RESEARCH NOTES: Closeup
Four Georgia Tech faculty are among 248 people elected to the highest membership rank of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Hugh W. Denny, Daniel C. Fielder, William E. Sayle and Mark J.T. Smith were named IEEE Fellows by the organization's board of directors. They were selected from a pool of 542 candidates and join a growing number of IEEE Fellows working at Georgia Tech.
Until his retirement this spring, Denny was chief of the Environmental Electromagnetic Effects Division of the Georgia Tech Research Institute's (GTRI) Sensors and Electromagnetic Applications Lab. He was elected as an IEEE Fellow for "the advancement of technology to minimize electromagnetic interference (EMI) through improved electrical and architectural design practice."
A principal research engineer, Denny's career at Tech spans almost 35 years. He and his colleagues realized in the early 1970s that the design and construction of a building can be an important contributor to EMI problems between elements of complex systems. Denny integrated all aspects of a building's structure with electrical needs to develop construction guidelines that meet electrical performance requirements.
Theory and applications manuals on grounding, bonding and shielding in construction resulted from Denny's EMI work for the Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Force. These manuals have been adapted and used worldwide in the military and commercial worlds since they were initially published. In addition, Denny organized national workshops and short courses to start a dialogue on EMI problems between builders and electronics users in the late 1970s--this led to important changes in the National Electrical Code and the Lightning Protection Code, all based on Denny's work.
Denny also developed guidelines for grounding and lightning protection systems used on rapid transit systems such as those in Atlanta, Miami and Pittsburgh. He wrote Grounding for the Control of EMI, which has sold more than 9,000 copies since 1983, and he is an industrial consultant on EMI issues. In 1992, he visited India for three weeks as a United Nations Industrial Development Organization consultant. There he gave lectures on grounding, bonding and shielding and advised Indian engineers on testing and design issues. In addition, Denny has worked on lossy transmission line filters, radio frequency bonding, and interference cancellation.
Denny serves on IEEE's Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Standards Committee, is the IEEE Press liaison for the EMC Society, and will serve as treasurer of the EMC Society International Symposium in August.
Dr. Fielder, professor emeritus in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was elected as an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to the study and use of integer and discrete mathematics in electrical engineering." Although he officially retired in 1988, Fielder still teaches and pursues research in engineering applications of integers and combinatorics. Results of his conversation counting formulas continue to be presented at international conferences.
In his 46 years in academia, Fielder has taught a wide range of electrical engineering courses, bringing a sense of enthusiasm and intellectual stimulation to his students. Much of his research, which is devoted to the simplification of complex conventional solutions to circuits and systems problems, has grown out of the inspiration of the classroom and has resulted in improved techniques for classroom presentation of complex material. One of Fielder's most significant contributions in that area is the use of integers as control devices in computational procedures.
His early research on ladder network design led to a pedagogically sound procedure to generate tables of integers for direct design of ladder networks. An improved technique to generate subscripts to produce quotient coefficients for Euclid's algorithm, applicable to the design of linear sequential networks, resulted from Fielder's research into continued partial fraction expansions. He also developed a procedure to generate subscripts that obtain A,B,C,D parameters of admittance matrices. His research on integers resulted in extension of the technique of Cederbaum and Weinberg for symbolic matrix inversion and to a procedure for the direct generation of residues and partial fraction expansion coefficients. Fielder also extended and simplified the Quine-McCluskey boolean reduction procedure and developed new techniques for generating state tables for sequential machines. Several special purpose integer sequences have been collectively classified as "Fielder Sequences."
Dr. Sayle is professor and associate director for undergraduate affairs in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He was elected as an IEEE Fellow "for [his] contributions to engineering education."
As an associate director since 1988, Sayle has directed ECE's undergraduate programs and served as the primary academic advisor to more than 1,600 students, supervised 60 graduate teaching assistants, and scheduled more than 110 lecture and 75 laboratory sections each academic quarter. He is a founder of the ECE's power electronics educational program, one of the first in the United States, and is an active participant in the IEEE Power Electronics Society and the Power Electronics Specialists Conference.
Sayle has been tireless in recruiting young people to the engineering profession. For more than 14 years, he served as the Georgia Tech Engineering Faculty Consultant for the Southeastern Consortium for Minorities in Engineering (SECME). In this position, Sayle presented engineering-oriented demonstrations to students all over Georgia, and he involved local industries and made Georgia Tech resources available on a regular basis. Sayle also developed seminars and in-service training sessions so that SECME teachers are more aware and involved in aspects of the engineering profession.
For his efforts, he earned the SECME Outstanding Service Award in 1988. Sayle also received the 1993 Engineer of the Year for Greater Atlanta from the Georgia Society of Professional Engineers. He remains active in a number of IEEE activities, including chairing the IEEE Committee on Engineering Accreditation Activities and serving on the IEEE Education Society Administrative Committee. Sayle has also served as an IEEE program evaluator for the Engineering Accreditation Commission of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) since 1983.
Dr. Smith, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow "for [his] fundamental contributions to the theory and design of multirate digital filter banks."
Smith has played a major role in this area. His early contributions introduced conjugate quadrature filters (a.k.a., the Smith/Barnwell filters) and the aliasing component matrix approach to analysis and design of digital filter banks. Smith's work introduced the concept of exact reconstruction and provided the first design method for obtaining optimal and near optimal two-band filter banks of this type.
Smith has also received international award recognition in the IEEE Signal Processing Society for his co-authored publications: on efficient recursive filter banks and implementation methods for 2-D subband coding; on directional image decompositions; and on time-domain design methodologies which allow for the optimal construction of low-delay systems, wavelet transforms, time-varying wavelet transforms, and a host of other analysis-synthesis systems. This work has important implications in image and video compression for data transmission and storage.
Additionally, Smith has been active, with his students, in research that has contributed many new innovations in vector quantization, subband coding, speech and music synthesis and modification, and object detection and classification, some of which is being marketed commercially through Georgia Tech. Smith, an award-winning teacher at Georgia Tech, is the co-author of two introductory textbooks, and co-author of two advanced-level books that are expected to be in print by the end of the year.
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