Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Elnaz Banan Sadeghian, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently received a $550,469 National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her project “Multitrack Read Channel Designs for Modern Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording.” The five-year award is one of the most prestigious and competitive awards available to early-career faculty.

Banan Sadeghian’s research seeks to develop efficient noise prediction, synchronization and symbol detection algorithms that support modern and future generations of ultra-high density two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR). TDMR is a hard disk drive technology that allows for a significant increase in data storage capacity, currently allowing for a data density of up to 10 terabits per square inch.

Banan Sadeghian’s project will investigate signal processing algorithms individually and in combination to more effectively mitigate such impediments as interference and readback signal noise to improve data recovery and develop more efficient novel TDMR read channels that will increase data density beyond what current read channel designs provide.

Following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee has recommended Stevens researcher Shucheng Yu for elevation to IEEE Fellow effective January 1, 2023 for contributions to information and network security. Less than 0.1% of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation. Yu's current research interests include information security, applied cryptography, wireless networking and sensing, distributed trust, and applied machine learning. He is also interested in practical security and privacy in IoT systems. Yu also received the Test of Time Paper Award of IEEE Infocom 2020 for his research on cloud data security. He directs the Analytics and Information Security research cluster in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Hongbin Li is actively working to enable passive radio frequency (RF) sensing, using existing wireless signals to locate objects that don’t have their own RF devices. To that end, Li has been granted a $360,000 award from the National Science Foundation for his research study, “Leveraging Bandwidth-Rich Wireless Signals for Passive Localization of RF-Silent Mobile Objects.”

The world is already full of wireless radio frequency signals from WiFi, cellular, radio, television and satellites. These signals, designed for communication with RF-equipped devices, also have the potential to support passive RF sensing for tracking, monitoring heart and breathing rate, detecting falls, and other activities involving “RF-silent” objects that are not equipped to communicate through radio frequencies.

Through this project, Li will work to develop techniques to locate passive RF-silent mobile objects in complex indoor and outdoor settings through harnessing bandwidth-rich wireless signals such as 5G/6G cellular and WiFi-6/7, multi-static sensing geometry and new graph-theoretic techniques. The results of his research may support improved security and surveillance, indoor or outdoor traffic monitoring, search and rescue operations, location-based services and health and wellness.