Three ENG Professors Named IEEE Fellows
By Liz Sheeley
Professors David Castañón (ECE, SE), Siddharth Ramachandran (ECE, MSE) and Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE, SE) have been named Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology.
“It is a great honor to be recognized as a Fellow by IEEE,” says Castañón. “I’ve the highest regards for the accomplishments of the many IEEE Fellows I have interacted with, and I am delighted that IEEE has included me in this select group.”
Castañón’s research has focused on dynamic decision-making in uncertain environments and how to synthesize incoming information to make those decisions. This means developing algorithms that extract maximal information from noisy sensors and select optimal decisions in real-time scenarios. Those algorithms can be used in applications such as threat detection, multi-target tracking, sensor management, object recognition and control.
Ramachandran says that being named a Fellow is, “an immense honor and privilege.” His research involves the study of the spatial complexity of light, how photons that twist and turn, rather than travel in a straight path, fundamentally alter light-matter interactions. His work has impacted and spawned applications in disparate areas ranging from quantum communications and sensing to high-power lasers and biomedical imaging.
Saligrama, head of the data science and machine learning lab, has been recognized for his contributions to detection and estimation theory for structured signals, a subfield of machine learning. His recent work deals with machine learning that accounts for limited resources. Machine learning relies on supervision from engineers to train algorithms to accurately predict outcomes or behaviors, but when that data is limited or unavailable, they are unable guide those algorithms towards correct decisions. Saligrama has made important strides in understanding such non-ideal scenarios to deal with these and other resource-constrained environments.
Through its 400,000 plus members in 160 countries, the IEEE is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics. The Institute publishes 30 percent of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, and has developed more than 1,300 active industry standards. According to the IEEE, the number of fellows selected in any one year “does not exceed one-tenth of 1 percent of the total voting Institute membership.”