Outreach

During the summer of 2019, Savva Morozov, Anirudh Kuchibhatla (REU recipient), Camille Kang, Morgan Sholeen, undergraduate students and Amay Bhatnagar and Christopher Knauth high school students are working closely with the PIs and graduate students in the Rice Networks Lab at Rice University.

An ASTRO team workshop was held June 2019.

 

We also got a visit after the workshop from Judge Hidalgo  who oversees Harris county’s disaster management.

During the summer of 2020, we are having 10 undergraduate student researchers (Michael Angino (REU), Robert Chen, Aleksandar Gavrić, Helena Hu, Peter Jia, Alex Lee, Sean Schuepbach, Huzaifah Shamim (REU), Qiyue Xia and Ruichen Xu). The undergraduate students are working closely with the PIs, postdoctoral associate and graduate students. As part of the ASTRO team, the intern students are working on the design of the sensing, communication and navigation algorithms of the ASTRO platform, which is a drone-network-based platform designed to gather real-time and high-resolution data about toxic pollutants and wireless RF signals. In addition to the design and the validation of the ASTRO algorithms, the intern students are helping with the test simulations and experimental evaluations, which are taking place both on the campus of Rice University in addition to a residential neighborhood that is located in close proximity to industrial processing plants, chemical refineries, and other sources of airborne pollutants. The interns are also helping the ASTRO team in the design of a mobile app which compiles the pollution data that is gathered by the drones’ system in order to alert local communities in case of a gas leak. Those alerts are based on efficient data analysis algorithms that are being designed with the help of the intern students.

During the summer of 2021, we are having 5 undergraduate student researchers (Timofey Efimov (REU), Duy Ha (REU), Divya Venkatesh (REU), Syed Nadeem and Balsa Knezevic). The undergraduate students are working closely with the PIs, postdoctoral associate and graduate students. As part of the ASTRO team, the intern students are working on the design of the sensing, communication and navigation algorithms of the ASTRO platform, which is a drone-network-based platform designed to gather real-time and high-resolution data about toxic pollutants and wireless RF signals. In addition to the design and the validation of the ASTRO algorithms, the intern students are helping with the test simulations and experimental evaluations, which are taking place both on the campus of Rice University in addition to a residential neighborhood that is located in close proximity to industrial processing plants, chemical refineries, and other sources of airborne pollutants.

Throughout the past year, we have deeply interacted with TFA staff in order to help them get familiarized with cutting-edge technology for air quality measurements.

During the summer of 2022, we are having 4 undergraduate student researchers (Tylor Gonzalez, William Nat Hill, Gabriel Baquero, and John Reko). Working closely with the PIs, postdoctoral associates, and graduate students, undergraduate student researchers are gaining hands-on experience in hardware and software design of the ASTRO platform. They also assist in gathering and processing real-time data, such as pollutant gas and wireless radio-frequency signals, and apply machine-learning algorithms to extract valuable insight for autonomous drone mission flights.

Moreover, graduate students present their work at various conferences and workshops and share their ASTRO project findings. Specifically, H. You gave a presentation on GCoD at the HPCA 2022 conference, C. Wan introduced PipeGCN in the ICLR talk and at Rice Ken Kennedy AI and Data Science workshop while C. Wan will present BNS-GCN at the MLSys 2022 conference.

Honors and Awards:

  • Edward Knightly was awarded the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award  for his contributions to the design, implementation and experimental demonstrations of wireless networks , May 2023.
  • Shaikhanov, S. Badran, J. Jornet, D. Mittleman, and E. Knightly, “Remotely Positioned MetaSurface-Drone Attack,” in Proceedings of ACM HotMobile, February 2023. (BEST DEMO AWARD).
  • Edward Knightly, received the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance Award for Research on New Opportunities for Dynamic Spectrum Access
  • Edward Knightly, named General Chair, ACM MobiCom: The 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and ACM MobiCom.
  • Boubrima and E. Knightly received a Best Paper award for their paper “Robust Mission Planning of UAV Networks for Environmental Sensing,” to appear in Proceedings of ACM DroNet 2020, June 2020.
  • Zhambyl Shaikanov, advised by E. Knightly received his M.S. degree, Rice University, March 2020.
  • Lin serves as a program co-chair for the ASAP conference, i.e., the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors.
  • Wan received Rice Engineering Alumni (REA) Graduate Student Travel Award to present BNS-GCN

Invited Presentations:

  • E. Knightly, Networked UAVs on a Mission, IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC 2018), Taipei, Taiwan, December 2018. (Keynote Presentation)
  • E. Knightly, Networked UAVs on a Mission, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan, December 2018. (Invited Presentation)
  • Edward Knightly, V2X Communication Requirements for Autonomous Vehicles, IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC 2018), Taipei, Taiwan, December 2018. (Invited Panel)
  • Lin Co-led the “Computing Architecture for Edge Computing” Breakout Session at NSF CSR/NeTS 2019 Joint PI Meeting.
  • Yingyan Yingyan Lin Co-chaired the “On-Device Intelligence” Workshop at MLSys 2020 with researchers at Facebook and Google.
  • Yingyan Lin – Invited Talk at ICCAD 2019 for the workshop on Hardware and Algorithms for Learning On-a-chip (HALO). (Invited Presentation)
  • Edward Knightly, “Experimentation Meets Platforms” – Invited Panel at IEEE INFOCOM 2019, Paris, FR, May 2019. (Invited Panel)
  • Edward Knightly, “Emerging WLAN Devices, Capabilities, Applications, and Control Plane Challenges” – Plenary Keynote at ACM MobiHoc 2019, Catania, Italy, July 2019. (Plenary Keynote)
  • Edward Knightly, Off-Grid Sensing Missions with Networked UAVs, IEEE SECON 2019, Boston, MA, June 2019. (Plenary Keynote)
  • Lin gave an invited talk on Machine Learning at the Google AI research group.
  • Knightly gave a keynote presentation at ACM MobiCom, i.e., the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing, New Orleans, LA, March 2022.
  • Lin gave an invited talk at the workshop at ISCA 2022 in June and at Meta AR/VR research team in July and gave a presentation at HP Houston Research Team.
  • Edward Knightly, Wireless Networking: from Technology For All to sub-Terahertz , NSF CISE Distinguished Lecture, February 2023.
  • Edward Knightly, Wireless Networking, Security, and Sensing above 100 GHz, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) webinar, October 2022.
  • Yingyan Lin, Gave an invited talk at Intel, 2023.