Professor Yoel Fink, Director of The Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has designated Vivienne Sze, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, as the 2013 recipient of The Jonathan Allen Junior Faculty Award.
The award is named in honor of Professor Jonathan Allen, sixth director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, for his dedication to mentoring and developing junior faculty members.
Professor Sze joined the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department as an assistant professor in August 2013. She received her B.A.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2004, and her S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2006 and 2010, respectively. From September 2010 to July 2013, Professor Sze was a Member of Technical Staff in the Systems and Applications R&D Center at Texas Instruments.
Professor Sze’s group in RLE focuses on development and implementation of energy-efficient and high-performance systems for various multimedia applications such as video coding/processing, imaging and vision. Her work on implementation-friendly video compression algorithms was used in the development of the latest video coding standard HEVC/H.265, enabling it to deliver better compression than previous standards, while still achieving high processing speeds and low hardware cost. She aims to develop energy-aware algorithms and efficient architectures for various energy-constrained applications including portable multimedia, health monitoring and distributed sensing.
She has received various awards including the Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in 2011, the 2007 DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest Award, the 2008 A‑SSCC Outstanding Design Award, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Julie Payette fellowship in 2004, the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarships in 2005 and 2007, and the Texas Instruments Graduate Woman’s Fellowship for Leadership in Microelectronics in 2008. In 2012, she was selected by IEEE-USA as one of the “New Faces of Engineering”.
Professor Yoel Fink, Director of RLE and Professor of Materials Science, said, “I am thrilled to have a junior faculty researcher of Vivienne’s caliber in RLE and honored to have this opportunity to provide her the financial support afforded by the Jonathan Allen Award at such an important point in her career. Vivienne’s research in compression and coding algorithms has the potential to provide ground breaking developments throughout a broad spectrum of applications and revolutionize the way data is encoded.”
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