Spring 2001 News & Events

May 2001

*24 May 2001 -- The A.J. Clark School of Engineering held its spring commencement ceremony at the Record Armory. Among this year's HyNet graduates were Bernie Frankpitt (Ph.D.), Youyu Feng (M.S.), and Amkit Goel (B.S.). Each received a degree in Electrical Engineering.

Bernie's dissertation topic was "Combined estimation and control for partially observed hidden Markov models". Youyu's thesis is entitled, "Resource Allocation in Ka-band Satellite Systems". Dr. John Baras was their advisor.

*10 May 2001 -- Taking a break from work and school, members of the HyNet community enjoyed a picnic and played volleyball and soccer at this year's HyNet Bar-B-Q. Faculty, staff, alumni, and students attended the annual event, which was held at Acredale Park. (photos)

April 2001

* 5 April 2001 -- Middle school students from the Charles and Calvert County School Systems visited the Center for a tour of the Hybrid Networks Laboratory.

Vijay Bharadwaj, ECE grad student and acting lab manager, provided a demo of the Center's work with high-speed Internet access using satellites. While showing the on-screen demo, he explained that web browsing protocols don't work very well over satellites, but that researchers at the Center wrote software to solve the problem of slow downloads. "What we do here is make things work better", he told the group of 7th and 8th graders.

* 1 April 2001 -- Dr. Michael Hadjitheodosiou, a HyNet research scientist, was among those interviewed for the Electronic Commerce World article,"Space: The Next Broadband Frontier" (4/1/01 issue). In the article, he shares his thoughts about the future of satellite broadband.

Electronic Commerce World is a monthly business-to-business magazine for business executives and managers.

March 2001

*20-22 March 2001 -- While many of their classmates were out of town for Spring Break, HyNet students attended the Fifth Annual ATIRP Conference at the University of Maryland Conference Center.

HyNet faculty and students presented papers, posters, and demonstrations of research conducted under the Advanced Telecommunications & Information Distribution Research Program (ATIRP).

The ATIRP conference is attended by DoD personnel and members of the ATIRP Consortium. The theme of this year's conference was "FedLab Technology Enablers for Army Transformation"; and topics of interest included five technical factors: (1) Wireless Battlefield Digital Communications, (2) Tactical & Strategic Interoperability, (3) Information Distribution, (4) Multimedia Concepts, and (5) Defensive Information Warfare. ( photos)

February 2001

*22 February 2001 -- HyNet held its semi-annual Industry Advisory Board Meeting in which board members discuss strategic initiatives of the Center and provide feedback. During the technical review portion of the day-long event, faculty members presented NASA project highlights and recent acomplishments.

*Four ISR faculty are members of a team that has won a $4 million, five-year Department of Defense University Research Initiative (URI) award. "Distributed Immune Systems for Wireless Networks Information Assurance" is one of only 20 successful proposals selected for funding during fiscal year 2001. The team includes Professor John S. Baras (ECE/ISR), the Principal Investigator; Professor Anthony Ephremides (ECE/ISR); Professor K.J. Ray Liu (ECE/ISR); and Assistant Professor Haralabos Papadopoulos (ECE/ISR). Professor Virgil Gligor (ECE) is also a member.

*ISR faculty are participating in three just-announced Department of Defense 2001 Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program (MURI) grants:

ISR participants in the Communicating Networked Control Systems project include Principal Investigator P.S. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR), John S. Baras (ECE/ISR), Prakash Narayan (ECE/ISR), Professor Roger W. Brockett (Harvard University) and Gregory Walsh (ME/ISR). Former ISR student, Assistant Professor Dimitrios Hritsu-Varsakelis (ME) is also one of the investigators. ISR-affiliated Ramamoorthy Ramesh (MNE) is one of the investigators in the Hybrid Smart Materials and Adaptive Structures project. ISR-affiliated Neil Goldsman (ECE) is on the team for The Effects of Radiofrequency Pulses on Electronic Circuits and Systems project.