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Prof. Thierry Blu and Prof. Liew Soung-Chang of the Faculty of Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) have been elected Fellows of the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012 for their extraordinary accomplishments in scientific research.  This brings the total number of IEEE fellows in CUHK to 28, the highest among all institutions in Hong Kong.

Fundamental contributions to approximation theory in signal and image processing

Prof. Thierry Blu from the Department of Electronic Engineering was named IEEE Fellow for his fundamental contributions to approximation theory in signal and image processing.  Professor Blu graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris and obtained a PhD in electrical engineering from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, France.  He started his research career at France Telecom R&D and joined the Biomedical Imaging Laboratory at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  Professor Blu has received several best paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society with his various publications in the world’s leading IEEE Transactions journals.  The awards recognized his theoretical contributions to signal and image processing. In 2007, he transferred his patented research on the interpolation of ‘sparse signals’ to a large international wireless telecommunications corporation, Qualcomm Inc. (San Diego, CA), for applications in Ultra Wide Band communications.  Professor Blu has been focusing his research on the optimisation of the representation of signals from digital samples, multi-scale signal processing and the restoration of images. His research has yielded fruitful results which are widely applied in biomedical imaging, including localization of brain activity from electroencephalographic or functional MRI measurements, restoration of fluorescence microscopy images, 3D reconstruction of DNA and neuronal cells, and high-resolution processing of optical coherence tomography data.

Contributions to wireless communications and networking 

Prof. Liew Soung-Chang from the Department of Information Engineering was recognized by IEEE for his contributions to wireless communications and networking.  Professor Liew received his bachelor, master and PhD degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He joined CUHK in 1993 and won the first Vice-Chancellor Exemplary Teaching Award.  In the same year, Professor Liew initiated and built the first inter-university ATM network tested in Hong Kong.  His current research interests include wireless networks, Internet protocols, multimedia communications, and packet switch design, and he owns eight U.S. patents. His research team won the best paper awards in international conferences including IEEE MASS 2004 and IEEE WLN 2004.  Professor Liew’s team pioneered the concept of Physical-layer Network Coding (PNC), and proposed TCP Veno, a version of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to improve its performance over wireless networks which has been incorporated into a release of Linux OS.  Professor Liew is active in both academia and the industry: not only has he co-founded two Internet software technology companies, but he has also been serving as consultant to many industrial organizations including the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI), providing technical advice as well as helping to formulate R&D directions and strategies in the areas of wireless Internetworking, applications and services.  He currently serves as the editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and IEEE Ad Hoc and Sensor Wireless Networks. 

About IEEE 

The IEEE is the world’s largest professional organization, with more than 400,000 members in over 160 countries.  IEEE members play a vital role in computer science, electronics, telecommunications and engineering fields etc.  Fellowship is the highest grade of membership and one of the most prestigious honours the IEEE can bestow upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.