On Friday April 5th, the 2023-2024 Chancellor and Provost Awards for Faculty Excellence were announced.  The annual Chancellor and Provost Awards for Faculty Excellence recognize Rutgers–New Brunswick faculty members who have made outstanding contributions through innovative teaching; cross-disciplinary research, inquiry, or artistic expression; public engagement; and service.

Awardees are nominated by their peers for work that exemplifies the ways all of our faculty work to meet the needs of our students, communities, and the world with recognition in one of the four following categories: teaching, scholarly inquiry, service, and impact.

ECE Professor and Chair,  Yingying Chen, was awarded The Provost Award for Pioneering Research.  Congratulations on this distinguished award and well-deserved recognition!

On Friday April 5th, the 2023-2024 Chancellor and Provost Awards for Faculty Excellence were announced.  The annual Chancellor and Provost Awards for Faculty Excellence recognize Rutgers–New Brunswick faculty members who have made outstanding contributions through innovative teaching; cross-disciplinary research, inquiry, or artistic expression; public engagement; and service.

Awardees are nominated by their peers for work that exemplifies the ways all of our faculty work to meet the needs of our students, communities, and the world with recognition in one of the four following categories: teaching, scholarly inquiry, service, and impact.

Professor and Chair,  Yingying Chen, was awarded The Provost Award for Pioneering Research.  Congratulations on this well-deserved recognition!

Rutgers ECE assistant professors Zhao Zhang, Bo Yuan, and Hang Liu have received a CSSI Framework award from NSF. The project is “hpcGPT: Enhancing Computing Center User Support with HPC-enriched Generative AI”. This is a collaboration between Ohio State University, Princeton University, University of California San Diego, University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, the University of Texas at Austin and Rutgers University with Rutgers as the lead. The total amount of the award is $2,996,103  with $1,199,126 at Rutgers.

hpcGPT is a question answering service for academic computing centers such as National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Ohio Supercomputer Center, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Texas Advanced Computing Center. These Centers provide high-performance computing (HPC) platforms to tens of thousands of users for science and engineering research. In collaboration with Princeton University and Rutgers University, hpcGPT uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) and integrates heterogeneous data sources with different update frequencies to enhance the user support service quality and efficiency, decrease the response time, and improve precision of the support.

With hpcGPT, user support teams can leverage the historical knowledge, real-time system status, and external technical expertise to better support the HPC users. With the high-quality and timely answers from hpcGPT, HPC users can resolve many technical issues, thus reducing  the workload of the user support teams. This will allow the support teams to focus more on new and novel support issues. hpcGPT will significantly enhance the user support service quality, capacity, and efficiency without increasing the human effort.
 

With deep sadness we report that Professor Emeritus Sophocles Orfanidis suddenly passed away on March 2nd.  Prof. Orfanidis retired just last year from the ECE Department.  Dr. Orfanidis, who lived in Highland Park, was a physicist and signal processing engineer. He spent 45 years teaching at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University.   He is survived by his wife, son, grandson, daughter-in-law, and several nieces and nephews.

Prof. Orfanidis had a passion for teaching and education.  He made his five books and numerous course notes available free from his webpage https://eceweb1.rutgers.edu/~orfanidi/

An  article in the ECE newsletter https://www.ece.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/newsletters/2023/ECE-Newsletter-2023.pdf  reflected the admiration and respect faculty had for Prof. Orfanidis.  He will be sadly missed by his family, his many friends, colleagues, and former students.

From Distinguished Professor Athina Petropulu:

I am very saddened by this news.

Sophocles made significant contributions to the signal processing and communication systems. His books on signal processing, and electromagnetic waves and antennas are widely regarded as masterpieces, having educated numerous students worldwide. During his tenure at Rutgers, he served as a model teacher and an inspiration for new faculty members, setting a high standard for excellence in educational delivery.

The ECE Newsletter column dedicated to him was a heartfelt acknowledgment of his dedication and the indelible mark he left on our students and faculty. It was very timely too.

May his memory be eternal.

Sincerely,

Athina

From Distinguished Professor Narayan Mandayam:

I’m really sorry to hear this.  I’m sharing below some thoughts about him.

Sophocles was the best teacher I have seen in my time in the ECE department at Rutgers. His dedication and commitment to teaching and student learning were exemplary. In my experience while department chair, he was the only faculty member I can say that was willing to take on a new course assignment, even in an area somewhat removed from his repertoire of courses in signal processing and linear systems, and executing it better than anyone had done it in the past. Upon my request, I was amazed at how well he taught Digital Logic Design during the last few years of his teaching in the department. I have never seen students enrolled in large classes happier than when Sophocles was teaching them.

It was a pleasure to have had Sophocles as a faculty colleague for over 25 years.

Narayan