Two Rice Professors Receive NSF Young Investigator Awards

Contact: Phil Montgomery
Phone: (713) 831-4792

Two Rice Professors Receive NSF Young Investigator Awards

Two Rice professors received Young
Investigator Awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for
research involving parallel computing and signal analysis.

Alan Cox, an assistant professor of computer science, and
Richard Baraniuk, an assistant professor of electrical and computer
engineering, were named recipients of the awards on Nov. 18.

The NSF named 147 men and 50 women from universities in 35
states as recipients of 1994 Young Investigator Awards. The winners
will receive a maximum of $100,000 annually for five years. The
awards are intended to encourage the development of future academic
leaders, both in teaching and research.

Baraniuk received the NSF Young Investigator Award for his
development of new signal analysis methods, which have a variety of
applications including improved analysis of radar and the modeling
of human speech and vision.

Cox was recognized for developing an algorithm that makes
parallel computing simple and efficient on general-purpose
processors and networks. Cox’s algorithm has been used to locate
disease genes on a chromosome and to solve problems varying from
scheduling airline crews to laying out a factory floor.

Explaining his research, Baraniuk said much of his work involves
time-frequency distributions, which represent signals in much the
same way a musical score represents a song.

"Signals and images surround us," said Baraniuk. "A music signa l
on a compact disc, a telephone signal carrying your voice over
wires, an image from a magnetic resonance imaging scan of someone’s
brain-the list goes on and on. For the past few years, I have been
developing ways to view signals from new perspectives in order to
uncover even more information than has been possible in the past."

Regarding his research, Cox said recent advances in computer
hardware have made workstation networks viable alternatives to
supercomputers for solving difficult scientific and commercial
problems.

"My research has produced a new algorithm, or method, for
creating a global memory that is shared by networked workstations,"
said Cox. "It is much easier to write programs using this global
memory, and my algorithm is fast enough to make the global memory
competitive with other more complex approaches."

Rice University is an independent, coeducational, nonsectarian
private university dedicated to undergraduate teaching and graduate
studies, research and professional training in selected disciplines.
It has an undergraduate student population of 2,572, a graduate and
professional student population of 1,375 and a full-time faculty of
448.

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