January 8, 2015
Professors Deepa Kundur and Baochun Li joined an impressive roster of internationally renowned scientists this month when they were officially named Fellows of the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
The two professors in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering were inducted into the 2015 cohort.
Professor Kundur was elevated with the citation “for contributions to signal processing techniques for multimedia and cyber security.”
“My research career has been multidisciplinary,” says Professor Kundur. “I use mathematical tools based in signal processing and applied cryptography, graph theory and dynamical systems, so it was rewarding to have a citation that reflects that breadth.”
She says that achieving the rank of IEEE Fellow is a meaningful moment in her career, because it provides an opportunity to consider the impact of her body of work as judged by peers, as well as future research directions. “Research can be interesting for its own sake,” says Professor Kundur. “But it’s especially rewarding when it is recognized by peers from such an eminent group.”
Professor Li was elevated with the citation “for contributions to application-layer network protocols and network coding.”
In 2007 he proposed a protocol for using network coding to help improve performance, stability and latency of live peer-to-peer streaming. At the time, network coding was a seven-year-old technology with roots in information theory that hadn’t been applied directly to applications before.
“I wanted to see whether network coding was something that has benefits on paper, or whether it was really something that could change the world,” he remembers. “The idea was so simple—I thought this was really something that could be done in the application layer.”
Professor Li’s papers have been cited more than 13,000 times according to Google Scholar.
Professors Kundur and Li join 25 faculty members, including Emeritus Professors, of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering who currently hold the grade of IEEE Fellow.
IEEE is the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology and humanity. Its Board of Directors selects fewer than one-tenth of one per cent of its total voting members as Fellows each year, the highest grade of membership available. The grade of Fellow is conferred to those members “whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interests are deemed fitting of the prestigious grade elevation.”
More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca