
Koeneke received his B.S. in Electronic
Engineering from Simon Bolivar University
in Venezuela and a M.S. in Computer Science
from Santa Clara University in California.
He has been an Associate Professor at
Daytona State College since 2010 and is
interested in systems of systems issues
in telecommunication systems as well as
computing architectures. Dr. Remzi Seker
(sekerr@erau.edu) is the degree’s program
coordinator.
LOOK INSIDE
02 CHAIR’S CORNER
02 FACULTY FEATURE
03 FAST FACTS
03 RESEARCH
WAVEBITS NEWSLETTER 1
Chair’s Corner
Faculty Spotlight
Welcome to Wavebits
Welcome to Wavebits, the newsletter of the Department of Electrical,
Computer, Software, and Systems Engineering. In this inaugural issue,
we highlight the department’s research culture.
Dr. Timothy Wilson,
Chair, Dept of ECSSE
Over the last several years, department
faculty members have led or contributed
to research efforts in topics ranging
from the development of cooperative
localization for commercial space launches
to simulation of airplane emergency
evacuation.Our intent is to grow research
activities in the department as they grow
in the College of Engineering, the campus,
and across the university as a whole.
To achieve that, we identified several
directions for department-based research.
• Sense and avoid for unmanned systems is a key element in bringing
the safe and effective use of unmanned aircraft into the national
airspace system.
• Cybersecurity and assured systems engineering is necessary for
safe and secure transmission and storage of data, as well as for the
development of robust high-performance software systems.
• Modeling and simulation is a key aspect in the development and
operation of contemporary aviation and aerospace systems.
We couldn’t grow our research activities the way we wanted to when
our highest degree was the M.S., so we developed our new Ph.D. in
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (see story on page 1) to
enable our research reaching new levels in terms both of funding and of
developing publishable artifacts.
I look forward to reporting on the results of these activities in future
issues of Wavebits.
The ECSSE department has been responsible for about half the
research in the College of Engineering at ERAU Daytona Beach for
some time now.
ASSURE Is Here!
In May 2015, the FAA designated the ASSURE (Alliance for
System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence) coalition, of which ERAU is a member, as the Center of Excellence
for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. ERAU is the technical lead
in UAS ground operations and in UAS pilot and crew training
and is the co-lead in command and communication research.
ERAU’s ASSURE team is led by ECSSE’s Richard Stansbury.
ASSURE awarded approximately $500k to ERAU researchers in its first set of grants. The coalition of twenty-one leading
universities and over a hundred industry partners is led by Mississippi State University. More information is available online at
http://www.assureuas.org/.
2 WAVEBITS NEWSLETTER
Dr. Jiawei Yuan,
Assistant Professor of Computer Science,
Department of ECSSE
The faculty and staff of the ECSSE department
are proud to welcome Dr. Jiawei Yuan as our
newest colleague. Dr. Yuan joined the ECSSE
faculty this fall after completing his Ph.D. in
Integrated Computing in 2015 from University
of Arkansas at Little Rock. He earned his B.S.
in 2011 from University of Electronic Science
and Technology of China and worked at the
Research Programs of Information Technology
at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
from July 2013 to July 2015.
As a researcher, Jiawei looks forward to
contributing toward ERAU’s growth in research
with efforts to address practical security and
privacy concerns. Motivated by the rapid
proliferation of cloud computing, increasingly
the platform of choice for launching cyberattacks, Jiawei’s research focuses on security
in the cloud and networks, eHealth security,
and applied cryptography. He has published in
top-tier journals, including IEEE Transactions
on Information Forensics and Security and
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed
Systems, and he has presented at leading
conferences such as the IEEE International
Conference on Computer Communications.
Jiawei’s teaching interests include cloud
computing, cybersecurity, and programming.
In front of the class and in the office, Jiawei
wants to help students not only achieve
academic success, but also develop skills that
will benefit them in their career and long-life
learning.
Research Bits
Dr. Brian Butka was awarded $300,000 over three years by the Office of
Naval Research to investigate development of a long endurance vehicle
that can remain in place in littoral waters for extended periods of time.
Dr. Billy Barott was awarded $165k on an NSF grant, “Coexistence of Radio Astronomical Arrays with Terrestrial and Satellite
Communication and Navigation Systems”, with partner Villanova
University. He continues as a representative to NATO’s Sensors and
Electronic Technologies panel and to AIAA’s Digital Avionics Technical
Committee.
Fast Facts
4
ACHELOR’S PROGRAMS:
B
Computer Engineering, Computer
Science, Electrical Engineering,
and Software Engineering.
4
( PLUS ONE)
MASTER’S PROGRAMS:
Cybersecurity Engineering,
Electrical and Computer
Engineering, Software Engineering,
and Systems Engineering (new,
2015), plus the COE’s Master
of Science in Unmanned and
Autonomous Systems Engineering
(ECSSE managed).
1
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering &
Computer Science
Dr. Petr Bojda was awarded $20,000 by Rockwell Collins to analyze
performance of multiple navigation algorithms implemented with
software defined radio technologies.
Dr. Thomas Yang continues his AFRL-sponsored projects ($200k
over two years) on distributed control for multi-agent autonomous
systems and on I/Q interference in digital communication systems. He
recently completed a project for the Florida Space Grant Consortium on
beamforming approaches for satellite-ground communications.
Dr. Radu Babiceanu and Dr. Shafagh Jafer visited Southwest Airlines
in Dallas, Texas, for initial efforts on a project to apply artificial
intelligence to better understanding of human-entered maintenance
records.
Last spring’s Integrated Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance
conference featured papers from Dr. Radu Babiceanu, Dr. Petr Bojda,
and Dr. Remzi Seker. The three, along with Dr. Thomas Yang and
Dr. Jiawei Yuan, are founding members of ECSSE’s CybEL, the
Cybersecurity Engineering Lab.
About $500k
Annual research spending and
growing.
In September 2015, NEAR (Next-generation Embry-Riddle Advanced Research) Lab director Dr. Massood Towhidnejad
served on the panel entitled “Systems Engineering and Software Engineering” at the first IEEE International Symposium
on Systems Engineering at Rome, Italy.
Dr. Remzi Seker and Dr. Andrew Kornecki both served on RTCA’s SC-216 on Aeronautical Security Systems. Both
contributed to the recently released documents, “Airworthiness Security Process Specification” (DO-326A), and
“Information Security Guidance for Continued Airworthiness” (DO-355).
Dr. Shuo Pang will be presenting work on autonomous underwater vehicles at this fall’s OCEANS ’15 conference.
ECSSE at AFRL
What did you do on your summer vacation? Dr. Billy Barott and
two graduate researchers, Kevin Scott and Ted Dabrowski, spent the
summer investigating passive radar at Air Force Research Labs at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. Unlike traditional
radar in which an object is illuminated by a signal transmitted and
recovered from a radar dish, passive radar uses receivers that are
distant from the illuminator to measure distance, speed, and other
characteristics of in-flight objects. Barott and his team from ECSSE’s
Microwaves and Radar lab have been looking into signal characteristics
of illuminators of opportunity, such as digital television or satellite radio
broadcasts, the propagation of such signals near Earth’s surface, and
what kinds of antennas are appropriate for receiving those signals.
Doctoral students Kevin Scott, left, and Ted Dabrowski stand
atop a 100-foot antenna tower at the Springfield (Ohio)
National Guard Base. The object on the right is a 48-beam
phased-array antenna that Scott and Dabrowski showed could
be used in a passive-radar application..
WAVEBITS NEWSLETTER 3
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