ISU Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty and Staff Awards

Faculty and Staff Awards

Somani, Celik Win Best Paper Award

Koray Celik, ECpE graduate student; Soon-Jo Chung, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Aerospace Robotics Laboratory; and Arun K. Somani, ECpE department chair and Anson Marston Distinguished Professor, won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology in May 2008. The paper entitled, "Mono-Vision Corner SLAM for Indoor Navigation,"presents a real-time monocular vision-based range measurement method for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for an autonomous micro aerial vehicle with significantly constrained payload. The proposed navigation strategy assumes a GPS-denied manmade environment, whose indoor architecture is represented via corner-based feature points obtained through a monocular camera.

Kothari and Company Earn Awards for Innovation

Suraj Kothari, professor, and his software company, EnSoft Corp., won the $25,000 top prize in the second annual statewide John Pappajohn Business Plan Competition. The prize was awarded during the Iowa Venture Capital and Entrepreneur Conference in Des Moines, Iowa. The Technology Association of Iowa also awarded the 2008 Prometheus Award for Innovation in Teaching to Kothari and Innovator of the Year to his company, EnSoft.

Mina Receives University Teaching, Mentoring Awards

Mani Mina, senior lecturer, received an award for teaching and leadership from Iowa State’s Engineering Student Council. He also won the Peer Mentor Supervisor Award for assistance with learning communities at Iowa State.

Ajjarapu Named IEEE Fellow

Professor Venkataramana Ajjarapu recently was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). This honor recognizes outstanding IEEE members for their significant accomplishments in the advancement or application of engineering, science, or technology and for their contributions to the mission of IEEE.

Aluru Named 2007 Computerworld Laureate

Professor Srinivas Aluru was recognized for his work to crack the corn genome by being named a 2007 Laureate and Finalist during the Computerworld Honors Program's 19th Annual Laureates Medal Ceremony and Gala Awards Evening in Washington, D.C., June 4. The awards honor individuals and organizations that have used information technology to benefit society. During the evening ceremonies, the program honored 50 Laureates as Finalists and then 10 Finalists as winners of 21st Century Achievement Awards.

Professors, Graduate Students Win Bets Paper Award

Diane Rover, professor; Zhao Zhang, assistant professor; and graduate students Daniel Helvick and Ramon Mercado won the Best Paper Award for their paper, “Reflections on Implementing and Teaching an Advanced Undergraduate Course in Embedded Systems,” published in the Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Microelectronic Systems Education.

2007 Promotions

In early May, the Board of Regents, State of Iowa approved the promotions of two electrical and computer engineering faculty members:

Doug Jacobson was promoted from associate professor with tenure to professor with tenure.
Aleksander Dogandzic was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor with tenure.

Department Honors Four Professors

The Warren B. Boast Undergraduate Teaching Award is given to instructors who "go above and beyond their duty" instructing and motivating undergraduate students. This year's recipients are:

Chen-Ching Liu, professor
James McCalley, professor
Gary Tuttle, associate professor

The Mervin S. Coover Distinguished Service Award is given to faculty or staff members for outstanding service to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. This year's award winners are:

James McCalley, professor
John Lamont, professor

Kruempel Receives Faculty Recognition Award

In a ceremony April 24, Kenneth Kruempel, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the Faculty Recognition Award from the Iowa State University Division of Student Affairs. This award recognizes his collaboration with the Division of Student Affairs in serving students and supporting student success.

Mina Wins VEISHEA Award

Mani Mina, senior lecturer in electrical and computer engineering, was named the VEISHEA Faculty of the Year in Engineering. The VEISHEA Faculty of the Year Award is one of three teaching awards Mina has received in the past year. He's also received the Memorable Teaching Award from the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Iowa State University and the Campus Impact Award, an honor given by the Iowa State Government of the Student Body and Student Union Board to recognize the faculty or administrator of the year. He was nominated by his students for all three of these awards.

Prof. Jacobson Named Educator of the Year

: Doug Jacobson

In March 2007, the Technology Association of Iowa (TAI) named ECpE Associate Professor Doug Jacobson the Prometheus Awards’ Educator of the Year. The Prometheus Awards recognize the outstanding contributions Iowa individuals and information technology companies have made to the industry, community, and state. Last year, Jacobson expanded a computer security competition to high school students, attracting students from 10 high schools. This year, he expects the number of participating high schools to grow to 30. This is the second consecutive year an Iowa State professor has won this award.

Somani Named an ACM Distinguished Engineer

ECpE Jerry Junkins Chair Professor and Department Chair Arun Somani was named a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This award recognizes ACM members who have at least 15 years of professional experience, five years of continuous professional membership, and who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field

Moore Presented with CYtation Award

: Anthony Moore

ECpE Academic Advisor Anthony Moore was selected to receive a CYtation Award. Iowa State University President Gregory Geoffroy presented the award to Moore in a January awards ceremony. The Professional and Scientific (P&S) Council gives CYtation Awards semi-annually to recognize P&S staff from throughout the university who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence. Moore was nominated by Vicky Thorland-Oster.

Guan Receives NSF CAREER Award

ECpE Assistant Professor Yong Guan received a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award. The award is given to teachers and scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within in the context of their organization’s mission. For more information about Guan and his research, click here.

Prof. Dogandzic Wins NSF Early Career Award

: Aleksander Dogandzic

ECpE Assistant Professor Aleksander Dogandzic received the NSF's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award for his project "Distributed Space-Time Processing for Sensor Networks."

Highly competitive CAREER awards support the development of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

Dogandzic received $153,466 to study how large-scale sensor networks can monitor an environment at close range with high spatial and temporal resolutions. He expects this research to play an important role in various applications, such as assessing the health of machines, aerospace vehicles, and civil-engineering structures. It will also be important for environmental, medical, food-safety, and habitat monitoring, as well as energy management, inventory control, and building automation.

Each node in the network will have limited sensing, signal processing, and communication capabilities, Dogandzic notes, but by cooperating with each other, they will accomplish tasks that are difficult to perform with conventional centralized sensing systems.

Prof. Song Wins NSF Early Career Award

: Jiming Song

ECpE Assistant Professor Jiming Song received the NSF's prestigious Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award for his project "Accurate and Efficient Electromagnetic Modeling Techniques for RF Integrated Circuits."

Highly competitive CAREER awards support the development of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

Song's grant of nearly $400,000 will be used on a project to develop next-generation accurate and efficient electromagnetic modeling techniques applicable to the design and analysis of mixed-signal radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC). This research relates closely with educational and outreach activities, including curriculum development of electromagnetic courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Song is also working on creating a virtual electromagnetic experimental laboratory to provide viable, accurate, and efficient solutions for many key electromagnetic modeling issues in mixed-signal RFICs.

The outcome, Song notes, will help attract, recruit, and retain engineering students and broaden the participation of minorities and women in engineering programs. The findings will also lead to advances in developing efficient algorithms in areas such as landmine and underground facility detection and electromagnetic nondestructive evaluation.

Bode Receives 2006 IBM Faculty Award

ECpE Adjunct Assistant Professor Brett Bode received the 2006 IBM Faculty Award for his work on developing management systems for petascale computing. Petascale computing is the push toward developing a supercomputer that has more than a petaflop peak performance. As part of the award, Bode will be collaborating with IBM on a yearlong project to develop software for one of their high-end computing systems. The IBM Faculty Awards program is a competitive worldwide program with the goal of fostering collaborations between researchers at leading universities throughout the world and those in IBM research, development, and service organizations. Bode is also an associate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory.

Maize genome assembly is selected for best paper award at IPDPS

Srinivas Aluru, Scott Emrich, and Anantharaman Kalyanaraman, ECpE; Patrick Schnable, Center for Plant Genomics, paper entitled "Assembling Genomes on Large-Scale Parallel Computers" has been selected as one of the four best papers at the IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium 2006. This recognition is especially noteworthy, as submissions numbered 531, a record that exceeds the previous record (in 2003) by almost 100 and the average of recent years by close to 200. The paper will be scheduled in a 30-minute slot at the plenary session dedicated to the four best papers. http://www.ipdps.org

Research Highlighted in Nature

Thermally Driven Non Contact AFM (ThNcAFM), a new technique for ultra-high resolution imaging, was highlighted in the Magazine Nature in the September 22, 2005 issue under the title "A Good Tip". This method was developed in the NanoDynamics Systems Lab headed by Prof. Murti V. Salapaka. The authors in the related paper published in Applied Physics Letters (Vol. 87 111901, 2005) are Anil Gannepalli, A. Sebastian, J. P. Cleveland and M.V. Salapaka.

Aluru, Somani and others Receive Large Grant

Srinivas Aluru and Arun Somani, ECpE; Pat Schnable, Center for Plant Genomics; and Robert Jernigan, Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics, were awarded $600,000 from NSF for Acquisition of a 512-Node Supercomputer for Large-Scale Applications in Genomics and Systems Biology.

Dogandzic receives IEEE Best Paper nod

Assistant Professor Aleksandar Dogandzic's paper, "Generalized multivariate analysis of variance: A unified framework for signal processing in correlated noise," has received the Best Magazine Paper Award for 2004 from IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. The article ran in the magazine's September 2003 issue. Dogandzic was recognized with the award, which includes a cash prize, at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing held last month in Philadelphia.