Alum Sidiropoulos receives three IEEE Signal Processing Society awards

ECE and ISR alum Nikolaos Sidiropoulos (EE PhD 1992) has received three awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS): the Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award, the Best Paper Award, and the Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award. These awards will be formally presented at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Rhodes, Greece, in June 2023.

Sidiropoulos, the Louis T. Rader Professor at the University of Virginia, has previously served chair of its Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (2017–2021).

The three awards

Sidiropolous won the IEEE SPS Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award “for exemplary contributions to tensor decomposition, beamforming, and spectral analysis.” The award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory and/or practice in technical areas within the scope of the SPS, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on the field.

The IEEE SPS Best Paper Award was given to Sidiropoulos and his co-authors Haoran Sun, Xiangyi Chen, Qingjiang Shi, Mingyi Hong and Xiao Fu for "Learning to Optimize: Training Deep Neural Networks for Interference Management." The award is based on a six-year window and honors the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to the Society’s technical scope. Judging is based on general quality, originality, subject matter, and timeliness. The paper must have appeared in one of SPS’s solely owned transactions journals. This paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 66, No. 20, October 2018.

The IEEE SPS Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award was given to Sidiropoulos and his co-authors Lieven De Lathauwer, Xiao Fu, Kejun Huang, Evangelos Papalexakis, and former ISR faculty member Christos Faloutsos (CMU), for "Tensor Decomposition for Signal Processing and Machine Learning." This paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 65, No. 13, July 2017. The award honors the author(s) of a journal article of broad interest that has had substantial impact over several years on a subject related to the technical scope of the SPS. Such articles present an overview of a method or theory with technical depth and application perspective, have a multi-year record of impact, and are relevant to current researchers and practitioners.

About Nikolaos Sidiropoulos

At Maryland, Sidiropoulos was a student of Professor John Baras (ECE/ISR). From 1994–1997, he was a postdoctoral researcher and ISR assistant research scientist. Prior to his current appointment, Sidiropoulos served on the faculty of the University of Minnesota and the Technical University of Crete, Greece.

Sidiropoulos was elected a Fellow of IEEE in 2009 for “contributions to signal processing for communications” and as vice-president of IEEE SPS from 2017-2019. He was elected a Fellow of EURASIP in 2014. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 1998, the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award in 2001, 2007, and 2011, and served as IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2008-2009). He received the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award. He received the University of Maryland Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2013.

Note: ECE/ISR alumni have won the IEEE SPS Best Paper Award for two years in a row. Nima Mesgarani (EE PhD 2008) won the IEEE SPS Best Paper Award in 2021 for his work with Yi Luo on "Conv-TasNet: Surpassing Ideal Time-Frequency Masking Magnitude for Speech Separation." This paper appeared in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, Vol. 27, No. 8, August 2019. Mesgarani is a former student of Professor Shihab Shamma (ECE/ISR). He is an associate professor at Columbia University.