Systems Assurance
Systems Assurance focuses on the design, development, and deployment of information systems with a particular emphasis on networked systems, information assurance, information security, and information integrity. The emphasis on assurance, security, and integrity are motivated in part by recent findings such as the Report of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection.

This report cites the increased reliance and vulnerability of networked information systems used to control power, communications, and information infrastructures. The report outlines the critical need to design and deploy complex interconnected systems that are reliable, safe, and secure. Our research focuses on the ways information systems are designed to work reliably, safely, correctly, and securely. These methods also aim to reduce the complexity of systems assurance.

Networked and Distributed Computing
The importance of networked computing and information retrieval is cited by many as crucial to the nation's information infrastructure. The challenge presented by this is the design, development, deployment, and assurance of complex systems in applications such as telecommunications, air traffic control, health care, mobile computing, and electronic commerce. These are critical and expensive systems.

They rely on a collection of switching systems, databases, network protocols, scheduling and routing algorithms, distributed hardware, and concurrent software. These systems must work correctly and economically with guarantees of performance, availability of service, safety, and security. This is an area of tremendous federal and industrial need and the funding opportunities are expected to be high, as are the job market demands for students. This defines the scope of the focus area in Trusted Real-Time Networked Computing. More specifically, the engineering challenges in this area include high performance protocols, architectures, and algorithms; design of concurrent systems of hardware and software; assurance of performance in real time; testing and performance evaluation; assurance of correctness, availability, integrity, and security; multimedia system and technologies; databases and information retrieval; and heuristic search and optimization algorithms.

RF and Wireless Information Systems
The area of RF and Wireless Information Systems brings together specializations such as communications, microwaves, antennas, and signal processing to solve problems that are challenging because of their magnitude, level of difficulty, and projected industrial impact. The objective of this area is threefold. One of the goals is to integrate the various faculty members in the electrical engineering program and then gradually link with faculty members in the other two programs who are interested and would like to participate in this initiative. The second goal is to prepare for the education and research of the next century since, according to many authorities, we are going to build an "Internet in the Sky" and according to some estimates predict that "we will spend 50 billion dollars by the turn of the next century to build and launch new satellites--and twice that for antennas, phones, switches, and other gear.''

Applied Computing
The applied computing area focuses on targets of opportunity that fall outside the scope of the other research areas. Much of what is done in this area currently falls into molecular electronics. Molecular electronics is an emerging and highly cross-disciplinary field, which lies at the interface of molecular physics, material science, biophysics, electrical and optical engineering, as well as computational science. Molecular electronics involves the encoding, processing, and retrieval of information at a molecular level, as opposed to the current semiconductor techniques in which the above functions are achieved via miniaturization of bulk devices. Therefore, molecular electronics suggests a fundamentally new concept in device miniaturization and operation.