ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING

The Department

prospective Students

Research

Dr. Taskin Kocak

Education

Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, May 2001

M.S., Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA, May 1998

B.S., Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, February 1996

B.S. (as a double major) Physics, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, February 1996

                                             

Work Experience

·        2007 - present: Senior Lecturer (US eq. Associate Professor), Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol, England, United Kingdom.

·        2001 - 2007: Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.

·        2002 - 2003: Director of Graduate Program, Computer Engineering Dept., University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.

·        2000 - 2001: Visiting Lecturer, Computer Science Dept., University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA.

·        1998 - 2000: Design Engineer, Mitsubishi Electronics America, Inc. (now, Renesas Technology), Durham, NC, USA.

 
Awards and Honors

·        ``Docent`` (Habilitation) title in Computer Science and Engineering, Higher Education Council, Turkey (Jan. 2008)

·        First Silicon Success Award, Mitsubishi Electronics America, Inc. (1999)

·        Undergraduate Fellowship, Turkish Education Foundation (1992-1996)

·        Graduate Scholarship, Duke University (1996-1998)

Research Summary

My broad research interests and expertise span the areas of computer networks and communications, hardware design (computer architecture/VLSI), and applied machine learning. At Bristol, my current research activities focus on developing high performance systems and architectures for very high throughput (multi-gigabits per second (Gbps)) wireless networks and are supported by Toshiba Research Europe, Great Western Research, ClearSpeed Technology and through Engr. and Phys. Sciences Research Council (UK) PhD Studentships. At UCF, I contributed significantly to the modeling, simulation, design and implementation of systems and architectures for computer networks. My primary work in this area includes a network processor design for a novel learning-based routing protocol (sustains 10 Gbps like TCP/IP counterparts), very high-throughput off-chip communications architectures for network line cards (doubles the throughput compared to the deployed systems to 450 Gbps), low-power architectures for network forwarding tables (reduces power consumption by 25%) and Bloom filter-based network intrusion detection systems (reduces power consumption by 85%), offload-engine design for IGMP multicast snooping (processes 4 million packets per second), front-end device design for content networking (searches 1.5 million inquires per second), and an efficient spam filtering technique based on local cache architectures (reduces the inquiries to the 3rd party DNS blacklist servers by 70%). My research work in the computer networks domain include the development of a novel scrambling algorithm that reduces the vulnerability of the wired equivalent privacy (WEP) security protocol used in the IEEE 802.11b wireless network standard, the introduction of a cluster leader election algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks, which takes into consideration the direction of the overall traffic flow in the network to provide better load balancing, the development of performance analysis methods for self-similar video traffic over ATM networks, and the introduction of a distributed protocol for resource allocation and scheduling in the computational grid using programmable networking hardware. At Duke, I showed through experimental data that the mine detection and false alarm filtering system I developed can achieve a 95% mine detection rate while reducing false alarms more than 90%. My publications in mine detection area have been cited more than 55 times. At Mitsubishi Semiconductor, I worked on mixed-signal data converter circuits primarily for communications. Particularly, I was one of the lead designers for a 14-bit, 2.2 MS/s sigma-delta analog-to-digital converter chip, which not only received an internal award for first silicon success, but also the journal paper describing it has been cited more than 35 times.

 

Publications

Over 85 peer-reviewed publications, including 29 journal papers. (Full publication list).

Teaching and Graduate Student Supervision

Currently, 7 PhD, 3 MSc and 2 BSc students are in progress under my supervision. I have graduated 2 PhD and 8 MSc students, and 2 BSc students with final year theses. I have published at least one paper with every student that I supervised. I have taught 12 different courses in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the undergraduate and graduate levels at UCF and Bristol. I developed two courses which were added to the UCF catalog.

Professional Service

·        Editor-in-Chief, ICST Trans. on Network Computing

·        Associate Editor, Computer Journal

·        Guest Editor, ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems

·        Guest Editor, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking

·        Guest Editor, Computer Journal

·        Founder and co-chair, Advanced Networking and Communications Hardware Design Workshop (2004 - 2006), held with the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Computer Architecture

Served on the technical program committees of many conferences and also as a technical referee for 2 books, 15 different journals and numerous conferences.