2022 IEEE President K.J. Ray Liu Honored for Leadership

Not like many budding engineers, K.J. Ray Liu wasn’t impressed to enter the sphere by tinkering with electronics or following within the footsteps of a member of the family. Rising up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his authorities’s name for college kids to develop into electrical engineers to assist manufacture semiconductors within the Nineteen Seventies, when the nation’s financial system was struggling.

“College students who had been good in math, science, and physics all needed to be {an electrical} engineer as a result of that was the highest precedence of the federal government,” Liu says. “That’s how I acquired into engineering. Now Taiwan is a world chief in semiconductors.”

However by the point he graduated from college in 1983, semiconductor services had been nonetheless beneath development, so there have been no jobs accessible.

As a substitute, he went on to have a profitable profession as an educator and entrepreneur within the United States.

For 31 years, he was a professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher on the University of Maryland in Faculty Park till he retired in 2021.

Liu was the chairman, CEO, and CTO of Origin Wireless, a startup he based in Rockville, Md. Origin, which was acquired by ADT in February, pioneers artificial intelligence for wi-fi sensing and indoor monitoring.

Liu, an IEEE Fellow, is an lively IEEE volunteer who served because the group’s president in 2022.

IEEE honored him with this yr’s Haraden Pratt Award for “transformative and impactful management.”

Liu is credited with growing the range of nominees for IEEE’s Fellow program, which is the best stage of membership. He additionally led the hassle to realign the organization’s regions geographically to make sure extra equitable world illustration on the IEEE Board of Directors.

He obtained the Pratt honor on 24 April throughout a ceremony in New York City. The IEEE Foundation sponsored the Board-level award.

“Greater than something, I share the distinction with the volunteers and workers I had the privilege to work alongside,” he says. “Our arduous work is fueled by our shared devotion to this skilled dwelling we love and look after a lot.”

Within the Nineteen Seventies, Taiwan’s policymakers determined to enhance the nation’s financial system by pivoting from making merchandise reminiscent of footwear and umbrellas to manufacturing electronics.

The business acquired its begin in 1976 when RCA, a significant electronics firm on the time, agreed to switch licensed semiconductor processes to Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute. ITRI spun off a number of semiconductor-related firms together with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC, launched in 1987, is the world’s largest devoted semiconductor foundry.

Liu graduated in 1983 with a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, in Taipei. On the time, there have been no semiconductor firms to work for, he says.

“These days, lots of the nation’s college graduates go proper to TSMC to get a job,” he says. “However again then, there was no actual job market.

“Most of my classmates—together with me—got here to the U.S. for graduate research. Many people stayed and, during the last three to 4 a long time, contributed to the event of digital laptop communication expertise within the U.S.”

Liu left Taiwan after a two-year obligatory stint within the Republic of China Armed Forces to attend the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, the place in 1987 he earned a grasp’s diploma in electrical engineering.

“If I may also help make IEEE a greater skilled dwelling for future members, that’s one thing that I pays again to IEEE.”

He went on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering in 1990 from the University of California, Los Angeles. His curiosity in digital sign processing and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) was sparked whereas at UCLA. At present VLSI powers all trendy electronics.

“Once I was a graduate pupil, there was no wireless communication. All people had a landline,” he explains.

VLSI was an necessary, lively analysis discipline on the time.

“My analysis curiosity was digital sign processing,” he says. “Sooner or later I noticed a e book on VLSI sign processing on my professor’s bookshelf. I instantly thought to myself: That’s the discipline I wish to pursue.

“VLSI is one lane, digital sign processing is the opposite, and there’s a bridge linking the 2. I used to be eager about each areas, so I did my Ph.D. thesis on VLSI sign processing.”

After graduating, Liu joined the College of Maryland, the place he’s credited with establishing its signal processing research program.

Along with instructing, he carried out analysis on a broad vary of sign processing and communication features. The matters embody bioinformatics, game theory, sign processing algorithms and architectures, and wi-fi sensing and communications.

He has authored greater than 10 books and 900 papers, and he holds 250 patents. Yow will discover his analysis papers within the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Ambient-sensing trailblazer

Liu is taken into account to be a pioneer within the discipline of ambient sensing. The expertise gathers environmental information and is utilized in safety programs and health-monitoring units.

He got here up with the concept, he says, whereas engaged on a venture in 2009 for the U.S. Navy. He was making an attempt to unravel an issue the Navy was having with the wi-fi communication programs utilized in its submarines. As a result of submarines are made from metallic, radio waves had been unable to penetrate the vessels’ compartments and as a substitute bounced round, creating interference, he says.

His answer was to make use of a comparatively unknown idea in physics: time-reversal signal processing. The approach captures waves, reminiscent of sound and electromagnetic indicators, and sends them again by means of the identical medium in reverse, flipping the sign from last-in to first-out, and re-emits them.

“By utilizing time-reversal feed, we might enhance the signal-to-noise ratio by 4 instances,” he says. “That improved efficiency dramatically.”

He turned fascinated by the physics of time-reversal sign processing, he says, and questioned how he might apply the idea to serve society. After three years of analysis, he got here up with the concept of utilizing wi-fi sensing purposes by means of ambient radio waves from surrounding Wi-Fi networks.

“I discovered to show Wi-Fi networks into sensing networks that decipher our actions,” he says. “We might know all the things taking place round us—our motions, respiratory, heartbeat, even fall detection—with none wearables.”

By the university’s incubator, which inspires college to work on initiatives with an impression on society, he launched Origin in 2013. The corporate’s Wi-FI and AI sensing expertise allows correct indoor monitoring, movement detection, and health monitoring with out the necessity for wearable devices or cameras. Its merchandise, together with its remote patient monitoring, obtained three innovation awards on the 2020 and 2021 Consumer Electronics reveals, together with one for greatest innovation.

Discovering his skilled dwelling

Liu joined IEEE in 1986 as a graduate pupil to entry its analysis papers, he says.

“In the event you didn’t be a part of an IEEE society, you didn’t get its journal—which meant that you just couldn’t learn probably the most up-to-date analysis papers,” he says. “So, I joined the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Once I attended my first sign processing convention, I knew I had discovered an expert dwelling. I met many like-minded individuals, and collectively, we constructed an expert dwelling for our members worldwide.”

He turned an lively volunteer, holding high management positions together with 2012–2013 president of the Sign Processing Society and 2016–2017 director of IEEE Division IX, which covers societies centered on sign processing, data transmission, navigation, and transportation. In 2019 he was vp of the Technical Activities Board.

In 2022 he served as IEEE president and CEO. The three accomplishments throughout his time period he says he’s most happy with are growing the prize cash for the IEEE Medal of Honor, overseeing the realignment of IEEE regions, and establishing larger monetary transparency.

The rationale for growing the prize for IEEE’s highest award—from US $50,000 to $2 million—in 2025, he says, was to underscore the significance of the applied sciences the IEEE neighborhood develops. These improvements embody semiconductors, the Internet, and the GPU. The cash for the Medal of Honor now exceeds that of the Nobel Prize, which carries an award of roughly $1 million.

“We’d like the entire world to grasp the IEEE neighborhood has made probably the most impression on society within the final century,” Liu says. “Nonetheless, we didn’t obtain the eye and respect we deserved, so we wanted to assist ourselves. We wish the entire world to know what our contributions are.”

His subsequent achievement was realigning IEEE’s areas. Throughout the previous a number of years, membership in Region 10, which covers international locations in Asia and the Pacific, has grown from 10 p.c of complete membership to almost 40 p.c, he says. It’s the largest and most populous of IEEE’s geographic areas, however its members weren’t equitably represented on the Board of Administrators. Every area had one consultant on the Board.

“The area has 40 p.c of the members however solely makes up 10 p.c of the Board,” Liu says. “That didn’t make sense to quite a lot of us.”

The IEEE Board in 2022 accredited area realignment. The whole variety of areas stays at 10, however their group is altering. Efficient 1 January 2028, the six U.S.-based areas will likely be consolidated into 5, and Area 10 will likely be break up into two. IEEE will now not use the Area 1 designation. The brand new Area 2 will symbolize the Northeastern and Jap U.S. Area 10 will cowl North Asia, and the brand new Area 11 will symbolize South Asia and the Pacific.

Liu additionally succeeded in main a motion that persuaded the IEEE Board to put money into a greater monetary reporting system to have a clearer understanding of the group’s funds. A extra trendy system now tracks banking transactions, contracts, expense stories, and different spending.

“Now we all know precisely the place the cash comes from and the place it’s spent,” he says, “in order that we are able to make extra knowledgeable choices.

“If I may also help make IEEE a greater skilled dwelling for future members, that’s one thing that I pays again to IEEE,” he provides. “I really admire what IEEE supplied me. From pupil to professor to a longtime chief, at each stage, it supplied me completely different alternatives to develop. That’s the reason I labored very arduous after I was president to verify everyone realizes it’s a skilled dwelling for our whole profession.”