Faculty News: Chairs, continued Muriel Médard is appointed as Cecil H. Green Professor in EECS Muriel Médard has been appointed the Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The Green Chair is a fitting memorial to Cecil Green, who passed away on April 11, 2003 at age 102. Sir Cecil Green earned the SB and SM in Electrical Engineering at MIT. In addition to founding Texas Instruments, he partnered with his wife Ida in extraordinary philanthropic activity. On announcing this appointment, Department Head Chandrakasan noted: "Professor Médard is an ideal candidate for this professorship, given her outstanding technical contributions and leadership in communications, signal processing and information theory. The honor of being a Cecil H. Green Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is also held by Prof. Jacob White." Professor Médard leads the Network Coding and Reliable Networking Group at RLE. The primary applications of her research are in the area of wireless communications, in which she won an IEEE-wide paper award in 2002. She and her students and other coauthors went on to demonstrate outstanding results in network coding, which bridges coding, information theory and networking. Network coding borrows from linear algebra, transmitting linear combinations of packets rather than the originals, acknowledging on the degrees of freedom of the set of linear combinations received rather than on receipt of individual packets. The flexibility afforded by coding in the network, without the need to reconstruct the original data, provides significant gains in throughput, reliability and security. This work was recognized with an NAE Gilbreth Lectureship in 2007 and two major IEEE prizes in 2009. She is a Fellow of IEEE and has won several conference paper awards. One of the main contributions of Médard’s group and her collaborators is the recognition that codes can be built in simple randomized and distributed ways, while maintaining optimality with high probability. This technique, dubbed random linear network coding (RLNC), has spawned considerable follow-on work internationally, both in academia and industry, in diverse application areas such as data transport, video distribution, cloud storage, and wireless transmission, and serves as the technological basis for several start-ups. Her group’s and her collaborators’ recent work on integrating RLNC with TCP, a standard means of managing Internet data transport, has shown how the flexibility of RLNC allows its integration into traditional protocols. Her group also implemented RLNC in a low-power integrated circuit. Professor Médard is an outstanding mentor and received the EECS Graduate Student Association Mentor Award last year. She has served as the President of the IEEE Information Theory Society and editor for several journals, and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal on Special Areas in Communications. She served as undergraduate housemaster for many years, served on and chaired the Institute Faculty Committee on Student Life, and co-chaired the Institute Task Force on Student Life. Médard teaches several graduate courses, including 6.450 (Principles of Digital Communication) and an advanced course on network coding.
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New Faculty in EECS Heldt, Sze and Vaikuntananthan join EECS Faculty Thomas Heldt joined the EECS Department in July 2013 as Assistant Professor of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering. He was also appointed to MIT's new Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, where he holds the Hermann von Helmholtz Career Development Professorship. Thomas studied Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, at Yale University and MIT. In 2004, he received the PhD degree in Medical Physics from MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology and commenced postdoctoral training at MIT's Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronics Systems. Prior to joining the faculty, Thomas was a Principal Research Scientist with MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, where he co-founded and co-directed (with Prof. George Verghese) the Computational Physiology and Clinical Inference Group.
Thomas's research interests focus on signal processing, mathematical modeling, and model identification to support real-time clinical decision making, monitoring of disease progression, and titration of therapy, primarily in neurocritical and neonatal critical care. In particular, Thomas is interested in developing a mechanistic understanding of physiologic systems, and in formulating appropriately chosen computational physiologic models for improved patient care. His research is conducted in close collaboration with colleagues at MIT and clinicians from Boston-area hospitals. Thomas has been active in teaching Quantitative Physiology (with Prof. Roger Mark) and has co-taught Cellular Biophysics and Neurophysiology (with Prof. Jay Han). He is looking forward to developing a course on Physiological Systems Modeling and Identification that puts equal emphasis on formulating mechanistic mathematical models of physiological systems, and on using these models to interpret clinical and physiological data.
Vivienne Sze joined the EECS Department in August 2013 as an Assistant Professor
and a member of RLE and MTL. She received the BASc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2004, and the SM and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2006 and 2010, respectively. From September 2010 to July 2013, she was a Member of Technical Staff in the Systems and Applications R&D Center at Texas Instruments, where she designed low-power algorithms and architectures for video coding. Vivienne's research focuses on pushing the power and performance limits through joint design of algorithms, architectures and circuits to build energy efficient and high performance systems for portable multimedia applications. Her work on implementation-friendly video compression algorithms was used in the development of the latest video coding standard HEVC/H.265. Vivienne has received numerous awards for academic achievement including the Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in 2011, the 2008 A-SSCC Outstanding Design Award, the 2007 DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest Award, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Julie Payette fellowship in 2004, the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarships in 2005 and 2007, and the Texas Instruments Graduate Woman's Fellowship for Leadership in Microelectronics in 2008. In 2012, she was selected by IEEE-USA as one of the “New Faces of Engineering”. Vivienne Sze was appointed the Emmanuel E. Landsman (1958) Career Development Assistant Professor in October 2013, and was awarded the 2013 RLE Jonathan Allen Junior Faculty Award. MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2014
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