Faculty

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Arogyaswami Paulraj.

Paulraj joins 14 other inductees this year, recognized for their inventions that have changed the world. The inductee ceremony will be held on May 3, 2018 at the National Building Museum, Washington D.C.

Paulraj pioneered MIMO—Multiple Input, Multiple Output—a wireless technology that has revolutionized broadband wireless internet access for billions of people worldwide. MIMO improves both transmission data rates and expands network coverage. It is the essential foundation for all current (WiFi and 4G mobile) and future broadband wireless communications.

About the National Inventors Hall of Fame:
The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is the premier non-profit organization in America dedicated to recognizing inventors and invention, promoting creativity, and advancing the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. Founded in 1973 in partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, NIHF is committed to not only honoring the individuals whose inventions have made the world a better place, but also to ensuring American ingenuity continues to thrive in the hands of coming generations through its national, hands-on educational programming and challenging collegiate competitions focused on the exploration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. NIHF has served more than 1 million children and 125,000 educators and interns, and awarded more than $1 million to college students for their innovative work and scientific achievement through the help of its sponsors.

Congratulations to Paulraj for this well deserved, and very impressive, honor!

Read more about NIHF inductee Arogyaswami Paulraj 

Excerpted from National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The Stanford chapter of Tau Beta Pi, an engineering honor society, is proud to announce the inaugural "Teaching Honor Roll," which recognizes the extraordinary teaching of 12 educators in the School of Engineering, three are from Electrical Engineering.

Selection criteria include great teaching, extraordinary inspiration to study a topic, outstanding mentoring and particularly creative lecturing, but are by no means limited to these characteristics. Any undergraduate in the School of Engineering can nominate an instructor.

The 2017 honorees in the Tau Beta Pi Teaching Honor Roll include Electrical Engineering's Stephen Boyd, Reza Mahalati, and Rahul Prabala (BS '16, MS '17).

"I'm so glad to be able to make an impact with EE108," said Rahul Prabala (BS '16, MS '17) on hearing the news of his inclusion. "And I'm honored to be part of the first TBP Teaching Honor Roll."

The honor roll will be displayed in the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center, with plaques bearing the names and short quotes from this year's 12 recipients. The Teaching Honor Roll wall can be found on the ground floor of Huang, near NVIDIA Auditorium. In subsequent years, a list of previous winners will be maintained on the Tau Beta Pi Honor Roll website.

Tau Beta Pi is the nation's second oldest honor society. Founded in 1885, it has chapters in at least 242 U.S. colleges and universities and a membership of well over 550,000. Tau Beta Pi promotes academic excellence, civic leadership and community service for students. In their duties, members organize panel discussions, host industry dinners and conduct math and science programs at local K-12 schools, among many other activities.

Congratulations Stephen, Reza, and Rahul!

Excerpted from Stanford Engineering's, "Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society debuts its "Teaching Honor Roll"" Dec. 6, 2017.

Professor Amin Arbabian and team are looking for ways to power tiny devices that may be used to pinpoint and repair problems deep inside the body without the trauma of major surgery or the side effects of systemic treatments like chemotherapy.

Ideally, the implants could be placed alongside vital organs to take sensor readings, deliver tiny amounts of drugs, provide remedial jolts of electricity or combinations of the above.

There are many challenges that stand between concept and execution, one of which is providing power to the devices. EE professor Amin Arbabian and his team, including graduate students Marcus Weber, Jayant Charthad and Ting Chia Chang, have been working on this approach for years, putting together electronic components in a modular design to create something new: an implantable device platform the size of a grain of rice that is designed to let engineers swap essential modules depending on the functions desired.

"Think of our implant platform as the chassis of a car that we can customize for different applications," Weber said.

Each implant contains a power-receiving module that can convert the energy from ultrasound waves into usable electricity. This is based on the well-known principle of piezoelectricity – the subtle pressure exerted by sound waves can compress certain crystals in a way that creates a flow of electrons. According to tests thus far, their implants can be powered beyond 12 centimeters below the skin, or a bit under 5 inches – which is sufficient for targeting most any vital organ in the body. The researchers believe they can implant devices even deeper in the future.

To store power between ultrasound charges, the engineers equipped the implant with capacitors instead of bulky batteries. The nanocapacitors store enough of a charge to run the onboard processor that controls each implant and power the implant's ultrasound transmitter.

The team is designing a skin patch that will serve as the control hub and a central power source for their closed-loop system. The skin patch draws on advice from Butrus "Pierre" Khuri-Yakub to think of it like the cell tower in a mobile phone network, relaying signals and orchestrating the activity of two or more implants in different parts of the body.

"We anticipate that as we further refine and test the system, we will find multiple applications beyond epilepsy, hypertension and diabetes, including bladder incontinence, chronic pain and cardiac arrhythmia," Arbabian says.

Read about the IEEE demonstrations at ISSCC and VLSI, or learn more about the lab's implant work at arbabianlab.stanford.edu/research/implants.

Excerpted from Stanford Engineering, "How implants powered by ultrasound can help monitor health," December 4, 2017.

The Great Teaching Showcase is a two-part event that brings together faculty and instructors from all seven schools at Stanford to share success stories and celebrate our collective commitment to improving learning through classroom innovation.

Part one, "Faces of Teaching" will feature short talks that focus on instructors' and students' personal journeys as teachers and learners.

The second part, Gallery Walk, will share successful models of course and assignment design, pedagogical approaches, and innovative classroom ideas to improve learning outcomes, drive student engagement, model inclusive teaching and learning, and reflect on challenges and opportunities.

We are pleased that two Electrical Engineering faculty will be presenting – professors Juan Rivas-Davila and Gordon Wetzstein. Juan's presentation is titled, "Ready-to-build power electronics design projects."

Gordon's presentation is titled, "Project-based learning in EECS: virtual reality as a case study."

Congratulations to Juan and Gordon on their acceptance into this important Stanford event!

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced Balaji Prabhakar of Stanford University as a 2017 ACM Fellow. ACM Fellows are selected each year for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

The 2017 ACM Fellows were selected by their peers from more than 100,000 ACM members worldwide and represent the top one percent of ACM members.

ACM recognizes excellence through its eminent series of awards for technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer science and information technology. ACM also names as Fellows and Distinguished Members those members who, in addition to professional accomplishments, have made significant contributions to ACM's mission.

"To be selected as a Fellow is to join our most renowned member grade and an elite group that represents less than 1 percent of ACM's overall membership," explains ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. "The Fellows program allows us to shine a light on landmark contributions to computing, as well as the men and women whose hard work, dedication, and inspiration are responsible for groundbreaking work that improves our lives in so many ways."

The 2017 Fellows have been cited for numerous contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, big data, computer architecture, computer graphics, high performance computing, human-computer interaction, sensor networks, and wireless networking.

ACM will formally recognize its 2017 Fellows at the annual Awards Banquet, to be held in San Francisco on June 23, 2018. Additional information about the 2017 ACM Fellows, and the awards event, as well as previous ACM Fellows and award winners, is available on the ACM Awards site.

Please join us in congratulating Balaji!

H. Tom Soh has been elected to the rank of National Academy of Inventors Fellow. The NAI Fellows committee chose Tom as he "has demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society."

Those elected to the rank of National Academy of Inventors (NAI) Fellow are named inventors on U.S. patents and were nominated by their peers for outstanding contributions in areas such as patents and licensing, innovative discovery and technology, significant impact on society, and support and enhancement of innovation.

The 2017 class of NAI Fellows was evaluated by the 18 members of the 2017 Selection Committee, which encompassed NAI Fellows, U.S. National Medals recipients, National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and senior officials from the USPTO, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Association of American Universities, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, Association of University Technology Managers, and National Inventors Hall of Fame, among other organizations.

"I am incredibly proud to welcome our 2017 Fellows to the Academy," said NAI President Paul Sanberg. "These accomplished individuals represent the pinnacle of achievement at the intersection of academia and invention––their discoveries have changed the way we view the world. They epitomize the triumph of a university culture that celebrates patents, licensing, and commercialization, and we look forward to engaging their talents to further support academic innovation."

Please congratulate Tom for this very well-deserved recognition of his groundbreaking contributions to biosensors and synthetic antibodies.

NAI Press Release, "National Academy of Inventors Announces 2017 Fellows," Dec. 12, 2017

The paper, "ESPRIT-Estimation of Signal Parameters Via Rotational Invariance Techniques" was coauthored by professor Thomas Kailath and Richard Roy in 1989.

The award will be presented at the Opening Ceremony of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Calgary, Canada. Ali H. Sayed, president of IEEE Signal Processing Society, will present emeritus professor Kailath with the award.

ICASSP is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference introduces new developments in the field and provides an engaging forum to exchange ideas with researchers and developers. Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence encompass many areas including advanced communications technologies and smarter homes/devices.

Thomas Kailath's research and teaching have ranged over several fields of engineering and mathematics: information theory, communications, linear systems, estimation and control, signal processing, semiconductor manufacturing, probability and statistics, and matrix and operator theory. He has also co-founded and served as a director of several high-technology companies. He has mentored an outstanding array of over a hundred doctoral and postdoctoral scholars. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Indian National Academy of Engineering, the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World and the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering. In 2006, he was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. In 2014, he received a US National Medal of Science from President Obama "for transformative contributions to the fields of information and system science, for distinctive and sustained mentoring of young scholars, and for translation of scientific ideas into entrepreneurial ventures that have had a significant impact on industry." Read article.

Congratulations to Tom and Richard on this well-deserved recognition.

Stephen Boyd has been elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering, one of China's highest academic honors. The elected candidates become lifetime members of the academy. Stephen is one of 17 elected foreign academicians.

New academicians are selected every two years from academic institutions, research institutes, enterprises and hospitals, both inside and outside China.

The Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) – which falls under the State Council, China's top governing body – also has a role advising Beijing on the country's economic and social development, and its new members need to have "strict political clearance."

Foreigners are eligible for membership if they have contributed to the development of or played an important role in promoting China's engineering, science, and technology, the CAE said on its website.

The academy's selection of foreign members is part of this effort to strengthen China's presence and influence in engineering, science, and technology, the organisation said on its website.

Please join us in congratulating Stephen for this special and very well-deserved recognition.

Excerpts taken from "Bill Gates given one of China's highest academic honours," published in South China Morning Post.

Congratulations to Andrea Montanari on his elevation to IEEE Fellow. IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Less than 0.1% of voting IEEE members are selected annually for this member recognition. IEEE Fellows will be formally announced by the IEEE at end of the 2017.

Professor Montanari's research interests include understanding patterns in complex high-dimensional data, and what mathematical and algorithmic methods can be used to disentangle them from noise. His research spans several disciplines including statistics, computer science, information theory, and machine learning. He also works on applications of these techniques to healthcare data analytics.

Congratulations to Andrea!

Related:

Andrea's EE Spotlight

Emeritus professor Tom Kailath has been elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The citation reads, "For contributions to information theory and related areas, and for applications."

The Fellows of the AMS designation recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics. Among the goals of the program are to create an enlarged class of mathematicians recognized by their peers as distinguished because of their contributions to the profession, and to honor excellence.

On the 2018 Class of Fellows of the AMS, Professor Kenneth A. Ribet, President of the American Mathematical Society, states, "This year's class of AMS Fellows has been selected from a large and deep pool of superb candidates. It is my pleasure and honor as AMS President to congratulate the new Fellows for their diverse contributions to the mathematical sciences and to the mathematics profession."

Please join us in congratulating Tom for this most recent recognition of his groundbreaking contributions!

Read more at the American Mathematical Fellows.