Issa Batarseh, Ph.D.
P.E. Director & Professor

This is UCF … This is EECS

"Creating Waves of Opportunity!"

Welcome to the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Central Florida in Orlando! On behalf of our faculty and staff, I am thrilled that you are exploring our EECS web site.

The School of EECS provides waves of opportunities in education and research, providing undergraduate and advanced degrees in the Renaissance Careers of the future. Computer Science and Engineering graduates are consistently among the highest paid jobs in today's work force. CareerBuilder.com recently reported that Computer Science graduates from the Class of 2008 had salary offers rise 7.9% and engineering graduates rose 5.7% over those of 2007.

I welcome you to browse our EECS pages and learn about our esteemed faculty, award-winning students, ranked and outstanding academic programs and high-tech, groundbreaking research.

The School of EECS offers Bachelors, BS MS (a 5year program), Masters and Doctorate degrees in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering, as well as a Bachelors degree in Information Technology.

The Harris Corporation Engineering Center (HEC) building is the School of EECS's greatest and most visible change. In October 2006, EECS moved into Harris Center's more than 100,000 square feet. Beautifully designed, the Harris Center features: state of the art research labs and classrooms, a 240-seat lecture hall, faculty offices, seminar and meeting rooms, the School's administrative offices and the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science's Dean's Office.

The breadth and depth of EECS research has expanded dramatically and into exciting areas. In 2007, EECS research funding exceeded more than $8.8 million. In 2008, EECS is approaching record-setting numbers, with research expenditures reaching an average of $140K per faculty member.

Other EECS highlights included:

• 2010 U.S. News and World Report America's Best Graduate Program rankings (released April 2009) placed the School's Electrical Engineering graduate program at 57 on the list. This was a dramatic rise for the FIFTH year in a row, moving up from 65 in 2009. Electrical Engineering is also UCF's highest ranked graduate program university-wide.
   

• Two EECS Assistant Professors earned prestigious NSF CAREER Awards this year: Dr. Pawel Wocjan won an NSF CAREER Award for his work in quantum computing, and Dr. Huiyang Zhou was selected for his work in computer architecture.
   
• EECS won two 21st Century World Scholar endowed chair professor proposals from the State of Florida. With these endowments, EECS hired internationally known faculty members:  
  • Professor Marwan Simaan, a National Academy of Engineering member from University of Pittsburgh, who is an international expert in signal processing, telecommunication, and knowledge-based signal processing and control.  
  • Professor Daniel van der Weide from University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is world-renown for his work in new uses for high frequencies for spectroscopy, sensing, computing, communications and biomedical applications, respectively. 
  • Both are highly visible, world-renown researchers in their respective fields. 
     
• The unprecedented and exciting success of the School's Team UCF in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge is one of EECS' crowning achievements. Team UCF built a self-navigating Subaru Outback autonomous vehicle - known as Knight Rider qualified as one of 11 teams in the final round of DARPA's National Qualifying Event, from an initial field of 89. 
   
  • Team UCF consisted of 10 faculty, students, researchers and alumni from EECS, and EECS alumnus Ben Patz, CEO and President of Coleman Technologies, Inc., directed the team's collaborative and interdisciplinary research. 
     
  • The newsworthy team competed against extremely prestigious programs such as Stanford, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and MIT. 
     
  • Team UCF found tremendous success - finishing 7th - through revolutionary ideas and creative, team-oriented problem solving, both of which were critical with a budget roughly 20% to 25% that of its competition. 
     
  • View video of the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge 
    
     

• The School has an enrollment of nearly 1900 undergraduates and 500 graduates with 64 full-time faculty members. 
   
• EECS recruited Professor Gary Leavens from Iowa State University, an extremely successful Software Engineering researcher. 
   
• The school recruited 14 outstanding new faculty members over the last three years from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan, Purdue, Cal Tech, Univ. of Texas-Austin, UC-Irvine and UC-San Diego among other great institutions. 
   
• EECS will soon launch a unique weekend certificate program for Software Engineering for both professional and traditional students. 
   
• A new Masters degree in Digital Forensics was approved in Nov. 2007 and is a collaborative effort between EECS, other UCF academic departments and the National Center for Forensic Science was approved in November 2007. It is now being offered for Fall 2008 student enrollment. 
   
• EECS celebrated 20 years of continued NSF funding for our REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) in Computer Vision. This REU has received funding each year since NSF began the program. 
   
• The EECS ratio of PhD degrees conferred is 0.7 per full time faculty member, matching top 10 research active schools. 
   
• EECS's EXCEL program (http://excel.ucf.edu/), run by PI and EECS Professor Michael Georgiopoulos, recruited 164 UCF STEM students in the fall of 2007. EXCEL is EECS' largest recruitment and retention program to date and it is a major funding success for the School. The program was recently renewed for a second three years of NSF funding. 
   
• EECS faculty had more than 159 journal publications in print in major and reputable journals, for an average of 2.5 journal papers per faculty member. 
   
• Conference papers published by EECS faculty reached 199 in total referred papers, with a majority in conferences having acceptance rates below 30%. This totals an average of 3 conference papers per faculty member. Ninety-six technical conference presentations were given in 2007 along with 33 technical publications in print as well. 
   
• The 2008 High School Programming Contest, sponsored by EECS, brought more than 80 participating high schools to the UCF campus for another successful competition. It is an outstanding partnership between high school educators and EECS and fosters interest in EECS programs. 
   
• EECS hosted the March 2007 Florida Science Olympiad. Directed by Sam Richie and Michael Georgiopoulos, it was the first time the event was held at UCF. EECS's will bring the Science Olympiad World Finals to UCF in 2012. The Science Olympiad's purpose is to increase interest youth in science and as an alternative to traditional science fairs and single-discipline tournaments. 
   
• The EECS Industry Advisory Board continued its work at bi-annual meetings and includes members from influential industry partners in EECS-related areas, including Harris Corp., Lockheed Martin, SAIC, Texas Instruments and Progress Energy Florida among others. 
   
• EECS Faculty and students are repeatedly awarded with numerous international and national awards and recognitions. 
   
• Dr. Alan Eustace, UCF CS PhD alumni, is the VP of Research and Systems Engineering at Google.