Our faculty and many of our students make research a fundamental part of their academic life. Here are some profiles detailing their research activities:
Dr. Tülay Adali specializes in statistical signal processing. Since 1992, Dr. Adali has been the director of the Machine Learning for Signal Processing Lab (MLSP-Lab) at UMBC. Currently, she has been working on diagnosing schizophrenia by analyzing functional MRI and other medical imaging data.
Dr. Nilanjan Banerjee specializes in developing renewable energy driven devices. He runs UMBC’s Mobile, Pervasive, and Sensor Systems Laboratory, which focused on three key areas: renewable energy driven systems, healthcare systems, and mobile phone based systems.
Dr. Fow-Sen Choa uses a Chemical Vapor Desposition System to grow semiconductors that are used for chemical detection and breath analysis using photo-acoustic (PA) effects. In addition, he has been working with undergraduate students at UMBC on projects dealing with flying robots, Fourier analysis of music instrument, x-ray scan of superlattice crystal growths, and brainwave measurement and analysis.
Dr. Tim Finin specializes in artificial intelligence and has been working on developing smart phones that can guage their user’s “context.” “What I have always found interesting since I was an Undergraduate was the idea that we could make machines as smart as people,” explains Dr. Finin, whose research involving semantic web technology is directed towards realizing that goal.
Dr. Curtis Menyuk specializes in the theory and simulation of opitcal and photonic systems. A member of UMBC’s Computational Photonics Laboratory, he is currently interested in short-pulse lasers and time and frequency transfer networks. “One of the central themes in my career has been an interest in solitons,” says Dr. Menyuk who first became interested in lasers in the early eighties while doing collaborative research with Linn Mollenauer.
Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin runs UMBC’s Energy Efficient High Performance Computing Lab, where she works to develop highly accurate, low-power communications and healthcare devices. Currently, Dr. Mohsenin is pursuing three distinct projects in the realm of digital signal processing (DSP) and VLSI implementation: 1) many-core architectures for DSP and secured trusted platforms, 2) low-power processors for portable healthcare devices, and 3)efficient error correction techniques for communication devices.
Dr. Tim Oates does research in the field of machine learning and is interested in understanding the development of the human brain. Dr. Oates is also fascinated by the idea of making robots that are capable of learning and exhibiting human characteristics. “I don’t know if we’ll ever have androids walking among us that are indistinguishable from humans,” says Dr. Oates, “but I bet we’ll get pretty darn close.”
Dr. Marc Olano is the director of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department’s Game Development Track and has been pursuing research in computer graphics and computer hardware for more than twenty years. Currently, he is working at Firaxis Games on texture compression for the Civilization V video game and collaborating with Dr. Erle Ellis of the Geography and Environmental Systems Department on a project dubbed Ecosynth.
Dr. Chintan Patel specializes in VLSI design and test and has been working on projects dealing with power supply modeling, noise estimation, current measurements circuits and hardware security. “Today’s complex devices operating at very low power supply voltages are very susceptible to even minor variations in the chip’s power supply,” explains Dr. Patel, adding that modeling these variations is crucial during the chip’s design phase in order to devise ways to compensate for these variations during normal operation.
Dr. Yelena Yesha is the Director of the Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA) and the site director of the Multicore Computational Center (MC2), and has been doing exciting research with cloud computing through the centers.