Dr. I-Hong Hou, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, received a research instrumentation award from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) for his proposal, “Equipment for Research in Network and Systems.”
The award is the result of a merit competition called The Defense University Research Instrumentation Program, which is jointly conducted by three DoD research offices: The Army Research Office, The Office of Naval Research and The Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
The program is highly competitive, and the three research offices collectively received 622 proposals requesting $209 million in support for research equipment. Only 176 researchers from 96 academic institutions across the United States received the award, which supports the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment that augments current university capabilities or develops new capabilities to perform cutting edge defense research and associated graduate student research training.
Hou won the award from the Army Research Office, along with collaborator and Dr. P.R. Kumar, professor, and Dr. Paul Gratz, associate professor, from the department.
Hou’s proposal addresses procuring equipment to support research in networking, computing and storage. It will support faculty members and students in the Computer Engineering and Systems Group conducting research under the DoD, and other areas, including wireless networking, programmable medium access control, software defined networking, cyber-physical systems and systems for emerging storage-class memory. The equipment will be used to build a new system, “The CESG Networking and Systems High Performance Cluster.”
Hou received his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University and his Master of Science and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received the C.W. Gear Outstanding Graduate Student Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Silver Prize in the Asian Pacific Mathematics Olympiad. His research interests include wireless networks, wireless sensor networks, real-time systems, distributed systems and vehicular ad hoc networks.