January 3, 2018
Professor Ben Liang of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) has been elevated to the prestigious grade of Fellow by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is elected “for contributions to mobility modeling and resource management in wireless networks”.
“My current research is on resource management and performance optimization of networked systems,” says Professor Liang. “I’m interested in how to efficiently allocate different types of resources such as bandwidth, power, and computation capabilities in different parts of a system and also how to optimize the performance of these systems.”
The IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology and has more than 423,000 members worldwide. The distinction of Fellow recognizes those IEEE members who have made “extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.” The grade is conferred upon less than one-tenth of one per cent of the total voting IEEE membership in a given year.
“It’s a great honour to be elevated to Fellow and to be recognized by my peers,” says Professor Liang, who was elevated with the 2018 cohort. “I am very fortunate to be at U of T where incredibly talented graduate students and researchers come from all over the world to work on exciting research problems.”
As a PhD student at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., Professor Liang worked on research related to wirelessly moving information from the internet to mobile users. “At the time, we didn’t have smartphones and we had just made the transition from analog wireless communication systems to digital wireless communication systems,” says Liang. “I began to get involved in research on keeping track of mobile users and effectively pushing information to these users.” After joining ECE in 2002, he continued to work on wireless networking but also expanded his research to meet new challenges arising from new applications at the interface between communication and computation such as mobile cloud computing and the Internet of Things.
Professor Liang joins 30 faculty members, including Emeritus Professors, of ECE who currently hold the grade of IEEE Fellow. “Congratulations to Professor Liang on this significant career milestone,” says ECE Chair Professor Farid Najm. “This well-deserved honour reflects his leadership in the field of communications and I wish him continued success.”
More information:
Jessica MacInnis
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; jessica.macinnis@utoronto.ca