Abbas El Gamal
Hitachi America Professor
Chair, Department of
Electrical Engineering
Summer 2014
Dear Electrical Engineering Alumni, Friends, and Colleagues,
These are exciting times for electrical engineering as a field and for our department. We have been thinking
deeply about where EE is going and what we as a department should do to live up to our glorious past. Our
department still ranks at the top of all EE departments in the world. We still attract the best and the brightest
EE students in the world. But our field is in a transition from the era of evolutionary advances in computing
and communication systems to a future in which new revolutionary technologies and systems will be needed
to meet the demands of a big-data-driven world and the societal challenges in areas such as healthcare and
energy. I will share with you some of the exciting developments in the department last year, which collectively
aim to help the department lead this transition.
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Faculty hiring. Hiring the faculty with the vision to lead the department in new strategic directions and
to strengthen our core areas is our highest priority. I am happy to report that last year three outstanding
faculty Juan Rivas (power electronics), David Tse (information theory and applications), and Jonathan
Fan (nanophotonics, flexible metamaterials) have joined our department. In addition, we have hired two
star junior faculty, John Duchi (machine learning, information theory) joint with Statistics and Gordon
Wetzstein (computational imaging and display). They will both be starting in Fall, 2014.
•
Undergraduate curriculum. Last year we made significant changes to the undergraduate requirements
to introduce application early, enhance student learning, and to provide them with more flexibility to
take courses outside EE or to complete their coterminal program earlier. As a follow up, we held a faculty
retreat last fall solely focused on undergraduate courses. After presentations of course objectives and
syllabi by each of the faculty who teach undergraduates, we developed a plan to revise several of our core
undergraduate courses and introduce new core and capstone courses taught by some of our top teachers.
Several of these courses, we believe will have broader appeal to students in other disciplines. The revised
and new courses will be rolled out starting Fall 2014.
•
MS program. We streamlined the MS course requirements to provide the students with more flexibility
and to improve program advising. We are also introducing a new joint EE MS/MBA program with the
Graduate School of Business. This program builds on the culture of entrepreneurship and creativity
in the schools of business and engineering at Stanford and will better equip our students to take new
technologies to commercial products. •
EE online. In December 2012, we received funding from the School of Engineering to develop online
versions of our most popular MS courses. The main goals are to improve learning outcomes of our
students, increase program flexibility, permit increased participation in the Bing overseas studies by our
undergrads, and to offer these courses as MOOCs to showcase the department. Last year we developed
five online courses and offered them conventionally, as flipped classes, and using teaching fellows. We are
continuing the experiment this year by developing several undergraduate and graduate online courses
and assessing the learning outcomes of the developed courses.
David Packard Building, 350 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-9505
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New external department website. One of our most important priorities is to improve
communication within the department and with prospective undergraduate and graduate
students, Alumni, and industry partners. I am happy to report that we have recently released
our new and much improved department web site ee.stanford.edu. This web site has updated
descriptions of the department research areas and the faculty who work in each area, a more
complete list of people with links to their individual web pages, a complete and up to date listing
of all seminars and events of interest to the entire department. Please browse it and tell us what
you think.
•
New research initiatives. EE plans to establish new collaborations with faculty in the Neurosciences
Institute and the ChEM-H Institute – both of which will be housed in new facilities across the street
from the Allen Building. Even more significantly, EE is playing key leadership roles in creating two
exciting new strategic initiatives that will span all areas of the department and help create a
myriad of new collaborations across Stanford. The first is the Stanford Data Science Initiative
(SDSI), which aims to conduct fundamental research on novel data management and exploitation
techniques, to develop complete data-based solutions for pressing scientific and engineering
problems that face society and corporations, and to provide education in data science for the next
generation of leaders. The second is the The SystemX Alliance, which will bring together academic
experts and industry leaders working at all abstraction levels (from system design down to device
physics). As these two initiatives begin to materialize, I will describe them in more details in the
coming years.
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Modernization of student and lab spaces. A key ingredient in reinventing EE is having modern
open and readily configurable office and lab spaces for students and faculty to collaborate
with each other and with researchers from other fields and from industry. The Stanford d.school,
the new Engineering Quad buildings, as well as the companies our students will work for have
already demonstrated the effectiveness of open and flexible spaces for enhancing creativity and
productivity, fostering collaborations, and strengthening the sense of community. We are in the
process of planning major renovations in the Allen and Packard buildings as well as a set of new
shared labs that will support the rapid prototyping and testing of intelligent systems.
Following are several additional highlights from 2013-2014.
Research Highlights
•
In a study published in Nature Geoscience, scientists operating the Cassini satellite, including
Stanford’s Howard Zebker, present evidence that Titan has seasonal cycles analogous to Earth’s,
and that the moon’s surface conditions change as the Titan year unfolds.
•
Ada Poon has invented a way to wirelessly transfer power deep inside the body and then use
this power to run tiny electronic medical gadgets such as pacemakers, nerve stimulators or new
sensors and devices yet to be developed.
•
Gregory Kovacs’ group, in collaboration with Texas Instruments, is looking at the next step in
interactive gaming – a handheld controller that gauges the player’s brain activity and makes
games more exciting when it senses that the player is bored.
•
Christos Kozyrakis and PhD Student Christina Delimitrou have created a cluster management
tool that can triple server efficiency while delivering reliable service at all times, allowing data
center operators to serve more customers for each dollar they invest.
•
Shanhui Fan and collaborators from Illinois-Urbana Champaign and North Carolina State
University created a heat-resistant thermal emitter that could significantly improve the efficiency
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of solar cells. The novel component is designed to convert heat from the sun into infrared light,
which can than be absorbed by the cells to make electricity.
• Research led by Subhasish Mitra and H.S. Philip Wong has led to the construction of a basic
computer using carbon nanotubes, a semiconductor material that has the potential to launch
a new generation of electronic devices that run faster, while using less energy, than those made
from silicon chips.
Appointments, Promotions & Retirements
•
John Duchi – Appointed as an Assistant Professor of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering
effective September 1, 2014. He will receive his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley this
summer.
•
Audrey Ellerbee – Reappointed as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering effective
September 1, 2014.
•
Shanhui Fan – Appointed as the Director of Ginzton Laboratory effective September 1, 2014.
•
Sanjay Lall – Promoted to Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Aeronautics and Astronautics
effective September 1, 2014.
•
Marc Levoy – Retired as Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering effective
July 1, 2014.
•
David Tse – Appointed as a Professor of Electrical Engineering effective March 1, 2014. Professor
Tse previously held a faculty position at University of California at Berkeley.
•
Gordon Wetzstein – Appointed as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering effective
September 1, 2014. Dr. Wetzstein is currently a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Media Lab.
•
Yoshihisa Yamamoto – Retired as Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Applied Physics
effective January 1, 2014.
Faculty Awards & Honors
•
Andrea Goldsmith received the Communication Theory Technical Committee (CTTC) Technical
Achievement Award for 2013. Her citation reads, “For contributions to the analysis of fundamental
performance limits for wireless channels and networks.”
•
Sachin Katti won the 2013 SIGCOMM Rising Star Award. This award recognizes a young researcher,
an individual no older than 35, who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of
communication networks during this early part of his or her career. •
James Harris received the 2013 Aristotle Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation
(SRC) for “outstanding teaching and a deep commitment to the educational experience of his
students.”
•
Andrea Montanari and Philip Levis have each won the 2013 Okawa Foundation Research Grant.
•
Jelena Vuckovic has been awarded a Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Institute for
Advanced Study at the Technical University in Munich, Germany. •
Stephen Harris was elected as an Honorary Member of the Optical Society of America (OSA) for
his “pioneering and profoundly influential contributions to the science of light, including optical
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parametric emission, lasing without inversion, electromagnetically induced transparency, and
single cycle optical pulse generation.”
•
Robert Dutton recently received the 2013 Aldert van der Ziel Award at the annual International
Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRA).
•
Arogyaswami Paulraj won the prestigious Marconi Prize of the Marconi Society for “his pioneering
contributions to developing the theory and applications of MIMO antennas.”
•
Stephen P. Boyd has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering
(NAE) for outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education” and to
the “pioneering of new and developing fields of technology,” among other acts of professional
distinction.
•
John Pauly was inducted into the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and
Biological Engineering (AIMBE), “for seminal contributions in Magnetic Resonance Imaging that
enabled new techniques with dramatically improved imaging speed, resolution, and contrast for
biomedical applications.” •
Subhasish Mitra is the recipient of the A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award for 2014 for
his 2002 paper entitled, “X-Compact: An Efficient Response Compaction Technique for Test Cost
Reduction.” •
Mendel Rosenblum was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAA&S). He
was elected to represent the “Computer Sciences” section.
There is so much to be proud of, and yet there’s much left to do. As EE alumni, you all are part of our
storied success—past, present, and future. I’d love to hear your thoughts on our current efforts by
emailing me at chair@ee.stanford.edu. Your ideas and support are essential to everything we do.
On behalf of my colleagues, thank you for being an integral member of the EE community. We’re very
excited about what’s to come in 2014-15!
Best regards,
Abbas El Gamal
Hitachi America Professor
Chair, Department of Electrical Engineering
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