ECASP is the Embedded Computing and Signal Processing Research Laboratory at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, located in Chicago, Illinois.

ECASP Research Laboratory is dedicated to the development of high performance and low power computing platforms targeted at computationally intensive problems in the fields of Secure Ultrasonic Communications, Ultrasonic Imaging and Signal Processing, Internet of Things (IoT), Cybersecurity, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Autonomous Navigation, System-on-Chip (SoC) and Embedded System Designs, High-Performance and Application-Specific Computing Systems. Currently, we have projects in Secure Communication in Nuclear Power Plants, Cybersecure SCADA System Architecture, Thermography and Machine Vision for Inspecting Additive Manufacturing Materials, Wireless Sensor Networks on Medical and Industrial Applications for Visually Impaired People, Smart Sensors for Visually Impaired People and Drone with Applications in the Area of Robotics and Transportations, Edge Computing, Wireless Secure Communications, and Cybersecurity for Smart Grids, Reconfigurable System-on-Chip (SoC) Design, Computer Vision and Image Analysis, Target Detection and Estimation, Data Compression, Neural Networks, and FPGA-based DSP Systems.

ECASP News

Spring '22

• Congratulations to Xin Huang (Ph.D.) on completing his dissertation and receiving his degree.
• Congratulations to Xin Zhang winning the prestigious 2022 Sigma Xi/IIT Student Research Award.
  
• Congratulations to Xin Zhang receiving 2022 Starr Fieldhouse Research Fellowship.
  
• Congratulations to Xinru Yu and Hans Johnson for receiving 2022 Dean's Awards for Excellence, Outstanding TA Award(Student-Nominated Award) - Picture
• Congratulations to Dr. Jafar Saniie for receiving 2022 Dean's Awards for Excellence in Advising (Student-Nominated Award)
• Dr. Won-Jae Yi was nominated for 2022 Dean's Awards for Excellence in Teaching (Adjunct; Department-Nominated Award)
• Congratulations to David Arnold, John Ford and Illinois Tech Cyberhawks (ECE Student Organization) winning a record-breaking National Cybersecurity Championship! - (Click Here for the News)
  
• IEEE Access Journal entitled "Software-Defined Ultrasonic Communication System with OFDM for Secure Video Monitoring" by Xin Huang has been published. (Click Here for Publications)
• 21 papers in the field of cybersecurity, computer vision, image and video processing, reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation have been accepted for publication at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology.
• 5 abstracts, including 1 invited paper, in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, ultrasonic platform for information transmission through solid channels, and ultrasonic video transmission framework have been submitted to the 2022 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium.
• Congratulations to Xin Huang (2nd Place, PhD Track: Networks and Communications, Title: Architecture of a Reconfigurable Software-defined Ultrasonic Communication Platform for Real-time Video Transmission), Xinrui Yu (1st Place, PhD Track: Signal and Image Processing, Title: Holistic Human Machine Interface for Assisting Visually Impaired using Computer Vision), Tianyang Fang (2nd Place, PhD Track: Digital Systems and Cybersecurity, Title: Frequency Shift Baseline Removal for Improved Flow Measurement using Microwave Cavity Resonator), Xin Zhang (3rd Place, PhD Track: Signal and Image Processing, Title: Unsupervised Learning for Detection of Defects in Pulsed Infrared Thermography of Metals), David Arnold (3rd Place, PhD Track: Digital Systems and Cybersecurity, Title: Machine Learning Models for Cyberattack Detection in Industrial Control Systems), Alejandro Perez-Vicente ((1st Place, MS Track, Title: Point Cloud Generation with Stereo and Monocular Depth Estimation on FPGA), and Kaitlyn Graves (3rd Place, MS Track, Title: Design Flow of mmWave Radar and Machine Vision Fusion for Pedestrian Collision Warning) winning the Annual 2022 ECE Day Research Competition
  
• Congratulations to the following ECE 441 - Smart and Connected Embedded System Design (Major Design Experience Course) Team Members for winning the Annual 2022 ECE Day Research Competition
  
  1. 1st Place: Conner J. Shaw, Nikhil Aditya Chaganti, Divyanshu Dilipbhai Kalola (Advisor: Dr. Jafar Saniie); Title: Motion Controlled Robotic Arm
  2. 2nd Place: Filip K. Zivko, Khoa D. Nguyen (Advisor Dr. Jafar Saniie); Title: Digital Oscilloscope and Signal Analyzer
  3. 2nd Place: Eduardo D. Calix-Ortiz, Matt Nicole C. Fajardo, Hazim Zain-Edin (Advisor: Dr. Jafar Saniie); Title: Autonomous Drone with LEDs and GPS
  4. 2nd Place: Samuel Michelsen, Bradley Estacio, Carlena E. Veller (Advisor: Dr. Jafar Saniie); Title: Automated Cat Feeder
  5. 3rd Place: Brian G. Gallagher, Oumaima Erragragui, Mohammed Y. Munshi (Advisor: Dr. Jafar Saniie); Title: Smart Mirror

Summer & Fall '21

• Congratulations to Mikhail Gromov and Hans Johnson on passing the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam Fall 2021.
• Xin Huang was featured on Illinois Tech's Student and Alumni Stories on his research in developing an ultrasonic system to help nuclear facilities overcome communication barriers. (Click Here for the Full Story)
• 5 papers in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, ultrasonic platform for information transmission through solid channels and ultrasonic secure video transmission framework have been published to present at the 2021 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium. (Click Here)
• Journal publication entitled Massive Ultrasonic Data Compression using Wavelet Packet Transformation Optimized by Convolutional Autoencoders by Boyang Wang has been published in IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems - (Click Here for Publications)
  
• Watch our latest ECE Undergraduate Student Projects from ECE 441 - Smart and Connected Embedded System Design (Major Design Experience Course) - Click Here for More Projects!
  1. Smart Hart by Kaitlyn Lipps, Michal Markevych, Abheek Mondal, Sean Straub
  2. Quadruped Rescue Robot by Victor Guiterrez, Quentin Moisy
  3. Centralized Animal Feeding Solution by Baudelio Romo, Jacob Lapka, Kiet Phan

Spring '21

• Congratulations to Boyang Wang (Ph.D.) and Guojun Yang (Ph.D.) on completing their dissertation and receiving their degree.
• Congratulations to Xin Huang winning the prestigious 2021 Sigma Xi/IIT Student Research Award. (Click Here for details)
  
• Paper titled "Material Texture Recognition using Ultrasonic Images with Transformer Neural Networks" by Xin Zhang was selected as Winner of the Best Student Paper (2nd place) at 2021 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology. (Click Here for Publications)
• Congratulations to Xin Huang (3rd Place, PhD Track: Computer Systems, VLSI and Electronics), Xinrui Yu (3rd Place, PhD Track: Signal and Image Processing), and John Ford (2nd Place, Master's) winning the Annual 2021 ECE Day Research Competition
  
• 10 papers in the field of IoT application, cybersecurity, computer vision, image and video processing, reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation have been submitted to the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology.(Click Here for Publications)
• Congratulations to John Ford receiving Department of Energy – Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) – Integrated University Program Graduate Fellowship
  
• Watch our latest ECE Undergraduate Student Projects from ECE 441 - Smart and Connected Embedded System Design (Major Design Experience Course) - Click Here for More Projects!
  1. Smart Suitcase by Benjamin Wagner, Christian Comillas, Bryant Schultz
  2. IoT Auto-Gardener by Jared Wagler, Sean McGuffey, Mife Atewogbola, Mouhammed Diagne
  3. Decibel Display by Cameron Haley, Anthony Banuelos, Colin Prochnow, Kamil Kaczmarczyk
  4. Neuro Sleep by Neil Dhote, Deep Trapasia, Dominik Chraca, Saurabh Saluja
  5. Smart Lab by Dharmendra Shah, Jorge Bravo, Raijin Albino
  6. Smart Lock Home Security by Melanie Acelor Ndambani, Irvin Delgado-Ramirez, Peter Fitzpatrick
  7. Medical Sensor Platform: HealthMon by Vanessa Andrea Nehme Allende, Arvil Dey, Karl Hallsby

Summer & Fall '20

• Congratulations to Tianyang Fang on passing the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam Fall 2020.
• Paper titled "Neural Learning Based Blind Source Separation for Detection of Material Defects in Pulsed Thermography Images" by Xin Zhang was selected as Winner of the Best Student Paper (1st place) at 2020 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology. (Click Here for Publications)
• IEEE Access Journal entitled "Sight-to-Sound Human-Machine Interface for Guiding and Navigating Visually Impaired People" by Guojun Yang has been published. (Click Here for Publications)
• 4 papers in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, ultrasonic platform for information transmission through solids have been published and presented at the 2020 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium. (Click Here for Publications)
• 9 papers in the field of IoT application, computer vision, image and video processing, reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation have been published and presented at the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology (EIT). (Click Here for Publications)
• Watch our latest Undergraduate Summer Student Projects from ECE 442 - Internet of Things and Cyber Physical Systems, and Armour R&D Summer Immersion Programs

Spring '20

• Congratulations to Boyang Wang winning the prestigious 2020 Sigma Xi/IIT Student Research Award. (Click Here for details)
  
• Congratulations to David Arnold receiving Department of Energy – Nuclear Energy (DOE-NE) – Integrated University Program Graduate Fellowship (Click Here for details)
  
• Members of ECASP Research Lab have submitted 5 abstracts in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, ultrasonic platform for information transmission through solids.
• Members of ECASP Research Lab have submitted 9 papers in the field of IoT application, computer vision, image and video processing, reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation.

Fall '19

• Congratulations to Boyang Wang winning Student Paper Competition (1st place) at 2019 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, Glasgow, UK. (Click Here for Photo)
  
• Members of ECASP Research Lab have published 3 papers in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, and ultrasonic platform for information transmission through solids. (See publications)
• Congratulations to Saumya Gupta (M.S.) on completing her M.S. thesis defense and receiving the degree
  
• Watch our latest IoT Student Project Smart Irrigation System by Salih Usta (M.S.) More projects can be found here

Summer '19

• Watch our latest IoT Student Projects (ECE 442 - Internet of Things and Cyber Physical Systems)
  
  1. IoT Shade Control System by Hieu Nguyen
  2. IoT-Enabled Secure Lockbox by Andrew Newman
  3. IoT Smart Switch Home Automation System by Sergio Huerta and Hao Wu Wu
• Congratulations to Visiting M.S. students (Guillaume Dos Santos, Breval Mesureur, Hussnain Aziz, Clement Vilquez) from ENSEA, France on completing their 3-month Internship Projects. Click and Watch student projects:
  
  1. Autonomous Indoor Mapping Robot using ROS
  2. Home Automation Security System using Facial Recognition
• Congratulations to Visiting Undergraduate Students from Beijing Institute of Technology and North China Electric Power University, China on completing their 4 Weeks Summer Research Projects. Click and Watch student projects:
  
  1. Real-time Video Transmission and Processing using Xilinx ZYNQ SoC by Tianwei Yan and Yang Xu
     1st Place Winner at 2019 Summer Elevate Poster Competition
  2. IoT Rehabilitation Assistance System based on Inertial 3D Motion Capture System by Xiaonan Li, Yufan Lin and Zhonghui Wang
     2nd Place Winner at 2019 Summer Elevate Poster Competition
  3. Real-time Target Tracking Car based on OpenCV and ROS by Rong Guo and Zixuan Liu
     3rd Place Winner at 2019 Summer Elevate Poster Competition
• Congratulations to 10 Undergraduate and Graduate students completing 2019 Armour R&D Summer Research Immersion Program including students from India participating in research projects: Robotic Arm, Fall Detection Web Application, FPGA Graphic Display, Home Automation System, and Computer Vision Systems
  
  Click and Watch student projects:
  
  1. Computer Vision Based Autonomous Robotic Arm by Michael Hu
  2. HCI Design for Physically Disabled Persons by Shreyas Shubhankar
  3. High Speed RGB Panel Driver using ZYNQ by Paritosh Sinha, Salini Mahapatra and Raul Martinez
  4. User Programmable Home Automation and Security System by Swapnil Modani, Randa Shady, Jenifer Rodriguez Delgado

Spring '19

• Congratulations to Guojun Yang (Ph.D.) for receiving 2019 Rath Endowed Research Award for Ph.D. Students with his research related to: "Computer Vision Based Navigation for Visually Impaired Individuals".
• Congratulations to Boyang Wang (Ph.D.) for nominated as a finalist in the student paper competition in 2019 IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium paper entitled: "A High Performance Ultrasonic System for Flaw Detection"
• Paper titled "Pulse Shaping and Matched Filters for EMAT Communication System" by Xin Huang was selected as Winner of the Best Student Paper (1st place) at 2019 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology, Brookings, South Dakota.
• Members of ECASP Research Lab have published 8 papers in the field of IoT application, computer vision, image and video processing, reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation. (See Publication Lists Here)
• 8 Members of ECASP Research Lab participated in 2019 ECE Day Poster Competition in the field of Digital Systems & VLSI, Signal & Image Processing, Electronics & Electromagnetics, and Computer Networks & Communications.
• Congratulations to Xin Huang (Ph.D. track 1st place; "Pulse Shaping and Matched Filters for Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers Communication System"), Scott Jones (M.S. track 3rd place; "Damage Assessment of Civil Structures after Natural Disasters using Deep Learning and Satellite Imagery"), David Arnold (B.S. track 1st place; "A Scalable IoT Platform for Remote Patient Health Monitoring") winning in the 2019 ECE Day Poster Competition.
• Congratulations to Scott Jones (M.S.) on completing his thesis and receiving his degree.

Summer & Fall '18

• Dr. Saniie was invited to give a talk entitle "Time-Frequency Analysis for Ultrasonic Echo Detection and Parameter Estimation" at Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), Singapore (Abstract, Group Picture 1, Group Picture 2)
• Watch our latest demo video on "Drone Aerial Survey System" by Guojun Yang (Ph.D.). (Watch Demo)
• Watch our latest IoT projects by Jose Toledo Monsalve (M.S.), David Arnold (B.S.,M.S.) and Andrew Mustea (B.S.). (Watch Demo: IoT Workout System), (Watch Demo: IoT Remote Health Monitoring System)
• Congratulations to Visiting M.S. students (Mbene Dieng, Ryasse Hadja Ismail, Eilott Vigourox) from ENSEA, France on completing their 3-month Internship Project, "Custom Home Automation System using Android, Amazon Alexa and HADP Protocol over ZigBee". (Watch Project Demo)
• Dr. Saniie was invited to give a talk entitled "Information Transmission through Solids using Ultrasound" at 2018 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, Kobe, Japan. (Click for Invited Paper)
• Dr. Saniie presented a short course entitled "Signal Processing and System-on-Chip Designs for Ultrasonic Imaging, Echo Estimation, Data Compression, and Software-Defined Communications" at 2018 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, Kobe, Japan. (LINK)

Spring '18

• 9 Members of ECASP Research Lab participated in 2018 ECE Day Poster Competition in the field of Digital Systems & VLSI, Signal & Image Processing, Electronics & Electromagnetics, and Computer Networks & Communications.
• Congratulations to David Hentrich (Ph.D. Track: Digital System & VLSI, Title: A Polymorphic Computing Architecture based on a Dataflow Processor Core) and Timonthy Ayodele (Undergraduate Track, Title: Design of Audio Signal Subband Decomposition and Reconstruction using ZYNQ System-on-Chip) winning 2018 ECE Day Poster Competition Awards.
• Congratulations to Vignesh Rajagopal (M.S.), Sam Rarick (M.S.), Vignesh Vasudevan (M.S.) on completing their theses and receiving their degrees.
• Members of ECASP Research Lab have submitted journal articles (1 accepted, 1 submitted) & papers (8 accepted) in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, ultrasonic platform for information transmission through solids, image and video processing, smart health monitoring system, parallel and distributed systems, and cloud computing. (See publications)

Fall '17

• Members of ECASP Research Lab have published 4 papers in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, and ultrasonic platform for information transmission through solids. (See publications)

Summer '17

• Congratulations to Won-Jae Yi (Ph.D.) on completing his dissertation and receiving his degree.
• Members of ECASP Research Lab have published 2 invited book chapters in the field of embedded systems, home automation protocols and mobile health monitoring system.(See publications)

Spring '17

• Members of ECASP Research Lab have published 2 invited book chapters & 9 papers in the field of machine vision, image and video processing, reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation. (See publications)
• Congratulations to Thomas Gonnot (Ph.D.), Tuan Dang (M.S.), Parth Desai (M.S.) on completing their dissertation and theses, and receiving their degrees.
• Paper titled "Image to Audio Frequencies Modulation for Visually Impaired People" by Thomas Gonnot and Matthew Mikuta was selected as Best Student Paper (3rd place) at 2017 IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Fall '16

• Dr. Saniie presented an invited talk entitle "Time-Frequency Analysis for Ultrasonic Echo Detection and Parameter Estimation" at 2016 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium, Tours, France. (Watch presentation video)
• Members of ECASP Research Lab have published 2 journal article & 4 papers in the field of reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, and real-time health monitoring system. (See publications)

Summer '16

• 20 undergraduate students from Brazil Scientific Mobility Program 2016 completed their projects in the area of machine vision and embedded computing. (See projects)

Spring '16

• Members of ECASP Research Lab have published 2 journal articles & 9 papers in the field of machine vision, image and video processing, reconfigurable and embedded systems, ultrasonic signal processing and non-destructive evaluation, and wireless remote health monitoring system. (See publications)