Faculty Accolades

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Pramod Khargonekar, Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and computer science and vice chancellor for research, has won the 2021

IEEE Control Systems Society’s Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize.

The Bode Lecture Prize annually recognizes distinguished contributions to control systems science and engineering. In addition to technical merit, IEEE also recognizes the broader impacts of contribution toward the benefit of society and IEEE CSS’s diversity and inclusiveness goals.

Khargonekar is highly regarded for his research in systems and control theory, as well as applications to renewable energy and smart grid, manufacturing and neural engineering. He was honored by IEEE with the IEEE Control Systems Award in 2019 for his outstanding contributions to robust and optimal control theory. He played an essential role in creating a state-space-based theory for H-infinity optimal control, which is considered one of the major achievements in the field of control theory in the last 40 years. Recently, he has started exploring novel research directions at the confluence of machine learning and control.

Khargonekar also was named to the California Council on Science and Technology’s board of directors. The council is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization established to respond to the Governor, the Legislature, and other state entities who request independent assessment of public policy issues affecting the State of California relating to science and technology.

Assistant Professor Zhou Li won a five-year, $527,416 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Computer and Network Systems.

Li’s research focuses on internet system security, specifically data-driven security analytics, internet measurement, sidechannel analysis and Internet of Things (IoT) security. His CAREER funding will help advance his efforts to debug a fragmented Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure.

DNS translates user-friendly names like www.google.com to computer-friendly IP addresses. Although it has been designed as a highly reliable infrastructure, it often fails – sometimes as a result of cyber-attacks or censorship, other times because of software bugs – leading to user disruption and network outages.

“We see more than trillions of requests on a single day processed by DNS, and the volume will keep rising, given that COVID-19 keeps pushing offline activities to online,” Li said.

Li’s preliminary work found that 27.9% of DNS requests from one country to Google were intercepted by network adversaries. His project seeks to develop novel platforms, techniques and tools that enable holistic debugging of the entire DNS infrastructure, both at the network layer and software layer. Li plans to make public the results of his research by releasing data, code, methods and tools through open sources to democratize DNS and network debugging in general for researchers, industry partners and the public.

The IEEE has selected Henry Samueli as the 2021 recipient of its Founders Medal in recognition of his leadership in research, development and commercialization of broadband communication and networking technology with global

impact. Samueli is a UCI distinguished adjunct professor in electrical engineering and computer science.

“I am very honored by this wonderful recognition from the IEEE,” said Samueli. “The prior recipients of the Founders Medal are a Who’s Who of technology industry pioneers so I am deeply humbled to be included in such an esteemed group of entrepreneurs.” Samueli, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from UCLA, began his career at TRW, Inc., where he was responsible for the development of military broadband communications systems. In 1991, while teaching at UCLA, he co-founded Broadcom Corp. with one of his Ph.D. students, Henry Nicholas. The company became a global leader in providing semiconductor technologies for wired and wireless communications.

Samueli’s pioneering advances in the development and commercialization of analog and mixed signal circuits for modern communication systems led to the explosive growth of the consumer broadband industry. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of IEEE, the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Samueli School’s Hamid Jafarkhani has received the 2020 IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition

Award. Jafarkhani, Chancellor’s Professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was recognized for fundamental contributions to MIMO wireless communications.

MIMO – or multiple-input and multiple-output – is used in billions of wireless devices to increase capacity and improve communications reliability. Employed in cellular networks, Wi-Fi, telemetry and other common applications, MIMO uses multiple antennas to advance transmission and receiving capabilities.

Jafarkhani is an expert in communications theory, with an emphasis on coding. His work in this area has greatly influenced the fundamental advancement of the theories of space-time processing and MIMO for wireless communications. Specifically, his research on different aspects of MIMO communications includes the invention of space-time block coding, differential modulation for MIMO, quantized/limited feedback beamforming, distributed space-time coding, network beamforming and cooperative communications.

A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the IEEE, Jafarkhani is author of the book “Space-Time Coding: Theory and Practice.” He is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher and the recipient of numerous awards. Of his most recent IEEE accolade, he said, “It is nice to be recognized by the wireless communications research community and I appreciate the certitude of my colleagues.”

Chin C. Lee, who retired in July 2020 after 40 years on the UCI electrical engineering and computer science faculty, received the 2021 IEEE Electronics Packaging Award for meritorious contributions to the advancement of components, electronic packaging or

manufacturing technologies. Chin, professor emeritus, is an IEEE Life Fellow and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was recognized specifically for his contributions to “new silver alloys, new bonding methods, flip-chip interconnect and education for electronics packaging,” by the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society through the Technical Field Awards Council of the IEEE Awards Board.

Lee’s research focused on the use of silver-based alloys in electronic applications and packaging, and he and his team developed new bonding methods and interconnection processes and technologies. His work uncovered surprising physical and chemical properties of these silver alloys, including anti-tarnishing qualities, anti-electrochemical migration and high thermal stability, which opened the door for the electronics packaging industry to adopt them for next-generation electronics.

The IEEE citation called Lee’s work “integral to developing high-temperature and high-power electronics,” adding that his research resulted in “a wider process window, lower cost and higher yield in packaging components.”

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UCI electrical engineering and computer science professors Athina Markopoulou and Peter Burke have been named 2021 IEEE Fellows in recognition of their outstanding research

achievements. The fellow designation is awarded by the board of directors to no more than one-tenth of one percent of the organization’s voting membership – those considered to have extraordinary records of accomplishment. This brings to 19 the number of UCI electrical engineering and computer science active faculty recognized as IEEE Fellows.

Markopoulou is a professor, Chancellor’s Fellow and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science who joined the Samueli School in 2006. IEEE recognized her for her contributions to network coding systems and network measurement; her research also focuses on computer network privacy and transparency, mobile and social networks, and internet of things.

She leads the UCI Networking Group and serves as the principal investigator of the NSF-funded ProperData Center, which addresses the need for protection of personal data flow on the internet by combining computer science and engineering methodologies with economic policy.

Burke, professor of electrical engineering and computer science was recognized for his contributions to active and passive microwave devices. Burke’s research into carbon nanotubes and graphene has made significant contributions to quantum electronics, quantum information science and high-speed semiconductor devices, and revolutionized ideas about how electromagnetic waves propagate along one-dimensional quantum wires.

His current research focuses on designing and using nanoelectronicbased instrumentation to probe, measure and analyze electrical activity in live mitochondria. This can lead to a better understanding of the pathways used by disease, including cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s and heart disease.

Maxim Shcherbakov, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is a finalist for the 2021 Blavatnik Regional Awards for Young Scientists in the physical sciences and engineering category.

Sponsored by the Blavatnik Family Foundation with guidance from the New York Academy of Sciences, the awards honor outstanding postdoctoral scientists from academic research institutions across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Shcherbakov was nominated by Cornell University, where he worked as a postdoctoral researcher before coming to UCI this fall.

Shcherbakov is an optical physicist who works with a special class of artificial materials, known as semiconductor metamaterials, that manipulate light. He has used common semiconductor materials, like silicon and germanium, to engineer metamaterials that display new optical properties. With discoveries including the first experimental observation of photon acceleration that changes the frequency of light, Shcherbakov’s research will impact technologies from telecommunications to quantum computing.

As a finalist, Shcherbakov will receive $10,000. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 Blavatnik Regional Awards winners and finalists will be honored at the 2022 New York Academy of Sciences Annual Gala.

Payam Heydari, recently named a Chancellor’s Professor, received the 2021 Innovative Education Award from

the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. The award, which comes with a plaque and a $5,000 honorarium, recognizes SSCS members who have made significant contributions to education in the field of solid-state circuits using innovative approaches that have a broad impact.

Heydari, an IEEE fellow, was acknowledged for worldwide contributions to education and dissemination of knowledge in the area of microelectronics, specifically impact on research and education in radio-frequency and millimeter-wave integrated circuits. He has delivered more than 100 distinguished lectures to higher education institutions, IEEE chapters and high-tech companies; and has presented keynote speeches, webinars, tutorials and short courses at premier IEEE solid-state circuits conferences.

He was one of 11 experts who presented the first massive open online course (MOOC) on key circuit concepts and trends in 2014-2015; the introductory course became a model for subsequent MOOCs.

Heydari also won a best paper award from the 2021 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, a flagship conference of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. Heydari’s single-author paper, “Transceivers for 6G Wireless Communications: Challenges and Design Solutions,” was announced as the Outstanding Invited Paper at the conference’s closing ceremony in April. The innovative transceiver architectures presented in his paper will bring about new, emerging applications such as wireless communications at speeds that are two orders-of-magnitude higher than the recently deployed 5G.

EECS Welcomes New Faculty in Academic Year 2021-22

Magnus Egerstedt, Professor

Research Interests: control theory and robotics, control and coordination of complex networks, multirobot systems, mobile sensor networks and cyberphysical systems Education: Ph.D., KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden

Sitao Huang, Assistant, Professor

Research Interests: hardware accelerators, programming languages and compilers for accelerators, high-level synthesis, heterogeneous computing Education: Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Maxim Shcherbakov, Assistant Professor

Research Interests: nanotechnology, nonlinear and quantum optics, optics-based telecommunications and computing, laser physics Education: Ph.D., Lomonosov Moscow State University

Changho Suh, Assistant Professor (January 2022)

Research Interests: information theory and machine learning, graph theory, channel capacity, channel coding, stochastic processes, broadcast channels, channel allocation, computational complexity Education: Ph.D., UC Berkeley