Awards and Commendations
The high caliber of MERL’s research and researchers is evident in a variety of ways. Several of our staff members have been recognized by their peers as fellows of technical societies. A number of the papers written by our researchers have received best paper awards. Other MERL achievements have received technology awards. The lists below show our current Fellows and the awards received in recent years.
Current Technical Society Fellows and Senior Members
- Dr. Joseph Katz, Fellow Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
- Dr. Joseph Katz, Fellow Optical Society of America
- Dr. Huifang Sun, Fellow Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
- Dr. Jinyun Zhang, Fellow Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
Best Paper Awards Since 2004
“Distributed Opportunistic Scheduling with Two-Level Channel Probing”, Thejaswi, C.; Pun, M-O.; Zhang, J.; Poor, H.V.,
IEEE Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), April 2009 (Best paper award.)
“Applications of Random Matrix Theory to the Performance Analysis of Wireless MIMO Communication Systems”,
PhD thesis, National Institute for Scientific Research, Montreal Canada, 2008.
(2008 ADESAQ Prize of Excellence for best PhD dissertation in natural sciences and engineering in the Canadian province of Quebec.)
“Travel Time Prediction using Singular Value Decomposition”,
Nishiuma, N.; Goto, Y.; Kumazawa, H.; Komaya K.; Nikovski, D.,
Journal of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan (SICE), Vol 42 Issue 7, July 2006.
(Received the SICE best paper award for 2008.)
“A Study of MPEG-2 to H.264/AVC Transcoding with Half-Horizontal Resolution”,
Xin, J.; Vetro, A.; Sekiguchi, S.-I.,
IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE),
Session 1.4: Video Transcoding & QoS, January 2008. (Best paper award.)
“Visualizing the History of Living Spaces”,
Ivanov, Y.; Wren, C.; Sorokin, A.; Kaur, I.,
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics,
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) and IEEE Information Visualization Conference (INFOVIS) Proceedings 2007, Vol. 13, Issue 6,
pp. 1153-1160, Nov-Dec 2007 (Best paper award.)
“Detection of Music Segment Boundaries using Audio-Visual Features for a Personal Video Recorder”,
I. Otsuka, H. Suginohara, Y. Kusunoki, A. Divarakan. IEEE Conference on Consumer Electronics, 2007.
“Human Detection via Classification on Riemannian Manifolds”,
O. Tuzel, F. Porikli, P. Meer. IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2007.
(Best Paper Prize Runner Up of 1300+ submitted.)
“Multimodal Multiplayer Tabletop Gaming”, E. Tse, S. Greenberg, C. Shen, C. Forlines.
International Workshop on Pervasive Gaming Applications (PerGames), 2006.
“Discovering Meaningful Multimedia Patterns with Audio-Visual Concepts and Associated Text”,
Lexing Xie, L. Kennedy, S.-F. Chang, A. Divakaran, H. Sun and C.-Y. Lin. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, 2004.
(One of three best student paper awards at ICIP 2004.)
Technology Awards From Outside Organizations Since 2004
In July 2007, MERL researcher Jeff Tao received the “Professor Alexander Hessel Award
for the Outstanding PhD Dissertation in Electrical Engineering” at
Polytechnic University.
In May 2007, MERL researcher Huifang Sun received an award for outstanding performance
as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems
for Video Technology in ISCAS2007.
In May 2006, MERL researcher Christopher Wren received the Best Presentation award for his talk on “Toward Scalable Activity Recognition for Sensor Networks”.
In January 2006, the Dome Projector, which was developed by MERL staff and productized by Mitsubishi Electric, was recognized by Nikkan Kogyo Simbun’s Best 10 New Products Prize.
In the spring of 2005, DiamondHelp was selected as a finalist for the international design competition associated with the Third International Conference on Appliance Design (3AD) and a finalist for the “INDEX: Award 2005” international design competition.
In June 2005, MERL’s Digital Merchandising technology as presented by Viaro (a Herman Miller company) won the “Best New Product 2005” award at the annual conference of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design.
In September 2004, MERL researcher Ramesh Raskar was chosen by MIT Technology Review for inclusion in their list of the top 100 innovators under the age of 35 worldwide.
Awards From Mitsubishi Electric Corp.
In June 2007, MERL staff received a Mitsubishi Electric Corporate R&D award for “outstanding contributions to global standardization activities on mobile communication technologies”.In May 2007, MERL staff received a Mitsubishi Electric Corporate R&D award through their work with Johosoken on WiMax and 3GPP for “contribution to mobile communication business via international standardization”.
In May 2006, MERL staff received a Mitsubishi Electric Corporate R&D award for their work on “Face Recognition Technology and Applications”.
In April 2006, MERL’s following three patents each received an “Excellent Patent Award” from Mitsubishi Electric Corporate R&D:
1. “Interactive Wireless Tag Location and Identification System”
2. “Multimedia Event Detection and Summarization”
3. “Method and System for Displaying Images on Curved Surface”
In early 2005, MERL staff received a Mitsubishi Electric Valuable Invention Award for their patent “Route discovery in Ad-Hoc Networks with Data Packets.”
In June 2005, MERL staff received a Mitsubishi Electric Corporate R&D award for their work on “Visual-Related Technologies for Digital Home Appliance Business.”
In June 2005, MERL staff received a Mitsubishi Electric Corporate R&D award for their work on “Visual Systems for Large Display Facilities.”
In June 2005, MERL staff received an award from Mitsubishi Electric’s Johosoken Research Laboratory for their work on the “Development of MPEG Decoder for Digital TV.”
In June 2005, MERL staff received an award from Mitsubishi Electric’s Sentansoken Research Laboratory for their work on “Personal Authentication Technology.”