3 new IC Professors elevated to IEEE Fellows in 2012
© 2012 EPFL
Prof. Babak Falsafi, Prof. Pascal Fua and Prof. Emre Telatar have been elevated to IEEE Fellows this year. This brings the number of IC professors who are IEEE Fellows to ten, a quarter of the faculty.
The 3 professors have been selected by the IEEE Board of Directors to enter the prestigious Association’s Fellow Program « for their extraordinary accomplishments in world‐changing technologies. »
Prof. Babak Falsafi
Prof. Falsafi was elected IEEE Fellow « for contributions to multiprocessor architecture and memory systems. »
Prof. Falsafi has made numerous contributions to computer system design and evaluation including a scalable multiprocessor architecture which was prototyped by Sun Microsystems in 1997, energy-efficient memory technologies that are cited by an Intel patent and incorporated into IBM BlueGene/P in 2008, and computer system simulation sampling methodologies that are in use by AMD and HP for research and product development. His most notable contribution has been to be first to show that contrary to conventional wisdom, multiprocessor memory programming models -- known as memory consistency models -- prevalent in all modern systems since the inception of microprocessors and infamous for burdening programmers with complicated software annotations are neither necessary (shown in a paper in 1999) nor sufficient (shown in a paper in 2007) to achieve high performance.
Prof. Falsafi joined the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL in 2008. Prior to that, he was a full Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon where he led the Microarchitecture theme of the FCRP Center on Circuit and System Solutions, a multi-university consortium of over 50 academics investigating digital platform designs for the end of CMOS roadmap. He is the founding director of the EcoCloud research center pioneering future energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly cloud technologies at EPFL.
His research targets technology-scalable datacenters, design for dark silicon, architectural support for software and hardware robustness, and analytic and simulation tools for computer system performance evaluation. He is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2000, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards in 2001, 2003 and 2004, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2004. He has been a member of ISCA Hall of Fame since 2003 and the Micro Hall of Fame since 2011 for contributions to the flagship IEEE/ACM conferences in computer architecture and microarchitecture respectively.
Prof. Pascal Fua
Prof. Fua was elected to IEEE Fellow « for contributions to the theory and practice of three-dimensional shape recovery from images and video sequences. »
Prof. Fua made key contributions to Computer Vision and more specifically 3D Shape Reconstruction. He initiated several original research directions and plays a pivotal role in his field, as evidenced by his obtaining a Senior ERC grant, the most prestigious European research funding bestowed on outstanding individual scholars. Prof. Fua is also working hand in hand with industrial partners to bring the resulting technology to market. He is for example the Founder of the Pix4D start-up, which is based in Switzerland and active in 2D and 3D representations of the environment. Additionally, Prof. Fua’s teaching and mentoring qualities were acknowledged by the IEEE as a very important element for his elevation to Fellow.
Before joining EPFL in 1996, Prof. Fua worked at SRI International and at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a computer scientist. He has been very active in the IEEE community, for example by serving as Associate Editor for IEEE PAMI and Program Chair at the 2011 IEEE CVPR Conference, one of the most prestigious Computer Vision conference.
Prof. Emre Telatar
Prof. Telatar was elected IEEE Fellow « for contributions to information theory and coding ».
Among Prof. Telatar research activities, one key work stands out in scientific popularity. It relates to multiple-antenna communication systems, a type of medium which governs wireless communications today. Since its publication in 1999, the paper ("The capacity of multi-antenna Gaussian channels") is still very much shared among the international scientific community, with about 8000+ citations in total.
Prof. Telatar was the recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2001. He was a program co-chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory in 2002, and associate editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Information Theory Transactions from 2001 to 2004. He was awarded the EPFL Agepoly teaching prize in 2005.
Prof. Telatar has been at the EPFL since 2000 after working for the Communications Analysis Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories (later Lucent Technologies), Murray Hill, NJ. He is the Director of the Communication Systems Section at EPFL and the Director of the Information Theory laboratory (LTHI).
About the IEEE
The world’s largest association for advancement of technological innovation and its members inspire a global community through its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities. IEEE creates an environment where members collaborate on world‐changing technologies – from computing and sustainable energy systems, to aerospace, communications, robotics, healthcare, and more.
Among the 400'000 members of the IEEE Association, about 400 members join the list of Fellows every year.