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News Highlights

2023-24
 

October 2023

2022-23

May 2023

  • Professor Hyeran Jeon published a book chapter titled, "GPU Architecture" as part of "Handbook of Computer Architecture" by Springer. This chapter explores fundamentals to advanced research topics related to GPU architecture.
  • EECS Ph.D. student Yue Zhang, advised by Professor Shijia Pan, was awarded the Best Poster Award runner-up at Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN) 2023, for his poster presentation titled, “Integrating On-and Off-body Sensing for Young Adults Failure to Launch (FTL) Behavior Profiling.”

March 2023

  • EECS Professor Xiaoyi Lu received an Amazon Research Award for his project aimed at scaling collective communication designs for Amazon's distributed deep learning training workloads on the AWS cloud.
  • Undergradaute students Shreya Shriram (UC Merced) and Asiyah Awais (CITRIS WIP intern from UC Berkeley) and Ph.D. student Shubham Rohal (UC Merced) advised by Professor Shijia Pan, are part of a team admitted to the CITRIS Foundry for their project on posture correction for chronical pain caused by sedentary behavior via musculoskeletal sensing. 

December 2022

November 2022

  • Prof. Hyeran Jeon and her co-authors published an IEEE standard, IEEE 1924.1, titled, "IEEE Recommended Practice for Developing Energy-Efficient Power-Proportional Digital Architectures." The standard provides guidelines for the designers and developers of digital architectures for creating power-proportionality at different levels of the system.

  • EECS Ph.D. students Tafadzwa Joseph Dube and Yuan Ren earned a best paper award at ACM ISS 2022, "Push, Tap, Dwell, and Pinch: Evaluation of Four Mid-Air Selection Methods Augmented with Ultrasonic Haptic Feedback." The paper, co-authored with EECS Professor Ahmed Sabbir Arif, along with Hannah Limerick from Ultraleap Ltd. and I. Scott MacKenzie from York University, Canada, is published at ACM Human-Computer Interaction 6, ISS, Article 570 (December 2022).

  • EECS Professor Shijia Pan was awarded the best demo award at SenSys 2022. Demo abstract: "MOOCA: Miura-Ori Origami-Based Configurable Shelf-Liner for Autonomous Retail," is a project supported by AiFi Inc. to build a low-cost elastic sensor inspired by origami – the Japanese paper folding structure. Authors: Shubham Rohal, Yue Zhang and Shijia Pan from UC Merced and Carlos Ruiz from AiFi Inc.

September 2022

  • EECS Professor Xiaoyi Lu received a Google-initiated Faculty Research Award for a project which focuses on collective algorithm designs for large-scale deep learning training workloads.

  • EECS Professor Xiaoyi Lu received a Meta/Facebook Faculty Research Award for a project which focuses on GPUDirect RDMA based communication scheme designs and accelerations for big DLRM models.

2021-22

July 2022

  • EECS Ph.D. student Suryabhan Singh Hada graduated with a thesis entitled "Some approaches to interpret deep neural networks." He is now an AI engineer at LinkedIn

  • EECS Professor Xiaoyi Lu and his co-authors (Prof. Panda from OSU and Dr. Shankar from SAP in Germany) have published a book titled, "High-Performance Big Data Computing" by the MIT Press. The book offers an in-depth overview of high-performance big data computing and the associated technical issues, approaches and solutions.

May 2022

  • EECS undergraduate Shreya Shriram, in Dr. Shijia Pan's lab, won Best Poster Award at IPSN 2022 conference for their paper, “Sedentary Posture Muscle Monitoring via Active Vibratory Sensing,” co-authored by Pan, graduate students Shubham Rohal, Zhizhang Hu and Yue Zhang, and VP Nguyen from the University of Texas, Arlington.

April 2022

  • EECS Ph.D. students Jie Ren and Wenqian Dong, who will graduate in May, have secured faculty positions starting Fall 2022. Both joined Dr. Dong Li’s lab in 2017. Ren will join the faculty at William & Mary and Dong will join Florida International University’s Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences in the College of Engineering and Computing as assistant professor.

March 2022

  • EECS Ph.D. student Laxmi Pandey and Professor Ahmed Sabbir Arif's SIGGRAPH 2021 poster research and how it contributes to accessible communication is featured in ACM SIGGRAPH's blog post.

February 2022

  • Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ph.D. student Xueting Li is a recipient of the 13th annual Google Ph.D. Fellowship Program. Li works in Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang’s Vision and Learning Lab and her research focuses on computer vision and deep learning, especially on the area of unsupervised learning and 3D computer vision. In 2020, Li was awarded a prestigious NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship.

  • EECS Ph.D. student Hsin-Ping Huang, who works with Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang, was selected as finalist for the 2022 Meta Fellowship in the AR/VR Human Sensing area.

2020-21

December 2021

  • EECS Ph.D. student Yerlan Idelbayev graduated with a thesis entitled "Low-rank compression of neural networks: LC algorithms and open-source implementation." He is now an applied scientist at Amazon.

November 2021

  • "Stepper, Swipe, Tilt, Force: Comparative Evaluation of Four Number Pickers for Smartwatches," a paper co-authored by Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ph.D. student Yuan Ren, received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 2021 ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces Conference, a premier HCI conference. https://iss.acm.org/2021/program/awards/

October 2021

May 2021

  • Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Ph.D. student Maryam Khazaei Pool, in Dr. Marcello Kallmann's group, received a 2020-21 UC Merced Outstanding Teaching Award.

  • Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate student Haoyu Niu is one of 24 scientists selected for this year's Bayer Grants4Ag program. He beat out over 600 proposals from around the world. Read more

  • “SwipeRing: Gesture Typing on Smartwatches Using a Segmented Qwerty Around the Bezel” has received the best paper award (the Michael A. J. Sweeney Award) at the 47th Graphics Interface Conference (GI 2021). EECS Ph.D. student Gulnar Rakhmetulla, in Dr. Ahmed Arif's lab, is the first author of this paper. Preprints of the paper is available online.

March 2021

  • LipType, a new invention from Dr. Ahmed Sabbir Arif and his lab, the Human-Computer Interaction Group, lets people send texts or emails on their computers and mobile devices and have contact-free interactions with public devices such as ATMs or other kiosks, without speaking aloud. Read more

February 2021

  • Dr. Hyeran Jeon and Dr. Dong Li received a COR grant through the Academic Senate Faculty Research Grants Program for their project, "Enabling Large Model Training on Heterogeneous Memory through Runtime Data Management and Architecture Support."

  • Dr. Xiaoyi Lu and Dr. Wan Du won a COR grant for a project between UC Merced and Merced College entitled, "A Networking and Data Processing Infrastructure for Collaborative Research on Agriculture."

  • Dr. Shijia Pan received a COR grant for her project, “TeethVib: Detecting Teeth Ill-Fitting Through Mouth-Guard Vibration Sensing.”

  • We welcome a new faculty member in CSE/EECS. Dr. Gokcen Kestor Gioiosa joins as Assistant Adjunct Professor. 

January 2021

  • We welcome two new faculty members in CSE/EECS. Dr. Pengfei Su and Dr. Xiaoyi Lu join as Assistant Professors.

  • Dr. Stefano Carpin is part of the four-year Labor and Automation in California Agriculture (LACA) team, an interdisciplinary group comprising UCs Merced, Berkeley, Davis and Riverside, as well as UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, that was awarded a $3.1 million University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives award.

November 2020

  • Xianzhong Ding, a third-year EECS PhD student in Dr.  Wan Du's group, received the Best Paper Runner-Up award and the Best Presentation award in ACM BuildSys 2020. It is a collaborative work with Prof. Alberto Cerpa. (Xianzhong Ding, Wan Du and Alberto Cerpa, “MB2C: Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-zone Building Control,” in the 7th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys), 2020.)

October 2020

  • Prof. Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán has joined the University of California Presidential Working Group on Artificial Intelligence. The systemwide group is charged with developing UC Ethical AI Principles to guide the development and application of AI in ways that are consistent with UC's mission and values, in areas such as health, human resources, policing and admissions. Prof. Carreira-Perpiñán's research is in machine learning and optimization.
  • Prof. Stefano Carpin is the PI for a four-year $1M grant from the USDA/NIFA for the project "Collaborative Resaerch: Mobile Robotic Lab for In-Situ Sampling and Measurement." This project is funded as part of the NSF led National Robotics Initiative and is in collaboration with Kostas Karydis and Amit Roy-Chowdhury at UC Riverside. Prof. Josh Viers is co-PI for the UC Merced team. More details can be found here.
  • Prof. Wan Du and Prof. Shijia Pan received a one-year $58,000 CITRIS Core Seed grant for the project "Data-Driven Fall Prevention Intervention for Older Adults."

September 2020

  • Prof. Shawn Newsam and EECS graduate student Shrishail “Shree” Baligar are using artificial intelligence (AI) to detect bird calls in the recordings.

  • Prof. Florin Rusu is the sole PI on a new three-year $500K NSF project "COMPASS: Online Sketch-based Query Optimization for In-Memory Databases."

  • Ph.D. student Laxmi Pandey received the 2020-2021 Hatano Cognitive Development Research Fellowship ($1000) for her work on accessible text entry with Prof. Ahmed Sabbir Arif.

  • Prof. Shijia Pan, her Ph.D. student Zhizhang Hu and co-authors won the best paper award at the 2nd Nurse Care Activity Recognition Challenge held as a part of HASCA Workshop, UbiComp, 2020.

  • Yerlan Idelbayev (Ph.D. student, EECS) received a UC Merced Outstanding Teaching Award. The $1,000 Outstanding Teaching Award is intended to recognize the valuable contributions of graduate students to teaching and pedagogy. Graduate student contributions include but are not limited to: UC Merced course development and instruction, as readers, teaching assistants, and lead instructors; participation in pedagogical training and development programs; and developing or delivering materials or instruction at professional workshops and summer schools. The award is intended to recognize a body of teaching and pedagogical contributions during the course of graduate education.

August 2020

  • Prof. Angelo Kyrilov won a two years NSF award for the project "START UP SJV: STEM Teachers Alliance for Regional Tech thinking through Underrepresented Professional development in the San Joaquin Valley." Prof. Stefano Carpin and Dr. Chelsea Arnold (SNS) are Co-PIs on the award. Here is the press release.

  • We welcome three new faculty members in CSE/EECS. Dr. Hyeran Jeon and Dr. Hua Huang join as Assistant Professors, and Dr. Santosh Chandrasekhar joins as Teaching Assistant Professor.

  • The National Science Foundation has awarded a 26 million, five year Engineering Research Center (ERC) grant entitled, NSF ERC for the Internet of Things for Precision Agriculture (IoT4Ag), to a consortium of universities led by Penn along with UC Merced, Purdue, and Florida.  Prof. Stefano Carpin serves as co-PI for the UC Merced team. The campus news story can be found at https://news.ucmerced.edu/news/2020/new-engineering-research-center-focu....

July 2020

June 2020

  • UC Merced received on of five Microsoft-Global Wildlife Conservation Innovation grants this month for their proposal to use artificial intelligence to better understand the planet and solve pressing environmental issues. The project will help researchers understand rapid human-driven landscape changes and their impacts to biodiversity, for the development of more effective conservation measures.
2019-20

May 2020

  • The paper “Step-Level Occupant Detection across Different Structures through Footstep-Induced Floor Vibration Using Model Transfer” by Mostafa Mirshekari; Jonathon Fagert;  Shijia Pan; Pei Zhang; and Hae Young Noh received the 2019 Best Journal Paper Award given by the ASME SHM/NDE Technical Committee. The award is selected among all peer-reviewed journal papers published in 2019 based on the criteria of (a) Technical quality, (b) Originality of research, and (c) Impact to SHM/NDE community for their paper.

  • Prof. Ahmed Sabbir Arif received a one-year, $50,000 Hellman Faculty Fellows Award for the project "Enabling Motor Impaired People to Input Text on Mobile and Wearable Devices". UC Merced Newsroom

April 2020

March 2020

  • UC Merced Newsroom, Mariposa Gazette, and IT Media News, Japan published stories covering Ph.D. student Gulnar Rakhmetulla's work on a novel chorded keyboard for sighted, low vision, and blind mobile users (CHI 2020) and Ph.D. students Laxmi Pandey and Azar Alizadeh's work on a deep learning powered predictive system for number entry (CHIIR 2020). Both projects were supervised by Prof. Ahmed Sabbir Arif.

February 2020

  • Congressman Jim Costa visited the Human-Computer Interaction Group, led by Prof. Ahmed Sabbir Arif. The group prepared hands-on demonstrations for him to showcase some of the technologies developed in the lab.

January 2020

  • Ph.D. student Laxmi Pandey, advised by Prof. Ahmed Sabbir Arif, has been awarded an ACM SIGIR Student Travel Grant and an ACM-W scholarship for attendance at the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR).

September 2019

  • We welcome our newest faculty member, Prof. Shijia Pan, who is joining UC Merced in Fall 2019. Prof. Pan has a Ph.D. in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley, and a bachelor's degree in Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her areas of research are on ubiquitous computing, mobile sensing systems, ambient structural vibration sensing, objects as sensors.
2018-19

May 2019

  • Arman Zharmagambetov (Ph.D. student, EECS) received a UC Merced Outstanding Teaching Award. The $1,000 Outstanding Teaching Award is intended to recognize the valuable contributions of graduate students to teaching and pedagogy. Graduate student contributions include but are not limited to: UC Merced course development and instruction, as readers, teaching assistants, and lead instructors; participation in pedagogical training and development programs; and developing or delivering materials or instruction at professional workshops and summer schools. The award is intended to recognize a body of teaching and pedagogical contributions during the course of graduate education.

April 2019

February 2019

August 2018

2017-18

September 2017

  • Prof. Marcelo Kallmann (PI) received a $344,480 award from the Army Research Office for the project Algorithms for Visualization and Simulation of Optimal Navigation.

August 2017

2016-17

December 2016

  • Prof. Stefano Carpin (PI) received a $961,144 grant from the USDA for the new project RAPID: Robot Assisted Precision Irrigation Delivery. This award is part of the NSF led National Robotics Initiative, and is in collaboration with Josh Viers (UCM), Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley) and Stavros Vougioukas (UC Davis). Here is the official press release.

September 2016

2015-16

July 2016

January 2016

2014-15

April 2015

December 2014

  • Graduate student Maksym Vladymyrov successfully defended his dissertation, "Large-scale methods for nonlinear manifold learning."

October 2014

  • Prof. Stefano Carpin received funding for the first year of a three year project with the Army Research Lab as part of the MAST CTA. The project "Rapid deployment of heterogeneous robot teams: abstractions, algorithms and experimentation" is in collaboration with Vijay Kumar at UPenn and Bert Tanner at the University of Delaware.
2013-14

August 2014

  • Professor Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán received an award from the National Science Foundation for the project titled Algorithms for accelerating optimization in deep learning ($450,000, 2014-2017).
  • Professor Sungjin Im (p.i.) received an award from the National Science Foundation for the project titled "AF: Medium: Collaborative Research: Multi-dimensional Scheduling and Resource Allocation in Data Centers". This is a joint-proposal with Professor Kamesh Munagala (p.i.) and Professor Benjamin Lee (co-p.i.) at Duke University. Professor Im's share is about $390K for four years including about $230K which is expected to be awarded in 2016. 
  • Professor Stefano Carpin obtained a $175K award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for the third year of the project "Grasping and Simulation for Next-Generation Manufacturing Robots".

May 2014

April 2014

December 2013

  • Prof. Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán spent the Fall 2013 semester at Carnegie-Mellon University on sabbatical.
  • Graduate student Weiran Wang successfully defended his dissertation, "Mean-shift algorithms for manifold denoising, matrix completion and clustering."

September 2013

  • Professor Stefano Carpin obtained a $208,000 award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for the second year of the project "Grasping and Simulation for Next-Generation Manufacturing Robots."
  • Professor Stefano Carpin obtained a one-year, $95,000 grant from the Army Research Lab to study algorithms for multirobot Rapid Deployment Strategies as part of the MAST CTA.

August 2013

July 2013

April 2013

  • Graduate student Oktar Ozgen successfully defended his dissertation, "Physics-Based Animation Models Using Fractional Calculus."
  • Graduate student Mentar Mahmudi successfully defended his dissertation, "Multi-Modal Planning for Humanlike Motion Synthesis using Motion Capture."

January 2013

December 2012

  • Graduate student Yang Yang successfully defended his dissertation, "Image Retrieval, Classification and Object Recognition Using Local Invariant Features in High Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery."
  • Graduate student Yazhou Huang successfully defended his dissertation, "Motion Capture Based Animation for Virtual Human Demonstrators: Modeling, Parameterization and Planning." He is now lead research and development engineer at EON Reality, Inc.

August 2012

  • We welcomed eight new Ph.D. students.
2011-12

July 2012

  • Professor Stefano Carpin received a 200,000 grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for a one-year project, "Grasping and Simulation for Next-Generation Manufacturing Robots."

July 2012

  • Graduate student Joshua Phillips successfully defended his dissertation, "Validation of Computational Approaches for Studying Disordered and Unfolded Protein Dynamics Using Polymer Models." He will start in August at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Metropolis Postdoctoral Fellow.

February 2012

January 2012

November 2011

August 2011

  • A video showcasing Professor Kallmann's research on virtual characters aired on KVIE in Sacramento. 
  • We welcomed our new Ph.D. students Stefan Achleitner (sensor networks); Yu Cheng (database systems); Angelo Kirilov (computational cognitive neuroscience); and Chengjie Qin (database systems).
2010-11

May 2011

  • Professor Stefano Carpin (p.i.) obtained a $53,000 grant from the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey) for a seven-month project, "Hierarchical Search with Heterogeneous UAVs."
  • Professor Stefano Carpin (p.i.) obtained a $300,000 grant from DARPA for an 18-month project, part of the IBM Synapse project. "Virtual Environments for High Fidelity Testing of Robotic Behaviors" builds on the USARSim software he developed in the past. The grant is in collaboration with UC Merced Professor Chris Kello (co-p.i.).

April 2011

  • Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang received the UC Merced Senate Award for Distinguished Early Career Research, in recognition for his research in face detection, object detection, object recognition, visual tracking, appearance models, motion analysis, image clustering and other areas of computer vision. This award for non-tenured faculty members is intended to encourage and recognize individuals for research and/or other creative activities that have had a major impact on the field, either through a sustained record of contributions or through a specific, highly influential contribution." Congratulations!

February 2011

  • Chao Qin successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, "Data-driven approaches to articulatory speech processing," supervised by Professor Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán. Chao is the second UC Merced student to graduate with a Ph.D. degree with emphasis in EECS. He is now a research scientist at sharethis.com, where he works on mining social network data for targetted advertising.
  • The EECS group had an opening at the associate/full professor level. 

September 2010

August 2010

  • Brian Starks joined the ANDES Lab as an undergraduate student in computer science and engineering, working toward a bachelor's of science in computer science and engineering. He worked on the SCOPES wireless sensing camera system, specifically on the implementation of a USB device driver for the reprogrammability of iMote2 via USB running on Linux. Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.
  • After spending the entire summer working with us at the ANDES Lab, Declan Delaney returned to Ireland to continue his Ph.D. studies in the Clarity Research Centre at University College Dublin, with plans to continue actively collaborating with EECS on issues related to multi-protocol routing switching based on locally detected network conditions, and applications related to building energy management. Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.
  • The Center for Autonomous and Interactive Systems (CAIS) officially becomes a UC Merced Centralized Research Unit. This new interdisciplinary research center includes members from the School of Engineering (EECS) and the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts (cognitive science). CAIS was established thanks to support form CITRIS and the National Science Foundation.
  • We welcomed our new Ph.D. students Derek Burch (robotics) and Robert Backman (graphics). They joined the EECS graduate program after having obtained undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering and mechanical engineering from UC Merced.
2009-10

July 2010

  • Joshua Phillips, EECS Ph.D. student under the direction of Professor Shawn Newsam, received a travel award from the UC Merced Graduate Research Council to attend the first Gordon Research Conference on Intrinsically Disordered Proteins. The conference accepted only 150 applicants from across the fields of chemistry, biology, physics and computer science. Phillips's work focuses on understanding the structure and function of disordered proteins using computational and machine learning techniques.

June 15, 2010

May 4, 2010

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

April 19, 2010

UC Merced EECS Professors Alberto Cerpa and Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán were awarded $150,000 through two seed-funding grants from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. The projects are:

  • "The Sensing Entity Tracking Initiative (SETI): A CITRIS Center for Smart Energy Infrastructure," with Professor Edward Arens of UC Berkeley;
  • "Magnetically Actuated MEMS Power Conditioning Circuits for Energy Scavenging in SmartGrid Applications," with Professor Richard White of UC Berkeley

More information about the CITRIS seed-funding projects can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Feb. 7, 2010

ANDES Lab’s ASSIST project has received a lot of attention recently thanks to the timely topic of solar radiation mapping. Here are some links to articles:

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Feb. 2, 2010

A group of undergraduate students was hired by the ANDES Lab to help processing ground truth video data from the occupancy estimation system. The group comprises Derek Anthony Burch, Paul Isaac Felkai, Jared Edwin Lindblom, Alexander Magnana, Jared Petker and Mark Ernest Torio. They used a series of scripts developed by Varick Erickson using perlmagic and open CV libraries to process and label ground truth video feeds for human recognition. The data is invaluable to understand failure modes and build error models for our smart-camera wireless sensor system.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Dec. 18, 2009

Lun Jiang, a graduate student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program working in the ANDES Lab, haschanged majors and was been admitted to the Environmental Systems program at UC Merced, researching solar energy technology under the supervision of Professor Roland Winston. We wish him the best in this new endeavor.

Dec. 15, 2009

We welcomed a new graduate student, Mohsen Farhadloo.

Dec. 8, 2009

Andreas Kolling successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, "Multi-Robot Pursuit-Evasion." Supervised by Professor Stefano Carpin, he is the first UC Merced student to graduate with a Ph.D. with an emphasis in EECS. Kolling accepted a postdoctoral fellowship with a primary appointment at the University of Pittsburgh to work on the AFOSR Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) and ONR Science of Autonomy grants under principal investigator Professor Katia Sycara, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Nov. 9, 2009

The ANDES Lab demo "Measuring Foot Pronation using RFID Sensor Networks"earned second place out of 42 academic and industrial demos presented at SenSys 2009.

Congratulations to Varick Erickson and Ankur Kamthe for their great work and effort in this demonstration.

Watch the full video of the system in operation here.

More information about ANDES Lab body sensing projects can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Nov. 9, 2009

The full video of the Session 5 (Sensing Applications) where Varick Erickson presented ANDES Lab work on body sensing can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

November 2009

Our 2009/2010 hiring season started. Please visit our EECS jobs web page for more details and application deadlines.

Oct, 12, 2009

ANDES Lab abstract "Measuring Foot Pronation Using RFID Sensor Networks" was accepted for presentation at the first workshop on Wirelessly Powered Sensor Networks and Computational RFID (WISP Summit 2009), in conjunction with ACM SenSys 2009.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Oct. 3, 2009

Sept. 26, 2009

A new article featuring the open-source-code culture at UC Merced’s Collaboratory is available at the CITRIS web site.

The full article can be found here.

The full paper describing the collaboratory can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Sept. 26, 2009

In addition to the M&M paper, the ANDES Lab had two posters and a demo accepted to the upcoming seventh ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2009): 

Click the links above for full information about the posters and demo.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Aug. 29, 2009

Professor Alberto Cerpa was awarded a $560,000 NSF grant for the development of ASSIST: Affordable System for Solar Irradiance Sensing and Tracking. This is a joint effort with Professor Carlos Coimbra (co-p.i.) from mechanical engineering, and Professor Qinghua Guo (co-p.i.) from environmental engineering. ASSIST was designed to be a model sensor and information technology system for directly and quantitatively observing the effects of cloud cover, aerosol content and the presence of participating gases in the lower atmosphere (water vapor, carbon dioxide) and in the stratosphere (ozone), all of which can reduce the availability of direct insolation at the ground level to a small fraction of the solar irradiance that reaches the upper atmosphere.

More information about the project can be found here.

Full NSF abstract can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Aug. 27, 2009

We welcomed our new graduate students Zhe Hu, Maksym Vladymyrov and Chih-Yuan Yang.

2008-09

July 27, 2009

Ph.D. student Joshua Phillips has been awarded a Best Student Poster Award at the 2009 Annual Symposium of The Protein Society for his poster titled "Dynamics Analysis of Unstructured FG-Nucleoporins." He was also featured in a Spotlight article on the UC Merced website. Way to go Josh!

July 23, 2009

ANDES Lab paper "M&M: Multi-level Markov Model for Wireless Link Simulations, was accepted to the seventh ACM conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems (SenSys 2009), in Berkeley in November 2009. Graduate student Ankur Kamthe, Professor Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán and Professor Alberto Cerpa are the authors.

Full paper information can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

July 15, 2009

Professor Marcelo Kallmann is PI on the newly awarded $499K grant from NSF for research on gesture modeling.

July 15, 2009

Professor Shawn Newsam was awarded a $396,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "Integrating Image and Non-Image Geospatial Data." Awarded through the Information Integration and Informatics program in the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate, this project develops novel methods for integrating image and non-image geospatial data to advance the state-of-the-art of automated remote sensed image analysis and, in turn, improve the coverage and fidelity of the non-image repositories. See the NSF official award page for more details.

July 5, 2009

ANDES Lab paper "SenSearch: GPS and Witness Assisted Tracking for Delay Tolerant Sensor Networks" was accepted to the eighth International Conference on Ad hoc Networks and Wireless (AdHocNow 2009), in Murcia, Spain, in September 2009.

Full paper information can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

July 2009

UC Merced won the RobocupRescue simulation competition in Robocup 2009 in Graz, Austria. Under the supervision of Professor Stefano Carpin, students Benjamin Balaguer, Derek Burch and Roger Sloan topped 11 teams from all over the world.

June 26, 2009

ANDES Lab graduate student Tao Liu successfully passed his Ph.D. qualifying exam and officially became a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program. His qualifying proposal is titled “Link Quality Estimation and Prediction for Wireless Sensor Networks." Professors Alberto Cerpa (chair), Stefano Carpin and David Noelle composed his Ph.D. committee.

Congratulations Tao!

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

June 2009

Various undergraduate students spent summer 2009 in Professor Stefano Carpin's and Professor Miguel Carreira-Perpinan's labs working on research projects in robotics and machine learning, supported by the National Science foundation through the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

May 25, 2009

After one year of working for the ANDES Lab, Varick Erickson decided to continue his studies as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program at UC Merced. His area of research was in occupancy and tracking modeling of people inside buildings using sensor network technology. We were delighted to have Varick in the ANDES Lab.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

May 22, 2009

Former ANDES Lab student Matt Dudys completed his bachelor's in computer science and engineering through UC Merced’s School of Engineering, and joined Morgan Stanley in New York as a technology associate.

Congratulations Matt!

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

March 26, 2009

ANDES Lab paper "Performance Evaluation of Link Quality Estimation Metrics for Static Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks" was accepted to the sixth annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON 2009) in Rome in June 2009.

Full paper information can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Dec. 2, 2008

ANDES Lab graduate student Ankur Kamthe successfully passed his Ph.D. qualifying exam and became a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program. His qualifying proposal was titled “Data Driven Modeling of Phenomenon in Wireless Sensor Networks." Professors Alberto Cerpa (chair), Miguel Carriera-Perpinan and Songhwai Oh composed his Ph.D. committee.

Congratulations Ankur!

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Nov. 24, 2008

ANDES Lab paper "SCOPES: Smart Cameras Object Position Estimation System" was accepted to the sixth European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2009) in Cork, Ireland, in February 2009.

Full paper information can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

October 2008

Hiring season started. Please visit our EECS jobs web page for more details and application deadlines.

Sept. 1, 2008

Professor Alberto Cerpa was awarded $350,000 in extramural funding from the Department of Energy and the California Institute of Energy and Environment (CIEE) for the project “Occupancy-Based Energy Management in Buildings“ under grant DOE-MUC-09-03. This was a joint effort  with Micheal Sohn (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, building energy model), Andrzej Banazuk (United Technology Research Center, occupancy and building energy models) and the ANDES Lab (sensor network infrastructure, data collection and occupancy models).

For more information about the project click here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Septt 1, 2008

We welcomed our new graduate students Carlo Camporesi, Varick Erickson, Zaihong Shuai, Weiran Wang and Jianwu Zeng.

Sept. 1, 2008

Professors Stefano Carpin, Marcelo Kallmann, Teenie Matlock, Shawn Newsam and David Noelle obtained a $475,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to acquire state-of-the-art equipment for humanoid robotics research in cognitive science and engineering (see the NSF official award page for more details). The award supported the acquisition of a humanoid robot and the development of a humanoid torso with dextrous manipulation abilities.

Aug. 18, 2008

Varick Erickson joined the ANDES Lab as a master's student in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He earned his bachelor's in mathematical and computational science in 2005 and a master's in statistics in 2006, both from Stanford University. After graduation, he taught for two years at Central Valley High School in Ceres, near his home town of Turlock.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

August 2008

Professor Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán was awarded $220,000 by the NSF for a three-year project entitled "Foreign Accent Conversion Through Mapping Inversion of the Vocal Tract Frontal Cavity" in collaboration with Professor Ricardo Gutiérrez-Osuna of Texas A & M University.

2007-08

July 2008

We welcomed our new faculty member, Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang, who joined UC Merced from Honda Research Institute, where he was a senior research scientist. He received his bachelor's in engineering from National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000. He works on computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning.

July 2008

UC Merced won the second-place award in the Virtual Robots competition at Robocup 2008 in China. Under the supervision of his research advisor Professor Stefano Carpin, Ph.D. student Benjamin Balaguer consistently performed excellent missions throughout the competition and was defeated only in the finals by a small margin. More details are available on the robotics group website and here.

May 26, 2008

ANDES Lab undergraduate student Matt Dudys won the Associated Students of the University of California, Merced, Fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to promote independent research under the guidance of a UC Merced faculty member. Matt worked on the SCOPES system, specifically on the implementation of more robust object detection algorithms, which involves initially crafting image processing algorithms in MatLab, then implementing them in TinyOS. In 2008, two fellowships were awarded and Matt's was one of them.

Congratulations!

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

May 15, 2008

ANDES Lab graduate student Ankur Kamthe won the University of California Merced Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award for his teaching assistant work in CSE 160 Computer Networks (Fall 2007) and CSE 31 Introduction to CSE II (Spring 2008).

Congratulations!

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

May 2008

The paper "SmartBody: Behavior Realization for Embodied Conversational Agents" by Marcus Thiebaux, Andrew Marshall, Stacy Marsella and Marcelo Kallmann was s one of three papers nominated for best paper at AAMAS 2008.

March 13, 2008

ANDES Lab poster "SCOPES: Smart Camera Object Position Estimation System" was awarded second place among 60 competitors in the UC Merced 2008 Student Research Poster Competition. Congratulations to the ANDES Lab graduate and undergraduate students Ankur Kamthe, Lun Jiang, Matt Dudys and Edward Smith.

Full information about the poster can be found here.

Information about the competition can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

March 2008

Professors Dominic Massaro and Yi Zhang, of UC Santa Cruz, and Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán of UC Merced were awarded $75,000 in seed funding from CITRIS for a one-year project entitled "An Automatic Wearable Speech Supplement in Face-to-Face and Classroom Situations."

March 2008

Ph.D. student Chao Qin spent six months at the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) of the University of Edinburgh, supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Union. Part of this work appears in the paper "Predicting Tongue Shapes From a Few Landmark Locations," presented at Interspeech 2008.

Jan. 5, 2008

Edward Smith joined the ANDES Lab an undergraduate student in computer science and engineering, working toward a bachelor's degree, and working on the SCOPES wireless sensing camera system, specifically on the implementation of algorithms for object recognition to process ground truth data using OpenCV libraries.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

January 2008

The new EECS seminar series started in spring 2008. Weekly research seminars spanning all aspects of electrical engineering and computer science are offered to graduate students and faculty members. Here you can find a detailed schedule.

Dec. 13, 2007

Professors Songhwai Oh and Stefano Carpin were awarded $75,000 in seed funding from CITRIS for a one-year project entitled "Mobile Sensor Networks for Independent Living and Safety at Home."

December 12, 2007

Matt Dudys joined the ANDES Lab as an undergraduate student in computer science and engineering, working toward a bachelor's degree and working on theSCOPES wireless sensing camera system, specifically on implementation of algorithms for background update and object recognition.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Nov. 7, 2007

Ph.D. student Chao Qin and his research advisor Professor Miguel Á. Carreira-Perpiñán won a best student paper award at Interspeech 2007 for "An Empirical Investigation of the Nonuniqueness in the Acoustic-to-Articulatory Mapping." This work is funded by an NSF CAREER award.

Nov. 1, 2007

Professor Shawn Newsam was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. More...

Oct. 29 - Nov. 2, 2007

The Robotics and Graphics group had five papers presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System (IROS) at San Diego - Congratulations to our graduate students Andreas Kolling, Benjamin Balaguer and Xiaoxi Jiang. Publications available at the group pages.

Sept. 21, 2007

Professors Marcelo Kallmann, Shawn Newsam and Teenie Matlock were awarded $250,000 from the National Science Foundation for establishing at UC Merced a Cognitive Sensorium and Visualization facilit, designed to integrate immersive visualization with motion-capture and eye-tracking technologies for the performance of interdisciplinary research work. See media coverage.

Sept. 16, 2007

Professor Alberto Cerpa secured a Student Travel Program Grant from the National Science Foundation. The goal of the program was to allow U.S.-based students to cover the travel expenses to the ACM SenSys 2007 conference in Sydney.

Full information about the NSF grant can be found here.

Click here for more details on the ANDES News page.

Sept. 15, 2007

The EECS group had various openings for faculty positions at all levels. 

Sept. 13, 2007

The EECS website went live!