Doctoral Program

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering offers tremendous opportunities for distinctive advanced learning with faculty members whose interdisciplinary, highly collaborative work is at the forefront of their respective fields.

Doctoral candidates have the opportunity to work with a member of the National Academy of Engineering, four IEEE Fellows, award-winning researchers, multiple patent holders, and editors of prestigious journals. In the process, they investigate such rapidly emerging fields as machine learning and biological computation, medical imaging and face resolution, steganography and watermarking, signal processing and the future of wireless networks.

Research Areas

• Wireless systems: Some of Stevens’ most renowned researchers specialize in wireless, pursuing research in data mining for hostile intent detection, next-generation communications systems, the dynamics of unreliable networks, and the physical design of future wireless systems, to name just a few areas.

• Multimedia systems: Medical imaging, face recognition, ad hoc multimedia networks, and many other areas form the focus of this research area.
• Information systems: Subspecialties include bioinformatics, medical wireless networks, access control in distributed systems, integrated broadband communications, cryptography, software-defined radio, and many others.
• Intelligent systems: Stevens researchers investigate such rapidly emerging fields as computational intelligence, machine learning, cooperative mobile robotics, and biological computation.

Facilities

• Embedded Systems and Robotics Laboratory
• Media Security, Networking and Communications Laboratory
• Robotics and Automation Laboratory
• Visual Information Environment Laboratory
• Wireless Information Systems Engineering Laboratory
• Wireless Networks Laboratory

Research Center

The Center for Intelligent Networked Systems (iNetS) explores ways to endow networked systems with intelligence, with the goal of creating “smart” systems whose components work easily with one another. This research could result in a level of security, performance, and reliability far beyond that in today’s networked systems.

Degree Requirements

Within two years of admission, students must take a written qualifying examination to test communication skills and ability to conduct independent research associated with the general dissertation topic area. After passing the qualifying examination and completing the required course work, students become a doctoral candidate and start dissertation research.

Doctoral research must be based on an original investigation, and the results must make a significant, state-of-the-art contribution to the field, worthy of publication in current professional literature. At the completion of the research, students must defend the thesis in a public presentation. For credit hour requirements, visit Graduate Academics.