Dear colleagues, alumni and friends,  

It is my pleasure to welcome you to our latest newsletter. As we complete another academic year, we want to celebrate our successes, share our ongoing work, and look ahead to the future of our department.  

 I would first like to highlight the outstanding contributions of our esteemed faculty who have been selected to receive funding from UF President Ben Sasse’s Strategic Funding Initiative. As part of this initiative, Kristy Boyer, Ph.D., is working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers as part of a $2.5 million project to build an infrastructure for AI-powered athletics based on wearable sensors and the health data of athletes.  

 We would also like to recognize research with real world implications. Sara Rampazzi, Ph.D., led a team of scientists to conduct acoustic attacks on underwater data centers and develop a machine learning algorithm to detect them before they can crash the system. The team presented their findings at the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 

 Additionally, we want to share recent news about our faculty receiving prestigious awards and grants. This spring, Christina Boucher, Ph.D., was named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) senior member and Eakta Jain, Ph.D., was named an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) senior member. Sanethia Thomas, Ph.D., was a corecipient of the AI2 Center, the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), and the Center for Instructional Technology & Training (CITT) inaugural AI Educator of the Year award. 

 I’d also like to highlight the exceptional achievements of our students who have distinguished themselves through their academic excellence, leadership and community engagement. Zhixin Pan, Ph.D., (Ph.D. CS ’22) received the European Design and Automation Association Outstanding Dissertation Award for his work on machine learning techniques to counter various malicious cyber-attacks, such as malware and ransomware. Using machine learning, he has developed detection models for Trojan horse attacks and enabled real- time detection of evasive attacks. 

I would like to express my gratitude to all members of the CISE community for your contributions and commitment to our shared goals in our pursuit of academic excellence and community engagement. I encourage you to stay connected with each other and to continue supporting our department’s mission in the months and years ahead. 

Sincerely,  

Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D.
The Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor
CISE Department Chair