University Distinguished Professor Dr. Jack Dongarra has penned an opinion piece about supercomputing for the Washington Post. The United States has once again claimed the top spot in the race for the world’s most powerful and fastest scientific supercomputer. Oak Ridge National Laboratory is home to this computer, called Summit.
Interim EECS Dept. Head Announced
Dr. Greg Peterson, Interim EECS Department Head
Dr. Lynne Parker, interim Dean of the Tickle College of Engineering, has announced that Professor Greg Peterson has agreed to serve as the interim head of the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, effective August 1, 2018. Current Department Head and Min H. Kao Professor Leon Tolbert is returning to the department’s faculty at that time, having served as head since January 2013.
Dr. Peterson has been a key member of the department for almost 20 years and will be a familiar face to our faculty during this time of transition. I would like to thank Dr. Tolbert for his years of leadership and for all the growth and success he has overseen during his time as head of the department.
Peterson has served in a number of leadership roles, including as a US Air Force captain at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Research Laboratory, as deputy director of the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, and as director of UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences. He earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
He is a senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Society for Engineering Education, the Accellera/VHDL International Users’ Forum, and the Society for Computer Simulation.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Peterson on his new role.
New EECS Professor Dr. Michela Taufer Quoted in Supercomputing Story on PBS’ NovaNext
The Human Connectome (Courtesy of PBS NovaNext website)
From the PBS NovaNext website:
Bobby Kasthuri has a problem.
In an effort to understand, on the finest level, what makes us human, he’s set out to create a complete map of the human brain: to chart where every neuron connects to every other neuron. The problem is, the brain has more connections than the Milky Way has stars. Just one millionth of the organ contains more information than all the written works in the Library of Congress. A map of the brain would represent the single largest dataset ever collected about anything in the history of the world.
Making that map seems like a task that could consume not just one lifetime, but dozens. Yet in just three years, it might just be possible.
EECS Professor and Grad Students win Best Paper Award
Dr. Qing Cao recently co-authored a paper with two of his graduate students, Yunhe Feng and Zheng Lu, entitled “Secure Sharing of Private Locations through Homomorphic Bloom Filters.” This paper has now won the Best Paper Award at IEEE BigDataSecurity 2018, the 4th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud. About 150 papers were submitted to this conference this year.
Current continuously increasing demands of cloud computing and relevant network-based techniques have driven a dramatic growth of the implementations of data mining, smart data, artificial intelligence, and data analysis in multiple domains. Security and privacy issues in big data have become a great concern due to the interconnecting environment. IEEE BigDataSecurity 2018 addresses this domain and aims to gather recent academic achievements in this field.
Moreover, cloud computing is the second concentration of IEEE BigDataSecurity 2018. The emerging mechanism of cloud computing has provided a variety of novel approaches addressing the solutions of big data. The new methods deriving from cloud computing have covered distinct dimensions, such as edge/fog computing, energy consumptions, high performance, and heterogeneous resources, cloud models, heterogeneous architecture, tele-health, resource allocation, load balance, multimedia, and QoS, etc.
Congratulations, Dr. Cao, Yunhe Feng and Zheng Lu!
EECS Professor and Ph.D. Student Present Paper at IEEE Symposium in San Francisco
Jared Smith, a Ph.D. student in the UT Computer Security Lab (volsec.eecs.utk.edu) advised by Dr. Max Schuchard, presented a full paper at the 39th annual IEEE Symposium for Security and Privacy in San Francisco, CA. The paper, entitled “Routing around Congestion: Defeating DDoS Attacks and Adverse Networking Conditions with Reactive BGP Routing,” was one of 63 papers accepted out of 564 submitted (11% acceptance rate) at S&P, one of the top 4 academic security conferences.
At the conference, Jared and Dr. Schuchard presented the first deployable solution to a previously unmitigated form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). This particular form of DDoS has been used in recent years to take entire countries offline, take down large parts of the Internet’s infrastructure, and prohibit millions of Internet users from communicating online. While most solutions to DDoS require cooperating with other networks or paying for expensive commercial solutions, their solution allows an online entity to defend against DDoS without these requirements, and in many cases make modern botnet-based attacks a problem of the past.
For more information on the paper and the UT Computer Security Lab in general, please visit volsec.eecs.utk.edu.
TENNLab- Neuromorphic Architectures, Learning, Applications Group Featured in New Video
Dr. Garrett Rose, Dr. James Plank, Dr. Mark Dean and Graduate Researcher Parker Mitchell, of the TENNLab– Neuromorphic Architectures, Learning, Applications group, are featured in a new video, speaking about neural networks and neuromorphic computing. HDIAC, the Homeland Defense & Security Information Analysis Center, has released this video, entitled “Neural Networks for the Homeland Defense & Security R&D Community of Interest.”
Parker Named Interim Dean of College
Lynne Parker, Tickle College of Engineering
Lynne E. Parker has been named interim dean of the Tickle College of Engineering.
Parker, the associate dean for faculty affairs and engagement for the college, takes the role effective Monday, May 7, as former dean Wayne T. Davis has been selected to lead the UT Knoxville campus as interim chancellor.
“It’s an honor for me to lead the college during this time of transition,” said Parker, a professor in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I look forward to working with TCE colleagues to maintain the momentum of the college until Dean Davis’s successor arrives.”
Parker earned a bachelor’s degree from Tennessee Tech University in 1983, a master’s from UT in 1988, and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994, all in computer science.
She is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a distinguished member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a senior member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a member of the American Society for Engineering Education. She has also served as a National Science Foundation division director for information and intelligent systems, and as a distinguished research and development staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
CS Honors Students Produce Short Film to Illustrate the Importance of Computer Science
The honors students in COSC 317 created this short film to illustrate the importance of Computer Science in real-world situations- specifically in law enforcement.
“The Great UTKCSPD Case”
One seemingly simple carjacking leads to a far more dangerous scheme. A retired detective must come back onto the force to work with a computer scientist and outsmart an elusive hacker in this educational and action packed short film.
2018 Gonzalez Family Awards Banquet- April 26, 2018
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- Dr. Kevin Tomsovic
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- Dr. Kamrul Islam
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- Wade Jenkins
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- Julia Elkins
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- Dr. R.C. and Connie Gonzalez
EECS Master’s Student Receives Best Oral Paper Presentation Award
Frances Garcia
Electrical Engineering student Frances Garcia received the Best Oral Paper Presentation award for her presentation on a paper titled “A SPICE Model for GaN-Gate Injection Transistor (GIT) at Room Temperature” at the Connecticut Symposium on Microelectronics & Optoelectronics (CMOC) 2018 held in New Haven, CT.
Garcia received her B.Sc. degree in physics from University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA. She is currently working on her Master Sc. Degree in electrical engineering under supervision of Dr. Syed Kamrul Islam. She is a DOE Wideband Gap Trainee Fellow at the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include semiconductor device modeling and characterization and power electronics.