Department News

At the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems, May 27-30, Dimitrios Loizos, ECE graduate student, was a third place winner for his paper "Multi-Channel Coherent Detection for Delay-Insensitive Model-Free Adaptive Control." Jennifer Blain Christen, ECE graduate student, received a honorable mention for her paper "Design, Analysis and Implementation of Integrated Micro-Thermal Control Systems."

Ms. Erin Fitzgerald, a graduate student in the ECE dept. was the recipient of the "5th Annual Diversity Recognition Award". The purpose of the Award is to acknowledge outstanding accomplishments of faculty, staff and students whose demonstrable efforts foster greater appreciation, advancement and celebration of diversity and inclusiveness in the Johns Hopkins culture and environment.

2006-07 WSE Teaching and Mentoring Awards: Dr. Trac Tran has been awarded The William H. Huggins Excellence in Teaching Award.

ECE Graduate Research Assistant, Ndubuisi Ekekwe, has been awarded the UK Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery (CAOS) 2007 fellowship. The award was announced at the recent annual conference of CAOS in England. Besides other benefits, the fellowship offers full funding for 2-4 weeks research in a choice institution/firm with emphasis on computer assisted surgical technologies. It also covers travel to London for the next UK CAOS congress where Ndubuisi will share his fellowship experience. Ekekwe Ndubuisi is advised by Drs. Ralph Etienne-Cummings and Peter Kazanzides.

"Science Spectrum magazine released the names of the "Trailblazers" today (05/08/06). The Science Spectrum Trialblazers are outstanding Hispanic, Asian American, Native American, and Black professionals in the science area whose leadership and innovative thinking on the job and in the community extend throughout and beyond their industry." The ECE department takes great pride in announcing that Associate Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings and Professor Pablo A. Iglesias have been selected as winners of this prestigious award. Profs. Etienne-Cummings and Iglesias were honored at a luncheon on Sept. 16, 2006 at the Baltimore Convention Center. For more information on this award, please click here.

Associate Professor Jin U. Kang has been promoted to Full Professor effective 07/01/06.

Professor Jacob Khurgin will be a part of a new national engineering research center. The Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE) is expected to revolutionize sensor technology, yielding devices that have a unique ability to detect minute amounts of chemicals in the atmosphere, whether they are emitted from factories or exhaled in human breath. The center is funded by the National Science Foundation and will be based at Princeton University.

Departmental Awards presented at the WSE Convocation
Monday, May 8, 2006 at 3pm
The William H. Huggins Award (Senior): Robert Karmazin
The William H. Huggins Award (Junior): Andrew Liu
The John Boswell Whitehead Award (EE): Marius Kwong
The John Boswell Whitehead Award (CE): Cassius Sims
The John Boswell Whitehead Award (CE): Kevin Zhu

Associate Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings has been selected as a Fulbright scholar grantee to South Africa by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (FSB). The FSB is the Presidentially appointed twelve-member Board that is responsible for establishing worldwide policies for the Program and for selection of Fulbright recipients. This grant is made possible through funds that are appropriated annually by the U.S. Congress and by contributions from partner countries and/or the private sector. As a Fulbrighter, Dr. Etienne-Cummings will be joining the ranks of some 273,500 alumni of the program who have become heads of state, judges, ambassadors, cabinet ministers, CEOs, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors and teachers. They have been awarded 35 Nobel Prizes. The principal purpose of the Fullbright Program is to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of the over 150 countries that currently participate in the Fullbright Program. Fullbrighters are committed to establishing open communication and long-term cooperative relationships in order to enrich the educational, political, economic, social and cultural lives of countries around the world.

Associate Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings has been selected by the Johns Hopkins Institutions Diversity Leadership Council to receive a 2006 Diversity Recognition Award. President Brody will present the awards at the Awards Ceremony and Reception scheduled for Tuesday, May 2, 2006 from 12:00-2:00 p.m. in the Evans Rooms inside of the O'Connor Recreation Center on the Homewood Campus.

Professor Andreas Andreou has accepted the invitation by The IEEE Electron Devices Society to become an IEEE EDS Distinguished Lecturer. The EDS Distinguished Lecturer Program, which is administered by the EDS Educational Activities Committee, exists for the purpose of providing EDS Chapters with a list of quality lecturers who can potentially give talks at local chapter meetings.
Currently, there are 134 EDS lecturers giving talks world-wide for the 120 EDS chapters.

Professor Pablo Iglesias has been appointed as an IEEE CSS Distinguished Lecturer in February 2006.

Dr. Frederick Jelinek, Julian Sinclair Smith Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to statistical language processing with applications to automatic speech recognition.

Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings has been elected to serve on the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Board of Governors for the period 2006-2008.

Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients for one of the Institute's most prestigious honors, election to IEEE Fellow. On November 13, 2005, Professor Andreas Andreou was elected as an IEEE Fellow, effective 1 January 2006, with the following citation:for contributions to energy efficient sensory microsystems.

Professor Jacob Khurgin has been elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America at its October 18, 2005 meeting. Professor Khurgin is being recognized for "outstanding original contributions to the physics of nonlinear optical and electro-optical semiconductors, especially the low-dimensional semiconductor structures"

Research Professor James West has received the Gold Medal from the Acoustical Society of America. The prestigious Gold Medal is presented annually to an individual whose contributions to the field of acoustics and to the Acoustical Society have been unusually distinguished and recognizes excellence in acoustics over a lifetime. The first Gold Medal was presented in 1954, on the occasion of the Society's Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Celebration, and biennially until 1980. It is now an annual award. The award will be presented at the Acoustical Society of American meeting in June, 2006.
Prof. West was also featured on the front page of SundayBusiness in The New York Times on November 13, 2005

Graduate Admissions Policy for Students Affected by Hurricane Katrina
(September 6, 2005)

On July 1, 2005, the ECE Department welcomed new Assistant Professor Virantha N. Ekanayake. Dr. Ekanayake received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and his interests include both asynchronous VLSI and ultra low-power wireless sensor network processors.

Graduate Research Assistant, Duygu Tosun won the Francois Erbsmann Prize for her presentation at the Information Processing in Medical Imaging (IPMI) 2005 Conference, which was held last week (July 2005) in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The Francois Erbsmann Prize is awarded at IPMI to the best oral presentation among all first-time presenters under the age of 35. According to the conference chair, regarding accepted papers: "The overall standard of submissions was very high, and we found it extremely difficult to reach decisions. There were 245 full paper submissions which was 122 more submissions than for IPMI 2003. We were only able to accept 27 (approx. 11%) of submissions for oral presentation with another 36 (approx. 15%) as posters." By my count, 17 of the 26 oral presentations (one paper was withdrawn) were given by presenters who were eligible for the prize. It is a great achievement for Duygu, and an honor for our lab and department. Congratulations to Duygu!
-Jerry (Professor Prince, Duygu's advisor)

Dr. Alexander Kaplan has been selected to receive the 2005 Max Born Award for distinguished contributions to physics in general and to optics in particular. The award will be presented at the annual conference of the Optical Society of America in Oct. 2005.

May 2005 - Students Katherine Tsai (advisor, Dr. Etienne-Cummings) and Michael Bryan Wheeler (advisor, Dr. Prince) have each been awarded the prestigious NSF Graduate fellowship Award. The National Science Foundation aims to ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in the United States and to reinforce its diversity by offering approximately 1,000 graduate fellowships in this competition. The Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based master's or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are at the early stages of their graduate study. The Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) invests in graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the National Science Foundation.

Professor Jerry L. Prince agreed to participate as a member of the Center for Computational Biology (CCB) Science Advisory Board (SAB) in the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles.

The Board of Directors of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) elected Professor Benjamin M.W. Tsui as an IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2005, with the accompanying citation: for contributions to nuclear medicine imaging, especially in single photon emission computed tomography.

Professor James E. West has been named one of Black Engineer of the Year and US Black Engineer magazine's 50 Most Important Blacks in Technology.

Associate Professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings collaborates with the University of Maryland in a spinal cord microchip project.

Professor Pablo Iglesias will serve as a Co-Director in the newly created Institute for Multi-Scale Modeling in Biological Interactions.

In July 2004, the Board of Directors of the IEEE named Dr. Frederick Jelinek the 2005 recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award "for fundamental contributions towards the statistical modeling of speech and language."

In June 2004, The European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing (EURASIP) selected the paper A VISION CHIP FOR COLOR SEGMENTATION AND PATTERN MATCHING, authored by Ralph Etienne-Cummings, Philippe Pouliquen, and M. Anthony Lewis (Pub.06/03) for the JASP 2003 Award. The Award Ceremony took place during the banquet at EUSIPCO-2004 (09/09/04).

On October 01, 2003, Dr. Ralph Etienne-Cummings started a two year term as member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE/ Circuits and Systems Society. As a member of the BOG, Dr. Etienne-Cummings will be playing a very significant role in the governance of the IEEE/CAS. Dr. Etienne-Cummings was also profiled on BlackEngineer.com.

On November 27, 2003,  Dr. James West was awarded the John William Struitt, 3rd Baron of Rayleigh 2003 Award, presented by the Mexican Institute of Acoustics at the X Mexican Congress on Acoustics.

On November 16, 2003, the IEEE Board of Directors elected Dr. Jerry Prince an IEEE Fellow effective January 1, 2004, with the following citation: "for contributions to signal and image processing for medical imaging."

Signals and Systems Demonstrations continue to be extensively used worldwide. Recently added demonstrations (Discrete Time Fourier Series, Continuous Time Fourier Transform Properties) use MathML to provide interactive mathematical descriptions.