Tag: 2025 Fall Newsletter

Two University of Florida teams earned top honors and a combined $35,000 in awards at the Mission Autonomy Hackathon, a national competition hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vanderbilt University in Nashville.  

Dear ECE students, staff, faculty and friends, I am thrilled to share ECE’s highlights from the fall semester.

Healthcare systems see significant promise in AI for improving care delivery and controlling costs, yet face significant barriers to safe and effective implementation, including concerns about AI accuracy, patient safety, and integration with health system workflows. Joel Harley, Ph.D., is working to overcome some of these barriers.  Harley is set to co-direct the Accessible Healthcare through […]

A student team from the Florida Institute of National Security (FINS) took top honors late last month at Gator Hack, the University of Florida’s 2025 AI Days hackathon. 

Described in a new study published in Photonics Research and selected for inclusion in Spotlight on Optics, researchers at the University of Florida and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have built a chip-sized device that uses forces exerted by photons to “strum” a single-crystal 4H silicon carbide (SiC) microdisk, inducing it to vibrate at frequencies that can be detected with the right techniques and equipment.  

Ivan Ruchkin, PhD, and José Príncipe, PhD, are collaborating on an NSF-funded project aiming to create an end-to-end methodology to model, analyze, quantify, detect, and adapt to changes in the visual environment of an autonomous cyber-physical system.

Monolithic Power Systems, manufacturer of small, highly energy efficient, easy-to-use industrial power management solutions, formally dedicated a named lab space in Benton Hall on Thursday, Oct. 2. The newly renovated lab space is designed to strengthen the department’s research and teaching capabilities in the area of power electronics, while enhancing opportunities for collaboration.

Dennis S. Kim, Ph.D., alongside co-PI Travis Anderson, Ph.D., from UF Chemical Engineering, have received a DARPA CRYSTAL grant to replace costly trial-and-error methods in wafer bonding with predictive modeling. The project tackles a critical manufacturing challenge: even advanced platforms like lithium niobate on insulator (LNOI) lack reliable models to predict optimal bonding conditions, limiting the scalable production of next-generation photonic, sensing, and electronic devices.

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.

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 faculty and students from ECE departments and engineering colleges across Sub-Saharan Africa.