June 24, 2024
Machine-Based Learning
Highlander Combat Robotics — a project of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers — provides students the opportunity to build and battle their bots against each other, an fun experience that also serves as a “a gateway to practical learning"
December 17, 2023
Engineering student professional organizations soar to success
Financial support from October’s annual BCOE Match Challenge helped drum up donations for student professional organizations, totaling the most donors in the challenge’s six-year history.
September 05, 2023
$1.2 million grant awarded for robotics software development
A $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation will allow UCR to develop better software architecture for robotics and other autonomous systems.
August 08, 2023
Virtual reality headsets are vulnerable to hackers
Headset hardware and virtual keyboard interfaces that immerse us into expanding worlds of virtual reality also create new opportunities for hackers, UCR computer scientists find studies to be presented at a national cyber security conference.
July 27, 2023
Engineering students receiving a total of $46,000 in scholarships were encouraged to connect outside the classroom
Our scholars got dollars. Nearly 40 future engineers received financial support this past academic year in the form of scholarship awards ranging largely between $1,000 and $2,500. While this financial support assists Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) students in covering some of the costs of their education, the scholarship-application process is meant to do something more: encourage them to make critical connections with the campus community beyond the classroom. In reviewing scholarship applicants, committees review student engagement. Examples of such engagement
June 29, 2023
Artificial Intelligence to reshape deep science learning
Artificial Intelligence, beyond the hype and hysteria in headlines today, plays a growing role in daily life and business – with uses ranging from predictive text to Netflix recommendations to the detection of bank fraud.
Much of that progress is thanks to researchers on the cutting edge of complex scientific exploration.
And there is more to come.
September 23, 2022
Robot sleeves for kids with cerebral palsy
UC Riverside engineers are developing low-cost, robotic “clothing” to help children with cerebral palsy gain control over their arm movements.
August 15, 2022
Professor Keogh's Lab wins Test-of-Time Award
A team led by Dr. Keogh has won the ACM SIGKDD test-of-time award, recognizing outstanding papers from past KDD Conferences beyond the last decade.
July 05, 2022
NSF-funded project aims to enhance STEM graduate training in sustainable transportation
New UC Riverside program will train doctoral students on translating science into public policy
June 15, 2022
Protecting computer vision from adversarial attacks
UC Riverside engineers are developing methods to keep self-driving cars and autonomous drones from being hacked
May 26, 2022
BCOE’s first ever Family Weekend brings together engineering families to experience life as an engineering student
Parents and families of engineering students at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering (BCOE) experienced a slice of college life at the first ever Family Weekend on Friday, May 13 and Saturday, May 14. Through MakeRspace activities, classroom lectures, tours of BCOE, and more, families experienced firsthand their student’s campus life and engaged fellow parents, faculty and staff. “We extend a warm thank you to the families who visited BCOE in support of their student, and a thank you to our BCOE Parent Advisory Council, faculty and staff who made this possible,” said Dean
May 14, 2022
Detecting deepfake videos with up to 99% accuracy
The video computing group led by Prof. Amit Roy-Chowdhury has recently developed a new method that can detect manipulated facial expressions in deepfake videos with higher accuracy than current state-of-the-art methods. The method also works as well as current methods in cases where the facial identity, but not the expression, has been swapped, leading to a generalized approach to detect any kind of facial manipulation. The achievement brings researchers a step closer to developing automated tools for detecting manipulated videos that contain propaganda or misinformation.
Developments in
April 04, 2022
UCR now offers a bachelor’s degree in robotics engineering
The new major complements a robotics master’s degree unveiled in 2021
January 13, 2022
Robotic assistive device will lend a helping hand to infants with movement difficulties
Infants and young children with motor delays may soon be able to wear robotic helpers
December 13, 2021
Quickly optimizing deep neural networks for different devices
Deep neural networks, or DNNs — layers of algorithms that perform computations in an orderly progression to make the apps work — need to be optimized for each device. On other devices, it can take longer for the DNN to perform computations, causing the app to lag. This lag is known to computer scientists as “latency.” But with so many different makes and models of devices and customization options, it is almost impossible for developers to accomplish.
Even if they tried, the process would be lengthy and add considerably to the cost. A crucial bottleneck is the difficulty of quickly evaluating
November 11, 2021
MURI research grant to study brain dynamics and reinforcement learning
Samet Oymak, Assistant Professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Fabio Pasqualetti, Professor of mechanical engineering, received a $3.75 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) research grant from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, to study brain dynamics and reinforcement learning. Oymak and Pasqualetti will serve as co-PI's in the collaborative effort led by McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Approximately $1.1 million will support the work at the University of California
July 16, 2021
Air-powered computer memory helps soft robot control movements
“Airhead” robot uses pneumatic RAM to play piano
June 25, 2021
Chance meeting spawned a tech startup for these engineering students
Friends Mahmood Shaheen and Nathaniel Ortiz are taking recycling to the next level
June 25, 2021
Ultrasound mind reading machine could improve assistive robotics
Less invasive interface maps brain activity to predict movements
June 11, 2021
Prof. Luat Vuong receives DARPA Director’s Fellowship of the Young Faculty Award Program
Luat Vuong, a Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has been chosen to receive a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, Director’s Fellowship. The fellowship continues for the third year of the DARPA Young Faculty Award Vuong received in 2019. Read more here
May 27, 2021
Prof. Pasqualetti receives the 2021 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award
Together with Abed AlRahman Al Makdah (currently a PhD in ECE at UCR) and Vaibhav Katewa (currently Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and previously postdoc in ME at UCR), Prof. Pasqualetti receives the 2021 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Automatic Control Council for the paper " Accuracy Prevents Robustness in Perception Based Control".
May 25, 2021
UC Riverside offers UC system's first master's degree in robotics | News
UC Riverside’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering now offers a Master of Science degree in robotics, the first and only one of its kind in the University of California system. Applications for fall 2021 admission are due by July 15 for international students, and by Sept. 1 for domestic students. Read more here
May 25, 2021
UC Riverside offers UC system's first master's degree in robotics
Algorithmic bias is one problem the program will tackle
May 12, 2021
Four robotics professors receive prestigious NSF CAREER Awards
Four robotics faculty members received National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Awards this year. NSF CAREER Awards are given to early-career professors to fund research that is expected to form a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. The four CAREER Award recipients of the robotics program and the projects funded by the award are listed below (ordered by award date). Salman Asif is awarded for a project titled "Optimized Sensing and Recovery for Computational Imaging". ECE News: https://www.ece.ucr.edu/news/2021/01/10/salman-asif-receives-nsf
May 08, 2021
Privacy-Aware Large-Scale Machine Learning
Prof. Basak Guler
Machine learning applications have observed tremendous breakthroughs by the abundance of data in today's world, including the data collected by everyday devices such as smart phones, cars, and home appliances. The data collected in such environments, however, often carries sensitive personal information, such as personal identifiable information, images, videos, financial transactions, or geolocation information, the leakage of which could lead to serious privacy and security consequences. Prof. Basak Guler’s research enables privacy-aware large-scale machine learning on sensitive data
April 27, 2021
Jay Farrell named new endowed chair
This July, Jay Farrell will step up to the KA Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Riverside’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering, or BCOE. The new endowed chair was made possible through a $1 million gift from anonymous donors. As one of seven new endowed chairs established at BCOE during UCR's Living the Promise Campaign, the KA Chair was created to recognize faculty in electrical and computer engineering with distinguished records of research, academic, and professional leadership. See the full story at https://insideucr.ucr.edu/stories/2021/04/23/jay
April 23, 2021
Jay Farrell named new endowed chair
The KA Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering established through $1 million gift
March 03, 2021
Three ECE professors receive prestigious NSF CAREER Awards
Three ECE faculty members affiliated with CRIS received National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Awards this year. NSF CAREER Awards are given to assistant professors to fund research that is expected to form a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. The four CAREER Award recipients of the ECE department and the projects funded by the award are listed below (ordered by award date). Salman Asif is awarded for a project titled "Optimized Sensing and Recovery for Computational Imaging". ECE News: https://www.ece.ucr.edu/news/2021/01/10/salman-asif
January 27, 2021
Prof. Pasqualetti receives two IEEE awards
Together with his students and collaborators, Prof. Pasqualetti has received the 2020 Roberto Tempo Best CDC Paper Award for the paper " A Framework to Control Functional Connectivity in the Human Brain", awarded by the IEEE Control Systems Society, and the 2020 IEEE Control Systems Letters Outstanding Paper Award for the paper " Data-Driven Minimum-Energy Controls for Linear Systems".
December 06, 2020
A robot that tells growers when to water crops is on the way
To determine water needs accurately, growers hand-pluck individual leaves from plants, put them in pressure chambers, and apply air pressure to see when water begins to leak from the leaf stems. That kind of testing is time consuming and means growers can only reach so many areas of a field each day and cannot test as frequently as needed to accurately determine optimal irrigation scheduling patterns. A group of researchers from UC Riverside and UC Merced have received a grant for more than $1 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the National Science Foundation’s National
November 19, 2020
A robot that tells growers when to water crops is on the way
Researchers are creating an autonomous mobile robot to sample leaves and measure their water potential
September 11, 2020
NSF grant on distributed multi-robot joint localization and tracking
Professor Wei Ren received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant on distributed multi-robot joint localization and tracking. In applications such as disaster response, a network of mobile autonomous robots collectively tracks a subject over a wide area in an intermittently GPS-denied environment. As the subject and the robots move in and out of observation and communication range, each robot in the network needs to propagate estimates of position, velocity, and orientation for both itself and the subject, based on noisy measurements. This project aims to address distributed joint
July 29, 2020
ECE and CSE faculty receive new DARPA grant on adversarial machine learning
ECE Professor Amit Roy-Chowdhury is leading a team of ECE and CSE faculty that has received a grant totaling almost $1 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to understand the vulnerability of computer vision systems to adversarial attacks. The project is part of the Machine Vision Disruption program, which is part of DARPA’s AI Explorations program. The results could have broad applications in autonomous vehicles, surveillance, and national defense. Team members include UC Riverside colleagues Srikanth Krishnamurthy, Chengyu Song, Salman Asif, and Xerox
July 27, 2020
UC Riverside computer scientists receive grant to improve security of visual artificial intelligence
Amit Roy-Chowdhury leads project that will develop robust context-aware machine vision for computers
July 20, 2020
Prof. Erfan Nozari joins CRIS!
Erfan Nozari received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering-Control in 2013 from Isfahan University of Technology, Iran, received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Cognitive Science in 2019 from University of California San Diego, and was a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Pennsylvania Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Riverside, California Department of Mechanical Engineering. He has been the (co)recipient of the 2019 IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Outstanding Paper Award, the
July 10, 2020
NSF grant on information theoretic analysis of machine learning in computer vision
ECE professors, Amit Roy-Chowdhury and Ertem Tuncel, have received a new $500K grant from NSF’s Communications and Information Foundations program on information theoretic analysis of machine learning algorithms in computer vision. The recent successes in image and video analysis have been largely in the domain of supervised learning. Supervised learning methods assume the availability of extensive amounts of manually annotated/labeled training data, which limits the applicability of existing methods to complex and unseen environments. This has motivated growing interest in developing semi
July 10, 2020
Hyoseung Kim receives NSF CAREER Award
Professor Hyoseung Kim received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award for his work on "Real-Time Scheduling of Intelligent Applications". The CAREER is NSF's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research. This award will support
March 31, 2020
UMD ECE Distinguished Alumni Award
Professor Amit Roy-Chowdhury has been selected as a recipient of the 2020 ECE Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Maryland (UMD). This prestigious award is presented annually to alumni that have provided leadership and meritorious contributions in the broad field of engineering.
March 13, 2020
Making ‘soft’ robots work harder
A new robot developed at UC Riverside can navigate uneven surfaces with silicone legs
February 03, 2020
Prof. Chen receives NSF CAREER award
Professor Chen received the NSF CAREER award for her work on " Networked Multi-User Augmented Reality for Mobile Devices". In multi-user augmented reality (AR), multiple users are able to view and interact with a common set of virtual objects. However, users can experience poor performance (such as high latency or inconsistent views of the virtual objects) due to the AR application's lack of advanced networking capabilities. This project seeks to address such issues by developing new network capabilities of the AR platform as well as tools to automatically measure multi-user AR experience.
December 18, 2019
Prof. Mohsenian-Rad named IEEE Fellow
Professor Hamed Mohsenian-Rad is named as Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The honor is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, less than 0.1% of IEEE voting members are selected for this prestigious member grade elevation. Professor Mohsenian-Rad was recognized for his contributions to the field of smart grid and wireless networks. Professor Mohsenian-Rad is a Bourns Family Faculty Fellow and the
November 09, 2019
Oymak and collaborators received NSF grant on Cyber-Physical Systems
Prof. Samet Oymak and his collaborators Necmiye Ozay, Dimitra Panagou (University of Michigan) and Sze Zheng Yong (Arizona State University) are awarded $1.2M NSF grant to improve Cyber-Physical System safety. These systems are networks of interacting elements such as constellation of satellites and fleet of self-driving cars. This project will develop supervisors that leverage preview information from various sensors and learned predictive models to guarantee reliability of cyber-physical systems. The application focus is advanced driver assist systems, where algorithms to learn behavior and
October 16, 2019
AFOSR YIP Award
Prof. Fabio Pasqualetti has been awarded a 2020 Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research! Read more here
October 15, 2019
A machine-learning approach for predicting defluorination of toxic contaminants in water
New paper from Prof. Bryan M. Wong's group on using machine learning to predict the defluorination of toxic contaminants in water. Read more here