The Office of Graduate and Professional Education has recognized three ECE Graduate Students for academic year 2014-2015.

Kassem Nabha, a Master’s graduate student, under the direction of Professor Fouad Kiamilev, has received the Graduate Scholars Award. Kassem is working on creating unique and singularly successful LED infrared scene projector systems that make civilian and military airplanes safer to fly. His research work is focused on developing algorithms and processes for controlled light emission from LED infrared scene projectors.

Hao Wu, a Ph.D. graduate student under the direction of Assistant Professor Hui Fang, has received the University Graduate Fellow Award.  Hao has made a lot of excellent research contributions in information retrieval, is involved in exploiting social media to discover unknown drug side effects, and more recently, has developed significant interests in developing fast and efficient IR systems.

Xitong Liu, a Ph.D. graduate student under the direction of Assistant Professor Hui Fang, has received the University Dissertations Fellow Award.  Xitong is in the process of finishing two separate studies with potentially ground-breaking results.  He is studying how to leverage the temporal changes of entities to better capture the entity profiles, which can be used to improve the accuracy of search engines as well as creating a more complete knowledge base.  He is also focusing on separating rumors from truth, which is quite an important, yet challenging, task given the exponential amount of user-posted information on the social media. The results of this study could have major impact on various domains such as education and mental health.

The University Graduate awards are given in recognition of a student’s prior academic achievements as well as the potential for future success in their respective fields of study. The Dissertation Fellows award is established by the Office of the Provost to enable and support Ph.D. students to devote full attention to the completion of their doctoral dissertation.