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electrical & computer engineering (ece) department

Damon Woodard

FINS Director, Professor

Before becoming a faculty member, Dr. Woodard was a Director of Central Intelligence postdoctoral fellow. His postdoctoral research focused on developing advanced iris recognition systems using high-resolution sensors. His research interests include biometrics/identity science and applied artificial intelligence (machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, computer vision, and natural language processing). His current research projects include authorship attribution (stylometry) / computational behavioral analytics via text analytics and natural language processing, image analysis/machine learning-based hardware assurance (hardware trojan detection, counterfeit electronics detection), and adversarial machine learning (DeepFake detection).

Domenic Forte

FINS Associate Director, Professor & Steven A. Yatauro Faculty Fellow

Dr. Forte’s current research focuses on:

  • Traditional and AI-Enabled Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Tools, Metrics, and Rules for Hardware Security
  • Microelectronics Supply Chain Security and Assurance: Semiconductor Intellectual Property (IP) Protection. Counterfeit Electronics Detection and Avoidance, Hardware Trojan Detection and Prevention, Reverse Engineering and Anti-reverse Engineering
  • Hardware Security Benchmarking: Test Article Generation and Data Augmentation
  • Countermeasures Against Physical Attacks
  • Hardware Security Primitive Design and Fabrication: Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), True Random Number Generators (TRNGs), Chaogates
  • Biometrics: Authentication, Indexing, and Privacy.

Jie Fu

Lab Director & Assistant Professor

Dr. Fu’s lab focuses on developing intelligent and (semi-)autonomous systems through the integration of control theory, machine learning, and formal methods. At our lab, we aim to build trustworthy systems in complex decision-making and dynamic environments, in coordination with or under the supervision of human operators. The research contains several main areas: (1) Preference-aware decision making with human-on-the loop; (2) learning-enabled adaptive control and planning with complex temporal objectives; (3) game-theoretic design of provably correct autonomous systems. The applications include human-autonomy shared control, security and safety for cyber-physical systems, and cyber security. (CPSs).

Sanjeev Koppal

Lab Director & Associate Professor

 Sanjeev J. Koppal is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and is a Kent and Linda Fuchs Faculty Fellow. Sanjeev is the Director of the FOCUS Lab at UF. Since 2022, Sanjeev has been an Amazon Scholar with Amazon Robotics. His interests span computer vision, computational photography and optics, novel cameras and sensors, 3D reconstruction, physics-based vision, and active illumination. His lab builds vision sensing prototypes and demonstrates these in real-world settings outside the lab. His lab has been funded (including continuing funding) by the ONR, NSF, DHS, USDA and industry.