Faculty Mentors
N. Sertac Artan, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, REU Program and Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
N. Sertac Artan is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) College of Engineering and Computing Sciences. He got his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from New York University (formerly Polytechnic University). Before joining NYIT, Dr. Artan was on the faculty of the New York University School of Engineering. He also worked as an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Design Engineer and designed integrated circuits for commercial, academic and military applications.
Dr. Artan co-chaired The Seventh National Workshop for REU Research in Networking and Systems (REUNS 2021) and served in the organizing committees of the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), IEEE Sarnoff Symposium, and ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks. Several of his papers were co-authored by REU fellows. His current research interests include network security, embedded systems and circuits for medical devices, and biomedical signal processing.
Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong, Ph.D.
Co-Principal Investigator, REU Program and Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Ziqian (Cecilia) Dong is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New York Institute of Technology (New York Tech). Her research interests include communication networks, network security and forensics, wireless sensor networks, assistive medical devices, and data analytics and innovative sensing technology to improve sustainability and resilience of both natural and built environment. She was awarded the Hashimoto Prize for the best Ph.D. dissertation in Electrical Engineering, NJIT. She is the recipient of 2006 and 2007 Hashimoto Fellowship for outstanding scholarship and the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame Graduate Student Award for her inventions in network switches. She received the New York Institute of Technology Presidential Award in Student Engagement in Research and Scholarship in 2015, Innovate Long Island's Fifth Annual Innovator of the Year Award in 2020, and the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Engineering Research Council 2020 Curtis W. McGraw Research Award in non-PhD program for research accomplishments and innovation. Her research is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Northrop Grumman, Motorola, Xilinx, Venturewell, and New York Tech.
She served as the program director for the NYIT REU program from 2013-2018 and currently serves as the program director for the Undergraduate Research and Entrepreneurship Program (UREP) at New York Tech College of Engineering and Computing Sciences. Her current research projects are interdisciplinary including the development of an autonomous soil nutrient sensing system to help with precision agriculture while reducing environmental impact and international collaborative project on the development of decision support visualization models and tools to understand the interconnection among food, energy, and water and their infrastructure in an urban environment. She is the principal investigator of a five-year NSF INFEWS grant to establish a research coordination network that use “City-as-lab” concept to study Food, Energy, and Water Nexus for a sustainable urban environment.
She is a senior member of IEEE, a member of IEEE Communication Society and Women in Engineering, American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), ACM, and the Environmental Sensing, Networking and Decision-Making (ESND) technical committee. She served as the general co-chair of the Food, Energy, and Water Nexus Conference 2019, the Networking Networking N2Women Workshop 2019, and the 37th IEEE Sarnoff Symposium 2016. She has served in technical program committee of IEEE HPSR, IEEE Sarnoff, IEEE ICC, GLOBECOM, GreenCom and ChinaCom, and as a reviewer for IEEE journals, conferences and NSF panels.
Reza K. Amineh, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Reza K. Amineh is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New York Institute of Technology. Prior to that, he was a Principal Scientist in the Department of Sensor Physics at Halliburton Co. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from McMaster University, Canada, in 2010. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and McMaster University, from 2010 to 2013. He was a Ph.D. intern with the Advanced Technology Group, BlackBerry, in 2009. He has authored/co-authored over 80 journal and conference papers, two book chapters, and a book titled “Real-Time Three-Dimensional Imaging of Dielectric Bodies Using Microwave/Millimeter-Wave Holography” published by Wiley & IEEE Press. He contributed to more than 40 patent disclosures in applied electromagnetics while working at Halliburton Co and received several industrial awards.
His research interests include applied electromagnetics with applications in imaging and sensing. Amineh was a recipient of the Banting Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Canada in 2012 and the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (OMRI) Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 2010. During his Ph.D. program, he was awarded the McMaster Internal Prestige Scholarship Clifton W. Sherman for two consecutive years. He has co-authored a paper selected as a finalist in the student paper competition at IEEE Wireless and Microwave Technology Conference in 2019, an Honorable Mention Paper presented at the IEEE Symposium on Antennas and Propagation in 2008, and a paper selected among the journal of Inverse Problems’ “Highlights Collection of 2010”. Amineh is a senior member of IEEE.
Kiran Balagani, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Dr. Kiran Balagani co-directs the cybersecurity laboratory in the NYIT College of Engineering and Computing Sciences, and conducts research in behavioral biometrics, biometric security, privacy, anomaly detection, and applied machine learning. His research has appeared in several leading peer-reviewed journals and conferences. In addition, Dr. Balagani teaches graduate and undergraduate courses such as Biometrics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Advanced Network and Internet Security. He also created the new graduate course on Biometrics.
Houwei Cao, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Dr. Houwei Cao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT). She was an adjunct professor at the Computer Science and Engineering Department of the Tandon School of Engineering of the New York University before joining NYIT in 2016. She obtained her PhD degree in Electronic Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2014, and research associate at the Tufts University from 2014 to 2015. She was also an Insight Data Science fellow in 2015.
Dr. Cao’s main areas of research are signal processing, machine learning, data mining and their applications in human-centric data analytics, with emphasis on developing computational methods, algorithms, and models for multimodal affective computing, speech and language processing, and data analytics for communication networks and social media. She won the audiovisual emotion recognition challenge (AVEC) in 2012, and was the runner-up for the Interspeech 2020 Elderly Emotion Recognition Challenge. She compiled the crowd-sourced emotional multimodal actors dataset (CREMA-D), which is one of the largest labeled datasets uniquely suited for the study of multimodal emotion expression and perception. She is currently the PI of the NSF EAGER grant “Towards Adaptive and Robust Multimodal Emotion Recognition In-the-Wild”, and the co-PI of the NSF DUE grant “Implementation of a Comprehensive High-School-College Partnership and Equity-Based Curriculum in Engineering and Computer Science”.
Her research has been also supported by industrial partners and in-house grants from NYIT. Dr. Cao is a member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC), and IEEE. She has served as program committee members and/or reviewers for more than ten journals and conferences in speech and language processing, affective computing, and computer vision. She is a faculty mentor of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), and also served as panelist for the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and Fonds de Recherche du Qubec.
Paolo Gasti, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Paolo Gasti's research focuses on behavioral biometrics, privacy-preserving biometric authentication and identification, secure multi-party protocols, and network security. His work includes protocols for privacy-preserving biometric authentication, deniable encryption schemes, information leakage through timing and energy measurements, and security in Content-centric Networking. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Defense (DARPA). He served as a member of the NDN project, which is a National Science Foundation-sponsored initiative with the goal of designing a new network architecture that will eventually replace the current internet.
Dr. Gasti's work has been featured in articles in the New Scientist and MIT Technological Review. Gasti worked as a research scholar at University of California, Irvine and received a Fulbright scholarship, under which he visited Johns Hopkins University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from University of Genoa, Italy, and his research pertained to the design of cryptographic schemes and network security.
Huanying (Helen) Gu, Ph.D.
Professor, Computer Science
Huanying (Helen) Gu is a professor of computer science in NYIT College of Engineering and Computing Sciences. Her research interests include data mining, data analysis, ontologies, object-oriented modeling, conceptual modeling, and medical informatics, with an emphasis on controlled medical terminologies.
Dr. Gu's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the UMDNJ foundation, the PDR network, and New York Tech ISRC grants. Her honors include the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and Annual Faculty Scholars Awards from New York Tech. She is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) and has served as a reviewer for journals and conferences on medical informatics.
Dr. Gu received her Ph.D. in computer science from New Jersey Institute of Technology. Prior to joining New York Tech, she was an associate professor of Health Informatics at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now part of Rutgers University).
Wenjia Li, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Wenjia Li is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the CoECS of NYIT. His current research interest include cyber security, mobile computing, and wireless networking, particularly security, trust, and policy issues for wireless networks, cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, and intelligent transportation systems. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers in various journals and conference proceedings. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the U.S. Department of Transportation Region 2 University Transportation Research Center (UTRC). He was the recipient of the 2019 IEEE Region 1 Technological Innovation (Academic) Award. He was also the recipient of 2020 NYIT Presidential Excellence Award for Student Engagement in Research, Scholarship, or Creative Activities.
Dr. Li is a senior member of IEEE an a member of ACM, and he has served as the organizing committee and program committee member for many international conferences such as ACM WiSec, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE MDM, IEEE IPCCC, and so on. He also served as a Reviewer for many prestigious journals, such as the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS,the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON DEPENDABLE AND SECURE COMPUTING, and the IEEE IoT Journal, etc. Dr. Li received his Ph.D in Computer Science from University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2011. Prior to joining NYIT in 2014, he was a tenure-track assistant professor in computer science at Georgia Southern University from 2011 to 2014.
Anand Santhanakrishnan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Dr. Anand Santhanakrishnan received his Ph.D. degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 2004. His thesis on performance analysis of resource allocation schemes in cellular networks was awarded the best thesis in the Division of Electrical Sciences (including the Departments of Electrical Engineering, Telecommunications Engineering, Micro Electronics, Computer Science and System Sciences and Automation).
Dr. Santhanakrishnan’s current areas of research include a diverse range of topics like data analytics for dynamics of Wikipedia and social media, spectrum management and security in dynamic spectrum access networks and covert timing channels, continuous authentication mechanisms for smart phones, and fast millimeter wave imaging for expedited scanning. He has experience in standardization of architecture and mobility management for the 4G-LTE wireless systems, where he represented Samsung Electronics in 3GPP and IEEE Standards meetings. He also represented Stevens Institute of Technology in the 1900.3A Study group meetings on the standardization of security of cognitive radio devices.
Dr. Santhanakrishnan has over 10 granted patents in architecture, mobility management and packet scheduling in wireless networks, some of which have also gone in as contributions to the LTE standards. He has over 40 publications in refereed international journals and conferences, in the area of social media analytics, security in wireless networks, resource management in wireless networks and dynamics of peer production projects. Over all he has 14 years of research experience in the industry as well as in academic environments. He joined the department of Electrical Engineering at New York Institute of Technology, in Fall 2015. In December 2021 Dr. Santhanakrishnan and his team won the Hyperspace challenge conducted by US Air Force Research Labs.
Dr. Santhanakrishnan’s Teaching interests and experience include Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes, Queuing Theory, Electromagnetic Theory, Multimedia Compression, Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Discrete Mathematics, Information Theory, Optimization and Business Analysis (listed as Management Sciences) and Economics.