Electrical and Computer Engineering

This course provides an introduction to the technical aspects of cyber security. It describes threats and types of attacks against computers and networks to enable students to understand and analyze security requirements and define security policies. Security mechanisms and enforcement issues will be introduced. Students will be immersed in cyber security through intense coursework, open-ended and real-world problems, and hands-on experiments.

Physics of optical communication components and applications to communication systems. Topics include fiber attenuation and dispersion, laser modulation, photo detection and noise, receiver design, bit error rate calculations, and coherent communications. Graduate-level requirements include additional homework and a term paper.

This course covers the fundamentals of designing fully functional software-defined radio systems using a hardware radio peripheral and GNU Radio software. Students will use the provided hardware to implement and design core components of physical layer communication systems such as channel estimation, equalization, forward error correction, and modulation.

Radar fundamentals: radar range equation, waveforms, ambiguity functions. Signal Processing: pulse compression, synthetic aperture radar (SAR)inverse SAR, moving target indication (MTI), pulse-Doppler radar, and space-time adaptive processing (STAP).

The course starts with basic concepts from classical detection theory, information theory, and channel coding fundamentals. An overview of basic principles of quantum mechanics, including state vectors, operators, density operators, measurements, and dynamics of a quantum system, is provided next to make the course self-contained. The course continues with fundamental principles of quantum information processing, basic quantum gates, no-cloning theorems, and theorems on the indistinguishability of arbitrary quantum states. The next topic in the course is related to quantum information theory, quantum detection and Gaussian quantum information theories, quantum communication, and quantum key distribution (QKD). The focus of the course is then on quantum networking. The course continues with quantum metrology and quantum sensing.

Parallel models of computation, data flow, reduction, rediflow, VLIW, Superscalar, superpipelining, multithreaded processors, multiprocessing, distributed computing, massively parallel systems, novel technologies, fundamentals of optical computing, optical architectures, neural networks.

Shannon's approach to cryptography. Symmetric key cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, and public key cryptosystems. Authentication, key management, and key distribution. Wireless and network security. Graduate students will be required to submit a research paper.