Research focus: Wireless Networks, Machine Learning, Big Data, Cyber-Physical Security

 

PhD students graduated so far (by Year 2021):

Andrew McKenzie (now with U.S. DoD Air Force, Greater Salt Lake City), PhD'2010.
Qingquan Sun (now a faculty in California State University San Bernardino), PhD'2013.
Mengcheng Guo (Software Engineer, San Francisco Bay Area), PhD'2014.
Yeqing Wu (now a senior engineer at Dolby Laboratories, Inc.), PhD '2015.
Jiang Lu (now a faculty in University of Houston-Clear Lake), PhD'2015.
Ting Zhang (now a faculty in University of Houston-Downtown), PhD'2016.
Rui Ma (now with Southern University of Science & Technology, China), PhD'2016.
Ke Bao, PhD'2017. (now a faculty in Tennessee State University).
Koushik A M. PhD'2018.
Lei Hu, PhD'2018.
Xin Li, PhD'2018.
Ji Qi, PhD'2018.

Qian Mao, PhD’2019. (Faculty)

Yu Lu, PhD’2019 (Mathworks)

  Iftikhar Rasheed, PhD’2020 (Faculty)

  Immanuel Manohar, PhD’2020 (Instructor)

  Lin Zhang, PhD’2020 (Faculty)

  Niloofar Toorchi, PhD’2020 (company)

  Zhijing Ye, PhD’2020 (company)

......

 

Selected Funded Projects: (Total >$10M as a PI or co-PI in last 19 years; average ~$500K per year)
DoD/SDSU: High-Mobility-Adaptive Cross-Layer Protocols for Airborne Networks with Single-/Multi-Beam Directional Antenna, 2020.
DoD STTR: Resilient and Self-Healing Protocol Stack for Directional Tactical Mesh Networks, 2020.
NSF PFI: Intelligent Robot with Hologram-enhanced Virtual Reality for Effective Body Rehabilitation.2019.
NSF MRI: Development of an underwater mobile testbed using a software-defined networking architecture, (PI: Aijun Song; co-PI: Fei Hu, Yang-Ki Hong), 2018.
DoD/SDSU: Quality-of-autonomy-oriented an QoS-aware transport and routing protocols for contested airborne swarm networks, 2018.
DoD: Design of Novel, Cross-Layer Neighbor Discovery Schemes for Directional Mesh Networks, 2018.
DoE (Dept of Energy): Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (APEA-E), "Quantification of HVAC Energy Savings for Occupancy Sensing in Buildings through An Innovative Testing Methodology ", 2018.
NSF DGE#1723250, "Captivology-Stimuli-based Learning (CAPITAL) of Big Data Security (BigSec): Towards a Science/Engineering, Career-Oriented Training," 2017.
AFRL: Intelligent Spectrum Handoff via Docitive Learning in CRNs, 2015.
NSF CNS#1541462, "CC*DNI Networking Infrastructure - UA SciNet". 2015.
U.S. DoD - AFRL, (awarded in Feb of 2014), the project is on wireless mesh networks with directional antenna and OpenFlow. It is a collaborative research with SDSU, total $1.2M. Duration: 4 years.
NSF Trusted Computing on Cyber-Physical System security education, awarded in September of 2013, total $300K. 2 years.
NSF CISE on the development of virtual reality based post-stroke rehabilitation system. Awarded in October of 2013. Total $700K. 3 years.
U.S. DoD - AFRL, (awarded in 2012), on hardware-demo of video over cognitive radio networks, $200K.
U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (awarded in August of 2011), Project Title: (Collaborative Research with SDSU) QoE-oriented Cognitive Radios Spectrum Information Distribution in Mobile Environments. $100K,
NSF CRI # 1059212, Awarded in January of 2011. (Duration:3 years). Project Title: Cognitive Sensing Research Infrastructure for Distributed Behavioral Biometrics. Total $420K.
U.S. Army Research Office (ARO), #W911QX-11-C-0017, Project Title: "Miniature Ferrite Chip Antenna for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles", Awarded in November of 2010. Total: $800K.
NSF TUES # 0941020, Awarded in August 2010. Duration: 3 years. Project Title: A Building-Block Approach to Tele-healthcare Computing. Total $200K.
NSF IIS (Artificial Intelligence) # 0915862; Project Title: Robust Intelligence: Intelligent Compressive Multi-Walker Recognition and Tracking (iSMART) through Pyroelectric Sensor Networks. Awarded in September of 2009. Total $330K.
NSF CCF (Computer Commmunications) #0829827. Awarded in September of 2008. (I was a PI at RIT. This project also has PIs at Univ. of Alabama and UC Davis. After I moved to UA, my budget share was incorporated into UA part and I thus became a co-PI at UA); Project Title: EMT: Collaborative Research: Primate-inspired Heterogeneous Mobile and Static Sensor Networks. Total: $600K.
NSF CNS (Cyber Trust) #0716455. Awarded in June of 2007. (as a PI). Project Title: Error-resistant, Accountable, RFID-assisted Wireless Sensor Networks For Elder Cardiac Tele-Healthcare. Total $400K.
NSF CCLI #0511098. Awarded in June of 2005. (As a PI);.
Project Title: Towards Enhancing Undergraduate Pervasive Computing Skills: An Innovative Multi-Disciplinary Adaptation and Implementation.
BBN (contract from NSF): GENI Experiments for Traffic Capture Capabilities and Security Requirement Analysis. Funding source: BBN. July of 2009.(as a co-PI).
Cisco URP (University Research Program), In 2005, I had two projects funded by Cisco URP on Sensor Network Security. Both as the PI. $200K.
Leveraging Inc. Project Title: "Sensor network to IBM Enterprise Database Interface". Funded in June of 2007. (PI)
Sprint Inc., Project Title: Video Telephony in 3G EV-DO Cellular Networks; Awarded in 2006. (co-PI)
 
Patents:
[1] (Approved for filing) Fei Hu, Yeqing Wu, "Smart-Learning-Based, (QoS+QoE)-Driven, Spectrum Handoff Scheme for Multimedia Transmissions over Cognitive Radio Networks or Any Spectrum-Agile Wireless Networks," Approved for filing by the University of Alabama, Feb., 2014.

[2] (Granted) Fei Hu, Yeqing Wu, and Sunil Kumar, "Multi-Layer Integrated Unequal Error Protection with Optimal Parameter Determination for Video Quality Granularity-Oriented Transmissions," United States Patent Application: 20150078460. March 19, 2015. Application No. 14/491092; Filed on Se 19, 2014.

[3] (Approved for filing) Fei Hu, Mengcheng Guo, "Non-Reconstruction, Compressive Spectrum Sensing and Classification through the Cyclostationary Domain in Cognitive Radio Networks," submitted in May 2014.

[4] (Granted) Fei Hu, Xin Li, Sunil Kumar, "Intelligent Multi-beam Medium Access Control in Ku-band for mission-oriented mobile mesh networks", Publication number: US20160381596 A1, Application number : US 15/193,617, Publication date: Dec 29, 2016. https://www.google.com/patents/US20160381596.

[5] (Approved for filing) Fei Hu, Rui Ma, "Advanced Sensing and Machine Learning for Intelligent Rehabilitation of Lower-Limb Motions", June 2015.

[6] (Approved for filing) Fei Hu, Ke Bao, and Sunil Kumar, "Diamond-Chain Routing Protocol in Wireless Networks Equiped with Multi-Beam Smart Antennas", July 2015.

[7] (Approved for filing) Fei Hu, Rui Ma, "Active Compressive Sensing via Pyroelectric Infrared Sensor for Human Scenario Recognition", March 2016.

[8] (Approved for filing) Fei Hu, Xin Li, Kumar Sunil, "Anti-Jamming MAC for Long-Distance Links and Full-Duplex Communications in Mobile, Multi-Beam Wireless Mesh Networks," May 2015.

[9] (Approved for filing) Fei Hu, Qian Mao, Lei Hu, "Smart, High-Speed UAV/UGV Communications via Bio-Inspired Multi-beam Pipe Transmission: Design of Routing/Transport layer Protocols," March 2017.
Explain my research focus: (please refer to my publications on more details)
 
Wireless Networks (including UAV swarming networks, OpenFlow, Cognitive Radio Networks, Wireless Mesh Networks, etc.)
We have developed a series of innovative protocols for UAV swarm networks, spectrum sensing and spectrum handoff schemes for cognitive radio networks. Currently, we are working on OpenFlow-based wireless mesh networks under directional antenna.

 
Cyber-physical security
The term Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) refers to the tight conjoining of and coordination between computational and physical resources. For example, in a tele-healthcare system, for a patient with pacemaker, the computational resources (the "cyber" part) include medical sensors, pacemaker, etc. The software-driven pacemaker clearly has a direct impact on the "physical" environment , that is, the patient's heart. The CPSs of tomorrow will far exceed those of today in terms of reliability and safety. Security is the prerequisite of reliability and safety since an attack-vulnerable CPS certainly is not reliable and safe. Given the recent trend toward open medical CPS design, use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and interconnection with existing attack-vulnerable networks, security for medical CPSs has become extremely important in terms of protecting patients' safety and privacy
 
Bioengineering
Sensors Design: I have built various tele-healthcare sensors. Especially I have designed low-cost RF (Radio Frequency) digital boards (Fig.1 (a)), ECG (Electrocardiography) sensors (Fig.1 (b)), EEG (Electroencephalography) sensors (Fig.1 (c)). Those sensors have interfaces to RFID readers (Fig.1 (d)). I have designed low-cost RFID readers.
Sensors Networks: I have also studied many issues in sensor networks. I have written the first textbook on sensor networks. My focus in this area is the distributed signal processing issues in sensor networks. For example, how do we achieve distributed in-network sensor data estimation and prediction? How do we achieve distributed manifold for high-dimensional sensor signal pattern recognition? Can we apply in-network machine learning for sensor network event spectrum learning?
 
Big data and Machine Learning
We have obtained NSF grant on big data security development. Machine learning and pattern recognition have been applied to intelligent signal processing and many other applications. I have investigated recent hot topics in this area such as NMF-based signal projection and decomposition for pattern recognition (see the following figure), Diffusion wavelet + manifold for multi-scale signal feature extraction (see figure below), information geometry for dimension reduction, HDP (hierarchical Dirichlet Process), Variational Bayesian, and other machine learning schemes for intelligent complex signal analysis.

Picture with UA president (2019)