Five New Faculty Members Boost Research and Academics
Electrical and computer engineering students will see some new faces in the classroom this semester as five new faculty join the ECE team.
“We are proud to introduce five new professors to our outstanding group of existing faculty,” said Tamal Bose, ECE department head. “These new faculty, who bring expertise in such areas as data mining, cybersecurity and wireless networks, will aid the ECE department in continuing to push the boundaries of technology.”
Ming Li joins the ECE department as an associate professor after serving as an assistant professor in the computer science department at Utah State University where he directed the Wireless Network and Cyber Security Research, or WiSeR, Lab.
Li’s research interests include cybersecurity and privacy, especially in communications, network and information security.
He is a principle investigator on three National Science Foundation (NSF) projects in the areas of cloud security and wireless networks. He is also a co-principal investigator on the NSF project “Secure and Resilient Vehicular Platooning.” His team is among the first to investigate the security vulnerabilities of autonomous transportation systems.
He won a distinguished paper award, titled “Privacy-Preserving Multi-keyword Text Search in the Cloud Supporting Similarity-based Ranking,” at the 2013 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security.
“Our research empowers users to regain control of their privacy by encrypting their cloud data, while still enabling them to conduct meaningful data searches without revealing what they have searched,” he said.
Li, who received an NSF CAREER award in 2014, received his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2011 from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in the field from Beihang University in 2008 and 2005, respectively.
Assistant professor Tosiron Adegbija was formerly a co-instructor of computer architecture and graduate research assistant in the Embedded Systems Lab in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida.
His research focuses on designing adaptable architectures for technologies so they remain useful and effective over time, high-performance embedded computing and dynamic optimization. He is also working on design and development of microprocessor systems for the Internet of Things, or IoT, a growing movement to enable objects to autonomously communicate, make decisions and reduce reliance on human intervention for data acquisition, interpretation and use.
“The IoT has been touted by some as the new digital gold rush, due to its potential impact on our lives, work and economy,” he said. “I believe that adaptable architectures and optimization methodologies will be a key for realizing the IoT’s full potential.”
Adegbija received his doctoral and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida in 2015 and 2011, respectively, and a bachelor of engineering degree in electrical engineering from the University of Ilorin in 2005.
He plays piano and bass guitar and produces music for bands, choirs and soloists as a hobby.
Assistant professor Siyang Cao was previously a graduate research associate at The Ohio State University where he studied radar, including electronic scanning, sensing waveform design and synthetic aperture radar. He was also working as an automotive radar system engineer focusing on waveform design, interference mitigation, and multiple-input and multiple-output radar system.
Cao has published several papers on radar waveform design. His research team was the first to propose using wavelet packets for radar waveform design.
“Currently, several organizations are trying to implement our waveform and new sensing mechanisms,” he said.
Cao received his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from The Ohio State University in 2014 and master’s degree in electronics and information from South China University of Technology in 2010.
A trail cyclist, he looks forward to discovering the trails of Tucson. Cao is excited to be living in Tucson where, because of the many research associations, it’s “an ideal place for not only developing new ideas but also implementing them,” he said.
Assistant professor Gregory Ditzler was previously a graduate research assistant and teaching assistant in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University. He also was an adjunct professor at Rowan University’s electrical and computer engineering department.
Ditzler conducts research in machine learning, bioinformatics and data mining, particularly in applied comparative metagenomics and other areas with important applications for the life sciences.
He won the best student paper award in 2014 for his work on learning in nonstationary environments at the IEEE/INNS International Joint Conference on Neural Networks and has won several awards for research excellence from Drexel University.
Ditzler received his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from Drexel University in 2015, master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Rowan University in 2011 and bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering technology from Pennsylvania College of Technology in 2008.
He enjoys traveling, woodworking, fishing and playing guitar.
Assistant professor Ravi Tandon joins ECE from the department of computer science and the Discovery Analytics Center at Virginia Tech where he was a research assistant professor. He was also a post-doctoral research associate in the department of electrical engineering at Princeton University.
His research involves information theory and its applications to wireless networks, communications, security and emerging areas like data mining and big-data analytics.
With funding from the National Science Foundation, he has conducted research to reduce interference and fading and improve efficiency of wirelessly shared information.
“Our findings have broad applications beyond commercial wireless networks -- for example, in mission critical and tactical environments,” he said.
Tandon received his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2010 and bachelor of technology in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2004.
He is an avid cricket fan and enjoys running, biking and playing tennis.