ECE Professors Kevin Kelly and Richard Baraniuk selected for a 2020 IEEE Best Paper Award

Both professors will receive the accolade at the ICASSP 2021 in Toronto, Canada

Kelly and Baraniuk

The department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University has had a number of successes with award-winning papers published within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) magazines.

Recently, two ECE Professors were awarded the 2020 IEEE SPS Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award and will be presented with the accolade at the ICASSP 2021 in Toronto, Canada.

Rice University, Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kevin F. Kelly, and Victor E. Cameron Chair in Engineering, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Richard Baraniuk, were recognized for their paper, "Single-Pixel Imaging via Compressive Sampling: Building simpler, smaller, and less-expensive digital cameras." Their paper, published in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in March 2008, was co-authored with Marco F. Duarte, Mark A. Davenport, Dharmpal Takhar, Jason N. Laska, and Ting Sun.

The authors' paper presented a new approach to building simpler, smaller, and cheaper digital cameras that can operate efficiently across a broader spectral range than conventional silicon-based cameras. Their approach fused a new camera architecture based on a digital micromirror device with a new mathematical theory and algorithms of compressive sampling.

Currently, Kelly's research area focuses on optics and photonics, working in partnership with the ECE and Physics Department at Rice. Prof. Richard Baraniuk helps chair the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Group at Rice and teaches courses on computational signal and image processing along with machine learning.

At the awards ceremony, they will be joining fellow ECE Professor, Santiago Segarra who won the 2020 IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award for "Network Topology Inference from Spectral Templates."

Commenting on the string of recent Rice ECE recognized papers, Department Chair Ashu Sabharwal said, "We are all thrilled by the string of awards for students and faculty, a testament of the department's research excellence and pushing the boundaries of knowledge."