Robert Karam

University of South Florida | USF · Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Content-addressable memory (CAM) and associative memory (AM) are types of storage structures that allow searching by content as opposed to searching by address. Such memory structures are used in diverse applications ranging from branch prediction in a processor to complex pattern recognition. In this paper, we review the emerging challenges and op...

Diagnosis of lower urinary tract dysfunction with urodynamics has historically relied on data acquired from multiple sensors using nonphysiologically fast cystometric filling. In addition, state-of-the-art neuromodulation approaches to restore bladder function could benefit from a bladder sensor for closedloop control, but a practical sensor and au...

For data-intensive applications, energy expended in on-chip computation constitutes only a small fraction of the total energy consumption. The primary contribution comes from transporting data between off-chip memory and on-chip computing elements—a limitation referred to as the Von-Neumann bottleneck. In such a scenario, improving the compute ener...

Energy-efficiency has emerged as a major barrier to performance scalability for modern processors. We note that significant part of processor's energy requirement is contributed by processor-memory communication. To address the energy issue in processors, we propose a novel hardware accelerator framework that transforms high-density memory array in...

Lower urinary tract dysfunction (LUTD) is a debilitating condition that affects millions of individuals worldwide, greatly diminishing their quality of life. The use of wireless, catheter-free implantable devices for long-term ambulatory bladder monitoring, combined with a single-sensor system capable of detecting various bladder events, has the po...

Physiological closed-loop control systems (PCLCS) automatically regulate physiological parameters, enabling widespread personalized treatments for diverse diseases. Medical device regulatory agencies such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have begun providing guidance to PCLCS device manufacturers with respect to designing disturbance a...

Biosignal monitoring using wearable and implantable devices (WIMDs) is driving the advent of highly personalized medicine. However, such devices may suffer from the same faulty behavior as any electronic system and may furthermore be targeted by malicious actors seeking to do harm. Closed-loop medical control systems, which monitor biosignals for d...

Wearable and Implantable Medical Devices (WIMDs) and Physiological Closed-loop Control Systems (PCLCS) are crucial elements in the advancing field of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Enhancing the safety and reliability of these devices is of utmost importance as they play a significant role in improving the lives of millions of people every...

Physiological closed-loop control systems (PCLCS) provide reliable and efficient treatment in medical care, but it is crucial to ensure patient safety when examining the potential advantages. Traditional animal and clinical studies are resource-intensive and costly, making them impractical for evaluating PCLCS in every relevant clinical scenario. T...

With the rapid proliferation of IoT devices and its growing usage in safety-critical systems, securing these devices from malicious attacks has become increasingly challenging. Due to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices, real-time software-based malware detection is difficult or infeasible. Alternatively, a promising approach is utilizin...

With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and increasing reliance on network-connected devices, IoT security, which integrates components of hardware and cybersecurity, is more important than ever. Hence, we must improve and expand training opportunities for students in IoT security. Experiential learning is an essential component of ed...

Malware is a major threat to present-day computing systems. With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their usage in safety critical systems, security has become increasingly important. Securing IoT devices is a challenge for designers, as they are generally resource constrained, which makes real-time software-based malware dete...

Adversarial machine learning is a prominent research area aimed towards exposing and mitigating security vulnerabilities in AI/ML algorithms and their implementations. Data poisoning and neural Trojans enable an attacker to drastically change the behavior and performance of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) merely by altering some of the input d...

Urodynamics is the current gold-standard for diagnosing lower urinary tract dysfunction, but uses non-physiologically fast, retrograde cystometric filling to obtain a brief snapshot of bladder function. Ambulatory urodynamics allows physicians to evaluate bladder function during natural filling over longer periods of time, but artifacts generated f...

A Body Sensor Network (BSN) is a system made up of low-power sensor nodes that monitor the wearer’s body and surroundings. BSNs have emerged as a prominent technology, largely influenced by the increased health consciousness, widespread availability of wireless-enabled consumer electronics, and growing wireless connectivity infrastructure. In this...

Security assurance in a computer system can be viewed as distinguishing between self and non-self; such is the view of Artificial Immune Systems (AIS), which are a class of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, inspired by innate behavior of biological immune systems that have evolved over generations to accurately classify self-behavior from non-self-...

Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) is a core technology for building computing hardware, including cache memory, register files and field programmable gate array devices. Hence, SRAM reliability is essential to guarantee dependable computing. While significant research has been conducted to develop automated test algorithms for detecting manufactur...

The Internet of things (IoT) ecosystem has grown exponentially with the convergence of various technologies such as deep learning, sensor systems, and advances in computing platforms. With such a highly pervasive nature of “smart” devices, the nature of data being collected and processed can be increasingly private and require safeguards to ensure...

FPGA bitstreams contain information on the functionality of all hardware intellectual property (IP) cores used in a given design. so if an attacker gains access to the bitstream, they can mount attacks on the IP. Various mechanisms have been proposed to protect IP from reverse engineering and theft. However, there are no examples of IP obfuscation...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a massively growing field with billions of devices in the field serving a multitude of purposes. Traditionally, IoT architectures consist of “edge” sensor nodes which are used purely for data collection, actuators for intermediary connectivity, gateways for transmitting data, and cloud servers for processing. However...

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are seeing a surge in usage in many emerging application domains, where the in-field reconfigurability is an attractive characteristic for diverse applications with dynamic design requirements, such as cloud computing, automotive, IoT, and aerospace. The security of the FPGA configuration file, or bitstream ,...

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become an attractive choice for diverse applications due to their reconfigurability and unique security features. However, designs mapped to FPGAs are prone to malicious modifications or tampering of critical functions. Besides, targeted modifications have demonstrably compromised FPGA implementations of...

Lower urinary tract dysfunctions, such as urinary incontinence and overactive bladder, are conditions that greatly affect the quality of life for millions of individuals worldwide. For those with more complex pathophysiologies, diagnosis of these conditions often requires a urodynamics study, providing physicians with a snapshot view of bladder mec...

Energy-efficiency has emerged as a major barrier to performance scalability in modern computers. For conventional computers as well as external hardware accelerators, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAS) and General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), the data transfer between on-chip computing elements and off-chip memories contr...

Big Data refers to the growing challenge of turning massive, often unstructured datasets into meaningful, organized, and actionable data. As datasets grow from petabytes to exabytes and beyond, it becomes increasingly difficult to run advanced analytics, especially Machine Learning (ML) applications, in a reasonable time and on a practical power bu...

Energy efficiency has emerged as a major barrier to system performance and scalability, especially when dealing with applications which require processing large datasets. These data-intensive kernels differentiate themselves from compute-intensive kernels in that increased processor performance through parallel execution and technology scaling are...

Virtualization has well-known security advantages for operating systems and software, but current techniques do not address increasingly important hardware-security concerns. For widely deployed systems (e.g., Internet of Things) and safetycritical systems (e.g., defense, automobiles), protecting against device tampering is critical, but is often u...

Text mining is a growing field of applications, which enables the analysis of large text data sets using statistical methods. In recent years, exponential increase in the size of these data sets has strained existing systems, requiring more computing power, server hardware, networking interconnects, and power consumption. For practical reasons, thi...

Urinary incontinence, overactive bladder, and other dysfunctions of the lower urinary tract are conditions which affect millions worldwide, imposing a high financial burden and greatly affecting quality of life. Diagnosis of these conditions can be facilitated by monitoring bladder activity over time. Recent work has demonstrated the feasibility of...

Urinary incontinence, or the loss of bladder control, is a debilitating condition affecting millions worldwide, which significantly reduces quality of life. Neuromodulation of lower urinary tract nerves can be used to treat sensations of urgency in many subjects, including those with Spinal Cord Injury (SCI). Event driven, or conditional stimulatio...

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being increasingly used in a wide range of critical applications, including industrial, automotive, medical, and military systems. Since FPGA vendors are typically fabless, it is more economical to outsource device production to off-shore facilities. This introduces many opportunities for the insertion of...

Inherent stochastic physical mechanisms in emerging nonvolatile memories (NVMs), such as resistive random-access-memory (RRAM), have recently been explored for hardware security applications. Unlike the conventional silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) that are solely based on manufacturing process variation, RRAM has some intrinsic randomn...

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are well-established as fine-grained hardware reconfigurable computing platforms. However, FPGA energy usage is dominated by programmable interconnects, which have poor scalability across different technology generations. In this work, we propose ENFIRE, a novel, energy-efficient, fine-grained, spatio-temporal...

Digital memory arrays, which serve as an integral part of modern computing systems, are traditionally used for information storage. However, recent reports show that memory can be used on demand as a reconfigurable computing resource, drastically improving energy efficiency for many applications. In this case, memory usage is limited to storing fun...

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAS) are well-established as fine-grained reconfigurable computing platforms. However, FPGAS demonstrate poor scalability in advanced technology nodes due to the large negative impact of the elaborate programmable interconnects (PIs). The need for such vast PIs arises from two key factors: 1) fine-grained bit-level...

Reconfigurable computing platforms enable rapid prototyping of arbitrary logic, but purely spatial fabrics suffer from issues with scalability and power consumption. Novel reconfigurable frameworks are being developed which similarly allow arbitrary function mapping, but do so with a mixture of spatial and temporal computing, improving scalability...

This paper reports long-term evaluation of a micropackage technology for an implantable MEMS pressure sensor. The all-polymer micropackage survived > 160 days when subjected to accelerated lifetime testing at 85°C in a 1% wt. saline solution. The package exhibited minimum impact on sensitivity and linearity, which deviated by less than 5% and 0.3%,...

Introduction: Urodynamics is widely used for evaluating voiding dysfunction, accomplished with multiple sensors and nonphysiologically fast cystometric filling. Meanwhile, cutting edge treatments for incontinence using neuromodulation use no sensors, relying on continuous stimulation. Wireless, implantable devices are under development that allows...

Security has emerged as a critical need in today's computer applications. Unfortunately, most security algorithms are computationally expensive and often do not map efficiently to general purpose processors. Fixed-function accelerators offer significant improvement in energy-efficiency, but they do not allow more than one application to reuse hardw...

Energy efficiency has emerged as a major design concern for embedded and portable electronics. Conventional approaches typically impact performance and often require significant design-time modifications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for improving energy efficiency through judicious fusion of operations. The proposed approach has two...