2024 Impact Report Now Available

The mission at I2S covers three distinct objectives:

• Basic and Applied Research: To create and disseminate fundamental knowledge and new technologies
• Advanced Workforce Development: To educate and train students for technology leadership
• Science and Technology Services: To provide state, national, and international leadership for next generation information infrastructure

Today, the areas of research at I2S address a wide range of modern communications technologies and concerns. As an organization, it’s important to note that these technologies, and the risks that accompany them, continue to expand and evolve at a very rapid pace. The faculty and graduate researchers at I2S continuously strive to improve technologies within their respective scopes of work.

“The last two years have been eventful at I2S. Perhaps most noteworthy was our transformation from the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center to I2S in 2022. This restructuring was not merely symbolic, but an important distinction that recognized the growth and inclusion of new and evolving technologies that touch all aspects of information-related research as well as their impacts on society,” said Dr. Perry Alexander, AT&T Foundation Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Science and Director of I2S.

READ: Impact Report: Serving State, Local and National Workforces Through the Development of New Technologies and Leaders.

These research areas, from their earliest days such as remote sensing research (now the Radar Systems Lab) and telecommunications and networking (now the Center for Communications, Networking and Photonics), continue at the heart of their activities. The High Assurance and Secure Systems Center, the Mathematical Methods and Interdisciplinary Computing Center, and the Computer Systems Center represent more recent areas of substantial growth. The newest center, the Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics, brings together researchers exploring computing impacts on societal norms.

The impact report highlights recent achievements across all six centers. Examples include:

• The Radar Systems Laboratory continues to work on a broad cross-section of radar topics, including diverse radar waveform design, optimized and adaptive receive processing, radio frequency direction finding, and sonar signal processing.
• The Center for Communications, Networking & Photonics research in wireless networks, especially in rural connectivity, has been featured in KU News, the American Society for Engineering Education, and Space War – part of Space Daily, a premier destination for space industry news.
• At the High Assurance & Security Systems Center, the Department of Defense awarded a two-year grant valued at $1.5 million to the center and I2S to participate in the Virtual Institute for Cyber and Electromagnetic Spectrum Research and Employ (VICEROY).
• Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Programs at the School of Engineering and Director of the Mathematical Methods & Interdisciplinary Computing Center Dr. Suzanne Shontz gave a plenary talk at the XI International Conference on Adaptive Modeling and Simulation in Gothenburg, Sweden, on her research on the generation of high-order curvilinear meshes for biomedical applications.
• The Center for Cyber-Social Dynamics was awarded a grant from the National Security Administration for their work on the vulnerabilities in online social environments. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how information warfare disrupts social norms and institutions, with a focus on the role of internet technologies and sophisticated forms of social hacking that target critical social institutions.
• Researchers at the Computer Systems Center are actively involved in projects that include gamified learning of computer hardware fundamentals, hardware security education through seamless extension of existing curriculum, and ongoing development of protocol-independent multicast (PIM) and accelerated dual in-line memory module (AxDIMM) ecosystems.

Learn more and stay up-to-date on I2S' research centers.

"While we continue to evolve with the rapid development of information technologies, as this report demonstrates, a reminder that our core mission is and will always be to nurture our research community. Our primary goals remain supporting our PIs in groundbreaking research, positioning our students for success, and serving our state, region and nation," said Alexander.