Four NSF CAREER Awards & Two DARPA YFA Awards in 2025

ECE’s early-career faculty members have had an unprecedented string of successes in the past year. No fewer than six early-career faculty members have earned prestigious awards from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2025. Their success speaks to the dedication and innovation of these remarkable researchers.

[ More ]

Tech Meets Tide: UF RoboPI Lab Joins Forces for Marine Ecosystem Monitoring

The RoboPI group led by Md Jahidul Islam, PhD, recently joined forces with the Ocean Rescue Alliance International and the International SeaKeepers Society to advance marine robotics for ecosystem monitoring. The collaboration focused on testing fully autonomous survey and mapping technologies designed to better understand the growth and health of remote marine habitats. 

[ More ]

Ray Works to Validate Hardware-Software Interactions with New NSF-Funded Project 

Sandip Ray, Ph.D., has received $300k in funding from the National Science Foundation in support of his research in the area of post-silicon validation. The project, “SOCRATES: Post-Silicon Validation of Hardware-Software Interactions,” is a collaboration with researchers at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

[ More ]

Ivan Ruchkin Is Building Worlds 

Ivan Ruchkin, Ph.D., builds worlds. His recent work, mostly along two major themes, concerns the way autonomous agents perceive the world and, indeed, the way in which the agents’ worlds are constructed. It’s work that verges on the philosophical, but is strongly rooted in machine learning, neural networks, and cyber-physical systems.

[ More ]

New Light-Based Chip Boosts Power Efficiency of AI Tasks 100 Fold

A team of engineers has developed a new kind of computer chip that uses light instead of electricity to perform one of the most power-intensive parts of artificial intelligence—image recognition and similar pattern-finding tasks. Using light dramatically cuts the power needed to perform these tasks, with efficiency 10 or even 100 times that of current chips performing the same calculations. Using this approach could help rein in the enormous demand for electricity that is straining power grids and enable higher performance AI models and systems.

[ More ]

Gator Africa Promises to Bring Collaboration, Exchange with Sub-Saharan Universities

A new initiative, led by Sachio Semmoto Chair of ECE Mark Tehranipoor and ECE Associate Chair for Academics Christophe Bobda, promises to connect University of Florida (UF) students and faculty with their counterparts from ECE departments and engineering colleges across Sub-Saharan Africa. GatorAfrica aims to promote common research projects and knowledge bases while creating an international faculty mentoring program. The program will also create innovative laboratory experiences, allowing students in Rwanda and Kenya to meaningfully participate in lab experiences taking place at UF.

[ More ]

With $650 and Determination, UF ECE Alumnus Created the Digital Computer

History has come to show that it was in 1937 that an alumnus of the University of Florida Electrical Engineering Department, John Vincent Atanasoff (BSEE ’25), went for a lonely drive and, in a bar, scribbled on a cocktail napkin the beginning pillars of modern computing. In doing so, he invented the digital computer.

[ More ]