News

DSP Bids Goodbye and Wishes All The Best!!

Laura Balzano is a PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, working with Professor Robert Nowak at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Laura received her BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Rice University and the University of California in Los Angeles respectively. She received the Outstanding MS Degree of the year award from UCLA. She has worked as a software engineer at Applied Signal Technology, Inc. Her PhD is being supported by a 3M fellowship. Her main research focus is on statistical signal processing, estimation, and modeling with highly incomplete or corrupted data, and its applications in network monitoring, sensor networks, and collaborative filtering.

Mark Davenport to start as Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in Fall 2012

Mark Davenport to start Assistant Professor position in EC Department at Georgia Tech in Fall 2012.
Mark joins Rice DSP alums Justin Romberg and Christ Rozell.

http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~markad/

DSP'er Daniel Williamson Takes y=phi x Concept To New Heights

DSP Alum Marco Duarte Accepts Assistant Professor Position at UMass-Amherst

Esteemed and award-winning Rice DSP alum Marco Duarte has accepted an Assistant Professor position at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A prestigious NSF IPAM Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton and Duke Universities enabled him to work with Prof. Robert Calderbank.

Duarte received his B.Sc. with distinction and his M.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison; he received his Ph.D. from Rice with Prof. Richard Baraniuk as advisor. He has published and presented widely, and is the co-inventor on several patents. Duarte’s areas of interest include signal, image, and data processing using sparse, compressible, and manifold signal models.

DSP Alum Rui M. Castro Accepts Assistant Professorship of Statistics at University of Technology, Eindhoven

DSP alum Rui M. Castro, formerly of Columbia University, began an assistant professorship of statistics at University of Technology, Eindhoven, August 2010.

Rui's research interests are on the borderline of signal processing, learning theory and statistics. One major research focus is on active learning techniques, also known as sequential experimental design.

Rebecca Willett Wins Air Force Young Investigator Research Program Grant

On November 3rd, the Air Force announced that Rice DSP PhD alum Rebecca Willett will receive one of its prestigious Young Investigator Research Program grants. The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering. Selected as one of 43 young researchers over a range of disciplines, Rebecca will use the grant over multiple years to conduct investigations in photon-limited sensing and surveillance.

Read the full Air Force press release here.

Farinaz Koushanfar receives 2010 PECASE

President Obama today named Rice ECE professor Farinaz Koushanfar as one of 85 researchers to receive the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

"Science and technology have long been at the core of America’s economic strength and global leadership," President Obama said. "I am confident that these individuals, who have shown such tremendous promise so early in their careers, will go on to make breakthroughs and discoveries that will continue to move our nation forward in the years ahead.”

Justin Romberg named 2010 REA Outstanding Young Alumnus

The Rice Engineering Alumni (REA) board of directors recently announced its 2010 awards for Outstanding Engineering Alumnus and Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus (OYEA). Named OYEA was Justin Romberg, assistant professor in the school of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1997, master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1999 and a PhD in 2004, all from Rice University.

From Fall 2003 until Fall 2006, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He spent the Summer of 2000 as a researcher at Xerox PARC, the Fall of 2003 as a visitor at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions in Paris, and the Fall of 2004 as a Fellow at UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. In the Fall of 2006, he joined the ECE faculty as a member of the Center for Signal and Image Processing.

Jarvis Haupt Appointed Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at University of Minnesota

Jarvis Haupt, a Rice DSP post doctoral research associate, has accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota. Jarvis' research focuses on distilled sensing, a multi-step adaptive sampling and refinement procedure for recovery of sparse signals in noise. His work demonstrates that dramatic improvements are achievable using adaptivity in sampling, relative to the best methods based on non-adaptive sampling -- for example, adaptivity enables reliable recovery (detection and estimation) of sparse signals in otherwise prohibitively-low SNR regimes. While at Rice, Jarvis pioneered the use of adaptive measurement schemes in conjunction with compressive sensing.

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.