ECE Department celebrates new faculty, extensive research for 2019-20

The 2019-20 academic year has been a fruitful one for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science.

New faculty

Welcome to Jian Li and Wenfeng Zhao, who have joined the ECE faculty as assistant professors.

Li was a postdoc with the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 2017 to 2019. He completed his PhD in computer engineering from Texas A&M University in 2016. He received his BE degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012.

Zhao earned his PhD degree from the National University of Singapore in 2014, and his MS and BS degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2009 and 2007, respectively. Prior joining Binghamton University, he was a postdoc with the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Research news

• Ning Zhou — promoted to associate professor in 2019 — earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to provide a vision for power systems as fossil fuels wane and renewable energy sources take center stage. His project is “Integrated Dynamic State Estimation for Monitoring Power Systems under High Uncertainty and Variation.”

• The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded $1.4 million to a joint project from Lockheed Martin Corp.’s Owego division and the ECE department for production of “chameleon circuits” to prevent chip hacking. Professor Douglas H. Summerville, chair of the ECE department, will serve as the primary investigator for the project, with Lockheed as the lead partner and contractor. The University’s share of the funding is approximately $540,000.

• A new joint study from Binghamton University and Purdue University will examine both power sources for flexible or wearable tech and energy efficiency for high-capacity servers. Working through the newly established Center for Heterogeneous Integration Research in Packaging (CHIRP), principal investigator Pritam Das (an ECE assistant professor) and co-PI Kanad Ghose (distinguished professor of computer science) will research higher-voltage package power delivery and power-management systems for high-end systems-in-package (SiP) devices. Funding the study over three years will be a $350,000 grant from the Semiconductor Research Corp., a nonprofit tech consortium that counts Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments as well as the National Science Foundation among its supporting members.

• Assistant Professor Tara P. Dhakal has found a new method for producing ultrathin films made from specific compounds, and that discovery could lead to lower-cost solar cells and other technological advances. In a study recently published in Materials Research Express, Dhakal outlined a way to grow tin sulfide into a “two-dimensional” semiconducting material. Dhakal became the director of the University’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP) in 2018.

• Ziang (John) Zhang, principal investigator, and Pritam Das, co-principal investigator, both ECE assistant professors, will develop and demonstrate a new energy storage process and solution for warehouse energy management. Funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the project will allow researchers to work with Raymond Corp., a leading manufacturer of electric forklift trucks and intralogistics solutions. The solution will use solar panels, a stationary energy storage system and lithium-ion batteries on forklifts that will reduce energy costs for warehouse owners.

• The National Science Foundation has awarded a $452,000 grant to Seokheun “Sean” Choi, ECE associate professor, and Ahyeon Koh, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, for research to generate power from human sweat. They will attempt to generate an innovative, practical and longstanding power source from human sweat, which is one of the few available energy resources on the skin, by using the metabolisms of sweat-eating bacteria.

• Assistant Professor Emrah Akyol received a $235,000 NSF grant for his project “CIF: Small: Strategic Communication: Concepts, Methods and Applications.” He will study problems related to networks of smart agents that exchange information with each other through the “Internet of Things,” such as channel noise and data compression.