Intelligent Systems and Wireless Networking (IS-WiN) Laboratory

The Intelligent Systems and Wireless Networking (IS-WiN) Laboratory in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University, led by Dr. Fatemeh Afghah, is an interdisciplinary research and education center targeted to address recent challenges in communication networks and AI-based decision-making in autonomous vehicle systems.

Dr. Afghah's Home Page

[Lab Update] October 2024: Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) establishes a joint appointment with Dr. Afghah. With SRNL and the US Forest Service, this collaboration will develop forest fire detection and suppression mechanisms alongside command, control, communications, cyber, and computer capabilities for unmanned systems. link

[Paper] October 2024: A paper on Style-Pro, a tool for style-guided prompt learning for generalizable vision-language models, was accepted to IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV).

[Paper] October 2024: A paper on ROADS: Robust Prompt-driven Multi-Class Anomaly Detection under Domain Shift was accepted to the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV).

[Paper] October 2024: A paper on using single-step, sharpness aware minimization for efficient accurate sparse training was accepted for the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

[Paper] October 2024: A paper on using single-step, sharpness aware minimization for efficient accurate sparse training was accepted for the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

[Paper] October 2024: A paper on flow topology and wind-driven wildfire propagation was accepted for the Bulletin of the American Physical Society.

[Lab Update] August 2024: Welcome to Moe Lambert, an MS student in Computer Engineering working on distributed computing.

[Paper] September 2024: A paper utilizing UAS infrared imagery to evaluate and monitor fire behavior was accepted in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

[Paper] September 2024: A paper on the joint path planning and power allocation of a cellular-connected UAV using apprenticeship learning via deep inverse reinforcement learning was accepted in Computer Networks.

[Lab Update] August 2024: Welcome to Duncan McCain, an MS student in Computer Engineering.

[Lab Update] August 2024: Welcome to John Bettger, an undergraduate student in Computer Engineering, and Keerthi Surisetty, an undergraduate student in Computer Science, as our inaugural Creative Inquiry students.

[Paper] August 2024: A paper on a physical testbed and open dataset for benchmarking passive sensing and spectrum co-existence was accepted in IEEE Access. Dataset available on IEEE DataPort: link

[Paper] August 2024: A paper on FlameFinder, which leverages Attentive DML to illuminate obscured fire through smoke, was accepted in the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[Paper] August 2024: A paper on the explainable detection of atrial fibrillation from ECG signals was accepted in the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (IEEE EMBC).

[Lab Update] August 2024: Welcome to Ryan Barker, a Master's student in Computer Engineering working on O-RAN.

[Alumni] August 2024: Congratulations to Bryce Hopkins for defending his master's thesis entitled "Training UAV Teams with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Towards Fully 3D Autonomous Wildfire Response."

[Paper] July 2024: A paper on energy-flow optimization at harmonized aerial intersections was accepted in the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC).

[Paper] July 2024: A paper on data overfitting for on-device super-resolution was accepted in the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV). 

[Lab Update] July 2024: Welcome to Dr. Tolunay Seyfi, a postdoctoral researcher.

[Paper] June 2024: A paper on a certificate-based ring signcryption scheme for securing UAV-enabled private edge computing systems was accepted in IEEE Access.

[Lab Update] June 2024: Welcome to Tim Ross, an undergraduate in Electrical Engineering completing a thesis in conjunction with the Clemson Honors College.

[Lab Update] June 2024: Welcome to Hossein Kashiani, a PhD student in Electrical Engineering working on adversarial attacks in autonomous systems.

[Lab Update] June 2024: Welcome to Niloufar Alipour, a PhD student in Electrical Engineering working on computer vision research.

[Lab Update] June 2024: Welcome to Mobin Habibpour, a PhD student in Computer Engineering working on UAV path planning.

[Lab Update] May 2024: Welcome to Chris Webb, a Master's student in Electrical Engineering.

[Media] March 2024: Dr. Afghah interviewed with "4 the Record" on WYFF News Channel. Watch the interview here: https://www.wyff4.com/article/4-the-record-artificial-intelligence/60230831.

[Award] Julia Boone wins the Holcombe Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Service. 

[Paper] 2024: A paper on hardware acceleration for the real-time detection of wildfires onboard drones was accepted into the IEEE INFOCOM Networked Robotics and Communication Systems Workshop (NetRobiCS).

[Paper] 2024: A paper on obscured wildfire flame detection by spatio-temporal analysis of smoke patterns using frame-wise tranformers was accepted in the international workshop on IoT Applications and Industry 5.0, International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (IEEE DCOSS-IoT).

[Paper] 2024: A paper on developing a mobile ad-hoc network testbed was accepted in the international workshop on IoT Applications and Industry 5.0, International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (IEEE DCOSS-IoT).

[Paper] 2024: A survey article on the research towards AI-enabled unmanned aerial systems in pre-, active, and post-wildfire management was accepted in the Information Fusion Journal.  

[Paper] 2024: A paper on PyroTrack, a belief-based deep reinforcement learning path planning for aerial wildfire monitoring, was accepted in the IEEE American Control Conference (ACC).

[Paper] 2024: A paper on dynamic online modulation recognition using incremental learning was accepted in the IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking, and Communications (ICNC).

[Paper] 2024: A paper on efficiency of fuzzy-based 3D flying base station positioning and trajectory for emergency management in cellular networks was accepted in IEEE Systems Journal.

[Lab Update] January 2024: Welcome to Mahshid Rezakhani, a Master's student in Computer Engineering working on O-RAN security.

[Lab Update] January 2024: Welcome to Basir Ebrahimi, a PhD student in Computer Engineering working on drone edge processing.

[Service] October 2023: Dr. Afghah serves as symposium chair of Aerial communication for ICC 2025. 

[Paper] 2023: A paper on evaluating prescribed fire with UAS-derived imagery was accepted for the International Fire Ecology and Management Congress. 

[Paper] 2023: A paper on artificial intelligence for climate smart forestry was accepted in the IEEE 5th International Conference on Cognitive Machine Intelligence (CogMI).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on high-quality and efficient video super-resolution via spatial-temporal data overfitting was accepted in the IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR).

[Patent] October 2023: Our patent on "Error Correction Schemes for Keyless Encryption" was granted. 

[Grant] October 2023: We received a NASA grant to support research on AI-enabled drone swarms for fire detection, mapping, and modeling. 

[Paper] 2023: A paper on meta-learning-based generalizable indoor localization using CSI was accepted in the IEEE Global Communications Conference (IEEE GLOBECOM).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on attention-based deep reinforcement learning O-RAN slice management was accepted in IEEE GLOBECOM.

[Media] September 2023: Our work was featured in ClemsonNews for our work on UAV innovation. Read the article here: https://news.clemson.edu/skys-the-limit-fatemeh-afghah-helps-usher-in-a-new-era-of-drone-innovation-at-clemson-university/. [media] 

[Media] September 2023: Our work was featured in the Optics & Photonics News Magazine's Cover. Read the article here: https://www.optica-opn.org/opn/media/Images/PDF/2023/0923/026-033_OPN3409.pdf?ext=.pdf. [media]

[Grant] September 2023: We received an NSF grant  to develop drone-assisted 5G networks in communication-denied environments. 

[Lab Update] August 2023: Welcome to Michael Marinaccio, a Master's student in Computer Engineering working on multi-modal learning.

[Alumni] August 2023: Congratulations to Ali Owfi for defending his master's thesis entitled "Generalizable Deep-Learning-Based Wireless Indoor Localization." [lab update]

[Alumni] August 2023: Congratulations to Jackson Murrin for defending his master's thesis entitled "A Study of 5G Cellular Connectivity to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles." [lab update]

[Grant]  June 2023: We received an NSF grant entitled "EAGER: Understanding complex wind-driven wildfire propagation patterns with a dynamical systems approach." 

[Talk] June 2023: Dr. Afghah presented the keynote talk titled "Firefighter Drones-Low-altitude Fleet of Drones in Forest Fire Management" during the ACM MobiSys Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications (DroNet).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on SCC5G, a PQC-based Architecture for secure cellular communication in a zero-trust environment, was accepted in the IEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (ASILOMAR).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on thermal image calibration and correction using unpaired cycle-consistent adversarial networks was accepted in the IEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (ASILOMAR).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on O-RAN LSTM-based traffic prediction and slice management using deep reinforcement learning was accepted in the IEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (ASILOMAR).

[Award] June 2023: Dr. Afghah serves as an Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellow.

[Paper] 2023: A paper on using commercial 5G performance for drones in non-urban areas was accepted in the IEEE PIMRC Workshop on Wireless Networking, Planning, and Computing Swarms.

[Award] May 2023: Julia Boone, Bryce Hopkins, and Dr. Afghah received  the Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2023's Workshop on Wireless Sensing and Actuating Robotic Networks (WISARN) for their paper titled "Attention-Guided Synthetic Data Augmentation for Drone-based Wildfire Detection." 

[Paper] 2023: A paper on attention-guided synthetic data augmentation for wildfire detection was accepted in the IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Wireless Sensing and Actuating Robotic Networks (WiSARN).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on autoencoder-based radio frequency interference mitigation for SMAP passive radiometer was accepted in the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on triplet loss-less center loss sampling strategies for facial recognition was accepted in the Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS). 

[Grant] January 2023: We received funding from Clemson for a post-doctoral researcher to establish an interdisciplinary center on 5G-enabled autonomous vehicle systems. 

[Paper] 2023: A paper on meta-learning for wireless interference identification was accepted in the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC).

[Paper] 2023: A paper on heterogenous drone small cells and their optimal 3D placement for power efficiency and rate satisfaction was accepted in Drones.

[Paper] 2023: A paper on synthetic ECG signal generation using probabilistic diffusion models was accepted in IEEE ACCESS.

[Talk] June 2022: Dr. Afghah was a panelist on the "Dataset generation barriers: software and human factors" panel during the NSF workshop on Radio Frequency Dataset Generation, Access, and Sharing. 

[Paper] 2022: A paper on deep reinforcement learning-based dynamic slicing management for O-RAN was accepted in the IEEE GLOBECOM Workshop on Next-Generation Radio Access Networks: Architectures, Interfaces, and Implementation. 

[Patent] May 2022: Our patent on "Cooperative target execution system for unmanned aerial vehicle networks" was granted.

[Paper] 2022: A paper on wildfire detection and monitoring using drone-collected RGB/IR image data was accepted in IEEE Applied Imagery and Pattern Recognition (AIPR). 

[Paper] 2022: A paper on secure PUF-based authentication and key exchange protocol using machine learning was accepted in the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI). 

[Award] May 2022: Dr. Afghah was selected as a Faculty Scholar at Clemson University School of Health Research. 

[Grant] May 2022: We received REU supplement funding from NSF-CPS program to support undergraduate research on drone-based fire monitoring. [grant]

[Paper] 2023: A paper on heterogenous airborne mmWave cells and their placement for maximum coverage was accepted in the IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Privacy-Preserving Air and Ground Smart Vehicular Networks (AIBESVN).

[Paper] A paper on arrhythmia classification using CGAN-augmented ECG signals was accepted in the IEEE BIBM workshop Network Science and Artificial Intelligence for Biomedicine & Heath Informatics.

[Paper] A paper on wildland fire detection and monitoring using FLAME2 was accepted in IEEE ACCESS.

[Service] May 2022: Dr. Afghah serves as a TPC member for PIRMC 2022. 

[Grant] April 2022: We received an REU supplement funding from NSF-SWIFT program to support undergraduate research AI-assisted communication. [grant]

[Service] April 2022: Dr. Afghah serves as a TPC member for CCNC 2023. 

[Paper] 2022: A paper on LB-OPAR, load-balanced optimized predictive and adaptive routing for cooperative UAVs, was accepted in Ad Hoc Networks.

[Paper] 2022: A paper on synthetic ECG signal generation using GANs was accepted in PLOS ONE.

[CPF] February 2022: We are organizing the first IEEE International Workshop on Test and Evaluation of Programmable Networks (TEPN 2022). Submission deadline: March 15, 2022. 

[Paper] 2022: A paper on electromagnetic contribution in astronomy, health, atmospheric, geology, and environment applications was accepted in the Spring Nature International Journal of Wireless Information Networks (IJWIN). 

[Paper] 2022: A review of AI-enabled routing protocols for UAV networks was accepted in Ad Hoc Networks.

[Paper] 2022: A paper on helper data masking for hardware key generation algorithms was accepted in IEEE ACCESS.

[Service] February 2022: Dr. Afghah serves as an Associate editor for ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare. 

[Service] February 2022: Dr. Afghah serves as a TPC member for ACM MobiSys Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems and Applications (DroNet 2022). 

[Paper] 2022: A paper on traffic scheduling, network slicing, and virtualization based on deep reinforcement learning was accepted in Elsevier Computers and Electrical Engineering.

[Paper] 2022: A paper on gfpop, an R package for univariate changepoint detection, was accepted in the Journal of Statistical Software.

[Paper] 2022: A paper on intelligent reflecting surface-aided wireless systems with imperfect hardware was accepted in Electronics.

[Lab Update] January 2022: Welcome to Mr. Ali Owfi. He is a PhD student in the Computer Engineering program working on AI-assisted communications. 

[CPF] January 2022: CPF: IEEE WOWMOM Workshop on Wireless Networking, Planning and Computing for UAV Swarms (SwarmNet 2022). Submission deadline: Macrh 1, 2022. 

[Lab Update] January 2022: Welcome to Mr. Ashish Chittimilla. He is a MS student working on UAV systems. 

[Lab Update] January 2022: Welcome to Mr. Bryce Hopkins. He is a senior EE student working on UAV systems. 

[Lab Update] November 2021: Welcome to Mr. Amir Ali Pour. He is a visiting PhD student from France working on hardware security.

[Talk] November 2021: Dr. Afghah presented a talk on "UAV Communications: Challenges and Opportunities" at 3rd Buffalo Day for 5G and Wireless Internet of Things.

[Paper] 2021: A paper on joint 3D placement and interference management for drone small cells was accepted in the IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (ASILOMAR).

[Paper] 2021: A paper on fuzzy key generation using ReRAM-based physically unclonable functions was accepted in the IEEE International Conference on Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics.

[Service] October 2021: Dr. Afghah serves on the editorial board of the "Journal of Networks and Computer Applications". 

[Grant] September 2021:  We received a planning grant from NSF Smart Connected Community program to develop remote heart monitoring solutions for rural patients. 

[Paper] 2021: A paper on an error correction approach to memristors PUF-based key encapsulation was accepted in the IEEE International Conference on Omni-layer Intelligent Systems (COINS).

[Paper] 2021: A paper on how UAVs’s dynamic 3D movements improve network security was accepted in the 22nd IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM).

[Paper] 2021: A study on the use of commercial LTE for UAVs was accepted in the IEE ICC Workshop on Integrating UAVs into 5G and Beyond.

[Paper] 2021: A paper on OPAR, an optimized predictive and adaptive routing protocol for UAVs, was accepted in the IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Wireless Sensor, Robot and UAV Networks (WiSARN).

[Paper] 2021: A paper on BlocKP, a key pre-distribution based secure data transfer method, was accepted in the IEEE IoT Journal. 

[Paper] 2021: A paper on drones’ edge intelligence over smart environments in B5G was accepted in IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking

[Lab Update] August 2021: WiNIP lab moved to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Clemson University. 

[Grant] August 2021: Dr. Afghah leads a collaborative project titled "Distributed Sensing and Computing over Sparse Enviroments"   funded by National Science Foundation. [grant]

[Service] July 2021: Dr. Afghah serves on the editorial board of "Computer Networks" Journal. 

[Paper] 2021: A paper on a hardware implementation of a password manager system using physical unclonable functions was accepted in IEEE ACCESS. 

[Paper] 2021: A paper on fully-echoed Q-routing for flying adhoc networks was accepted in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering.

[Paper] 2021: A paper on cloud proportionate medical data stream analytics for IoT-based healthcare was accepted in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

[Alumni] June 2021: Congratulations to Dr. Alireza Shamsoshoara for successfully defending his PhD thesis on "Communications and Spectrum Sharing in UAV Networks". He joined the Volkswagen Group of America Innovation and Engineering Center as an AI Engineer. [lab update]

[Paper] 2021: A paper on UAV-assisted communication for disaster relief using imitation learning was accepted in the IEEE Open Journal of the Communication Society. 

[Paper] 2021: A paper on the FLAME dataset and wildfire detection using deep learning was accepted in Computer Networks.

[Media] March 2021: Dr. Afghah's research on autonomous UAVs was featured on "Arizona TechConnect Magazine". 

 [Talk] March 2021: Dr. Afghah moderated the panel on "AI in Health and Biomedical Research-Challenges and Opportunities" during NSF Smart Health Workshop.

 [Talk] March 2021: Dr. Afghah spoke as a panelist on "Expert panel: Research during a Pandemic-Lessons Learned" during NSF Smart Health Workshop. 

[Paper] 2021: A paper on exploiting secrecy performance of uplink NOMA in cellular networks was accepted in IEEE ACCESS.

[Paper] 2021: A review of applications and strategies for Green IoT using UAVs in beyond-5G networks was accepted in Ad Hoc Networks Journal.

[Grant] February 2021: Dr. Afghah is leading a collaborative grant titled "CPS: Medium: Wildland Fire Observation, Management, and Evacuation using Intelligent collaborative Flying and Ground Systems" funded by the National Science Foundation. The project is a collaboration between NAU, Georgia Tech, UCAR and DRI. 

[Paper] 2021: A paper on greedy graph search algorithms for automatic QRS-complex detection was accepted in Elsevier Computers in Biology and Medicine Journal.

[Paper] 2021: A paper on decentralized blockchain-based trust monitoring for UAVs was accepted in IEEE ACCESS.

[Service] October 2020: Dr. Afghah is the co-organizer of 2021 NSF Smart Connected Health PI meeting in collaboration with Prof. Jerzy Rozenblit. 

[Grant] August 2020:  Our collaborative proposal with the MSU and SUNY Buffalo tilted "AI-enabled Spectrum Coexistence between Active Communications and Passive Radio Services: Fundamentals, Testbed and Data" was funded by NSF. 

[Service] August 2020: Dr. Afghah serves as an editorial board member of Elsevier Ad hoc Networks Journal. 

 [Talk] August 2020: Dr. Afghah spoke as a panelist on "Expert Panel: Novel Spectrum Uses" panel during National Science Foundation Workshop on Wireless, Spectrum and Innovation. 

 [Lab update] July 2020: Welcome to our new group member, Dr. Nima Namvar. He is a research specialist working on UAV communications and networking.

[Grant] June 2020:  Dr. Afghah received the NSF CAREER Award! [grant]

[Service] June 2020: Dr. Afghah serves as an Associate Editor for the Aerial and Space Networks, Frontiers in Communications and Networks Journal. [service]

 [Lab update] May 2020: Congratulations to Dr. Sajad Mousavi for successfully defending his PhD thesis. Sajad joined the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher.

 [Award] April 2020: Dr. Afghah received the NAU's Most Promising New Scholar Award.

[Lab update] April 2020: Welcome to our new group member, Dr. Mohammed Algharib. He is a postdoctoral associate working on UAV communications and networking.

[Patent] April 2020: Our patent titled "Authentication based on a Challenge and Response using a PUF and a Machine Learning Engine" was issued. 

[Service] April 2020: Dr. Afghah serves as an Associate Editor for the Springer Neural Processing Letters.

March 2020: Dr. Afghah was promoted to an Associate Professor with Tenure (effective August 2020).

[Patent]  March 2020: Our patent titled "Multi-state Unclonable Functions and Related Systems" was issued. 

[Patent] March 2020: Our patent titled "False Alarm Suppression in Intensive Care Units" was approved. 

[CPF] February 2020: CPF: IEEE WOWMOM Workshop on Wireless Networking, Planning and Computing for UAV Swarms (SwarmNet 2020). Submission deadline: March 30, 2020. 

[Patent] February 2020: Our patent titled "Authentication Based on a Challenge and Response Using a PUF" was approved. [patent]

[Talk]  January 2020: Dr. Afghah served as a panelist on the "Expert Panel: AI Needs for the Future of Smart Health" during the NSF Smart and Connected Health (SCH) Principal Investigator Meeting, discussing the challenges and opportunities of smart healthcare systems. 

[Award] October 2019: Dr. Afghah received the Air Force Young Investigator Award.

[Grant] September 2019: We received an INTERN supplement grant from NSF with the amount of $53,000. Thank you NSF!

[Lab Update] August 2019: Welcome to our new group member, Sixian Zhang. He started his PhD program in Fall 2019 and will work on computer-assisted decision-making algorithms for biomedical applications. 

[Lab Update]  August 2019: Welcome to our new group member, Mahsa Keshavarz. She is a PhD student working on trust-management and security of multi-agent systems. 

[Grant] May 2019: Congratulations to Ashwija for receiving NSF Travel Grant to attend IEEE SECON 2019. 

[Service] March 2019: Dr. Afghah serves as a TPC member for several UAV related workshops including SwarmNet co-located with IEEE WoWMoM 2019, DroNet co-located with ACM MobiSys 2019 and WiDroIT colocated with IEEE DCOSS 2019. 

[Award] May 2019: Congratulations to Ashwija for receiving iREDEFINE Professional Development Award. 

[Award] February 2019: Dr. Afghah was elevated to an IEEE senior member. 

[Service] January 2019: Dr. Afghah serves as a TPC member for several IEEE conferences including SECON'19, PIRMC'19 and CCNC'19. 

[Service] January 2019: Dr. Afghah serves as the N2Women Mentoring Co-chair from 2019 to 2021. 

[CPF] November 2018: CPF: IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Mission-Oriented Wireless Sensor, UAV, and Robot Networking (MiSARN 2019). Submission deadline: December 31, 2018. 

[Grant] October 2018: Our project on developing a signal processing framework for early detection of Atrial Fibrillation was funded by NIH Southwest Health Equity Research Collaborative (SHERC) Center. 

[Grant] September 2018: Our project "PFI-RP: Design and Fabrication of Hardware-based Security Platform using Fabrication Variability of Ultra Low Power Memories" was funded by National Science Foundation.