Faculty Awards & Honors

“IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer”

Professor Sheila Hemami has been elected an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer, with a two-year term starting 2010.

Prof. Hemami's work reflects the integration of the goal of providing "anytime, anywhere visual communications" with characterizing the human visual system (HVS). To understand HVS characteristics, she explores how the human brain perceives visual information by developing better models for visual cortex processing, as well as models which include understanding and cognition. She simultaneously develops both theory and practice for signal processing techniques which can fully exploit HVS characteristics. The resulting models provide improved processing, higher efficiency, and/or better compression performance. This dual approach consisting of signal- processing informed psychophysics and psychophysics-informed signal processing has yielded substantial gains over traditional decoupled approaches.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society's Distinguished Lecturer Program provides means and financial support for IEEE chapters to have access to individuals who are well known educators and authors in the fields of signal processing. Prof. Hemami's research accomplishments in visual communications have earned her the recognition. During her term as a Distinguished Lecturer, she will give lectures to IEEE local chapters across the world.

“Provost Award for Distinguished Scholarship”

Cornell recognizes Michal Lipson who recently received the Provost Award for Distinguished Scholarship for research in the field of silicon photonics.

In a letter from Provost Kent Fuchs, The Provost Award for Distinguished Scholarship is "given to recognize distinguished research by outstanding tenured faculty early in their careers. It is an opportunity for the university to recognize its talented researchers". In Professor Lipson’s case, "the award was granted for her research in the field of silicon photonics which develops technology for manipulating light signals on a microelectronics chip for future low power consumption".

Michal joined the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University in 2001 as an Assistant Professor. Her research at Cornell involves novel on-chip Nanophotonic devices. She was the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2004, is the inventor of 8 patents on novel micron-size photonic structures for light manipulation and is the author of over 40 papers in the major research journals in physics and optics. She is currently a topical editor of Optics Letters.

“IEEE Fellow”

The IEEE Board of Directors, at its meeting on 12 November 2008, has elevated Sheila Hemami to IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2009, with the following citation: for contributions to robust and perceptual image and video communications.

The primary objective of her research is to enable high-quality, reliable visual communications for all users. All users, regardless of their individual network connection bandwidths, qualities-of-service, or terminal capabilities, should have the ability to access still images, video clips, and multimedia information services, and to use interactive visual communications services. Specific research topics include motion estimation and compensation for video coding, psychovisually-based image processing and compression, and error-resilient coding for transmission applications.

Sheila is currently the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. She chaired the IEEE Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee, and has served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. In 1997 she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She held the Kodak Term Professorship of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University from 1996-1999. In 2000 she received the National Eta Kappa Nu C. Holmes MacDonald Outstanding Teaching Award, and she has won numerous teaching awards at Cornell. In 2005 she received the Alice H. Cook and Constance E. Cook Award at Cornell University for her leadership of the Women in Science and Engineering committee.

“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.

“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....

“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.

“NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER)”

“2003 NSF Career Award”