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ECE Student Team Presents Papers at Las Vegas IEEE ICCE Conference

Young Asian female student standing next to her poster at a conference.
Olivia Duong

A team of five students and two professors from the School of Engineering Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) traveled to Las Vegas in January to present six papers at the 42nd Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE).

Students Rohan Gorajia, Erwei He, Olivia Duong, Surabhi Panda, and Arpan Gupta, along with assistant teaching professors Sasan Haghani and Maria Striki, presented selected papers covering senior capstone research.

These included topics such as the implementation of a smart rain barrel network on the Blynk IOT platform; a drone for the maintenance and monitoring of small-scale farms; a machine learning-based robot for controlling invasive species’ spread; a novel device for detecting early Alzheimer’s; and a digital platform for detecting and monitoring the progression of Alzheimer’s disease; as well as an interactive platform to enhance campus crime alert systems.  

According to ECE professor and department chair Yingying Chen, the students submitted research work from capstone projects that were advised by Sasan Haghani and MariaStriki. “The conference presentations increased the visibility of our department’s undergraduate programs and undergraduate research,” she says.

Male student with eyeglasses and a beard wearing a dark grey suit and white button down shirt standing in front of his research poster.
Rohan Gorajia

Gorajia, who completed work on his capstone team project “RUSafe: An Interactive Platform to Enhance Crime Alert Systems on University Campuses” as a senior in 2023 under the guidance of Striki and Haghani, expects to earn his master’s degree in computer engineering in May 2024.

“This project helps students, staff, and faculty feel safer around campus,” he states. “The current university crime alert system leaves a lot to be desired, and our project helped to fill that gap.”

It does this by providing accurate locations where crimes occurred, and a way for students and staff to report crimes. It also offers a panic button for crime victims. “RUSafe would allow for a  much safer campus,” he notes.

For Gorajia, presenting at this conference was a “huge honor. It was an opportunity to meet people from around the world, as well as experience and learn about new technologies and research going on in many different fields.”

Duong, who like Gorajia, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in May and plans to graduate with a MS in computer engineering, reports she was honored to publish and showcase her team’s paper as a first-time conference attendee, and grateful to professors Haghani and Striki for giving her the opportunity to represent the ECE department.

“My colleagues and I designed and implemented a multi-functional agricultural drone with monitoring tasks to ensure crops are adequately watered, protected from pests, and monitored for fires,” she explains. “Our results show the potential to improve the effectiveness of small-scale farming operations.”

For both students, it was also a lot of fun to visit Vegas, where they enjoyed exploring sights like the Las Vegas Strip and the new MSG Sphere, whose engineers gave a conference keynote address, according to Duong.