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

In contrast to 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 students to change into electrical engineers to assist manufacture semiconductors within the Seventies, when the nation’s economic system was struggling.

“College students who have 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 have been nonetheless below development, so there have been no jobs accessible.

As an alternative, 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 12 months’s Haraden Pratt Award for “transformative and impactful management.”

Liu is credited with growing the variety of nominees for IEEE’s Fellow program, which is the very 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 acquired 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 dignity with the volunteers and employees I had the privilege to work alongside,” he says. “Our onerous work is fueled by our shared devotion to this skilled dwelling we love and look after a lot.”

Within the Seventies, Taiwan’s policymakers determined to enhance the nation’s economic system by pivoting from making merchandise corresponding to sneakers and umbrellas to manufacturing electronics.

The trade acquired its begin in 1976 when RCA, a serious 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 corporations 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 corporations to work for, he says.

“These days, most 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, over the past three to 4 many years, contributed to the event of digital laptop communication know-how within the U.S.”

Liu left Taiwan after a two-year necessary 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 help make IEEE a greater skilled dwelling for future members, that’s one thing that I will pay 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. In the present day VLSI powers all fashionable electronics.

“After I was a graduate scholar, there was no wireless communication. Everyone had a landline,” he explains.

VLSI was an vital, lively analysis subject on the time.

“My analysis curiosity was digital sign processing,” he says. “In the future I noticed a e book on VLSI sign processing on my professor’s bookshelf. I instantly thought to myself: That’s the subject 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 concerned with 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 performed analysis on a broad vary of sign processing and communication points. The subjects embrace 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. You could find his analysis papers within the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Ambient-sensing trailblazer

Liu is taken into account to be a pioneer within the subject of ambient sensing. The know-how gathers environmental knowledge and is utilized in safety programs and health-monitoring units.

He got here up with the thought, he says, whereas engaged on a mission in 2009 for the U.S. Navy. He was attempting to resolve an issue the Navy was having with the wi-fi communication programs utilized in its submarines. As a result of submarines are manufactured from steel, radio waves have 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, corresponding to sound and electromagnetic indicators, and sends them again via the identical medium in reverse, flipping the sign from last-in to first-out, and re-emits them.

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

He grew to become 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 thought of utilizing wi-fi sensing purposes via 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 pieces taking place round us—our motions, respiratory, heartbeat, even fall detection—with none wearables.”

By means of the university’s incubator, which inspires college to work on initiatives with an influence on society, he launched Origin in 2013. The corporate’s Wi-FI and AI sensing know-how 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, acquired three innovation awards on the 2020 and 2021 Consumer Electronics reveals, together with one for finest innovation.

Discovering his skilled dwelling

Liu joined IEEE in 1986 as a graduate scholar 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 essentially the most up-to-date analysis papers,” he says. “So, I joined the IEEE Signal Processing Society. After 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 grew to become an lively volunteer, holding prime management positions together with 2012–2013 president of the Sign Processing Society and 2016–2017 director of IEEE Division IX, which covers societies targeted 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 higher 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 group develops. These improvements embrace 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 want the entire world to grasp the IEEE group has made essentially the most influence on society within the final century,” Liu says. “However, 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 nations in Asia and the Pacific, has grown from 10 % of complete membership to almost 40 %, 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 % of the members however solely makes up 10 % of the Board,” Liu says. “That didn’t make sense to loads of us.”

The IEEE Board in 2022 authorized area realignment. The overall variety of areas stays at 10, however their group is altering. Efficient 1 January 2028, the six U.S.-based areas will probably be consolidated into 5, and Area 10 will probably be break up into two. IEEE will not use the Area 1 designation. The brand new Area 2 will characterize the Northeastern and Japanese U.S. Area 10 will cowl North Asia, and the brand new Area 11 will characterize 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 fashionable system now tracks banking transactions, contracts, expense experiences, 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 help make IEEE a greater skilled dwelling for future members, that’s one thing that I will pay again to IEEE,” he provides. “I actually respect what IEEE supplied me. From scholar to professor to a longtime chief, at each stage, it supplied me completely different alternatives to develop. That’s the reason I labored very onerous after I was president to verify everyone realizes it’s a skilled dwelling for our complete profession.”