Three ECE Alums to be Honored by A. James Clark School of Engineering

Three ECE Alums to be Honored by A. James Clark School of Engineering

Inducted into 2024 Class of Early Career Distinguished Alumni

Three ECE alums have been inducted into the A. James Clark School of Engineering 2024 Class of Early Career Distinguished Alumni (ECDA): Domenic Forte (Ph.D. ’13), Upal Mahbub (MS ’17, Ph.D. ’18), and Himanshu Tyagi (Ph.D. ’13). The ECDA recognizes Clark School alumni under the age of 40 for their leadership, innovation, service and entrepreneurship. Inductees will be honored with a ceremony and reception on September 27, 2024.

Domenic Forte, Professor and Steven A Yatauro Fellow, University of Florida

After receiving his Ph.D. degree from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2013, Domenic Forte joined the University of Connecticut as an Assistant Professor. He is currently with the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Florida (UF) where he holds the titles of Professor and Steven A Yatauro Faculty Fellow. In 2022, he was named the Associate Director of UF’s Florida Institute for National Security (FINS).

Forte’s research centers on hardware security and assurance, where he specializes in microelectronics supply chain security, security-aware computer-aided design (CAD) tools, hardware security primitives, and hardware reverse/anti-reverse engineering. Forte has co-authored 1 book (editing 2 other books), 14 book chapters, more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, and over 150 peer-reviewed conference/workshop papers. He has been an organizer and/or TPC member of top security conferences, including USENIX Security, NDSS, and HOST, and top hardware conferences, such as DAC, ICCAD, ITC, and ISTFA. He is currently an Associate Editor of 3 journals.

Forte is a recipient of the prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award, and the Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Award. His research has been recognized with more than 10 best paper awards and nominations. Other honorifics include the HWCOE Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award, Pramod P. Khargonekar Junior Faculty Award for Excellence, Provost’s Excellence Award for Assistant Professors, Excellence in Teaching Award from the UF ECE GSO, and George Corcoran Outstanding Teaching Award from UMD.

Forte was advised by Professor Ankur Srivastava.

Upal Mahbub, Staff Engineer, Qualcomm Technologies Inc.

Upal Mahbub, Ph.D., Senior Member IEEE, is a Staff Engineer at the Multimedia R&D Lab at Qualcomm, San Diego, CA. He received his Ph.D. (2018) and an M.S. (2017) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and another M.S. (2011) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from BUET, Dhaka, Bangladesh. His doctoral research was on multi-modal active user authentication for smartphones using computer vision and machine learning techniques. Previously, Mahbub was an Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, BUET, Dhaka, Bangladesh. He received the best paper awards at IEEE UEMCON 2016 and ICCIT 2011, best poster award at BTAS 2016, and a distinguished graduate fellowship from the A. James Clark School of Engineering at UMD.

Mahbub has been pursuing impactful research for 15+ years in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, and speech enhancement. His current research focus is on developing hardware-efficient computer vision solutions for extended reality (XR) and mobile apps. Mahbub has published 30+ articles in international conferences and journals, published an edited book titled “Contactless Human Activity Analysis” from Springer, 2021, served as guest editor of PRL special issue AHAAGR 2021, associate editor of IJCVSP, and in the program committees of ICIEV (2012 - Present), IVPR (track chair 2020, program chair 2021 - Present), and ABC (2019 - Present). Since 2022, Mahbub has served as the chair of IEEE Computer Society San Diego Chapter. He received the 2024 Outstanding Engineering Service award from the San Diego County Engineering Council for his contributions in reviving the chapter.

Mahbub was advised by Professor Rama Chellappa.

Himanshu Tyagi, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Science

Himanshu Tyagi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He is also a co-founder and CTO for the Kaleidoscope Blockchain, a blockchain startup building decentralized physical infrastructure, and founder and CEO for Banyan Intelligence, an AI service company pioneering in bringing automation to observability for Telcos.

Tyagi is a recipient of the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) Young Scientist Medal for the year 2020. His students have authored papers that won the Best Student Paper Awards at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, the top conference in Information Theory, in 2018 and 2021, making his research group only one of the few winning this prestigious award multiple times.

When at UMD, Tyagi was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship 2012 for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and was one of the Future Faculty Program Fellows of the Clark School of Engineering in 2010.

Tyagi has conducted research in Information Theory, Cryptography, AI and 5G. He has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and an Area Editor for Foundations and Trends in Communication and Information Theory. He co-authored a book on Information Theoretic Cryptography with Cambridge University Press. He was one of the co-PI for India's 5G Testbed project. He was also the scientific advisor for the Bangalore city COVID war-room and led the development of the software that was used for tracking COVID cases and deciding testing strategy for 6 million residents of Bangalore Urban Area.

Tyagi was advised by Professor Prakash Narayan.

Published September 26, 2024