News
2012 MIT Lincoln Laboratory Technical Awards ceremony
honors high achievement
Helen Kim and Clifford Weinstein receive Technical Excellence Awards
The March 8 late winter blizzard did not prevent the MIT Lincoln Laboratory auditorium from being filled to capacity with family, friends, and colleagues who gathered to congratulate the recipients of the Laboratory's 2012 awards for technical excellence, early career technical achievement, best paper, and best invention.
Dr. Helen H. Kim, senior staff member in the RF and Quantum Systems Technology Group, and Dr. Clifford J. Weinstein, leader of the Human Language Technology Group, were honored with prestigious Technical Excellence Awards. Dr. Eric D. Evans, director of Lincoln Laboratory, presented these awards that recognize "exceptional, sustained, technical work that has made a significant impact on a Laboratory mission area."
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| Dr. Helen Kim (center) was presented a 2012 Technical Excellence Award by MIT Lincoln Laboratory Director Eric Evans (left) and was introduced by Dr. Robert Atkins (right), head of the Advanced Technology Division. |
Kim was recognized for "creativity in developing innovative radio-frequency (RF) integrated circuit capabilities that have solved difficult RF system challenges in a wide range of applications, and for her leadership in helping revitalize RF technology work at MIT Lincoln Laboratory." During her ten-year career at the Laboratory, Kim has built a strong team that has demonstrated the exceptional capability of an RF system-on-chip in silicon and silicon-germanium technology and that is currently applying nonlinear signal processing to nanoscale complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology. In 2010, she and her team won an R&D 100 Award for the development of a novel four-channel miniature RF receiver.
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| Dr. Clifford Weinstein (center) was presented a 2012 Technical Excellence Award by MIT Lincoln Laboratory Director Eric Evans (left) and was introduced by Dr. Marc Zissman (right), associate head of the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division. |
Weinstein was honored for "his nationally recognized technical achievements and leadership in human language technology and its applications, and specifically for his contributions in speech recognition, machine translation, automated social network analysis, speech communications in packet networks, and digital signal processing." As the leader of the same group since 1979, he has overseen the evolution of the Laboratory's speech and language technology work, directing research and development for a broad range of applications that has recently expanded into social network analysis and cyber security. His early work on packet speech helped lead to the development of the Internet and to the awarding of an IEEE Milestone for this seminal work, the "First Real-Time Speech Communications on Packet Networks."
The 2102 Early Career Technical Achievement Awards were presented to Laura A. Kennedy, a technical staff member in the Space Control Systems Group, and Dr. Jason R. Thornton, a technical staff member in the Informatics and Decision Support Group. Kennedy was recognized for contributions, including analysis and algorithm development, that have been instrumental to a wide range of technical programs. Thornton received the award for his work on video processing systems, particularly the development of novel video-analysis methods that have significantly enhanced the Laboratory’s ground-based video-analysis capabilities.
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| An Early Career Technical Achievement Awards for 2012 was presented to Laura Kennedy (left, left photo) by Lawrence Candell, assistant head, Aerospace Division, and to Dr. Jason Thornton (left, right photo) by Dr. Timothy Dasey, leader, Informatics and Decision Support Group. |
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Dr. Peter Cho (right) accepted the 2012 MIT Lincoln Laboratory Best Paper Award from Director Evans. Cho and co-author Prof. Noah Snavely of Cornell University received this award for the article "Enhancing Large Urban Photo Collections with 3D Ladar and GIS Data," which will be published in the International Journal of Remote Sensing Applications later in 2013. The paper was selected because of the originality and technical importance of the techniques the authors developed for fusing multiple sources of remotely sensed data.
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The 2012 MIT Lincoln Laboratory Best Invention trophies were awarded to (left to right) Dr. Michael Vai, Dr. Joshua Kramer, Dr. David Whelihan, and Dr. Roger Khazan. The team, which included Daniil Utin who could not attend the ceremony, developed the Self-Contained, High-Assurance Micro Crypto and Key-Management Processor, or SHAMROCK. SHAMROCK combines a set of cryptographic functions with advanced key management technology into a single component that is compact, power-efficient, and well suited to the security needs of small-form-factor applications. A patent for SHAMROCK was filed in July 2012. |
Lincoln Laboratory established the Technical Excellence Awards in 2001 to recognize exceptional individual technical accomplishments in support of a Laboratory mission area. The Best Paper and Best Invention Awards were introduced in 2009, and the Early Career Technical Achievement Awards were instituted in 2010.
Posted March 2013
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