Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Sihan Yu

To make sure our department continues to stride towards R1 status, we’ve been bringing aboard new, talented faculty each semester. One such faculty member is assistant professor Dr. Sihan Yu, communication technology extraordinaire! 

Dr. Yu, one of our newest faculty members, was a PhD student at Clemson University. He chose Rowan as his new home due to the university’s rapidly growing research programs–Rowan clinched R2 status in 2018, and R1 is just around the corner. 

As a Professor, Dr. Yu has two main philosophies; integrating theory with practice, and encouraging independent student exploration. He values a learning approach that’s situated in examples, where students can apply their knowledge, instead of just reciting slideshows and powerpoints on demand. “After I introduce concepts, I will provide some exercises for students to solve, to let them test whether they understand these concepts correctly,” says Dr. Yu. “I cannot cover every detail, I cannot tell [students] what is right and wrong for every situation. They need to practice on their own. Through trial and error, they can have a deeper understanding of programming.” For Dr. Yu, a successful student in his class or research groups is just as enthusiastic about hands-on practice as he is. “Computer science is a discipline that needs a lot of practice; [practice] is paramount.”

Currently, Dr. Yu teaches Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, but his area of interest involves communication technology, IoT issues, and side channel attacks. He explores such topics in his most recent research paper, FreeEM: Uncovering Parallel Memory EMR Covert Communication in Volatile Environments, showcased at ACM MobiSys 2024. Dr. Yu details his discovery of a new cyberattack method; he and his fellow researchers stole information from computers wirelessly through the electromagnetic radiation (EMR) of their memory. You can read more about his paper here. “I’m dedicated to improving the efficiency of wireless communication, specifically exploring how to transmit more data using less spectrum resources,” Dr. Yu says. Another one of his papers, Behaviors Speak More: Achieving User Authentication Leveraging Facial Activities via mmWave Sensing, was recently accepted at SenSys 2024, one of the top three computer science conferences. In the paper, Dr. Yu and his co-authors present their methods of user authentication by using sensors that detect dynamic facial movement, rather than static faces, to fight against identity fraud and better determine the identity of a user. You can read more about that paper here. If you’d like to read the full papers, Rowan students can access them and thousands of others through Campbell Library Online.

Students interested in participating in research with Dr. Yu can email him at yus@rowan.edu. We welcome Dr. Yu to the Rowan CS community!