IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022 - 18

2022 IEEE MEDALS
IEEE Dennis J. Picard Medal for
Radar Technologies and Applications
Sponsored by Raytheon Technologies
IEEE Simon Ramo Medal
Sponsored by Northrop Grumman Corporation
Moeness G. Amin
Pravin Varaiya
For contributions to radar signal processing
across a wide range of applications
including through-the-wall imaging and
health monitoring
A world leader in through-the-wall radar imaging technologies,
Moeness G. Amin has driven advances in disaster rescue, urban
defense and security, surveillance, and law enforcement. His work
on radar for seeing through walls enabled mapping of building
interiors from different standoff distances using electromagnetic
waves. His groundbreaking algorithms have achieved diminished
strong exterior wall reflections; exploited signal multipath
and interior wall scatterings; and detected, localized, resolved, and
tracked animate objects behind walls and inside enclosed opaque
structures. His work has advanced transparent urban structures using
handheld, vehicle-mounted, and airborne through-wall sensors.
He established the area of compressive urban radar where his
sparse signal processing approach led to fast data acquisitions and
solved key problems in urban radars operating with substantially
reduced data. Amin's radar signal processing and machine learning
techniques for in-home sensing have advanced contactless health
monitoring and improved the man-machine interface. His algorithms
for fall detection using radio frequency reduce injury, save
lives, protect privacy, and bring the notion of " aging-in-place " for
the elderly population closer to reality. His work on abnormal gait
detection brings radar to the forefront of biomedical applications
as it relates to injury assessment, rehabilitation, and recognition of
neurological and physical conditions. His approaches for classification
of human activities of daily living detect variants in daily
routines, recognize changes in mobility, and identify markers of
psychological conditions. His hand- and arm-gesture recognition
techniques help seniors and people with disabilities to command
in-home appliances and entertainment units. His novel signaling
techniques for embedding communication information into radar
pulses and beams enable shared aperture design and progress cooperative
coexistence of radio-frequency sensing and services toward
spectrum efficiency and interference avoidance, which are considered
fundamental to advances in radio frequency convergence.
An IEEE Life Fellow, IEEE-HKN Member, and recipient of
the 2016 Humboldt Prize, Amin is director of the Center for
Advanced Communications and professor, Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering, Villanova University, Villanova,
PA, USA.
Scope: For outstanding accomplishments in advancing the fields of
radar technologies and their applications.
For seminal contributions to the engineering,
analysis, and design of
complex energy, transportation, and
communication systems
The systems engineering expertise of Pravin Varaiya has benefitted
the analysis and design of complex energy, transportation,
and communication systems with innovations in highway traffic
sensing, Internet and wireless usage and pricing methods, and the
control and operation of the electric power grid. His work on
California's Performance Measurement System (PeMS) helps the
state's department of transportation collect, process, and visualize
real-time traffic data from over 39,000 sensors. This work also
led to the development of a wireless low-power magnetic sensor
that is more reliable, less expensive to install, and easier to maintain
than the traditional inductive loops. His PeMS model has
been incorporated throughout the U.S. to allow traffic engineers
to base their operational decisions on knowledge of the current
state of the freeway network and determine whether congestion
bottlenecks can be alleviated by improving operations or by minor
capital improvements. He has also led the design of automated
highway system communication and control architectures that allow
for platoon operations such as formation, merging, splitting,
and vehicle longitudinal and spacing control. Regarding communications
networks, Varaiya led the Internet Demand Experiment
(INDEX), where he studied the use of pricing mechanisms
for coordinating distributed communication systems to improve
throughput and reliability. INDEX conducted an influential
2-year study that provided a deep understanding of consumer behavior
and preference in wireless communication systems. Varaiya
also is responsible for major advances in technologies for realtime
operation and assessment of stability and security of complex
electric power grids that are used to study vulnerability to blackouts
and in reconstruction of the cascading events that precede
blackouts. He also developed a stochastic control framework to
deal with increased information and predictability of renewable
generation in a sequence of forward markets in California. This
framework, called Risk Limiting Dispatch, has significantly reduced
the cost of grid operations under deep renewable penetration
by substantially reducing reserve procurement.
An IEEE Life Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy
of Engineering, Varaiya is a Professor Emeritus with the Graduate
School in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Scope: For exceptional achievement in systems engineering and
systems science.
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IEEE Awards Booklet - 2022

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