About

Director's message

The greatest needs of the United States Navy are cutting-edge research and a highly trained workforce.

To address these future needs, UMass Dartmouth has created the Marine and UnderSea Technology (MUST) Research Program. UMass Dartmouth and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) has a long history collaboration on research and talent development. Working alongside with NUWC, MUST has identified areas of focus where the expertise of UMass Dartmouth faculty can have the greatest impact in research and training. Collaborations will include the general areas of undersea technologies addressing sensing, communications, and autonomous underwater vehicles.

With these areas in mind, MUST and NUWC have identified a set of thirteen research projects that UMass Dartmouth faculty will conduct with NUWC researchers. To ensure faculty, students, and NUWC personnel can conduct cutting-edge research, MUST will identify necessary costs for lab renovations, state of the art equipment, and staffing. The current thirteen projects broadly cover areas of biofouling, acoustic sensor design, flow battery technology, composite conductors, energy storage, wake detection, RF photonics, soft robotics and biomimetic sensor development.

UMass Dartmouth is the second leading supplier of workforce talent to NUWC and has the program synergies to propel naval technology into the future.

Assistant Director - Ming Shao, PhD

Dr. Ming Shao is an Associate Professor of Computer & Information Science in the College of Engineering at UMass Dartmouth. Since joining the University, he has secured $3.4M in funding from several sources and received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award in 2022. His research interests include predictive modeling, adversarial machine learning, continual and incremental machine learning, robust and multi-view representation learning, and health informatics. Dr. Shao has published more than 100 articles in top journals and conference proceedings and was the best paper award winner at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ICDM 2011 Workshop on Large Scale Visual Analytics and the best paper award candidate of ICME 2014. Dr. Shao is the Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine, and SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging. In addition to being an editor, he is a reviewer for many IEEE Transactions journals, including TPAMI, TKDE, TNNLS, TIP, and TMM. He also served on the (senior) program committee for top-tier conferences such as AAAI, IJCAI, CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, KDD, ICDM, CIKM, ACM-MM, etc. Dr. Shao received the Presidential Fellowship of the State University of New York at Buffalo from 2010 to 2012. He received a PhD in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston in 2016.