Faculty Directory

Qu, Gang

Qu, Gang

Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Institute for Systems Research
Maryland Applied Graduate Engineering
Maryland Energy Innovation Institute
1417 A.V. Williams Building

Gang Qu received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UCLA in 1998 and 2000, respectively. Previously, he had studied Mathematics in the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and the University of Oklahoma. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland in 2000. He holds a joint appointment with the Institute for Systems Research. He is currently the director of Maryland Embedded System and Hardware Security (MeshSec) lab and wireless sensors laboratory.

Dr. Qu works on power/energy efficiency and security problems in the design of integrated circuits (IC), embedded systems, cyber physical systems, and the Internet of Things. He has more than 300 publications in these areas and served 18 times as the general or program chair/co-chair of international conferences, symposiums, and workshops. He is a co-founder of IEEE Asian Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (2016), the founding chair for the hardware security track in ACM Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (2016), a co-founder of the Hot Picks in Hardware and System Security Workshop (2018), a co-founder of IEEE CEDA Hardware Security and Trust Technical Committee (2019). He has served as the associated editor for many scientific journals, including IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), Transactions Emerging Topics in Computing (TETC), Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), Transactions on Circuits and Systems II (TCAS-II), Embedded Systems Letters (ESL); ACM ACM Transactions on Design Automation for Electronic Systems (TODAES); Integration, the VLSI Journal; Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST); Journal of Hardware and System Security (HaSS); and Fundamental Research (FR).

Honors and awards

•IEEE Fellow, 2021

•Best Paper Awards: 33rd IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference (SOCC 2020); 4th IEEE Asian Hardware Oriented Security and Trust Symposium (AsianHOST 2019); 17th IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP 2006);  ACM SIGMOBILE International Conference on

Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom 2001)  

• ACM Recognition of Service Awards, ACM SIG Governing Board (2019, 2006,  2005)  

• Outstanding Systems Engineering Faculty Awards, ISR, University of Maryland (2020)

• George Corcoran Award, ECE Department, University of Maryland (2002)   

Dr. Qu's research interests fall in the broad field of VLSI design automation with focus on low power and security issues in the design of integrated circuits (IC), embedded systems, cyber physical systems, and the Internet of Things. For real life problems, we build mathematical models, develop optimal and heuristic algorithms, implement practical solutions, and perform system prototyping. He has served on the ACM SIGDA Low Power Technical Committee and is the co-founder of IEEE CEDA Hardware Security and Trust Technical Committee. 

The scope of his work on hardware and system security and trust goes from new materials, transistor, and logic gates to architecture, system, network, and application levels. Some examples include resistive RAM based authentication, polymorphic logic as a new hardware security primitive, ring oscillator physical unclonable functions (RO PUF), gate camouflage and logic obfuscation, secure scan chain design, VLSI intellectual property (IP) and IC protection, information hiding, fault injection and side channel attacks, fault tolerant and approximate computing for security and authentication, GPS spoofs attack detection and survival, insider attack detection in wireless network, security in smart grids and vehicles, privacy preservation in vehicular network, and more recently various security and trust issues in machine learning algorithms and their implementations.

He has made significant contributions in the power and energy efficient design of VLSI systems, embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, and the Internet of Things. He is among the first to investigate how to change system's operating voltage and clock frequency based on system's real time computation demands to reduce power and energy, which nowadays is known as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling. He proposed a series of studies on trading performance for energy saving (such as design with quality of service guarantee and probabilistic design), the key concept of approximate computing. More recently, he is looking into various security vulnerabilities introduced by aggressive power and energy reduction.


He has taught the following courses: ENEE 114, ENEE 244, ENEE 644, ENEE 759B, and ENEE 759Q. He won the George Corcoran Teaching Award in 2002.

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Data-Driven Research, Pandemic Impact Highlighted at TRB

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Srivastava, Qu part of Department of Defense 'SHIP' Project hardware security team

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$4.96M for Maryland researchers in DARPA AISS semiconductor security project

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Jacob, Qu Named IEEE Fellows

ECE professors elected fellows of world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology.

Seven UMD Engineers Recognized as Highly Cited Researchers

Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers have published multiple papers frequently cited by their peers over the last decade.

Assessing Natural Hazard Risks to Nuclear Facilities

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BBI Awards Seed Grants to Six Interdisciplinary Projects

Funded teams feature UMD faculty from 15 academic departments and six centers and institutes

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Brain and Behavior Initiative Hosts 3rd Annual Seed Grant Symposium

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Key concerns include vehice safety, software reliabillity, and cybersecurity.

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Faculty, staff, and students gave more than 50 presentations during the four-day event.

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NanoDay2016 Features Inspiring Speakers, Poster Awards

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Chang, Fu, Hu and Marcus developed ideas at the core of the system that defeated Go master Lee Se-Dol in early March.

BBI Seed Grant winners announced

Five projects selected for inaugural round of funding.

Qu Wins NIST Grant

Qu and research team will study the use of Silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) as an entropy source.

University of Maryland, College Park & Baltimore Campuses Announce Seed Grant Winners

Program, now in eight year, spurs inter-campus research collaboration

Transparent, Interactive Nanopaper Uses Touch to Generate Electricity

New material described in ACS Nano, featured in Nanowerk and C&EN.

Thin coatings controlled at atomic scale protect high performance lithium anodes

Anodes with layer of alumina resist corrosion and cycle well

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Creating Transparent Electronic Networks with Graphene-Based Ink

Printed transparent conductors are the first to use sodium ions embedded in reduced graphene oxide to boost performance.

Dachman-Soled Wins ORAU Award for Junior Faculty

ECE professor was one of two nominees from the University of Maryland.

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New material designed to boost performance of solar cells, displays, and electronics published in Nature Communications.

Clark School Faculty Promotions Announced

Faculty promoted to full professor, associate professor with tenure.

Researchers at UMD, UCONN, and Rice Awarded MURI

Qu, Srivastava and Alumnus Forte Focus Research on Changing Future Nano-Scale Device Security

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Undergraduate presenters honored for their 11-week research internship projects.

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Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

  • Fellow, 2021