Alumni award winners announced

The ECE Alumni Board of Directors has announced its alumni award winners for 2008. Recipients will be honored at the 39th Alumni Awards Banquet on September 5.

Distinguished Alumni Awards

Distinguished Alumni Awards are given in recognition of outstanding achievement and long-standing loyal support of the ECE Department. To be eligible, individuals must have a degree from the ECE Department at Illinois, and can neither be a current member of the ECE Alumni Board of Directors, nor a current member of its faculty.

Alan Bovik earned all three of his degrees from Illinois: BSCompE ’80, MSEE ’82, and PhD ’84. As a professor of electrical and computer engineering and holder of the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair at the University of Texas at Austin, Bovik has made fundamental and enduring technical, educational, and service contributions to the field of digital image and video processing. In his capacity with the University of Texas at Austin, he also serves as the director of the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE), manages several million dollars worth of contracts and grants, and advises more than 15 PhD students. To date, he has supervised and graduated 35 PhD students.

Bovik is co-founder of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, where he served as the longest-serving editor-in-chief. During his tenure, he is among the most cited journals in any engineering field. Bovik created, founded, and served as the first general chairman of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).

Bovik has published nearly 500 refereed papers and 50 book chapters, and authored four books, including the best-selling Handbook of Image and Video Processing. He has earned high distinction and international prominence in his field, garnering several honors including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Education Award in 2007, which is the highest educational honor given by one of IEEE’s largest societies. Other professional recognition include the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award in 2005 — the highest technical honor awarded by the 25,000-member IEEE Signal Processing Society — as well as the 2000 Distinguished Lecturer Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award of 1998. He is both a Fellow of the IEEE and of the Optical Society of America (OSA).

Ho Kyoon Chung, who serves as the CTO and executive vice president of Samsung SDI Corporate R&D Center, is being recognized as for leadership in the display industry, the worldwide display community, and the commercialization of plasma and organic LED displays. He graduated from Illinois with his PhD in 1981.

In his capacity at Samsung, Chung directs the corporate research staff of more than 2,000 research scientists and development engineers. Under such leadership, he helped Samsung SDI introduce the first 102-inch plasma display in 2005, and the 52-inch single-scan high-definition plasma television in 2007.

For his service to Samsung and his other contributions to his field, Chung received the Medal of Honor for Science and Technology from the President of Korea in 2006. He has also been the recipient of the 2006 prestigious Special Recognition Award from the Society for Information Day (SID); the Special Recognition Award for the Society for Information Display in 2006; the Basic Science and Technology Award from the Ministry of Science and Technology in 2002; Samsung’s Chairman’s Award for Technical Excellence in 2002; and the Korea Display Industry Grand Prize from the Ministry of Industry and Energy in 2001.

Chung, who is also the founder of the ECE Illinois alumni chapter in Korea — serving as its chair since 2004 — hosted several visits by the ECE Department head and faculty to Korea in an effort to promote interactions between Illinois ECE faculty and the Korean optoelectronics industry.

Martin Eberhard, the founder and former CEO of Tesla Motors, graduated from Illinois with two degrees: a BS in CompE in 1982 and an MS in EE in 1984. In Tesla Motors, he is credited with creating a company that designs, manufactures, and sells electric cars that are the first to combine high energy efficiency with great driving performance. Eberhard was directly involved in car design, including that of the motor, battery system, electronic control system, transmission, and styling. The Tesla Roadster can travel 220 miles on a charge and reach speeds of up to 60 mph in less than four seconds.

Prior to founding Tesla Motors, Eberhard was the founder and CEO of NuvoMedia, creators of the Rocket eBook, the first electronic book to use the Internet to deliver content. He was also co-founder and chief engineer with Network Computing Devices, the first company making network-attached graphics terminals that run the X-Windows system. Prior to that, he worked as an electrical engineer at Wyse Technology where he designed the successful WY-30 terminal, among other products.

Ranked among the top 24 innovators of 2007 by Fortune magazine, as well as number 32 out of 50 “people who matter now” in a 2007 edition of Business 2.0 magazine, Eberhard has received countless awards. He received the 2006 Environmental Leadership Award from Global Green and the Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics magazine. Eberhard also is cited as inventor on nine patents, with several more pending.

David Yen, an executive vice president of the Storage Group with Sun Microsystems, Inc., received master’s and PhD degrees in 1977 and 1980, respectively. Yen has more than 26 years of technology know-how, engineering vision, and strong business management expertise.

Yen is responsible for driving growth of Sun’s Overall Storage business and strengthening its ability to deliver comprehensive storage solutions and end-to-end information management solutions to a growing $65 billion market. He has held multiple positions with the company, including executive vice president of Sun’s Processor & Network Products Group and vice president and general manager of Sun’s Enterprise Systems, Integrated Products, Enterprise Server Products, and Enterprise Server Engineering group.

Prior to working at Sun Microsystems, Yen was co-founder and director of hardware development for Cydrome, Inc., a mini-supercomputer start-up company. He was also employed by IBM Research for manufacturing automation and TRW, Inc. for advanced processor development. Yen holds three US patents.

Young Alumni Achievement Awards

The ECE Young Alumni Achievement Award recognizes young alumni (less than 40 years old as of April 1 in the year of the award) who have made outstanding professional contributions to their field since graduating from ECE Illinois.

As the chief engineer for General Electric (GE) Security, Samit Basu is being recognized for his contributions to the fields of medical imaging, signal processing, and homeland security. Basu, who graduated from Illinois with a master’s in EE in 1998 and PhD in 2000, has technical contributions that span 12 years of research and development work in the field of Computed Tomography (CT) imaging and reconstruction. He has led multimillion dollar projects at GE’s Global Research Center, focused on the next generation CT scanners for a variety of applications. In his current position, he is responsible for technical oversight and leadership of the engineering team that makes CT scanners for luggage inspection.

In addition to his contributions at GE, Basu also played an integral role in the formation of the company InstaRecon, which works to market technology to industry , and has written an open source software package called FreeMat. FreeMat allows people from a variety of fields free access to data analysis and reduction tools, and is used by students and professionals alike.

Basu has received several awards from GE, including the 2006 Edelheit Award for work on the Position Emission Tomography scanners sold by GE, and GE’s Technologist of the Week. He was also awarded the 2001 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, has published nearly a dozen peer reviewed journal papers, and been awarded 23 patents, some of which were based on his at Illinois.

Mark Laufenberg, the co-founder and president of PowerWorld Corporation since its inception in 1996, is being honored for his significant contributions to the electric power industry and for providing entrepreneurial vision and leadership to the community. Laufenberg received three degrees from the University: BSCompE ’92, MSEE ’93, and PhD ’96.

In his role with PowerWorld, an Urbana-based company specializing in developing and distributing software to the electrical energy industry, Laufenberg manages the daily activities of the company and participates in numerous consulting projects for the industry.

He has been the principal investigator on three separate NSF Small Business Innovation Research Grants, and has previous industrial experience at Pacific Gas & Electric and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Laufenberg is also a visiting professor at Illinois, and teaches a course that provides the foundation for entrepreneurial ideas and new businesses.

Laufenberg was awarded an IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000, and is an IEEE member and treasurer of the IEEE Central Illinois Section. Laufenberg has also received the 2004 Walter Fee Outstanding Young Engineer Award.  

Marcia Peterman ECE Award

The Marcia Peterman ECE Award recognizes a former ECE Alumni Board Member for dedicated service to the department. The award is named for Marcia Peterman, who served as supervisor of clerical staff and as secretary and adviser to four department heads during the course of her lengthy career in the ECE Department.

This year’s recipient is Michael Winberg. Winberg served on the ECE Alumni Board for more than eight years. During that time he participated in the freshman calling program, student receptions, and mock interviews. Winberg has been a passionate advocate of ECE, working to help broaden the department’s connection to industry, and helping current students at every turn.

Winberg is retired from Texas Instruments, where he held several positions in sales and marketing, including manager of global business and operations for TI’s Motorola account. Winberg began his career with TI as a product engineer.

Winberg earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1983. He also holds an MBA from Indiana University.