ECE @ MARYLAND IN THE NEWS: MEDIA COVERAGE

The New York Times, November 1, 2007
The Future of Solar-Powered Homes
"The University of Maryland team installed a wide, bookcase-sized, indoor waterfall—not just to soothe the soul, but to pull humidity out of the air. It was a desiccant solution—like the “Do not eat” packets that come in your electronics, but in liquid form—that absorbs moisture. Drier air inside means that you don’t need to run the air conditioner as much. The saturated waterfall flows out the bottom to an outdoor evaporator; the re-concentrated solution is pumped back in to the waterfall, and the cycle begins again."

ITBusiness.ca, Canadian Technology News, October 31, 2007
13 future mobile technologies that will change your life
Anthony Ephremides, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland, said "I'd guess [the new technology] will be [ready] in a five-to-10-year time frame." Why it's important: These networks will extend network access to where none exists without building a lot of infrastructure. Because there is little infrastructure, the networks can withstand catastrophe. That is why, Ephremides said, the military is sponsoring a lot of research into ad hoc networks.

Environmental Science & Technology, October 31, 2007
Solar Decathlon Stars Sustainable Designs
"The third Solar Decathlon, held October 12–20 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., drew students from universities and colleges around the world 'to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house,' in the challenge set by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the primary sponsor of the event. Of the 20 teams competing, second place went to the University of Maryland team, which used a creative leaf-structure design. The roof of this house had a 'stem' and 'veins' for its architecture and solar cells for 'photosynthesis.' "

Maryland Daily Record, October 28, 2007
Testing Tiny Solutions (Registration required)
"At the Maryland NanoCenter, a collaboration between the University of Maryland, College Park’s schools of engineering, computer, math and physical sciences, and chemical and life sciences, researchers are knee-deep in the emerging field, according to Director Gary Rubloff. 'We have very significant research interest in understanding and anticipating the risks of nanotechnology in general, not only nanobiotech,' Rubloff wrote in an e-mail. The NanoCenter’s work includes creating nanoparticles using different means in order to create various sizes and shapes, so their properties are well defined when researchers test their effects."


Science, October 26, 2007
AAAS Members Elected as Fellows
In October, the AAAS Council elected 471 members as Fellows of AAAS. These individuals will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held on 16 February 2008 during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. The new Fellows will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments. They include ECE Chair Patrick G. O'Shea, University of Maryland.

Computerworld, October 22, 2007
13 Future Mobile Technologies That Will Change Your Life
"Most of us take it for granted that we can check e-mail with our mobile phones. But not long ago, this was a truly disruptive technology that changed how we did business and stayed in touch when we were away from home and the office. Which begs the question: What new mobile technologies will emerge in the next few years that will change our lives? ... Better access ... A variant of the multihop relay network called ad hoc networks could come even later. With this technology, data would be relayed through, among other things, devices themselves. In other words, your phone will also be a movable access point. 'The
defining quality of the ad hoc network is that it has no infrastructure,' said Anthony Ephremides, a professor of electrical and computer engineering (Clark School) at the University of Maryland. 'I'd guess it'll be [ready] in a five-to-10-year time frame.' "

Science Daily, October 22, 2007
Second Place Solar Home Uses Liquid Desiccant Waterfall
The University of Maryland Solar Decathlon Team capped its "silver" honors in the U.S. Department of Energy competition by winning the BP Solar People's Choice Award on Saturday. The Terps amassed the most votes as the favorite of visitors to the Decathlon site over nine days.

Washington Post, October 22, 2007
UM Solar House Wins Award
The University of Maryland team captured the BP Solar People's Choice Award on Saturday for its energy-efficient, solar-powered house in the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon, a day after winning second place in the international competition. The Terps team, made up of architecture and engineering students, received the most votes from visitors to the Decathlon site over nine days. The Maryland team placed just behind a team from Darmstadt, Germany, and ahead of all other U.S. teams in the competitions that make up the decathlon, categories that rate the house's appearance and performance. The Terps' LEAFHouse features a waterfall inside to help cool the air and is powered entirely by the sun.

Voice of America, October 22, 2007
Washington DC Becomes Solar Village
The Maryland team calls its entry "the LEAF House." "LEAF House stands for Leading Everyone to an Abundant Future," explains Nirmal Mehta, "and we believe that the leaf is nature's best solar collector, and we try to emulate that not only in our engineering but in our architectural design.

Baltimore Examiner, October 20, 2007
University of Maryland finishes second in solar contest
The University of Maryland placed second Friday in the Solar Decathlon contest on the National Mall yesterday, building an energy-efficient house featuring an indoor waterfall and an ability to evaporate excess water. "It's all about proving the technology to the public," said Nirmal Mehta, an engineering team leader at the University of Maryland. Mehta, a fifth-year electrical engineering undergraduate student, hopes to start a career focused on the business and investment side of energy efficiency.

Maryland Daily Record, October 11, 2007
Uzi Vishkin Named an Innovator of the Year
"Professor Uzi Vishkin, currently working for the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (Computer, Mathematical & Physical Sciences), the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Clark School), and the Department of Computer Science (CMPS), identified the importance of parallel programmability in 1979. And unlike his colleagues, who proceeded directly to building parallel computers, Vishkin spent the next 15 years inventing parallel algorithms. Simply put, Vishkin has created a prototype of the next generation of personal computers — a prototype capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops. The technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip that allows the computer to perform many tasks simultaneously, while allowing the processors to work in conjunction with one another."

Community Times, October 12, 2007
Big Brother is here
Human motion analysis, a pet project of researchers at the University of Maryland (Prof. Rama Chellappa), aims to create an individual "code" for the way people walk - researchers refer to it as "finding DNA in human motion." Dubbed Gait DNA, this surveillance system works by matching a person's facial image to his gait, height, weight and other elements - all captured through remote observation, thereby allowing the computer to identify someone instantly and track them, even in a crowd.

Baltimore Sun, October 10, 2007
2 physicists win Nobel for work in computers
By the early 1990s, computer drives made of nickel iron alloy strips had become the state of the art. But even they could detect only 1 percent of the changes in electrical resistance brought on by changes in a magnetic field, said Romel Gomez, a University of Maryland professor of computer and electrical engineering. The Albert Fert's and Peter Gruenberg's discovery led to technology that allows for the detection of 80 percent of the changes in the electrical resistance, he said. "Their work spurred a lot of this incredible reduction in the size of the bits that can be stored on hard disks," Gomez said.

Network World, October 8, 2007
Google, IBM launch parallel-computing initiative
Google and IBM are going back to school to teach university students about parallel computing. Parallel computing is a method for computers to more quickly carry out large-scale tasks by simultaneously handling several different instructions through multiple processors. Researchers at the University of Maryland, for instance, developed a parallel processing desktop computer this summer that they say runs 100 times faster than today’s PCs.

Resource Investor, October 4, 2007
Not just for wizards anymore: Scientists use gold to create invisibility cloak
"Step aside, Harry Potter. Scientists at the University of Maryland have created 'the world’s first true invisibility cloak.' So maybe it only works in two dimensions and on a very small scale - but it’s a start. The cloak uses gold rings coated in polymethyl methacrylate to divert light rays around an object and release them on the other side in a straight line, rendering an object inside the cloak 'invisible.' "

New Scientist, October 3
Gold Rings Create First True Invisibility Cloak
The world's first true invisibility cloak -- a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum -- has been created by physicists in the US. But don't expect it to compete with stage magic tricks. So far it only works in two dimensions and on a tiny scale. The new cloak [http://arxiv.org/abs/0709.2862], which is just 10 micrometres in diameter, guides rays of light around an object inside and releases them on the other side. The light waves appear to have moved in a straight line, so the cloak – and any object inside – appear invisible. The cloak was built by a team led by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland, and borrows some ideas from the first theoretical design for an invisibility cloak, published by Vladimir Shalaev from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, US, earlier this year. Their breakthrough comes just a year after US and British physicists created an invisibility cloak that worked in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. At that time, a visible light cloak was thought to be years away because of the much shorter wavelengths produced in the visible spectrum."

NewKarala.com, India, October 3, 2007
Scientists use gold rings to create world's first true invisibility cloak
U.S. physicists have created what can be termed as the world's first true invisibility cloak — a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum of light. A team led by Igor Smolyaninov from the University of Maryland built the cloak.

All Headline News, October 3, 2007
Scientists Unveil New Invisibility Cloak Using Gold
University of Maryland researchers have created a an invisibility cloak, bending light the way a river rock bends running water. Headed by the University's Igor Smolyanikov (and Prof. Christopher Davis), the researchers were able to use gold rings to redirect light waves around an object, causing it to seem invisible.

TG Daily, October 2, 2007
Gold rings show first hint of true cloaking ability
Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a cloaking device which can now hide objects in a much wider portion of the visible spectrum of light.  An observer could even see what's behind the object, just as if the obstruction wasn't there.  While not quite up to Romulan standards, the application does work in two dimensions and on very small objects.

IEEE Spectrum, September 28, 2007
From Nerd to Wonk By Prachi Patel-Predd
IEEE Fellow Patrick O’Shea, chairman of the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Maryland, in College Park, says that the standard engineering curriculum teaches students to ask whether something is possible, and if so, whether it is practical. That may be fine for computers and iPods, he says, but it won’t work for energy and transportation, where “things may be feasible and even practical, but there is tremendous resistance to them for various reasons that have nothing to do with technology.”

Science Letter, NewsRX.com, September 26, 2007
Findings from University of Maryland broaden understanding of speech (subscription required)
According to recent research from the United States, "In this paper we present a model called the Modified Phase-Opponency (MPO) model for single-channel speech enhancement when the speech is corrupted by additive noise. The MPO model is based on the auditory PO model, proposed for detection of tones in noise." The MPO technique leads to the lowest value of the LPC-based objective measures and the highest value of the perceptual evaluation of speech quality measure compared to other methods when the speech signals are corrupted by fluctuating noise," wrote O.D. Deshmukh and colleagues, University of Maryland.

BBC News, September 15, 2007
Big Brother is watching us all
I was at the University of Maryland just outside Washington DC, where Professor Chellappa and his team are inventing the next generation of citizen surveillance. "As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challappa. "These are all things that don't need the cooperation of the individual."

Chronicle of Higher Education, September 11, 2007
Mild-Mannered Desktop Computer
It’s about time that everybody’s computer became super, say researchers at the University of Maryland at College Park. To demonstrate, they have recently unveiled a prototype of a supercomputer the size of a normal desktop. Called the Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer, it can run 100 times faster than a typical PC, reports Computerworld, and is simple enough for a high-school student to program. Maryland researchers are making this computer using parallel computing algorithms in combination with transistors found in modern processors.

The Pioneer, September 9, 2007
Tracking Cyber Thieves
As industry and Government increasingly rely on digitised content, the problem of protecting electronic assets is growing more challenging. There is now a new generation of cyber criminals which works together to engage in multimedia piracy, unauthorised data dissemination and security leaks. Min Wu, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) in the Clark School of Engineering and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, and Ray Liu, professor in ECE, are developing innovative new cyber forensics technologies that will not only protect digital resources but also trace those who attempt to steal or misuse them through sophisticated 'collusion attacks', a common method used by today's cyber thieves.

Computerworld, September 10, 2007
Coming soon: A supercomputer for the rest of us
What if your desktop computer could run 100 times faster than a PC and were simple enough for a high school student to program? That's not an idle question. Researchers at the University of Maryland have built a prototype of a "desktop supercomputer" that can do just that. Professor Uzi Vishkin's Explicit Multi-Threading (XMT) computer combines the decades-old philosophy of using parallel computing algorithms with the huge number of transistors in modern processors.

Mechanical Engineering Magazine, September 8, 2007
Super-Quick PC
"Although your new computer may seem lightning fast, one that sits on your desktop is pretty slow compared to a supercomputer. Now researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park say they've developed personal computers powered by the same parallel processing that a supercomputer relies on. The researchers have demonstrated personal computers capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than a current PC."

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MIT Technology Review, August 30, 2007
Saving Power in Handhelds
"In the most recent issue of the Association for Computing Machinery's Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, researchers at the University of Maryland describe a simple way for multimedia devices to save power. In simulations, the researchers applied their technique to several common digital-signal-processing chores and found that, on average, it would cut power consumption by about two-thirds. The premise of the technique, says Gang Qu, one of its developers, is that in multimedia applications, 'the end user can tolerate some execution failure.' Much digital video, for example, plays at a rate of 30 frames per second. But 'in the old movie theaters, they played at 24 frames per second,' Qu says. 'That's about 80 percent. If you can get 80 percent of the frames consistently correct, human beings will not be able to tell you've made mistakes.' "

Los Angeles Times, July 15
It's the Super Bowl with a Science Bent: Students' creations are put to the test in an underwater robotics contest in San Diego
"It was time for the robotics squad from the University of Maryland to put Tortuga through its underwater paces. ‘We need to put a diagnostic on the board so we know the pressure at the surface,' said Stepan Moskovchenko, 20. Joseph Gland, 24, questioned the way the craft was descending in the practice pool.' That's not the desired angle; that's a weird, secondary, shadowed angle,' he said. 'It's trying to yaw a lot,' warned Joseph Lisee, 21, as he monitored readings on a laptop. And so it went in warm-ups for the Super Bowl of underwater robotics: the 10th annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Student Competition, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and co-hosted with the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a trade group of manufacturers. The competition ends today. At stake is a $20,000 prize and serious bragging rights wherever students of robotics assemble."

June 25, 2007
New Era of 'Desktop Supercomputing' Made Possible with Parallel Processing Power on a Single Chip
A prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers has been developed by a research group led by Professor Uzi Vishkin in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops, the technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip.

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Federal Times, June 19, 2007
Data Volume, Changing Technology Challenge Archivists
"Eventually, all federal records that should be preserved will be preserved, and most of those records will feed into the planned Electronic Records Archive — a system for preserving records and making them easily available, said Laurence Brewer, division director of the Life Cycle Management Division of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). ... Eventually, all will be tied in to the Electronic Records Archive (ERA), which will be deployed in September when four agencies — the Patent and Trademark Office, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Navy Oceanographic Office and National Nuclear Security Administration — will test its effectiveness. ... Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md., the prime contractor for ERA, is developing the software for the program... The challenge of transferring the records over the Internet in a safe, secure way has already been solved, according to Joseph JaJa, professor of
electrical and computer engineering (Clark School) at the University of Maryland. His team’s creation, an elaborate software called Producer -- Archive Workflow Network (PAWN), will enable agencies to submit their records easily and with the assurance that it is transmitted correctly, JaJa said. 'This software, which was funded by [National Archives], enables you to remotely and securely transmit data — all electronically,' JaJa said."

Law Enforcement Technology, June 1, 2007
Video surveillance networks: Lights, camera, controversy; Advances in video surveillance technology lets Big Brother zoom in (Link expired)
Researchers at the University of Maryland, among others, are pursuing this goal. Electrical and computer engineering professor Rama Chellappa is designing intelligent surveillance systems that include recognition of human gait, faces and behaviors. Crunching data from surveillance cameras with sophisticated algorithms, Chellappa has developed a signature for characterizing human gait and corresponding activities, such as humans carrying objects like backpacks, handbags or briefcases.

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Tech Journal South, April 30, 2007
Biomed Firms Dominate 50K University of Maryland Competition
"Accelign, a biomedical company developing hardware that fuses medical images from multiple sources, creating a 3D image, won first place and $10,000 in the University of Maryland business plan competition last week. 'We plan to leverage the competition to launch our product,' says Dr. William Plishker, CEO of Accelign, who is a research associate at the university."

Firehouse.com, April 27, 2007
Tracking System is the 'Future of Firefighting': New technology presented at Maryland institute
Through the use of emerging technology, a group of engineers at the University of Maryland-College Park are attempting to advance firefighter locator and tracking systems to the next level. The April 26 symposium held at the Maryland Fire Rescue Institute, located adjacent to the university, showcased several projects currently in development. Many in attendance would argue, however, that TRX Systems Inc. -- which is part of the university's technology advancement program -- stole the show. The TRX Sentinel locator and tracking system takes the concept of a global positioning system (GPS) and brings it indoors. According to the project's president, Dr. Neil Goldsman, the indoor environment is totally GPS denied since the system works exclusively off of satellites. "Our team has used state-of-the-art MEMS (Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems) devices that only have come on the market within the last few years," Goldsman explained. "This new technology has allowed us to design a brand new system that allows you to track firefighters." "The process of tracking people on a map is very difficult; a lot tougher than we first thought," TRX Systems Chairman Gilmer L. Blankenship said.

Photonics, April 23, 2007
Research on Shortest Light Pulse, 'Superlens' and More
"The shortest light pulse ever created, a new type of laser that provides 3-D retinal imaging with an emerging method called optical coherence tomography (OCT), and a magnifying 'superlens' are just some of the breakthroughs in optics and photonics that scientists from around the world will present in papers during the 2007 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics/Quantum Electronics Laser Science Conference (CLEO/QELS), being held May 6-11 at the Baltimore Convention Center. ... The University of Maryland's Igor Smolyaninov (associate research scientist, electrical and computer engineering; Clark School) will describe
what his group calls a 'magnifying superlens' in the paper, Magnifying Superlens in the Visible Frequency Range, being presented during the six-day conference."

Business Gazette, April 6, 2007
UM Researchers Explore Nanotechnology
"University of Maryland researchers say these 'nanofactories' may not be that far away. Nanofactories are pseudo-cells that are swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through the skin, and travel to a specific location in the body. What’s unique about the tiny biochemical factories is that they could potentially use materials already in the body to manufacture medicine at the first sign of infection or disease. 'You actually take components and make something that wasn’t there before,' said Gary Rubloff, a professor and director of the University of Maryland NanoCenter (Clark School) in College Park. 'It takes things from their environment and puts them through the factory and generates something important.' "

MarketResearch.com, March 31, 2007
Patient Monitoring in Intensive Care Unit and Critical Care Unit
Among the recent innovations in patient monitoring, Tia Gao, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, and David Crawford, an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland have developed a prototype device that would help physicians track a patient's vital signs during the waiting period. Developed in conjunction with the Center for Innovations in Quality Patient Care at Johns Hopkins, under the aegis of the director of the Center, Peter Pronovo, this prototype device is the size of an altoid tin and is comparatively less expensive than the existing vital signs monitor. The device transmits vital sign information, which includes pulse, blood oxygen, blood pressure, and temperature to a unit with a radius of 150 yards, helping monitor the patient condition during often extended wait times.

MIT Technology Review, March 23, 2007
Superlenses and Smaller Computer Chips
"How small one can fabricate transistors, the detail that can be seen in an optical microscope,
and the amount of data that can be squeezed onto a DVD--all these things are limited by the
way light moves through materials. But several separate advances reported this week in Science describe new materials for manipulating light in exotic ways, potentially leading to vastly improved electronic circuitry, microscopy, and data storage. The three Science papers are part of a fledging field of research called metamaterials, in which novel optical materials are made using micro- or nanoscale structures from combinations of materials. ...[B]etter resolution might be observed if smaller dots were used, says Igor Smolyaninov, a Maryland research scientist and author of the paper. He estimates that the method could resolve features as small as 10 nanometers."

Chemistry World (UK), March 23, 2007
Could Nanofabricated Photonic Materials Lead to a Cloaking Device?
"The field is advancing at a dizzying pace. 'It's a bit like the space race,' said Igor Smolyaninov
of the University of Maryland. Smolyaninov's group used a series of concentric polymer rings on a gold surface to amplify an image generated by surface plasmons."

Physics Web (UK), March 23, 2007
Magnifying Superlenses Show More Detail Than Before
"At the University of Maryland, a team led by Igor Smolyaninov has created a flat superlens consisting of concentric polymer rings deposited onto a thin film of gold (Science 315 1699). These designs are classified as 'metamaterials' – artificial nanostructures made by physicists because substances with a negative index in the optical range do not occur naturally."

Nature, March 22, 2007
Superlenses bring the nanoworld into focus
"The superlens made by the Maryland team magnifies an object so that it can be seen with a conventional microscope. The design consists of concentric semicircles of a polymer laid down on a gold film. To see a row of polymer dots inside the innermost semicircle, the sample is illuminated with light. This excites waves of electrons, called plasmons, in the gold film, which radiate into the superlens structure and produce an enlarged image of the dots."

EE Times, March 19, 2007
Paper: Fix IC Variability Post-Silicon
A 'best paper' award winner at the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD 2007) proposes a new approach to nanometer IC variability challenges — combining design optimizations with post-silicon fixes. The paper, entitled 'Variability-driven formulation for simultaneous gate sizing and post-silicon tunability allocation,' was authored by Ankur Srivastava, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering (Clark School) at the University of Maryland, and Vishal Khandelwal, Srivastava's graduate student. Khandelwal presented the paper at ISPD in Austin, Texas Monday.

Fox 5 TV, Washington, DC, March 12, 2007
Smart Surveillance Allegedly Predicts Crime (video)
Fox 5 TV News features Prof. Rama Chellappa's intelligent surveillance system technology.

MIT Technology Review, March 12, 2007
Detecting Suicide Bombers
The technology, developed by SET of Arlington, VA, is assisted by video analysis software designed by Rama Chellappa, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Maryland.

Baltimore Sun, March 6, 2007
University of Maryland Provost to Lead RIT in New York
The provost at the University of Maryland has been named president of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the New York school announced yesterday. William Destler, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost of the University of Maryland (and former ECE Department Chair), will become RIT's ninth president July 1. 'His breadth of experience, understanding of academia, and his sense of vision for the future will help propel our university to new heights,' the university's board chairman, Michael Morley, said in a memo sent yesterday to faculty, staff and students.

Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, March 6, 2007
New RIT Leader Lauded for Warmth, Varied Career
Most of William Destler's career has been spent at the University of Maryland at College
Park, starting as a research associate before working his way up the academic ranks to
professor of electrical engineering, then dean of engineering and various other administrative
roles. Destler is an expert on high-power microwaves. And his résumé includes more than
two dozen pages of books, journal articles, and academic papers he has delivered. While
Destler spent so much time at one institution, 'if a person is able to progress up through the
ranks, that says something about you,' said Michael A. Morley, chairman of RIT's board
of trustees. 'His career is very broad and varied.'

WRC-TV & News Channel 8, February 26, 2007
News programs announce the research of Rama Chellappa, professor of electrical and
computer engineering, who is improving the sophistication of surveillance
cameras. An Associated Press story released yesterday received wide national attention.

News Channel 8 (Northern Va.): "Perfecting the art of fighting crime and finding suspects is
the focus of some graduate students and professors at the University of Maryland. They're
working on new and improved security cameras that could bridge the gap between getting
caught on tape and being nabbed by police."

WRC-TV (Washington): "Wow! Smart cameras could soon get a whole lot smarter.
Researchers at the University of Maryland as well as security companies are developing
cameras that not only watch the world but interpret what they see. Graduate students and
professors are working on something that analyzes the way someone walks to determine if
they are a threat."

USA Today, February 26, 2007
Surveillance cameras get smarter
At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person’s unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat. A camera trained to look for people on a watch list, for example, could combine their unique walk with facial-recognition tools to make an identification. A person carrying a heavy load under a jacket would walk differently than someone unencumbered — which could help identify a person hiding a weapon. The system could even estimate someone’s height. With two cameras and a laptop computer set up in a conference room, Chellappa and a team of graduate students recently demonstrated how intelligent surveillance works. A student walked into the middle of the room, dropped a laptop case, then walked away. On the laptop screen, a green box popped up around him as he moved into view, then a second focused on the case when it was dropped. After a few seconds, the box around the case went red, signaling an alert.

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Boston Globe, February 26, 2007
Surveillance cameras' latest job: interpret the threats they see
At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person's unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat.

Seattle Times, February 26, 2007
New cameras analyze what they see
Engineering professor Rama Chellappa of the University of Maryland is developing a camera that can determine if someone is a threat.

Forbes, February 26, 2007
Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter
At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person's unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat.

RedOrbit, February 25, 2007
Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter
At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person's unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat.

Wired News, February 25, 2007
Surveillance Cameras Get Smarter
At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person's unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat.

KATU Portland, OR, News, February 25, 2007
Surveillance cameras get smarter
At the University of Maryland, engineering professor Rama Chellappa and a team of graduate students have worked on systems that can identify a person's unique gait or analyze the way someone walks to determine if they are a threat.

New Scientist, February 23, 2007
Now you see me...What's the truth behind reports of an invisibility cloak?
Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland, College Park has designed a photonic crystal lens capable of capturing optical images of the kind you can normally only get with an electron microscope.

MSN Money, January 31, 2007
Millionaires tell how they did it
In 1998, when he was 37, [ECE Professor of Practice] Jeong Kim sold his telecommunications company to Lucent Technologies for $1.1 billion. It was a classic rags-to-very-great-riches story for the South Korean immigrant, who lived in subsidized housing after he arrived in Maryland with his family at age 14, barely able to speak English. Kim has given millions of dollars to both Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, where he returned as an engineering professor and where a building bears his name.

MIT Technology Review, January 17, 2007
Walking like a Bomber: New strides in radar and gait-analysis software show that it's possible to detect when someone is carrying a bomb well before he or she reaches a security checkpoint
[T]he next generation of Prof. Rama Chellappa's technology could extend the role of gait recognition. In early-stage research, he has shown that he can analyze the joint movements of a walking person and tell whether those movements are anomalous and possibly consistent with carrying heavy objects--and even whether the person has just deposited something on the ground.

PC Magazine, January 10, 2007
CPU Road Map 2007: Quad Core and More
"For the power budget of a single core, you could get two cores," says Uzi Vishkin, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Maryland who specializes in parallel computing. "And if you have enough parallelism to keep the two cores busy, they could give you close to double the performance."

Internet Business News, January 5, 2007
University of Maryland Researchers Pairing 'Human Gait DNA' with Surveillance Cameras to Better ID Potential Terrorists
Chellappa and his team have integrated human gait DNA into a real-time video surveillance system and used it to study and locate pedestrians.

Baltimore Sun, January 5, 2007
Watch & Learn: Behavior recognition software is helping catch criminals and may be useful in the war on terror
Professor Rama Chellappa has provided algorithms for gait recognition and estimating a person's height to Honeywell International, which is using them under a Homeland Security contract to devise video technology for automatically tracking suspicious people through airports while alerting security personnel.

NPR's All Things Considered, January 2, 2007
For Iraqi Expatriate, Divisions Come Hard
ECE Professor Shihab Shamma Featured on NPR's 'All Things Considered.' Shamma, who grew up in Baghdad, has relatives in Iraq. He says most people he talks to back home are sad but hopeful. Shamma is also bothered by the way the conflict has been couched in sectarian terms, and remembers terms like Shiite and Sunni meaning little in his childhood.

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