ISR faculty win two Invention of the Year awards

ISR faculty won two of three categories and three other ISR-related inventions were finalists at the University of Maryland's 18th annual Invention of the Year awards, sponsored by the Office of Technology Commercialization.

In the Information Science category (where all three finalists were ISR inventions), Professor K.J. Ray Liu (ECE/ISR), along with ISR postdoc Dr. Weifeng Su and ISR alum Dr. Zoltan Safar, won for their invention, "Coding Techniques for Maximum Achievable Diversity in Space, Time and Frequency for Broadband Wireless Communications.

In the Physical Science category, Assistant Professor Benjamin Shapiro (AE/ISR), Assistant Professor Pamela Abshire (ECE/ISR), and Associate Professor Elisabeth Smela (ME) won for their invention, "Cell Sensor Based Pathogen Detection."

Three other inventions from ISR faculty were finalists for the awards.

In the Information Science category, Associate Professor Mark Austin (CEE/ISR), David Everett of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, MSSE alum and former ISR Faculty Research Assistant Vimal Mayank and current ISR Faculty Research Assistant Natalya Shmunis, were finalists for "A Tree-to-Graph Folding Procedure for Systems Engineering Requirements."

In the same category, Assistant Professor Rajeev Barua (ECE/ISR) and Sumesh Udayakumaran were finalists for "A Dynamic Memory Allocator for Embedded Systems with Scratch-Pad Memory."

In the Physical Science category, Associate Professor Reza Ghodssi (ECE/ISR) and his grad student Brian Morgan were finalists for ""On-Chip Active Optical Fiber Alignment System using Gray-Scale Technology."

The awards are presented annually to honor outstanding inventions and inventors from the previous year. Read the full story

Published April 2, 2005