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Eight EECS faculty members named to chairs

Eight faculty members in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science have recently received appointments to professorships.

Professor Dimitri Antoniadis is the new holder of the Ray and Maria Stata Professorship. Formerly know as the Distinguished Professorship and recently renamed after its donors, the chair reflects their interest in education and semiconductor electronics.

Dr. Antoniadis received the BS in physics from the National University of Athens in 1970 and the MSEE and PhD from Stanford in 1973 and 1976, respectively. He came to MIT as an assistant professor in 1978 and was promoted to associate professor in 1981 and professor in 1987. He was the first director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories from 1984 to 1990.

The first holder of the Stata chair was the late Richard B. Adler. Since 1990, the chair has been held by Professor Alan Oppenheim, who has been appointed a Ford Professor along with Barbara Liskov, replacing retiring Ford Professors Alvin Drake and Fernando Cor-bato.

Professor Oppenheim received the SB and SM degrees (1961) and the ScD (1964) in electrical engineering from MIT. His research interests are in the area of signal processing and its applications to speech, image and underwater data processing. He is co-author of the widely used textbooks Discrete-Time Signal Processing and Signals and Systems.

A 1961 mathematics graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Professor Liskov received the MS (1965) and PhD (1968) from Stanford and became a professor at MIT in 1972. Her research focuses on programming methodology, distributed computing, operating systems and programming languages, most recently on Thor, the object-oriented database system.

Succeeding Professor Liskov as holder of the NEC Professorship in Software Science and Engineering is Nancy Lynch, an expert in the theory of distributed computing. Professor Lynch came to MIT as a visiting associate professor of computer science in 1981. She was promoted to associate professor in 1982 and professor in 1986. She holds the BS in mathematics from the City University of New York (1968) and the PhD in mathematics from MIT (1972). Her most recent book, Distributed Algorithms, has just been published.

Professor Rodney Brooks, associate director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has been named to the Fujitsu chair. Robert Gallagher, the original holder of the chair that was established in 1988, is retiring this year.

Professor Brooks generated healthy controversy in his field with his layered "subsumption architecture" for robot intelligence, whereby each layer works independently without global coordination or reasoning. His artificial insects use this architecture to maneuver through rough terrain and over obstacles. Recently he has focused his attention on building humanoid robots with human-level intelligence, and new methods of human-computer interaction in the AI Lab's Intelligent Room. He received the BSc (1975) and MSc (1977) degrees from Flinders University of South Australia and the PhD in computer science from Stanford in 1981. Professor Brooks joined the MIT faculty in 1984 after a year as an assistant professor at Stanford and an earlier two-year period as an AI Lab research scientist. He was named to the rank of associate professor with tenure in 1989 and professor in 1993.

Tomas Lozano-Perez has been appointed to the Cecil H. Green Professorship. The chair-which is used by the department to encourage senior faculty to examine what for them are new research areas where they do not yet have the credentials to secure other funding-will enable Professor Lozano-Perez to study the intersection of biology and computer science. He received the SB (1973), SM (1977) and PhD (1980) from MIT. He was appointed to the faculty as assistant professor in 1981, gaining promotion to associate professor in 1984 and professor in 1991. He has done his research in the fields of robotics, computational geometry and artificial intelligence.

Named to the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professorship, established to recognize and encourage excellence in teaching among junior MIT faculty, is Associate Professor Gregory Wornell. Professor Wornell, who has received several teaching awards including the Junior Bose Award and the Goodwin Medal, received the BASc from the University of British Columbia (1985) and the SM and ScD degrees (1987 and 1991) in electrical engineering from MIT. He has been on the Institute faculty since 1991 and formerly held the ITT Career Development Assistant Professorship. His research interests are in signal processing, wireless and broadband communications, and applications of fractal geometry and nonlinear dynamics in these areas.

David Forney will join the faculty as the new Bernard M. Gordon Adjunct Professor, succeeding Don Clausing. The chair was established in 1978 to expose students to the product-development process and encourage the appointment of faculty with extensive industrial experience. Professor Forney developed modems for Codex (now part of Motorola, of which he is vice president) and made major contributions to information theory and data communications. A member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1983, he holds the BSc (1961) from Princeton and the MSc (1963) and PhD (1965) from MIT. Dr. Forney has been a visiting lecturer at MIT in 1991, 1994 and 1995.

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on November 6, 1996.

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