The Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded a grant worth an estimated $6.25 million in funding over five years through its Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program for a proposal titled "Designing Reliable and Secure Tactical MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks)." The team included Principal Investigator (PI) Virgil Gligor (pictured, left) (Electrical and Computer Engineering [ECE]), John Baras (pictured, right) (ECE/Institute for Systems Research [ISR]/HyNet), and Jonathan Katz (computer science/ECE/University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies) from the University of Maryland, along with Adrian Perrig of Carnegie Mellon University, Nitin Vaidya of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and Radha Poovendran, a 1999 ECE Ph.D. alumnus and professor at the University of Washington, Seattle.


The DoD also awarded MURI funding to a proposal titled "Exploiting Nonlinear Dynamics for Novel Sensor Networks" by PI Edward Ott (pictured, right) (ECE/physics), Tom Antonsen (pictured, left) (ECE/physics), P. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR), Tom Murphy (ECE), Jim Yorke (Institute for Physical Science and Technology/math/physics), John Rodgers (Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics [IREAP]), Dan Lathrop (IREAP/physics), Raj Roy (physics), and Brian Hunt (math) of the University of Maryland, as well as Dan Gauthier of Duke University.

Professor Carol Espy-Wilson (ECE/ISR) is the principal investigator on a $1.8 million National Science Foundation grant for "Landmark-based Robust Speech Recognition Using Prosody-Guided Models of Speech Variability." The research will develop a system with performance comparable to humans in automatically transcribing unrestricted conversational speech, representing many speakers and dialects, and being embedded in adverse acoustic environments. Mary Harper, an affiliate with the UM computer science department and a professor at Purdue University, is co-principal investigator. Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Yale University and Boston University are also involved with this project.