Faculty Awards & Honors

“International Ionospheric Effects Symposium First Prize”

Paul Kintner wins first prize for a paper, entitled Simulating Inosphere-Induced Scintillation for Testing GPS Receiver Phase Tracking Loops, which was submitted at the 125th International Ionospheric Effects Symposium (IES) in Washington, DC on May 13-15th. Approximately 125 papers were submitted.

To view the paper, visit: http://www.ies2008.com/IES2008-A106.txt. To lean more about IES, please visit the following url: http://www.ies2008.com/.

“Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teaching Award in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008”

Wesley Swartz, Senior Research Associate receives the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teaching Award in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008. This Award was made in recognition of Wesleyﾒs dedication to teaching and willingness to capture the studentsﾒ interest, guide and offer assistance to help them succeed.

Swartz received his B.S. from Drexel University in Electrical Engineering and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State. Swartz joined the School in 1972. During that time he has grown and enhanced the curriculum for our students. Swartz teaches ECE 303, Electromagnetic Fields and Waves and ENGRD 230, Introduction to Digital Logic Design in the fall and ECE 488, RF Circuits and Systems in the spring semester. One student commented, "Professor Swartz is one of the best professors I have had at Cornell. Not only was he prepared for each lecture and stimulated my interest in the subject, he extended above and beyond his role as professor to help students succeed in the course. He showed that he truly cares about his students and really made me like my major more than before this course." The general theme from student evaluations is that Professor Swartz's lectures were well organized and that he made himself available for all of his students.

“DARPA 2008 Young Faculty Awards”

Three ECE assistant professors, Ehsan Afshari, Sunil Bhave, and Farhan Rana, have been identified by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to receive DARPA 2008 Young Faculty Awards. DARPA made awards to 39 "rising stars in university microsystems research" who are on the faculty of 27 universities located in 17 different states. The DARPA Young Faculty Award program is designed to seek out ideas from non-tenured faculty in order to identify the next generation of researchers working in microsystems technology [Full Story].

“2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering”

The 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering will be presented to Emeritus professor James Thorp for his career work at Cornell in the "development and application of microprocessor controllers in electric power systems. These devices make synchronized measurements to monitor and protect components throughout the power grid, playing a key role in diminishing the frequency and impact of blackouts." He is sharing the award with Prof. Arun Phadke of Virginia Tech. The award will be presented on April 17 in Philadelphia.

Related articles:

"Two Virginia Tech electrical engineers named among the greatest in science, engineering, and technology in the world"
-Virginia Tech News

The 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering (Announcement)
- Franklin Institute Website

“National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Award”

G. Edward Suh, assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently received a five-year National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Award for his project, "Flexible Multi-Core Substrate for Trustworthy Computing Systems". Multi-core architecture with 4 to 8 cores on a die is a reality today and future generations of processors are expected to contain even more processing cores per chip. The project aims to realize the full potential of large-scale multi-core processors as a secure and trustworthy computing substrate by investigating strong isolation techniques and building a flexible framework for dynamic inspection of various correctness properties. The research will deliver the benefits of hardware support in security and verification without requiring dedicated resources for a single fixed mechanism.

“Fellow of Optical Society of America”

Michal Lipson was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) by the Board of Directors at their September 2007 meeting. Prof. Lipson is recognized for outstanding contributions to the field of silicon nanophotonics, including the development of high-bandwidth modulators and low-power nonlinear optical devices. OSA members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics may be proposed for election to the class of Fellow. This honor is reserved to no more than 10% of the total membership.

“Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award”

"...John Belina has recently been awarded the universityﾒs Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award. The $5,000 award recognizes ﾓsustained and distinguished contributions of professorial faculty and senior lecturers to undergraduate advising.ﾔ Previously, he was named the 2006ﾖ2009 Rosenblatt Endowed Faculty Fellow for his sustained contributions to students outside the classroom and to the life of the residential communities.
'Advising is one of the most important things at Cornell because [the university] is very decentralized,' says Belina..."

Cornell Engineering Magazine
Summer 2007
Pg 32
[download the article]
[read the magazine]

“Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers”

Professor Zygmunt J. Haas was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2007 for "contributions to wireless and mobile ad-hoc networks".

The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The accomplishments honored shall have contributed importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, bringing the realization of significant value to society.

The IEEE Fellows are an elite group from around the globe. The IEEE looks to the Fellows for guidance and leadership as the world of electrical and electronic technology continues to evolve.

“Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teaching Award in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007”

Professor David A. Hammer received the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teaching Award in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007. This Award was made in recognition of Professor Hammer's dedication to teaching and willingness to help students and to provide them with a course they will reflect back upon as one of their most interesting undergraduate classroom experiences.

Over the past several years, Professor Hammer has taught two courses in the Spring semesters: ECE 484, Introduction to controlled Fusion: Principles and Technology, and ECE 588 Energy Seminar II; and he teaches one course in the Fall semesters: ECE 581 Introduction to Plasma Physics, which is the cornerstone to the Universityﾒs plasma physics program. To ECE 484 and 588 he brings his research experience into the undergraduate classroom with great effectiveness. In the energy seminar he captivated the studentsﾒ interest in energy issues by organizing excellent speakers and in 484 he enlightens students about ﾓthe holy grail of energy productionﾔ as one student puts it. A consistent theme from the student evaluations is that Professor Hammer cares deeply about students.

“John Swanson College Teaching Award for 2007”

Assistant Professor Alyssa Apsel was recently awarded the John Swanson College Teaching Award for 2007.  Professor Apsel teaches courses in analog and mixed signal integrated circuit design, most recently ECE 453 and ECE 554. Her award noted her success at adding a strong design component to 453, converting the course into one of the school's capstone design courses required for ABET.  The design project became the focus of this revised course, with lectures and homework building toward the goal articulated in a final project. Prof. Apsel’s lectures were designed to couple student's design-driven curiosity with the lecture material.

“ECE Professor Goes to Washington...”

In an effort to explain an alarming event which resulted in the disruption of global positioning signals (GPS) “around the world”, professor Paul Kintner joined other researchers at a conference in Washington DC. Although Kintner and his grad-student Alessandro Cerruti predicted an event like this is likely to occur (see award-winning student paper), the effect, said professor Kintner, was “more profound and widespread than we thought possible”.

- April 8, 2007 Washington Post [read more]

“Professor Johnson is the Featured Guest on NPR's Science Friday Show – May 18, 2007”

“… can number crunching determine whether art is authentic? We'll talk with a scientist (Professor Richard Johnson) who says that a technique called 'stylometry' may be able to distill the essence of an artist's technique down to a set of geometric data points. He met this week with representatives of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Can the technique determine whether a purported 'van Gogh' was really painted by the master? We'll run the numbers….”

-- NPR’s Science Friday, [read more, listen to the show!]. An archive of the show will be stored on Science Friday's website after it airs on the radio.

National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday® is a science talk show that can be heard each Friday afternoon, 2-4 p.m. on selected NPR stations.

Science of art: Scientists say ‘stylometric’ analysis could tell if a version of a Van Gogh sunflower painting bought by a Japanese insurance company (left) is a forgery. At right is an authentic painting from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. -- AP

Related article:

Is that painting real? Ask a mathematician.
Engineers use a mathematical process dubbed 'stylometry' to set apart real Van Gogh paintings from forgeries.
-- By Elizabeth Svoboda | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

"On May 14, teams of engineers that Mr. Johnson recruited will meet with art students and curators at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to announce what they think sets real Van Gogh paintings apart from forgeries. By analyzing a database of 101 paintings by the artist and his known imitators, the scientists have arrived at what they say are key elements of Van Gogh's 'visual signature,' which can be distilled into numbers. This, they say, will give art experts an important new tool to assess works like 'Vase With Fifteen Sunflowers.' They can compare how closely a disputed painting's visual signature matches the baseline "signature" derived from the database."[read more]

“National Science Foundation Early Career Award”

Sunil Bhave, assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering,recently received a five-year National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER award under the Integrative, Hybrid, and Complex Systems. Prof. Bhave proposes a comprehensive study and design of dielectrically transduced MEMS resonators for communication and computation. The CAREER project focuses on the key challenges for solid- and liquid-dielectrically transduced, high-quality factor RF resonators,including tuning methods, electrode optimization, substrate isolation,and large array synchronization behavior.

“National Science Foundation Early Career Award”

Assistant Professor Aaron Wagner has received a National Science Foundation Early Career Award for his proposal “A New Look at the Fundamental Limits of Lossy Network Compression.” The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is NSF's most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars.

Lossy compression plays a key role in our information economy. By far, most of the information that we generate as a society represents pictures, sounds, and videos, and for this kind of data, lossy compression yields a tremendous reduction in transmission and storage requirements. The aim of Prof. Wagner's project is to understand the fundamental limits of lossy compression, especially in the context of networks, which dominate today's communication infrastructure.

“NSF Early Career”

TITLE: Designing with Light: Comparative Analysis and Design of Optical Interconnects for Chip-to-Chip Communication

Abstract:

CMOS electronics have become ubiquitous in modern society, continuing to create both technological and economic opportunities in such areas as portable computing and handheld devices. In the past, the capabilities of CMOS processors have been limited internally by transistor density, power consumption, and speed. All of these characteristics have improved consistently with transistor scaling, governed empirically by Moore's Law. However, as CMOS feature sizes decrease into the sub-micron regime, electrical signaling and interconnect problems promise to become the ultimate limit of high performance systems at both the board and chip levels. Integration of optical interconnects into high-performance computing offers a promising and necessary approach to solving the inter-chip communication bottleneck....

“Global Indus Technovators Award”

“Prof. Lang Tong named to Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Engineering”

The Trustees have named Prof. Lang Tong to have the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Engineering. This is the endowed chair that Toby Berger held before his retirement last January. It is great to see the Chair stay within the School, and it is appropriate that it also is going to someone who has had a strong impact in the communications field.

Lang has distinguished himself in many ways in our school, but was noted in particular for his pioneering scholarship in the field of communications signal processing, his leadership in the school, and his effort and success at team building for funded research among the faculty in the school and college. Even as this award is announced, Lang is busy assembling a large proposal for an Army-funded center that will involved over 6 Cornell faculty plus a number of other schools. He has been an active leader in helping others get research funding since he arrived.

This is a great honor both for Lang and for the School. A Chair represents the highest rank that can be achieved in a university; it is well-deserved and appropriate honor for Lang.

Cornell Chronicle

“IEEE Micro Top Picks”

“Hemami promoted to Full Professor”

“Bruce Land Receives Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teaching Award in 2006”

Bruce has been teaching in the School in various capacities for the last 20 years. For the last 8 years he has taught our capstone course ECE 476 Digital Systems Design using MicroControllers. This has become the most popular course in the school, due primarily to Bruce's enthusiasm, teaching skills, and personal guidance in the lab.

In ECE 476, Bruce teaches the students about designing systems using microcontrollers, and then allows each student to build and test a self-generated design projects. Bruce has helped students build robots, health monitors, computer games, energy controllers, and "smart trains". It’s an amazing array of projects that he leads each year. His web page, http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ee476/FinalProjects/ shows most of the projects from over the years.

Each year Bruce encourages all students to submit their designs for publication. Many students have seen their projects published in national magazines.

This award is not the first time Bruce has been recognized for his outstanding teaching. In 1993 he was awarded the “Faculty of the Year” teaching award in Computer Science. In 1996 he won first place in "Instructional Materials" at the national ACM SIG User Conference XXIV. In 1995 he presented a series of lectures on "Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching" at Oregon State University. Bruce is a leader in instruction.

“IBM Faculty Award”

“IBM Faculty Award”

“IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award”

Professor Sandip Tiwari (ECE) was named the 2007 recipient of the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award with the accompanying citation: "For pioneering contributions to nano-crystal memories and to quantum effect devices". The Brunetti Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the advancement of information storage with emphasis on technical contributions in computer data storage device technology.

Visit the IEEE website for more information about the Cledo Brunetti Award, award recipients, and Sandip Tiwari.

“National Science Foundation Early Career Award”

Assistant Professor José Martínez has received a National Science Foundation Early Career Award for his proposal "Power-Performance Considerations of Thread-level Parallelism in On-chip Multicore Architectures." The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is NSF's "most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization."

As the microprocessor industry moves toward multicore solutions (several processor cores on a single chip), performance growth on these inherently power-constrained platforms will increasingly rely upon their ability to support thread-level parallelism efficiently. Martínez's project seeks to develop the necessary insights for the successful design of mechanisms that can address the unique power-performance opportunities and challenges of running parallel applications on multicore chip architectures.

“2006 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award”

“2005 IEEE PES OUTSTANDING POWER ENGINEERING EDUCATOR AWARD”

Awarded each year by the IEEE Power Engineering Society for excellence in teaching and ability to inspire students, and leadership in electric power engineering education through publication of textbooks and writings on engineering education. The citation reads “For outstanding contributions to teaching and research in the field of power ”

“Best Paper Award”

“Lang Tong Elected Fellow of the IEEE”

“Lang Tong and M. Dong Receive Best Paper Award fr”

“NSBE Educator of the Year Award”

“Career Communications Group "50 Most Important Bla”

“Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship”

“Kevin Kornegay Honored”

“Provost's Ronay and Richard Menschel Award”

“NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)”

“IEEE Micro, "Top Picks"”

Quoted from IEEE Micro: "Jose F. Martinez, in recognition of the inclusion of 'Speculative Synchronization: Programmability and Performance for Parallel Codes' in the 2003 Micro Top Picks special issue on the most industry relevant and significant papers of the year in computer architecture. Congratulations on your contributions to our field. P.B., Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Micro."

“2003-04 Affinito-Stewart Award”

“Best Student Paper Award”

“Candidate for Best Paper Award”

“Best Paper”

“Best Student Paper Award for 2003”

“2004 Plasma Science and Applications Award”

“2004 Lockheed Martin University Research Grants Pr”

“American Physical Society Fellow”

“IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal”

“IEEE Expert Lecturer”

“Highly Commended Paper Award”

“Vice-Chair of the Division of Plasma Physics of th”

“Distinguished Educator Award”

“Chicago Museum of Science and Industry Information”

“IBM Faculty Award”

“Fulbright Grant”

“NSF Award”

“2003 NSF Career Award”

“"Michael Tien'72 Award," Cornell College of Engine”

“Outstanding Teacher”

“Outstanding Teacher”

“Outstanding Teacher”