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 College of Engineering and Computing Sciences. He got his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from New York University (formerly Polytechnic University). Before joining New York Tech, 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 the sustainability and resilience of both natural and built environments. She was awarded the Hashimoto Prize for the best Ph.D. dissertation in Electrical Engineering at NJIT. She is the recipient of the 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 a 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 an 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 the 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 N2Women Workshop 2019, and the 37th IEEE Sarnoff Symposium 2016. She has served on the 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.
Houwei Cao, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Dr. Houwei Cao is an Associate 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 New York University before joining New York Tech 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 a research associate at 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 a program committee member and/or reviewer 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 a panelist for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Fonds de Recherche du Québec.
Huanying (Helen) Gu, Ph.D.
Professor, Computer Science
Huanying (Helen) Gu is a professor of computer science in the 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 interests include cybersecurity, 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 the 2020 New York Tech Presidential Excellence Award for Student Engagement in Research, Scholarship, or Creative Activities.
Dr. Li is a senior member of IEEE and 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 the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in 2011. Prior to joining New York Tech in 2014, he was a tenure-track assistant professor in computer science at Georgia Southern University from 2011 to 2014.
Anand Santhanakrishnan, Ph.D.
Associate 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, 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 smartphones, 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 contributed to the LTE standards. He has over 40 publications in refereed international journals and conferences, in the areas of social media analytics, security in wireless networks, resource management in wireless networks, and dynamics of peer production projects. Overall, 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 the U.S. 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.