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The paper, "Visualization of Second Order Tensor Fields and Matrix Data," was coauthored by professor Bert Hesselink and Thierry Delmarcelle in 1992. This paper describes some of their work on mathematical topology related to data analysis and lossless compression and visualization of tensor and vector data sets. The committee selected this paper for its importance and long term impact.

The IEEE VIS Test of Time Award is an accolade given to recognize articles published at previous conferences whose contents are still vibrant and useful today and have had a major impact and influence within and beyond the visualization community.

Papers are selected for each of the three conferences (VAST, InfoVis and SciVis) by Test of Time Awards panels appointed by the conference Steering Committees.

The decisions are based on objective measures such as the numbers of citations, and more subjective ones such as the quality and longevity and influence of ideas, outreach, uptake and effect not only in the research community, but also within application domains and visualization practice.

A full rationale will be provided for each paper at the conference opening, where we hope to encourage researchers to aim to produce work that is forward looking and has transformational potential. We're trying to build on our heritage to establish an ambitious future by making it clear at the outset of the conference opening that we want participants to aspire to be writing papers today that will be relevant in decades to come.

Professor Hesselink's research encompasses nano-photonics, ultra high density optical data storage, nonlinear optics, optical super-resolution, materials science, three-dimensional image processing and graphics, and Internet technologies.

Congratulations to Bert on this well-deserved recognition.

IEEE 2017 Test of Time Awards

Engineering Professor emeritus Thomas Kailath will be given the Marconi Society's Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his many transformative contributions to information and system science, as well as his sustained mentoring and development of new generations of scientists.

Kailath is the sixth scientist to be honored with a Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award. The society is dedicated to furthering scientific achievements in communications and the internet.

"The award is being conferred on Kailath for mentoring a generation of research scholars and writing a classic textbook in linear systems that changed the way the subject is taught and his special purpose architecture to implement the signal processing algorithms on VLSI (Very Large-scale System Integration) chips," the society said.

Kailath's research and teaching at Stanford have ranged over several fields of engineering and mathematics, with a different focus roughly every decade.

Please join us in congratulating Tom for this very special recognition. Tom will receive his award at the annual Marconi Society Awards dinner in October.

Excerpted from Stanford News, "Stanford electrical engineering Professor Thomas Kailath honored for lifetime achievement by Marconi Society," August 16, 2017.

The Marconi Society press release, "Legendary Stanford Professor Thomas Kailath Will Receive The Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award," August 14, 2017. 

Related News

Professor Emeritus Thomas Kailath Awarded Honorary Degree, April 2017

Tom Kailath selected as Eminent Member, IEEE-HKN, February 2017

Professor Kailath Receives National Medal of Science from President Obama, October 2014

This month, Electrical Engineering recognized several staff for their outstanding effort! Please join us in acknowledging the extraordinary efforts of Vickie Carillo, Doug Chaffee, Julia Gillespie, Kenny Green, Ann Guerra, Edwin Mendoza, Helen Lin, Joe Little, and Eric Wheeler.

Each were nominated by peers, faculty and/or students for professionalism that went above and beyond their everyday roles. Gift card recipients continue to make profound and positive impact in the department's everyday work and academic environment.

Please join us in congratulating Vickie, Doug, Julia, Kenny, Ann, Edwin, Helen, Joe, and Eric. Modified excerpts from their nominations follow.

Vickie Carillo, Administrative Associate

• Vickie really helps the department run smoothly – all while remaining calm and polite.
• As a colleague, I appreciate her willingness to step in and provide assistance and support!

Doug Chaffee, ISL Faculty Administrator

• Doug's professionalism and inclusion is really inspiring.
• He works so hard on staff appreciation events, we are lucky to have him!

Julia Gillespie, Faculty Administrator

• Julia's transparency is greatly appreciated, especially when there are many people involved.
• Her work is always excellent and thoughtful.

Kenny Green, Facilities Manager

• Kenny is always pleasant and helpful and goes out of his way to find solutions for challenging problems.
• He bridges many groups and finds solutions that work for everyone — thanks, Kenny!

Ann Guerra, Faculty Administrator

• I appreciate Ann's quick responses to all my emails.
• She is so patient and willing to explain.

Helen Lin, Faculty Administrator

• Helen's support in preparing and running the ICCP 2017 was crucial to its success.
• She surpasses expectations!

Joe Little, Principal Systems Architect

• Joe is supremely efficient and responsive colleague.
• His server and networking knowledge is vast, and he's always willing to share.

Edwin Mendoza, Faculty & Staff Affairs Administrator

• His work juggling several projects simultaneously is appreciated by the department.
• Edwin's contributions as a colleague are appreciated — he is such a pleasure to work with.

Eric Wheeler, Systems and Web Developer

• His thoughtful attention is evident in his outstanding deliverables!
• Eric's expertise and ability to take on new areas is a great benefit to the department.

The Staff Gift Card Bonus Program is sponsored by the School of Engineering. Each year, the EE department receives several gift cards to distribute to staff members who are recognized for going above and beyond their role. Staff are chosen from nominations received from faculty, students, and staff. Past nominations are eligible for future months.

Nominate a deserving staff person or group today! We encourage you to nominate individuals or groups that have made a profound improvement in your daily work life. Each recipient receives a $50 Visa card. Nominations can be made at any time.

Orly Liba (PhD candidate '18) is the lead author of a study published in Nature Communications. Her advisor, Professor Adam de la Zerda and fellow researchers have devised a way to improve the quality of images obtained through optical coherence tomography (OCT).

The relatively simple, low-cost fix — entailing a pair of lenses, a piece of ground glass and some software tweaks — erases blemishes that have bedeviled images obtained via OCT since its invention in 1991. This improvement, combined with the technology's ability to optically penetrate up to 2 millimeters into tissue, could enable physicians to perform "virtual biopsies," visualizing tissue in three dimensions at microscope-quality resolution without excising any tissue from patients.

Their study describes how the researchers tested the enhancement in two different commercially available OCT devices. They were able to view cell-scale features in intact tissues, including in a mouse's ear, retina and cornea, as well as Meissner's corpuscle, found in the skin of a human fingertip.

"We saw sebaceous glands, hair follicles, blood vessels, lymph vessels and more," Liba said.

Other Stanford co-authors of the study are former postdoctoral scholars Matthew Lew, PhD, and Debasish Sen, PhD; graduate student Elliott SoRelle; research assistant Rebecca Dutta; professor of ophthalmology Darius Moshfeghi, MD; and professor of physics and of molecular and cellular physiology Steven Chu, PhD.

Excerpted from "Scientists turbocharge high-resolution, 3-D imaging," published on Stanford Medicine's News Center, June 20, 2017

A new 4D camera designed by Professor Gordon Wetzstein and postdoc Dr. Donald Dansereau captures light field information over a 138° field of view.

The difference between looking through a normal camera and the new design is like the difference between looking through a peephole and a window, the scientists said.

"A 2D photo is like a peephole because you can't move your head around to gain more information about depth, translucency or light scattering," Dansereau said. "Looking through a window, you can move and, as a result, identify features like shape, transparency and shininess."

That additional information comes from a type of photography called light field photography, first described in 1996 by EE Professors Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan. Light field photography captures the same image as a conventional 2D camera plus information about the direction and distance of the light hitting the lens, creating what's known as a 4D image. A well-known feature of light field photography is that it allows users to refocus images after they are taken because the images include information about the light position and direction. Robots might use this to see through rain and other things that could obscure their vision.

The extremely wide field of view, which encompasses nearly a third of the circle around the camera, comes from a specially designed spherical lens. However, this lens also produced a significant hurdle: how to translate a spherical image onto a flat sensor. Previous approaches to solving this problem had been heavy and error prone, but combining the optics and fabrication expertise of UCSD and the signal processing and algorithmic expertise of Wetzstein's lab resulted in a digital solution to this problem that not only leads to the creation of these extra-wide images but enhances them.

This camera system's wide field of view, detailed depth information and potential compact size are all desirable features for imaging systems incorporated in wearables, robotics, autonomous vehicles and augmented and virtual reality.

"Many research groups are looking at what we can do with light fields but no one has great cameras. We have off-the-shelf cameras that are designed for consumer photography," said Dansereau. "This is the first example I know of a light field camera built specifically for robotics and augmented reality. I'm stoked to put it into peoples' hands and to see what they can do with it."

Two 138° light field panoramas and a depth estimate of the second panorama. (Image credit: Stanford Computational Imaging Lab and Photonic Systems Integration Laboratory at UC San Diego)

Read more at Professor Wetztein's research site, Stanford Computational Imaging Lab.

Excerpted from Stanford News, "New camera designed by Stanford researchers could improve robot vision and virtual reality," July 21, 2017.

Co-authors Yuanfang Li (MS candidate) and Dr. Ardavan Pedram received the Best Paper Award at the 28th annual IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP).

The conference covers the theory and practice of application-specific systems, architectures and processors – specifically building upon traditional strengths in areas such as computer arithmetic, cryptography, compression, signal and image processing, network processing, reconfigurable computing, application-specific instruction-set processors, and hardware accelerators.

Yuanfang Li is an M.S. candidate and Dr. Ardavan Pedram is a senior research associate who manages the PRISM Project. The PRISM project enables the design of reconfigurable architectures to accelerate the building blocks of machine learning, high performance computing, and data science routines.

Congratulations to Yuanfang and Ardavan for their well-deserved award!

Abstract "CATERPILLAR: Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Architecture for Accelerating the Training of Deep Neural Networks":
Accelerating the inference of a trained DNN is a well studied subject. In this paper we switch the focus to the training of DNNs. The training phase is compute intensive, demands complicated data communication, and contains multiple levels of data dependencies and parallelism. This paper presents an algorithm/architecture space exploration of efficient accelerators to achieve better network convergence rates and higher energy efficiency for training DNNs. We further demonstrate that an architecture with hierarchical support for collective communication semantics provides flexibility in training various networks performing both stochastic and batched gradient descent based techniques. Our results suggest that smaller networks favor non-batched techniques while performance for larger networks is higher using batched operations.

Congratulations to Dianmin Lin (PhD '16), she has been awarded the 2017 QEP Doctoral Research Prize, jointly with Dr. Jamie Francis-Jones (University of Bath).

The QEP Doctoral Research Prize recognizes students who have conducted work of an exceptional standard in the field of quantum electronics and photonics. The winning student receives an award of £250 and a certificate.

Dr. Dianmin Lin is recognized for the design and demonstration of all-dielectric (silicon) phase-gradient metasurface optical elements, such as axicons, flat lenses and blazed gratings, operating in transmission mode at visible wavelengths, as well as multifunctional metasurfaces providing new or combined functions that are difficult if not impossible to achieve with conventional optical components. Her research has been published in Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, and Science. Three patent applications have been filed for her work at Stanford, one patent has been issued, and two are pending.

Dianmin is currently a senior optical scientist working on augmented reality.

Congratulations to Dianmin on her well-deserved recognition and award!

Pictured, The Brongersma Group is concerned with the development and understanding of nanophotonic devices. As part of a worldwide research and development effort on 'metamaterials' - manmade media that possess unique properties not found in nature, students in the group aim to nanostructure the layered materials in conventional optoelectronic devices so as to increase their performance or to achieve entirely new functions. They have successfully applied this approach to the fields of solar energy production, information technology, and optical imaging.

Excerpted from IOP's 'QEP Group Prize.'

Professor David Tse has been appointed to the Thomas Kailath and Guanghan Xu Professorship in the School of Engineering. This professorship was established with an endowed gift from Guanghan Xu, a Stanford alum who earned his PhD in EE. Guanghan established this professorship to honor his advisor, Thomas Kailath, the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus. The Thomas Kailath and Guanghan Xu Professorship carries preference for faculty whose academic focus is in the broad field of signal processing and its applications.

David has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 2014. His research focuses on information theory and its applications in various fields, including wireless communication, energy, and computational biology. David serves at the Stanford Information Systems Laboratory, and is the inventor of the proportional fair scheduling algorithm used in all third- and fourth-generation cellular systems. He also co-authored with Pramod Viswanath the text Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, which has been used in over 60 institutions around the world.

Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, David served in the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley from 1995 to 2014, and was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1994 to 1995.

A fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), David has received the IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award on three occasions, and he has served on the IEEE Information Theory Society's Board of Governors twice. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council 1967 Graduate Fellowship. David has been honored with the Outstanding Teaching Award from the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and he is a recipient of the American Society for Engineering Education's Frederick Emmons Terman Award, the National Academy of Engineering's Gilbreth Lectureship, and the IEEE Information Theory Society Claude E. Shannon Award.

David received a bachelor's degree in systems design engineering from the University of Waterloo in 1989, and MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992 and 1994, respectively.

David's contributions to the field of information theory and its applications make him a deserving candidate for the Thomas Kailath and Guanghan Xu Professorship in the School of Engineering.

Please join us in congratulating David on this achievement.

Related News:

2017 Claude E. Shannon Award, July 2016

David's EE Spotlight 

If electric cars could recharge while driving down a highway, it would virtually eliminate concerns about their range and lower their cost, perhaps making electricity the standard fuel for vehicles.

Now Stanford University scientists have overcome a major hurdle to such a future by wirelessly transmitting electricity to a nearby moving object. Their results are published in the June 15 edition of Nature.

"In addition to advancing the wireless charging of vehicles and personal devices like cellphones, our new technology may untether robotics in manufacturing, which also are on the move," said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering and senior author of the study. "We still need to significantly increase the amount of electricity being transferred to charge electric cars, but we may not need to push the distance too much more."

The group built on existing technology developed in 2007 at MIT for transmitting electricity wirelessly over a distance of a few feet to a stationary object. In the new work, the team transmitted electricity wirelessly to a moving LED lightbulb. That demonstration only involved a 1-milliwatt charge, whereas electric cars often require tens of kilowatts to operate. The team is now working on greatly increasing the amount of electricity that can be transferred, and tweaking the system to extend the transfer distance and improve efficiency.

"We can rethink how to deliver electricity not only to our cars, but to smaller devices on or in our bodies," Fan said. "For anything that could benefit from dynamic, wireless charging, this is potentially very important."

The study was also co-authored by former Stanford research associate Xiaofang Yu. Part of the work was supported by the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford.

Excerpted from Stanford News, "Wireless charging of moving electric vehicles overcomes major hurdle in new Stanford research," June 14, 2017.

By Julie Chang, PhD candidate

The seventh annual IEEE International Conference on Computational Photography (ICCP) was hosted at Stanford University on May 12-14, 2017. Over 200 students, post-docs, professors, and entrepreneurs from around the world came together to discuss their research in this area. Professor Gordon Wetzstein from Stanford served as program chair alongside Laura Waller from UC Berkeley and Clem Karl from Boston University.

Wetzstein leads the Computational Imaging group at Stanford, which works on advancing the capabilities of camera and display technology through interdisciplinary research in applied math, optics, human perception, computing, and electronics. Active areas of research include virtual reality displays, advanced imaging systems, and optimization-based image processing. Wetzstein also teaches the popular Virtual Reality course (EE 267) as well as Computational Imaging and Displays (EE 367) and Digital Image Processing (EE 368). Several members of Wetzstein's lab presented their work at the conference. Isaac Kauvar (co-advised by Karl Deisseroth) and Julie Chang's paper on "Aperture interference and the volumetric resolution of light field fluorescence microscopy" was accepted for a talk. Posters and demos from Wetzstein's group included Nitish Padmanaban's provocatively titled project on "Making Virtual Reality Better Than Reality," Robert Konrad's spinning VR camera nicknamed "Vortex", and Felix Heide's domain-specific language "ProxImaL" for efficient image optimization.

ICCP 2017 was comprised of nine presentation sessions each with several accepted and invited talks organized around topics such as time-of-flight and computational illumination, image processing and optimization, computational microscopy, and turbulence and coherence. There was a mix of hardware and software projects for a wide variety of applications, ranging from gigapixel videos to seeing in the dark to photographic stenography. One keynote speaker was scheduled for each day. In Friday's keynote, Professor Karl Deisseroth (Stanford) discussed the importance of optical tools, namely optogenetics and advanced fluorescence microscopy, to help elucidate the inner working of the brain. The second keynote was given by Paul Debevec (USC/Google), who showed some of his team's work in computational relighting, both in Hollywood to make movies such as 'Gravity' possible, and in the White House to construct Barack Obama's presidential bust. The final keynote speaker was Professor Sabine Susstrunk (EPFL), who spoke on the non-depth-measurement uses of near-infrared imaging in computational photography.

The conference this year also included an industry panel on computational photography start-ups comprised of seasoned experts Rajiv Laroia of Light, Ren Ng of Lytro, Jingyi Yu, and Kartik Venkataraman of Pelican Imaging. Kari Pulli of Meta chaired a lively discussion covering the risks and thrills of startups, comparison with working at large companies, and the future of the computational photography industry.

The best paper award was received by Christian Reinbacher, Gottfried Munda, and Thomas Pock for their work on real-time panoramic tracking for event cameras. By popular vote, the best poster award was presented to Katie Bouman et al., for their work on "Turning Corners into Cameras," a method of seeing around corners by looking at the shadows produced at a wall corner, and the best demo award to Grace Kuo et al, for "DiffuserCam," which allows for imaging with a diffuser in place of a lens.