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IEEE Elects Four New Fellows from UCSD and UC Irvine Divisions of Calit2

12.14.04 -- Two faculty members each from UC San Diego and UC Irvine have been elected Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). They all work in areas of special interest to Calit², including computer vision, computer architecture, video compression and VLSI CAD.

UCSD's Jeanne Ferrante and Truong Nguyen as well as UCI's Glenn Healey and Fadi Kurdahi are among 268 senior researchers from the private and public sectors named to the organization's highest membership level, effective January 1, 2005.

Jeanne Ferrante

The election of Ferrante and Nguyen brings to 24 the number of IEEE Fellows on the faculty of the Jacobs School of Engineering. "Professors Ferrante and Nguyen are stellar examples of dedicated researchers working at the intersection of their respective disciplines-computer science and electrical engineering," said Frieder Seible, dean of the Jacobs School. "Their research successes are all the more impressive because of their strong educational contributions, and in Professor Ferrante's case, substantial administrative duties as well."

Jeanne Ferrante is Associate Dean of the Jacobs School and a professor in its Computer Science and Engineering department. She was honored by the IEEE "for contributions to optimizing and parallelizing compilers." Compiler technology makes scientific applications run faster by providing the necessary interface between programming languages and architectures. Ferrante's work includes the development of intermediate program representations that allow the exploitation of parallelism and more efficient analysis and optimization. The computer scientist joined the UCSD faculty in 1994 after sixteen years on the research staff at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1974.

Truong Nguyen

Truong Nguyen is a professor in the Jacobs School's Electrical and Computer Engineering department, where his research focuses on image and video compression and signal processing. IEEE cited him for "contributions to the theory and applications of filterbanks and wavelets"-the topic of a popular textbook he co-authored with Gilbert Strang in 1997 (Wellesley-Cambridge Press). Wavelets refer to the tiny waves of video information into which video streams may be decomposed for further manipulation and processing. Nguyen's research involves invention, development, analysis and implementation of multi-rate systems, with emphasis on low-power application in image and video processing and implementations on digital signal processor (DSP) architectures. After receiving his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1989, Nguyen worked with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 1989 to 1994, and taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Boston University prior to joining the UCSD faculty in 2001.

Glenn Healey

Glenn Healey is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department in UCI's Henry Samueli School of Engineering, and director of the university's Computer Vision Lab. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1988. Healey was cited by the IEEE for his "contributions to the modeling and processing of multispectral and hyperspectral images." Healey's research is focused primarily on the physics of vision and on color vision. His efforts are aimed at the development of representations and algorithms that support the recognition of three-dimensional objects in complex scenes. The applications for Healey's work include target detection in infrared images, fire detection, motion tracking, color illumination for the inspection of plants, and illumination invariant recognition in satellite images. In the future, his work may be used in the classification and quantification of cells in brain images for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and other conditions.

Fadi Kurdahi

Fadi Kurdahi is also a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department in the Henry Samueli School. The IEEE hailed his "contributions to design automation of digital systems and to reconfigurable computing." Kurdahi joined the UCI faculty in 1987 after receiving his Ph.D. in computer engineering the same year from the University of Southern California. He works in the area of VLSI CAD on high-level synthesis, estimation and design methodology of large-scale, mostly digital systems.

The IEEE Board of Directors selects Fellows based on an extraordinary record of research accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Since 1963, IEEE has acknowledged those individuals who have contributed to the advancement of engineering science and technology (although the fellowships date back to 1912 and a predecessor organization of IEEE).