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December 19, 2002

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UCSD Professors Named IEEE Fellows For Research In Telecommunications

Two faculty members at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering have been elected Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), effective January 1, 2003. Electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professors Yeshaiyahu Fainman and Rene Cruz are among 260 senior researchers from the private and public sectors named to the organization’s highest membership level for 2003. Their election brings to 19 the number of IEEE Fellows on the Jacobs School faculty.

Rene Cruz

Rene Cruz was elected "for the development of a network calculus for characterization on traffic of packet networks.” Cruz developed the new mathematical methodology for characterizing the flow of data through packet-switching networks such as the Internet. The method succeeds in predicting the “burstiness” of data flows, and is an advance over the previously dominant statistical methods. The method can assess how smooth traffic flow will be within a network, and also predict likely bottlenecks. Cruz’s network calculus has opened new terrain for developers of algorithms for scheduling data-packet flows as well as providing a theoretical basis for billing schedules employed by privately-operated networks, including frame-relay networks run by various telephone companies.

Shaya Fainman

The IEEE cited Shaya Fainman for his “contributions to the use of optical nonlinearities for signal processing." After joining the UCSD faculty in 1990, Fainman began experimenting with optical nonlinearities to do what a wave mixer does in radio frequencies. That research evolved into his focus on the interplay of time and space coordinates to observe very fast phenomena, including at nanoscale. “For communication,” said Faiman, “if you have a sequence of pulses at terabits per second rate, and you convert every 100 pulses to 100 spots in space, you would only need to do detection at 10 gigabits per second rate.” Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Fainman and Cruz (along with ECE professor and IEEE Fellow Larry Milstein)
are investigating the use of optical nonlinearities for CDMA (code division multiple access) networks, where it may enable more cost-effective management of optical networks (such as most of today’s most advanced wireless phone networks in the United States).

IEEE Rene L. Cruz Faculty Profile Yeshaiyahu (Shaya) Fainman Faculty Profile

Both Cruz and Fainman are affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2], and Cruz with the UCSD Center for Wireless Communications [CWC].

IEEE Fellowships are conferred by the Board of Directors on researchers with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. A brief citation is issued to new Fellows describing their accomplishments and the total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth percent of the total voting Institute membership.