2022 IEEE President K.J. Ray Liu Honored for Leadership

Not like many budding engineers, K.J. Ray Liu wasn’t impressed to enter the sector by tinkering with electronics or following within the footsteps of a member of the family. Rising up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his authorities’s name for college kids to change into electrical engineers to assist manufacture semiconductors within the Nineteen Seventies, when the nation’s economic system was struggling.

“College students who had been good in math, science, and physics all needed to be {an electrical} engineer as a result of that was the highest precedence of the federal government,” Liu says. “That’s how I received into engineering. Now Taiwan is a world chief in semiconductors.”

However by the point he graduated from college in 1983, semiconductor amenities had been nonetheless below development, so there have been no jobs accessible.

As an alternative, he went on to have a profitable profession as an educator and entrepreneur within the United States.

For 31 years, he was a professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher on the University of Maryland in School Park till he retired in 2021.

Liu was the chairman, CEO, and CTO of Origin Wireless, a startup he based in Rockville, Md. Origin, which was acquired by ADT in February, pioneers artificial intelligence for wi-fi sensing and indoor monitoring.

Liu, an IEEE Fellow, is an energetic IEEE volunteer who served because the group’s president in 2022.

IEEE honored him with this 12 months’s Haraden Pratt Award for “transformative and impactful management.”

Liu is credited with rising the range of nominees for IEEE’s Fellow program, which is the best degree of membership. He additionally led the hassle to realign the organization’s regions geographically to make sure extra equitable world illustration on the IEEE Board of Directors.

He obtained the Pratt honor on 24 April throughout a ceremony in New York City. The IEEE Foundation sponsored the Board-level award.

“Greater than something, I share the glory with the volunteers and employees I had the privilege to work alongside,” he says. “Our exhausting work is fueled by our shared devotion to this skilled house we love and look after a lot.”

Within the Nineteen Seventies, Taiwan’s policymakers determined to enhance the nation’s economic system by pivoting from making merchandise equivalent to footwear and umbrellas to manufacturing electronics.

The trade received its begin in 1976 when RCA, a serious electronics firm on the time, agreed to switch licensed semiconductor processes to Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute. ITRI spun off a number of semiconductor-related firms together with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC, launched in 1987, is the world’s largest devoted semiconductor foundry.

Liu graduated in 1983 with a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, in Taipei. On the time, there have been no semiconductor firms to work for, he says.

“These days, most of the nation’s college graduates go proper to TSMC to get a job,” he says. “However again then, there was no actual job market.

“Most of my classmates—together with me—got here to the U.S. for graduate research. Many people stayed and, over the past three to 4 many years, contributed to the event of digital laptop communication expertise within the U.S.”

Liu left Taiwan after a two-year obligatory stint within the Republic of China Armed Forces to attend the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, the place in 1987 he earned a grasp’s diploma in electrical engineering.

“If I may also help make IEEE a greater skilled house for future members, that’s one thing that I will pay again to IEEE.”

He went on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering in 1990 from the University of California, Los Angeles. His curiosity in digital sign processing and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) was sparked whereas at UCLA. At the moment VLSI powers all trendy electronics.

“After I was a graduate scholar, there was no wireless communication. Everyone had a landline,” he explains.

VLSI was an essential, energetic analysis area on the time.

“My analysis curiosity was digital sign processing,” he says. “Someday I noticed a e-book on VLSI sign processing on my professor’s bookshelf. I instantly thought to myself: That’s the area I wish to pursue.

“VLSI is one lane, digital sign processing is the opposite, and there’s a bridge linking the 2. I used to be concerned with each areas, so I did my Ph.D. thesis on VLSI sign processing.”

After graduating, Liu joined the College of Maryland, the place he’s credited with establishing its signal processing research program.

Along with educating, he carried out analysis on a broad vary of sign processing and communication elements. The subjects embrace bioinformatics, game theory, sign processing algorithms and architectures, and wi-fi sensing and communications.

He has authored greater than 10 books and 900 papers, and he holds 250 patents. You’ll find his analysis papers within the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Ambient-sensing trailblazer

Liu is taken into account to be a pioneer within the area of ambient sensing. The expertise gathers environmental knowledge and is utilized in safety programs and health-monitoring units.

He got here up with the concept, he says, whereas engaged on a mission in 2009 for the U.S. Navy. He was making an attempt to unravel an issue the Navy was having with the wi-fi communication programs utilized in its submarines. As a result of submarines are manufactured from metallic, radio waves had been unable to penetrate the vessels’ compartments and as an alternative bounced round, creating interference, he says.

His resolution was to make use of a comparatively unknown idea in physics: time-reversal signal processing. The method captures waves, equivalent to sound and electromagnetic alerts, and sends them again via the identical medium in reverse, flipping the sign from last-in to first-out, and re-emits them.

“By utilizing time-reversal feed, we might improve the signal-to-noise ratio by 4 instances,” he says. “That improved efficiency dramatically.”

He turned fascinated by the physics of time-reversal sign processing, he says, and questioned how he might apply the idea to serve society. After three years of analysis, he got here up with the concept of utilizing wi-fi sensing functions via ambient radio waves from surrounding Wi-Fi networks.

“I discovered to show Wi-Fi networks into sensing networks that decipher our actions,” he says. “We might know every little thing taking place round us—our motions, respiratory, heartbeat, even fall detection—with none wearables.”

By way of the university’s incubator, which inspires college to work on tasks with an affect on society, he launched Origin in 2013. The corporate’s Wi-FI and AI sensing expertise permits correct indoor monitoring, movement detection, and health monitoring with out the necessity for wearable devices or cameras. Its merchandise, together with its remote patient monitoring, obtained three innovation awards on the 2020 and 2021 Consumer Electronics exhibits, together with one for finest innovation.

Discovering his skilled house

Liu joined IEEE in 1986 as a graduate scholar to entry its analysis papers, he says.

“When you didn’t be a part of an IEEE society, you didn’t get its journal—which meant that you simply couldn’t learn essentially the most up-to-date analysis papers,” he says. “So, I joined the IEEE Signal Processing Society. After I attended my first sign processing convention, I knew I had discovered an expert house. I met many like-minded folks, and collectively, we constructed an expert house for our members worldwide.”

He turned an energetic volunteer, holding prime management positions together with 2012–2013 president of the Sign Processing Society and 2016–2017 director of IEEE Division IX, which covers societies centered on sign processing, data transmission, navigation, and transportation. In 2019 he was vp of the Technical Activities Board.

In 2022 he served as IEEE president and CEO. The three accomplishments throughout his time period he says he’s most happy with are rising the prize cash for the IEEE Medal of Honor, overseeing the realignment of IEEE regions, and establishing better monetary transparency.

The explanation for rising the prize for IEEE’s highest award—from US $50,000 to $2 million—in 2025, he says, was to underscore the significance of the applied sciences the IEEE group develops. These improvements embrace semiconductors, the Internet, and the GPU. The cash for the Medal of Honor now exceeds that of the Nobel Prize, which carries an award of roughly $1 million.

“We’d like the entire world to know the IEEE group has made essentially the most affect on society within the final century,” Liu says. “However, we didn’t obtain the eye and respect we deserved, so we would have liked to assist ourselves. We would like the entire world to know what our contributions are.”

His subsequent achievement was realigning IEEE’s areas. Throughout the previous a number of years, membership in Region 10, which covers nations in Asia and the Pacific, has grown from 10 p.c of complete membership to just about 40 p.c, he says. It’s the largest and most populous of IEEE’s geographic areas, however its members weren’t equitably represented on the Board of Administrators. Every area had one consultant on the Board.

“The area has 40 p.c of the members however solely makes up 10 p.c of the Board,” Liu says. “That didn’t make sense to lots of us.”

The IEEE Board in 2022 accredited area realignment. The whole variety of areas stays at 10, however their group is altering. Efficient 1 January 2028, the six U.S.-based areas can be consolidated into 5, and Area 10 can be break up into two. IEEE will not use the Area 1 designation. The brand new Area 2 will symbolize the Northeastern and Jap U.S. Area 10 will cowl North Asia, and the brand new Area 11 will symbolize South Asia and the Pacific.

Liu additionally succeeded in main a motion that persuaded the IEEE Board to spend money on a greater monetary reporting system to have a clearer understanding of the group’s funds. A extra trendy system now tracks banking transactions, contracts, expense experiences, and different spending.

“Now we all know precisely the place the cash comes from and the place it’s spent,” he says, “in order that we will make extra knowledgeable selections.

“If I may also help make IEEE a greater skilled house for future members, that’s one thing that I will pay again to IEEE,” he provides. “I really recognize what IEEE supplied me. From scholar to professor to a longtime chief, at each stage, it supplied me totally different alternatives to develop. That’s the reason I labored very exhausting after I was president to verify all people realizes it’s a skilled house for our total profession.”