Welcome to the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) group at Rice University. The DSP group has been actively teaching courses, conducting research, and publishing results since 1968.

Volkan Cevher Appointed Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at EPFL

At its meeting on December 9-10, the Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology appointed Volkan Cevher a tenure-track assistant professor of electrical engineering at the School of Engineering.

Volkan Cevher’s activities in compressive sensing (CS) represent a significant breakthrough in signal processing. Specifically, his work has made it possible to use signal models that are more structured than the purely sparse models used to date. His approach, which combines machine learning and CS, also offers demonstrable performance guarantees for realistic models with basic applications, for example, in modeling and compressing natural images. Assistant Professor Cevher is being appointed in the context of a scientific partnership between the EPFL and the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny in the wide-ranging field of signal processing.

Rejecta Mathematica releases inaugural issue

What if there was an academic journal that published only papers rejected by other journals?

Thanks to a group of four Rice DSP graduate students and alumni, now there is: Rejecta Mathematica (math.rejecta.org). Rejecta Mathematica, founded by Mark Davenport, Jason Laska, Christopher Rozell, and Michael Wakin, publishes only papers that have been previously rejected by peer-reviewed journals.

Justin Romberg receives PECASE

Rice DSP alum Justin Romberg has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the nation's highest honor for professionals at the outset of their independent scientific research careers. He was among the 100  recipients of this award, who were named by President Barack Obama on July 9. The honorees will receive their awards this fall at a White House ceremony.

"These extraordinarily gifted young scientists and engineers represent the best in our country," President Obama said. "With their talent, creativity and dedication, I am confident that they will lead their fields in new breakthroughs and discoveries and help us use science and technology to lift up our nation and our world."

Marco Duarte wins prestigious IPAM postdoctoral fellowship

Rice DSP graduate student Marco Duarte has been awarded a prestigious IPAM postdoctoral fellowship. Duarte was among only 45 of the over 800 applicants to receive the award.

Duarte will work with faculty in the Mathematics and Electrical Engineering Departments at Princeton University on new applications of computer science, including machine learning and compressed sensing. Professors Robert Calderbank (Princeton) describes this research as “building mathematical tools to find needles in haystacks.” For example, compressed sensing is an ingenious method for extracting nearly complete information from a large dataset with very few measurements. An outstanding example is the work of Professors Richard Baraniuk and his research group including Duarte at Rice University, on the single-pixel camera, which was recently selected by MIT Technology Review as one of their TR10 Emerging Technologies to Watch.

Baraniuk to lead $6.3 million DoD MURI project developing new techniques for "opportunistic sensing"

Rice is challenging Texans' notion that bigger is better, particularly when it comes to security-related research. Rice led Texas' top-tier research universities this month in awards from the Department of Defense's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program, winning new grants worth more than $9 million, or about 3.5 percent of total MURI funding awarded this year.

"This funding will help Rice continue its leadership in researching and developing technology to improve future security capabilities and surveillance systems and better ensure our nation’s safety," said Sen. John Cornyn. "The important work being done at Rice is a source of pride for Texas."



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