Research Laboratory Of Electronics
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The Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), founded in 1946, is the Institute's first interdisciplinary research laboratory. Today it is the largest such laboratory at MIT in terms of faculty and student participation. RLE grew out of the wartime MIT Radiation Laboratory and was formed to bring together physicists and electrical engineers to work on problems in electromagnetic radiation, circuits, and specialized vacuum tubes. Over the years, RLE's research interests have branched in many directions and have led to the creation of additional laboratories. Research within RLE today is conducted by approximately 40 faculty members who are affiliated with the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Division of Biological Engineering, the Engineering Systems Division, and the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. During the past year, approximately 250 graduate students and 60 undergraduates from 11 MIT departments pursued research within RLE. The research is supported primarily by the Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In addition, numerous projects are funded through industry and private foundations. RLE research is widely varied and consists of six major inter-related groupings: circuits, systems, and communications; physical sciences; quantum computation and communication; nanostructures; photonic materials, devices, and systems; and communication biophysics.
Detailed information about RLE research in the calendar year 2002 can be found in RLE Progress Report No. 145, available at http://www.rle.mit.edu/Publications/prog.htm. The report is a summary of research highlights during the past year.
Circuits, Systems, and Communications
Professor Jacob White uses a range of engineering design applications to drive research in simulation and optimization algorithms and software. He has recently released FastImp, a tool for computing impedances of complicated three-dimensional interconnect structures. The program, which is primarily intended for analyzing integrated circuit interconnect, is based on a fast precorrected version of the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and a novel integral formulation. The program is being incorporated into several commercial products, and is being used by semiconductor manufacturers such as Intel and Texas Instruments.
Professor Alan Oppenheim has continued to work on a broad array of problems in the area of signal processing and its applications. A number of new algorithms for detection and estimation have emerged form his efforts in quantum signal processing. Other significant results that have been obtained include a Markov model for signal transduction in cell biology, compensation techniques for faulty digital-to-analog converters, and distributed signal processing approaches to signal detection on reduced data sets.
Professor Gregory Wornell, who directs the Center for Wireless Networking, is interested in the algorithmic and architectural aspects of the design of multimedia networks, wireless communication and sensor networks, and reliable circuits and microsystems. During the past year, he has derived efficient cooperative diversity strategies, based on distributed space-time coding, that improve network reliability. He has also developed content-aware algorithms for efficient congestion and storage management in networks, as well as new network-aware compression technologies for efficient sensor networks.
Professor Jae Lim's Advanced Telecommunications and Signal Processing (ATSP) group participated in the design of the Grand Alliance digital High-Definition Television (HDTV) system, which served as the basis for the US digital television standard adopted in 1996 by the Federal Communications Commission. Since then, Professor Lim has focused his efforts on making improvements to digital television, working within the considerable latitude for technological advances that is allowed for in the current standard. During the past year this has entailed work on the use of adaptive format conversion as enhancement data for HDTV and for scalable video coding.
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Professor David Staelin and Dr. Philip Rosenkranz have continued their work on the development of instruments and algorithms for retrieving atmospheric and surface parameters from data collected by airborne or satellite sensors. Two major developments during the past year were new methods for monitoring polar snowfall rates from space, and retrieving the altitude distribution and integrated abundance of cloud liquid water. Previously, global observation of these water-cycle parameters could not be done well. Current and planned satellites observe these parameters four or more times daily, and should improve our understanding of our global environment over coming decades.
Professor Rahul Sarpeshkar is pursuing a collection of projects in biologically-inspired electronics. He has created a 500 mW programmable, analog, bionic-ear signal processor that consumes less than one-tenth the power of traditional cochlear implant processors. An advanced version of this analog processor, which will consume only 200 mW and will offer higher performance, is going to be commercialized. This processor is also suitable for use as a low-power front end for speech recognition systems.
Professor John Wyatt's long-term goal is the development of a retinal implant device to restore some level of useful vision to patients with outer retinal diseases. During the past year he has constructed a wireless, saline-proof, flexible retinal implant prototype for chronic implantation in animals. He has also developed a method for recovering and reusing energy from electrodes in neural stimulation devices. These energy recovery ideas should work with any neural or muscular stimulator system that relies on iridium oxide electrodes, e.g., cardiac pacemakers.
Professor Donald Troxel, in collaboration with Professor Carl Thompson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is working on tools and techniques for system-level assessment of the reliability of new interconnect strategies and technologies, with a particular focus on three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D ICs). He has developed and released Magic3D, the first public-domain tool for layout of 3D circuits, and sysRel, the first public-domain tool for system-level interconnect reliability.
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Professor Jongyoon Han is interested in biological microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS). His current work is aimed at the development of multidimensional protein separation devices and nanofluidic molecular filters. The former would be of great value in chemical/biological defense and remote health monitoring; the latter could someday replace the traditional membranes used for molecular sieves. During the past year, he has successfully demonstrated the coupling between isoelectric focusing and gel electrophoresis of proteins within a single chip, thus establishing the first step toward fully integrated microfluidic protein separation in a 2D device.
Professor Joel Voldman's research interest is microfabricated devices for cell manipulation that will help cellular biologists understand how cells work. His initial focus has been on a cytometer for analyzing cell morphology and dynamics, and a massively parallel cell culture and assay system that will allow simultaneous analysis of many different experimental conditions. During the past year, he has modeled two novel cell-trapping geometries, one of which is scalable to large numbers of individually controllable traps.
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Professor Dennis Freeman has demonstrated the use of interferometric illumination to decouple the resolution of a light microscope from its working distance, depth of focus, and field of view. This approach dramatically increases the design space for optical microscopy, enabling high resolution to be obtained in combination with large working distance, depth of focus, and field of view. He is currently investigating the application of the technique to problems in biology.
Physical Sciences
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Professors Daniel Kleppner and Thomas Greytak lead the Ultracold Hydrogen group, whose studies center on the structure of atomic hydrogen, ultracold collisions, the properties of hydrogen as a quantum gas, and ultrahigh precision spectroscopy. Their principal activities for the last year include: a study of the possibilities for trapping deuterium; the first demonstration of spectroscopy from the metastable 2S state of ultracold hydrogen; construction of a modelocked laser for optical frequency metrology of hydrogen; and development of a new technique for trapping and cooling hydrogen that employs a thermalizing agent—a second species of trapped atom—and uses buffer gas cooling techniques.
Professor David Pritchard has research interests in atom optics, mass spectroscopy of ions, precision measurements, and Bose-Einstein condensates. In addition, he has developed CyberTutor, a computer program that functions as an interactive personal tutor. It presents students with multi-part problems that can require free-response answers, such as analytic, numerical, or fill in the blank answers. It offers hints and simpler subproblems on request, and spontaneous responses to incorrect answers of all types. The CyberTutor problem library includes 500 problems involving Newtonian mechanics and electricity and magnetism at the university level and 100 at the high school advanced placement (AP) level. CyberTutor has been used by over 2000 students in college and AP high school classes over the past three years.
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Professor Wolfgang Ketterle's research concentrates on the properties of Bose-Einstein condensates and Fermi seas. Coherent atoms sources based on Bose-Einstein condensation may replace conventional atomic beams in demanding applications such as atom interferometry, precision measurements, future atomic clocks, and matter wave microscopy. During the past year his experiments have shown that illuminating a condensate with short and intense laser pulses generates patterns of recoiling atoms that are strikingly different from those seen previously. This work elucidates the nature of bosonic stimulation in four-wave mixing of light and atoms, and the interplay of optical and atomic stimulation.
Professor John Joannopoulos has been working on the development and application of a new method for the dynamical simulation of shock waves in condensed phase systems. Unlike traditional approaches, which create a shock on the edge of a large system and allow it to propagate until it reaches the other side, his technique, based on the Euler equations for compressible flow, scales roughly linearly with the total simulation time. As a result, the method allows the molecular dynamics simulation of the system under dynamical shock conditions for orders of magnitude longer time periods than is possible using the standard approach. It also opens the door, for the first time, to the study of materials that require an accurate quantum mechanical treatment.
Professor Abraham Bers and Dr. Abhay Ram are engaged in theoretical research on plasma electrodynamics and its applications. They have recently completed a self-consistent analysis, coupled with extensive computations, of the Ohkawa method for current generation in tokomak-confined fusion plasmas. Their results show that this method can be an effective means for stabilizing neoclassical tearing modes in the outboard plasma, where other means of current generation are ineffective.
Professor Bruno Coppi and Dr. Linda Sugiyama lead the Physics of High Energy Plasmas group, an international undertaking in terms of its funding and composition that is studying both thermonuclear and astrophysical plasmas. Highlights from this year's research include the following. The accretion theory for explaining the phenomenon of angular momentum generation in asymmetric plasmas confined by strong magnetic fields was confirmed in a series of experiments both at MIT and in Europe. In related work, substantial progress was made in linking analyses of magnetic reconnection and angular momentum transport, which are two major issues confronting modern theoretical astrophysics.
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Professor Jin Kong's research on electromagnetics addresses a variety of problem areas, including: left-handed media, unexploded ordnance (UXO) detection, and remote sensing of earth terrain and vegetation. His work on left-handed media includes both theory and numerical simulations related to media exhibiting a negative index of refraction. In UXO detection studies, he has extended the parameter range over which full analytic solutions to scattering from prolate spheroid and spheroidal shells may be obtained. In vegetation sensing, he has developed an improved synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulator to properly account for the wide-aperture effect encountered in sloping terrain.
Quantum Computation and Communication
Professor Seth Lloyd investigates methods for constructing quantum computers and quantum communication systems using atomic physics, quantum optics, and superconducting electronics. He is also interested in novel quantum algorithms and quantum communication protocols. An especially important recent result from his research is the derivation of the "quantum speed limit." This limit assembles all the dynamical limitations connected to the energy of a system. Thus it bounds how fast any physical system can evolve given its energy characteristics. Using this result he has shown that homogeneous separable pure states cannot exhibit any quantum speedup, whereas he has found one example of an entangled system that does exhibit speedup.
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Professor Jeffrey Shapiro and Dr. Franco Wong have been working on the generation of entangled photons and their applications in quantum communications and quantum cryptography. During the past year they have demonstrated the highest flux of entangled photons seen to date, using a bidirectionally pumped, frequency-degenerate parametric downconverter. They have also demonstrated entanglement between the highly nondegenerate beams of a different downconverter system. These entanglement sources, when further developed, will be employed in an architecture for long-distance, high-fidelity qubit teleportation that they are instantiating, in collaboration with other researchers from MIT and Northwestern University. In classical-domain optical communications they extended their theoretical results for spatial diversity reception, space-time coding, and channel capacity for the turbulent atmospheric channel, and performed preliminary diversity-communication experiments in a test bed system on the MIT campus.
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Professor Terry Orlando is using superconducting circuits as components for quantum computing and as model systems for nonlinear dynamics. The goal of the present research is to use superconducting quantum circuits to perform the measurement process, to model the sources of decoherence, and to develop scalable algorithms. The particular device being studied is made from a loop of niobium interrupted by 3-nm-size Josephson junctions. Measurements made with a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometer have shown clear evidence of the two qubit states, and thermal activation of these states has been observed.
Nanostructures
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Professor Henry Smith directs the NanoStructures Laboratory (NSL), whose dual mission is the development of advanced nanofabrication technology and the application of that technology to research in optical, electronic, and magnetic devices. Among his many research highlights from the past year are the following. Pattern placement accuracy of 1 nm was demonstrated with a mode of spatial-phase-locked e-beam lithography (SPLEBL) that is compatible with commercial implementation. The use of zone-plate-array lithography (ZPAL) to realize very high quality patterns at 1/3 an optical wavelength was demonstrated, thus providing a maskless lithography technique with higher resolution than the projection systems used by the semiconductor industry, and one that is suitable for prototyping and small-volume manufacturing. The development of grating-based filters for optical communication was completed, and a technology transfer arrangement with IOCC, a commercial company in Sunnyvale, CA, was established.
Photonic Materials, Devices, and Systems
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Professor Leslie Kolodziejski and Dr. Gale Petrich are working on the fabrication of opto-electronic devices composed of III-V compound semiconductors. Their principal research activities for the past year include: the design and fabrication of ultra-wideband saturable Bragg reflectors (SBRs) for use in the Cr:Forsterite lasers being developed by Professor Erich Ippen; the creation, with Professors Erich Ippen, John Joannopoulos, and Henry Smith, of a new coupling scheme that allows near 100 percent transmission of light from a standard optical waveguide to a photonic crystal waveguide; and the fabrication of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) superprisms.
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Professor Yoel Fink is interested in optical materials and photonic bandgap structures that will lead to new approaches to efficient generation, localization, and transport of light. Over the past year, he has continued to develop his state of the art fiber-optic fabrication facility, whose centerpiece is a fiber draw tower that is custom fitted for drawing photonic bandgap fibers. He has also developed a novel optical preform fabrication system, and installed a chalcogenide glass synthesis line. These fabrication facilities are now bearing fruit. For example, Professor Fink has reported a process for creating 100 nm features over kilometer length scales, resulting in the realization of sophisticated optical components on a polymeric/textile fiber. He has also demonstrated, for the first time, an optical fiber that is more transparent than its constituent materials.
Professor Erich Ippen continues to develop the technology of ultrashort-pulse (femtosecond) lasers and to use these new sources in scientific and engineering applications. During the past year he became the leader of a new Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program aimed at the development of optical clocks for improved frequency standards. A cornerstone of that program is the work he has been doing with Professor Franz Kärtner on octave-wide comb generators. In particular, they have demonstrated the locking of two femtosecond lasers to subfemtosecond precision. This is the first step towards single-cycle pulse generation and direct laser production of femtosecond combs. Professor Ippen has also achieved record low, quantum-limited timing jitter with picosecond pulse trains from both a modelocked semiconductor laser and a modelocked fiber laser. These sources form the basis for photonic analog-to-digital conversion technology.
Professor Franz Kärtner is working on ultrashort pulse generation—in the few-cycle regime—with applications in frequency metrology, as well as miniaturized femtosecond lasers, and high-density integrated optics made of high-index contrast silicon waveguides. During the past year he has developed a carrier-envelope stabilized, prismless, octave-spanning Ti:sapphire laser for frequency metrology, optical coherence tomography, and time-resolved spectroscopy. He has also demonstrated a sub-10-fs, diode-pumped Cr:LiCAF laser, and proposed a novel ultrafast switch that is based on carrier injection in high-index contrast silicon waveguides. The ultrafast switch is especially interesting, because it opens up the possibility of new router architectures for future optical communication systems.
Professor James Fujimoto divides his research efforts between two areas: laser medicine and diagnostics; and ultrashort-pulse laser technology. He continues to pioneer optical coherence tomography (OCT), a field which was created by his group in 1991. OCT is an emerging medical imaging technology that is analogous to ultrasound. One of the key problems with OCT has been the lack of compact, high performance, low coherence light sources with sufficient bandwidth and power to enable high resolution, real-time imaging. During the past year, Professor Fujimoto has developed a compact, high-resolution OCT system based on new compact broadband light sources that can emit in either the 1 mm or 1.3 mm wavelength ranges. The 1.3 mm wavelength allows good image penetration depth in tissue, while the 1 mm wavelength offers a good compromise between axial resolution and penetration depth. The laser and OCT system are compact, robust, transportable, and suitable for clinical studies.
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Professor Vladimir Bulovic's laboratory is focused on deciphering the physical properties that govern behavior of nanostructured organic materials, and applying the findings to development of practical, active organic technologies. In collaboration with Professor Moungi Bawendi of the Chemistry Department, he has recently demonstrated the first efficient hybrid organic/inorganic light emitting devices (LEDs), with saturated color emission, whose performance matches that of the all-organic LED technology. The hybrid LEDs are large-area, efficient light emitters, consisting of luminescent inorganic nanocrystals—quantum dots—embedded in organic LED structures. They represent a completely new technology platform for the development of flat-panel displays and flat-panel lighting.
Professor Marc Baldo is interested in electronic and optical processes in molecules. He has recently measured the ratio of fluorescent (spin 0) to non-fluorescent (spin 1) excitons in two typical organic materials, finding that near-degenerate statistics prevail in both cases, i.e., 25 percent fluorescent in both molecules and polymers. This spin-measurement result is important because it is the theoretical maximum efficiency for electroluminescence in these materials, and it addresses a controversy that has existed for some time concerning whether small molecules or polymers have the highest possible fluorescent efficiency.
Professor Rajeev Ram addresses the science questions that arise during the development of new or improved opto-electronic devices. Much of his recent work deals with thermal management issues in such devices. Specific accomplishments include: showing that bias-dependent heat exchange can cause a significant temperature drop in the junction temperature of a p-n diode; demonstrating the utility of thermal profiling as a noninvasive technique for wafer-scale testing of the optical power distribution in photonic integrated circuits; and developing an electro-thermal model for mid-infrared semiconductor lasers.
Professor Qing Hu's research is focused on the development of terahertz (THz) lasers and electronics. During the past year, he developed the first THz quantum cascade laser that is based on phonon-assisted depopulation, and the first THz quantum cascade laser that uses metal waveguides for mode confinement. He also achieved a record operating temperature of 128 K for a laser operating at 3.8 THz. These sources will be of great importance in opening up the THz spectral region for remote sensing, imaging, communications, and ultrafast signal processing.
Professor Peter Hagelstein works on a variety of applied problems relating to an unconventional approach to energy generation, as well as the general problem of thermal to electrical energy conversion. In recent work on thermal to electrical conversion with thermal diodes, he has proposed a mechanism that may explain hitherto unaccounted for experimental results obtained with an initial solid-state (semiconductor technology) version of the vacuum thermionic converter. Evidence supporting his model—which posits that a thin p-type layer between the emitter and the solid gap could isolate the emitter region from the gap region—has been obtained from recent experiments. This work points to the possibility of a new class of solid-state converters with near-Carnot limited thermal to electrical conversion efficiencies.
Communication Biophysics
Professor Kenneth Stevens leads a research group whose general focus is to develop models for human speech production and perception, and for how children develop these skills. His experimental and theoretical results are showing that the physics of human speech production point to the prior existence of quantal relations between movements of the articulators and the properties of the resulting sound (and its perception), thus creating a framework for the discrete categories of sound that are used in language. This research has application to improved algorithms for speech synthesis from text and for automatic speech recognition. It is also relevant to the study of normal and deviant speech development in children.
Dr. Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel studies the prosody of spoken language, both in the sense of the abstract structures that specify the prosody of a spoken utterance—e.g., intonational phrases—and in the sense of how those structures are reflected in the phonetic variation of word forms across different utterances. She has generated a spontaneous speech corpus that will be used for analysis of phonetic variation and the factors that influence it. To test the hypothesis that speech-accompanying gestures of the hands, shoulders, head, eyebrows, etc. are timed with respect to prosodic constituent boundaries and prominences, a corpus of videotaped lectures is being digitized and separately labeled for the prosodic structure of the speech and the gestural organization of the speaker's movements.
Dr. Helen Hanson works on the interaction of prosody and physiology. Her studies are aimed at developing quantitative models of the mappings among linguistic, articulatory, and acoustic descriptions of spoken utterances during the control of the prosodic aspects of speech production. During the past year she has shown that stop releases are more complicated than had previously been assumed. In particular, her observations suggest that speakers can choose between two ways of enhancing cues to place of articulation during a portion of a stop consonant release. This result has important implications for speech synthesis and speech recognition.
Professor Louis Braida and Dr. Julie Greenberg have as their long-term research goal the development of improved hearing aids and cochlear implants. Their current efforts are focused on problems resulting from inadequate knowledge of the effects of various transformations of speech signals on speech reception by hearing-impaired listeners. Although it has long been known that sentences spoken "clearly" are more intelligible than those spoken "conversationally," their recent experiments show that this difference is not intrinsically tied to a slower speaking rate for clear speech, i.e., the intelligibility advantage is not lost when talkers are trained to produce a form of clear speech at normal rates. They are now investigating the acoustical properties that contribute to this higher intelligibility at normal rates.
Dr. Charlotte Reed's research interests lie in basic studies of human touch and the development of tactual displays of acoustic stimuli as communication aids for persons with profound hearing loss. In recent work she has shown that the peak information transfer rate through the sense of touch is roughly 12 bits/sec, regardless of signal duration or the amount of information in the stimulus set. This result contradicts the accepted wisdom that the optimal delivery rate is 2–3 items/sec, independent of self-information and duration.
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Dr. Andrew Oxenham is addressing how peripheral changes in hearing can affect the more central auditory processes involved in speech and music perception. In collaboration with Dr. Jennifer Melcher of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, he has obtained what may be the first demonstration of a pitch-sensitive area in the brain. In other work, he has developed, and is in the process of validating, a behavioral test of auditory temporal resolution that is designed to be insensitive to peripheral hearing loss. Unlike previous temporal resolution measures, his new test would be able to determine whether or not a person with peripheral hearing loss also suffers from more central auditory deficits. Hence it is likely to be of great benefit when designing and fitting hearing aids.
Professor Dennis Freeman made further advances in his work investigating the way the inner ear processes sound. During the past year, he has measured the electro-mechanical properties of the tectorial membrane, a key tissue that mechanically stimulates the hair cells within the cochlea. These experiments showed that the tectorial membrane moves in response to electrical stimulation, whereas previously it had been thought that this membrane behaved as a simple mechanical linkage conveying sound-induced motions to the sensory cells. Hence it appears that the tectorial membrane could play a more active role in transduction than previously believed.
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Dr. Mandayam Srinivasan directs the Touch Lab, whose research focus is understanding the scientific underpinnings of human touch and developing of haptic technology for a variety of applications, such as virtual reality based surgical trainers, long-distance touch communication between remote users, and direct control of robotic machines using brain neural signals. Last year, in collaboration with Professor Mel Slater of University College, London, he demonstrated the first transatlantic touch communication. This experiment was hailed worldwide as a major achievement, in the tradition of historical benchmarks in transatlantic communication such as the first telegraph, telephone, and video transmissions.
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Dr. Joseph Perkell has two principal projects underway. The first, which involves experimental studies of speech production and perception, has shown that speakers with greater perceptual acuity tended to produce different speech sounds more distinctly from one another. These findings support a model of brain function being developed by Dr. Perkell's collaborator, Professor Frank Guenther of Boston University. The second project in Dr. Perkell's group concerns speech outcomes in postlingually-deafened adults who wear hearing aids or receive cochlear implants. Both projects could have long-term applications in diagnosing and treating communication disorders.
Professor William Peake has been studying the interspecies variations in the structure and function of the ear, and developing interpretive speculation about how these specializations might relate to survival of the particular species. Measurements on the skulls of sand cats—a wild cat species from the deserts of North Africa—have shown substantially different structural features than those from other species of the same size. Acoustic property measurements, made on live anaesthetized sand cats, show an unusually high value of input admittance, indicating that sand cat ears are capable of absorbing more low-frequency acoustical power than can other species. This translates to an additional kilometer over which the sand cat can detect sounds, such as those produced by predators or prey, leading to data-based hypotheses about evolutionary mechanisms that produce specialization in ears.
Dr. Bertrand Delgutte's research, during the past year, has concentrated on the neural mechanisms for spatial hearing. A topic of particular interest was spatial release from masking, i.e., the improved detectability of a target sound in noise that accompanies increasing spatial separation between the two sources. His experiments revealed a population of neurons in the auditory midbrain that show a correlate of spatial masking release in that signal detectability based on the information available in the neural firings is better when the target and the masker are spatially separated. Computational analysis showed that neural sensitivity to interaural time differences and enhanced response to signals whose waveform envelope shows pronounced amplitude fluctuations both contribute to this improved detectability.
Dr. Donald Eddington's research is directed at a number of issues related to cochlear implants, viz., devices that attempt to restore hearing to the profoundly deaf by using cochlea-implanted electrodes to produce sound percepts by delivering electrical stimuli to excite the auditory neurons. Most patients receive a single implant. During the past year, Dr. Eddington implemented bilateral stimulation in three volunteer subjects. He found that simply fitting a patient with a second, off-the-shelf sound processor to the second implant—one that is not synchronized to the other ear's sound processor—can provide significantly better performance in localizing sound sources. More substantial benefits are expected when the stimuli are properly synchronized across the two ears.
Appointments, Awards, and Events
Professor David E. Pritchard was appointed associate director, effective 1 July 2003.
Dr. Jongyoon Han was appointed assistant professor of electrical engineering.
Dr. Joel Voldman was appointed assistant professor of electrical engineering.
Professor Rajeev J. Ram received permanent tenure, effective July 1, 2003.
Professor Rahul Sarpeshkar was promoted to associate professor, effective 1 July 2003, and appointed the Robert J. Shillman career development professor of electrical engineering.
Professor Vladimir Bulovic was appointed the KDD career development professor of electrical engineering.
Dr. Bertrand Delgutte was promoted to senior research scientist.
Dr. Charlotte M. Reed was promoted to senior research scientist.
Dr. Mandayam A. Srinivasan was promoted to senior research scientist.
Dr. Franco N. C. Wong was promoted to senior research scientist.
Dr. Andrew J. Oxenham was promoted to principal research scientist.
Dr. Linda E. Sugiyama was promoted to principal research scientist.
Professor James G. Fujimoto received the William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award from the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Vladimir Karapetoff Award from MIT.
Professor John J. Joannopoulos was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and received an MIT School of Science Teaching Prize.
Professor David E. Pritchard received the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize for Laser Science from the American Physical Society.
William H. Smith, III received a 2002 MIT Excellence Award.
Maureen C. Howard, Cindy LeBlanc, and Krista Van Guilder received 2003 MIT Infinite Mile Awards.
Professor Jeffrey H. Shapiro was the principal organizer of the Sixth International Conference on Quantum Communication, Measurement and Computing (QCMC'02), which was held on the MIT campus July 22–26, 2002.
Professors Wolfgang Ketterle and David E. Pritchard were general cochairs of the 18th International Conference on Atomic Physics (ICAP 2002), which was held on the MIT campus July 28 to August 2, 2002.
In Memoriam
MIT Institute Professor Hermann Anton Haus, one of the world's leading authorities on optical communications, died on May 21, 2003. A member of RLE for 52 of the laboratory's 57 years, Professor Haus inspired generations of new thinkers in a field that led to successive revolutions in communications. Professor Haus was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Optical Society of America. In 1995, he received the National Medal of Science from President William J. Clinton.
Affirmative Action
RLE has worked and will continue working to increase the number of women and minorities in career positions in the laboratory, in the context of the limited pool of qualified technical applicants and the unique qualifications of RLE's sponsored research staff. Specific measures will include: maintaining our high standards for recruitment procedures that include sending job postings to minority colleges and organizations; working closely with the RLE faculty/staff supervisor at the beginning of each search to identify ways of recruiting minority and women candidates for the new position; and being committed to finding new techniques to identify more effectively women and minority candidates. During the past year, one woman was promoted to senior research scientist and another was promoted to principal research scientist.
More information about the Research Laboratory of Electronics can be found on the web at http://www.rle.mit.edu/.