09/07/2019 - Published an introductory video about the SWIM simulator

03/17/2018 - Just published a video showing my new Actobotics Elevation Platform

01/25/2018 - Check out my blog post titled: “ROS on Ubuntu on Beaglebone Black (BBB) Rev. C” here

10/21/2017 - Check out my recent paper on underwater swarm search using a tetherball-inspired algorithm here

11/6/2016 - Joined Modo Labs team ... very excited. Check Modo Labs website, the team builds awesome apps!

• Swarm robotics
• Sensor deployment in wireless sensor networks (WSNs)
• WSN routing protocols
• Computational geometry algorithms
• Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
• Embedded systems
• Artificial Intelligence

• Robotics List
• AI List
• Machine Learning List

This box will soon hold several interesting ideas in different fields. Some of them will be just links to ideas that grabbed my attention somewhere else, and others will be ideas I implemented in the past or ones I am currently working on.

Take a look at my Pinterest 'Outside the Box' board.

• Please consider the environment :)
  This is where we live.


• I learned humbleness when I realized that I am one of billions of tiny creatures in an enormous universe.


• Life is full of opportunities. If you find one, work hard on it. If you miss one, find the next.


• Our BEAUTIFUL campus!

• Respect your body, it will respect you!
• Having spent a big part of my life learning, and coming up with ideas that I thought were smart, then discovering that somebody else had already proposed them in the literature or somewhere else ... then noticing that they rarely get implemented or commercialized ... and also noticing that for most of them, I did not see them around in my daily life ... has led me to one conclusion: The world has more than sufficient information to be a significantly better place. What it only misses is the right people to bring the enormous wealth of ideas to life by actually implementing them and making them available to the general public! ( I am not accounting for many things here ... )

• The One-Minute Correspondence Analysis Course (Youtube)
• Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors (Khan Academy)
• Refresh your memory about Grad (gradient), Div (divergence), and Curl.
• Another nice video, by Stephen Bedding, about the differential operator (Nabla or Del) over here.
• Laplacian and Poissons ... Simple and to the point!

I found this website very useful for Physical Computing lovers. I thought it would be nice to share it with those who are interested in the area. It comes from ITP “a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts”, New York University.

• [2017] Virtual Tether Search: A self-constraining search algorithm for swarms in an open ocean

  Tolba S.; Ammar R., “Virtual Tether Search: A self-constraining search algorithm for swarms in an open ocean,” Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2017 IEEE Symposium on , 03-06 Jul. 2017

  
  
• [2016] Taking Swarms to the Field: Constrained Spiral Flocking for Underwater Search

  Tolba S.; Ammar R.; Rajasekaran S., “Taking Swarms to the Field: Constrained Spiral Flocking for Underwater Search,” Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2016 IEEE Symposium on , 27-30 Jun. 2016

  
  
• [2015] Taking swarms to the field: AUV reorientation algorithm for PSO realization

  Tolba S.; Ammar R., “Taking swarms to the field: AUV reorientation algorithm for PSO realization,” Signal Processing and Information Technology (ISSPIT), 2015 IEEE International Symposium on , 07-10 Dec. 2015

  
  
• [2015] Taking Swarms to the Field: A Framework for Underwater Mission Planning

  Tolba S.; Ammar R.; Rajasekaran S., “Taking Swarms to the Field: A Framework for Underwater Mission Planning,” Computers and Communications (ISCC), 2015 IEEE Symposium on , 06-09 Jul. 2015

  
  
• [2011] Modeling attacker-technology system interaction in transportation networks: P²I³-model

  Tolba, S.; Fiondella, L.; Ammar, R.; Lownes, N.; Rajasekaran, S.; Ivan, J.; Wang Q., “Modeling attacker-technology system interaction in transportation networks: P²I³-model," Technologies for Homeland Security (HST), 2011 IEEE International Conference on , pp.306-312, 15-17 Nov. 2011

  
  
• [2012] Underwater delay tolerant routing in action

  Tolba, S.; Hakami M.; Mihdhir A.; Zhu Y.; Le S.; Cui J. H., “Underwater delay tolerant routing in action”, OCEANS'12 MTS/IEEE, Oceans 2012, 14-19 Oct. 2012

  
  
• [2012] VDPA: A WSN Deployment and Analysis Tool for Road Network Security

  Tolba S.; Fiondella L.; Ammar R.; Rajasekaran S.; Lownes N.; Ivan J., “VDPA: A WSN Deployment and Analysis Tool for Road Network Security,” Technologies for Homeland Security (HST), 2012 IEEE International Conference on , 13-15 Nov. 2012

  
  
• [2014] Underwater Sensing and Processing Networks (USPN)

  Alharbi A.; Alhumyani H.; Tolba S.; Ammar R.; Cui J. H., “Underwater Sensing and Processing Networks (USPN),” COMPUTERS AND COMMUNICATIONS (ISCC 2014), THE NINETEENTH IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON , 23-26 Jun. 2014 (to appear in the proceedings this year)

  
  
• [2011] Integrating equilibrium assignment in game-theoretic approach to measure many-to-many transportation network vulnerability

  Wang Q.; Fiondella L.; Lownes N.; Ivan J.; Ammar R.; Rajasekaran S.; Tolba S., “Integrating equilibrium assignment in game-theoretic approach to measure many-to-many transportation network vulnerability,” Technologies for Homeland Security (HST), 2011 IEEE International Conference on , pp.351,357, 15-17 Nov. 2011

  
  
• [2012] Game theoretic vulnerability analysis for the optimal defense of high speed rail

  Fiondella L.; Liu J.; Tolba S.; Rajasekaran S.; Ammar R.; Rahman A.; Lownes N.; Ivan J., “Game theoretic vulnerability analysis for the optimal defense of high speed rail,” Homeland Security (HST), 2012 IEEE Conference on Technologies for , pp.305,311, 13-15 Nov. 2012

  
  

• Color Picker: helps you to quickly get the RGB values of your selected colors.


• CSS3 Gradient Generator: enables you to build your favorite gradient and provides you with the associated code for different browsers.


• ASCII Art Generator: use it to generate ASCII-based headings that you can use as separating comments in your code for organization purposes.


• jsfiddle: A very useful online tool for writing JavaScript, HTML, and CSS codes and testing the result. It also has a very nice set of examples to get you started.


• Timeline JS: A JS library that enables you to easily create and embed a timeline into your website. The timeline is interactive and you can place Youtube videos, Wikipedia content, Google maps, and many other content formats in it.


• Regular Expressions 101: Easy-to-use online tool for regular expression writing, debugging, testing, etc. It also has a reference at the bottom to help you with your regex's. This is one of regular expression tools that I liked most among the ones I previously used. Thanks to the creator of that useful tool!


• htaccess Tester: Want to test .htaccess rewrite rules? I found this service site very useful. If you're not familiar with “.htaccess” files or rewrite rules, you can learn more at Apache's “Apache HTTP Server Tutorial: .htaccess files” or “mod_rewrite” module here and here, respectively


• Border Radius: Easily and quickly generate CSS styles for border radius using this service. Thanks to Jacob Bijani


• Background Image Generator: Select a background for your web site in a matter of seconds


• PIXLR Editor: Online, Photoshop-style image editor.


• ConvertICO: Want to generate a “.ico” file for your web site's favicon? Use this nice tool.

• Copying files over SSH
• Very useful, commonly needed regular expressions
• Password validation via regular expression
• Public vs. private keys
  
• How stuff works?
  

Early stage of my MakerBot (SketchUp Design)

A couple of months ago I started designing my MakerBot. The project is still in its early stages. The goal is to make it a multipurpose bot. More details about the intended uses and the design steps will follow soon. A screenshot of the current status of the design in shown below.

(01/28/2018) AR-1.1 - A simple autonomous robot. Uses Arduino UNO and three ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles and avoid them.

My SWIM (underwater SWarm sIMulator) Simulator - 2015. A simulator for underwater swarm robotics that I am actively developing (completely in Java). It uses jMonkeyEngine (jME).

Home Monitoring System - May 2014: A project that my teammate Haitham Ghalwash and I worked on this Spring. It consists of a WSN, RFID network, WiFi network, a robot, and web interface. We built the robot nearly from scratch by hacking an RC car and only using its chassis. All other components have been carefully selected and a complete system design was conducted.

Software performance engineering project (course project) - 2009. Click here

SWIM Simulator video is finally here!

• Email: sherif[DOT]tolba[AT]uconn[DOT]edu


• Mailing Address:
    Computer Science & Engineering Department
    371 Fairfield Road, Unit 4155
    University of Connecticut
    Storrs, CT 06269-4155