UW ECE’s outstanding faculty are national and international leaders in their respective fields. Our faculty members include:

1 MacArthur Fellow

1 Guggenheim Fellow

Rajesh Rao

CJ & Elizabeth Hwang Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering

5 NAE Members

8 Sloan Fellows

Scott Hauck

Gaetano Borriello Professor for Educational Excellence

Rajesh Rao

CJ & Elizabeth Hwang Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering

30 IEEE Fellows

Scott Hauck

Gaetano Borriello Professor for Educational Excellence

Josh Smith

Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor in Entrepreneurial Excellence; PMP Faculty Coordinator

Rajesh Rao

CJ & Elizabeth Hwang Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering

27 faculty members with research publications cited over 1,000 times

A highly cited research publication is important because it indicates that a study has had a significant impact on a field and is considered to be a key contribution to academic discourse. When a publication is highly cited, it means that many other researchers have found it valuable and relevant enough to reference in their own work, signifying its quality, influence, and potential to be a foundational piece of knowledge within that area of study. Research publications generated at UW ECE are cited often. Below is a list of professors in the Department who have each produced research papers and other publications cited over 1,000 times.

Les Atlas

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Biosystems, Data Science

Publication: “Improving generalization with active learning,” Machine Learning, 1994

Number of citations: 2,220

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper was the start of a now-common approach, called active learning, within the field of machine learning. It combined a novel idea of how babies learn speech with the theory of machine learning, including neural nets. Active learning was shown to allow more efficient use of labeled training data. Because most machine learning problems have limited amounts of labeled training data, this approach offered a potentially more efficient and lower cost training approach, inspiring many subsequent papers.

Jeffrey Bilmes

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Machine learning, AI, Biosystems, Data Science

Publication: “A gentle tutorial of the EM algorithm and its application to parameter estimation for Gaussian mixture and hidden Markov models,” ICSI Journal, 1998

Number of citations: 3,997

Why was this publication so highly cited?

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is needed in very important machine learning scenarios where there are variables that interact with those in the dataset but were hidden or not observed. It is an effective and general approach, yet it was not widely understood before this paper. This was the first paper to fully develop the EM algorithm for maximum-likelihood estimation in a way that made it easy to understand by a broad sector of the machine learning community.

Linda Bushnell

Role at UW ECE: Research Professor

Research focus: Robotics and Controls

Publication: “Stability analysis of networked control systems,” IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 2002

Number of citations: 2,631

Why was this publication so highly cited?

The significance of this work is in the combining of communication constraints and control specifications, which had not been previously addressed, for the scheduling of real-time network traffic, such as those used in the controller area network (CAN) protocol in modern automobiles. This paper helped to pave the way for a significant body of work as demonstrated by the hundreds of papers, books and conference tracks that reference it.

Howard Chizeck

Role at UW ECE: Professor Emeritus, former Department chair

Research focus: Robotics and Controls, Biosystems

Publication: “Controllability, stabilizability, and continuous-time Markovian jump linear quadratic control,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 1990

Number of citations: 1,194

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper establishes necessary and sufficient conditions for optimal steady state quadratic control of continuous-time linear systems that possess randomly jumping parameters, which can be described by finite-state Markov processes. This seminal paper established a direction of theoretical development and has been applied to a wide variety of practical problems, including wireless communication and traffic control.

Professor Emeritus Richard Christie headshot

Richard Christie

Role at UW ECE: Associate Professor Emeritus

Research focus: Power and Energy Systems

Publication: “Transmissions Management in the Deregulated Environment,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Volume 88, Issue 2, February 2000

Number of citations: 1,130

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper analyzes three very different methods of managing the operation of the transmission system in deregulated power system operating environments around the world. It also points to future methods of combining decentralized market solutions with operational use optimal power flow to provide better solutions to existing and emerging problems.

Maryam Fazel

Role at UW ECE: Moorthy Family Professor

Research focus: Data Science, Robotics and Controls

Publication: “Guaranteed minimum-rank solutions of linear matrix equations via nuclear norm minimization,” SIAM Review, 2010

Number of citations: 4,248

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper was the first to show how to estimate low-rank matrices perfectly from highly incomplete information. This surprising result ushered in the new research field of matrix completion and sensing, which found many applications, including in recommender systems, dynamical system identification and phase retrieval in imaging.

Blake Hannaford

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Robotics and Controls, Biosystems

Publication: “Measurement and modeling of McKibben pneumatic artificial muscles,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 1996

Number of citations: 2,144

Why was this publication so highly cited?

A goal of robotics is to make mechanical actuators behave in a manner similar to human skeletal muscle. This paper recognized that while pioneers in artificial muscle research had inspired many and took advantage of artificial muscles’ compatibility with the human body, there was little or no engineering theory of how artificial muscles worked, and no formal comparison with human muscle. This paper provided the necessary new theory and experimental verification to lay the groundwork used by many researchers in both rehabilitation robotics and soft robotics, which have exploded in use in recent years.

Professor Emeritus Robert M. Haralick headshot

Robert M. Haralick

Role at UW ECE: Professor Emeritus

Research focus: Pattern recognition, image processing, computer vision, document image analysis, artificial intelligence

Publication: “Textural features for image classification,” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Issue 6, 1973

Number of citations: 31,167

Why was this publication so highly cited?

Texture is one of the important characteristics used in identifying objects or regions of interest in an image, whether the image be a photomicrograph, an aerial photograph, or a satellite image. This paper describes some easily computable textural features based on gray-tone spatial dependencies, and illustrates their application in category-identification tasks of three different kinds of image data. The results of this study indicated that easily computable textural features probably have a general applicability for a wide variety of image-classification applications.

Scott Hauck

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: VLSI and Digital Systems

Publication: “Reconfigurable computing: a survey of systems and software,” ACM Computing Surveys, 2002

Number of citations: 2,364

Why was this publication so highly cited?

In the mid 1990’s field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based computation was in its infancy, with much promise and many approaches. Since then, it has become a major force in high-performance computing. This paper served as the introduction to this field for researchers, guiding many to this evolving field.

Professor Jenq-Neng Hwang headshot

Jenq-Neng Hwang

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Data Science, Computing and Networking

Publication: “Grounded language-image pre-training,” Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 10965-10975

Number of citations: 1,123

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper presents a grounded language-image pre-training (GLIP) model for learning object-level, language-aware, and semantic-rich visual representations. GLIP unifies object detection and phrase grounding for pre-training. The unification brings two benefits: 1) it allows GLIP to learn from both detection and grounding data to improve both tasks and bootstrap a good grounding model; 2) GLIP can leverage massive image-text pairs by generating grounding boxes in a self-training fashion, making the learned representations semantic-rich.

Professor Emeritus Akira Ishimaru

Akira Ishimaru

Role at UW ECE: Professor Emeritus

Research focus: Wave propagation and scattering

Publication: “Wave propagation and scattering in random media,” Book, 1978, IEEE Explore

Number of citations: 10,670

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This book presents a clear picture of how waves interact with the atmosphere, terrain, ocean, turbulence, aerosols, rain, snow, biological tissues, composite material, and other media. The theories presented enable one to solve a variety of problems relating to clutter, interference, imaging, object detection, and communication theory for various media. This book is expressly designed for engineers and scientists who have an interest in optical, microwave, or acoustic wave propagation and scattering.

Research Professor Emeritus Darrell Jackson headshot

Darrell Jackson

Role at UW ECE: Research Professor Emeritus

Research focus: Wave propagation and scattering

Publication: “An introduction to underwater acoustics: principles and applications,” Book, 2002, Springer Science & Business Media

Number of citations: 1,840

Why was this publication so highly cited?

Presented in a clear and concise way as an introductory text and practical handbook, this book provides the basic physical phenomena governing underwater acoustical waves, propagation, reflection, target backscattering and noise. It covers the general features of sonar systems, transducers and arrays, signal processing and performance evaluation. It provides an overview of today’s applications, presenting the working principles of the various systems.

Daniel Kirschen

Role at UW ECE: Donald W. and Ruth Mary Close Professor

Research focus: Power and Energy Systems

Publication: Book, Fundamentals of Power System Economics, John Wiley & Sons, 2004

Number of citations: 2,483

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This book became widely used because it looked at an important problem from two different perspectives: It rigorously explained the economics of electricity markets for electrical engineers, while also explaining the underlying engineering to economists. The second edition was published in 2018.

UW ECE Professor and Chair, Eric Klavins. Dennis Wise / University of Washington

Eric Klavins

Role at UW ECE: Professor and Chair

Research focus: Biosystems, Robotics and Controls

Publication: “Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot Systems,” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2007

Number of citations: 1,165

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper was a collaboration with several leaders in modular robotics to define some of the grand challenges in the robotics field. It turned out that many of the problems proposed, such as how to create robotic modules that are lightweight, powerful, and flexible, continue to be very fruitful areas of discovery. This paper supplies the larger context for robotics research even 16 years later, and it is still regularly cited.

Professor Jose Nathan Kutz headshot

Jose Nathan Kutz

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Data Science, Computing and Networking

Publication: “Discovering governing equations from data by sparse identification of nonlinear dynamical systems,” Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016

Number of citations: 4,693

Why was this publication so highly cited?

Extracting governing equations from data is a central challenge in many diverse areas of science and engineering. Data are abundant whereas models often remain elusive, as in climate science, neuroscience, ecology, finance, and epidemiology, to name only a few examples. Research described by this paper combines sparsity-promoting techniques and machine learning with nonlinear dynamical systems to discover governing equations from noisy measurement data.

Mo Li

Role at UW ECE: Professor, Associate Chair for Research

Research focus: Electronic, Photonic, and Integrated Quantum Systems

Publication: “Ultra-sensitive NEMS-based cantilevers for sensing, scanned probe and very high-frequency applications,” Nature Nanotechnology, 2007

Number of citations: 1,344

Why was this publication so highly cited?

Nanoscale mechanical sensors (dubbed NEMS) offer a greatly enhanced sensitivity that is unattainable with past microscale devices. This paper reported the first very-high-frequency, self-sensing nanocantilevers for chemical gas sensing and analysis in ambient conditions. By measuring its vibration frequency change, the nanocantilever can detect the mass of 30,000 water molecules (or 1 attogram (10-18 g).

Professor Lih Lin headshot

Lih Lin

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Electronic, Photonic, and Integrated Quantum Systems

Publication: “Enhanced mobility CsPbI₃ quantum dot arrays for record-efficiency, high-voltage photovoltaic cells,” Science Advance, Volume 3, Issue 10, October 2017

Number of citations: 1,010

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper describes work developing lead halide perovskite quantum dot films with tuned surface chemistry based on A-site cation halide salt treatments. Quantum dot perovskites offer colloidal synthesis and processing using industrially friendly solvents, which decouples grain growth from film deposition and at the time of this publication, produced larger open-circuit voltages than thin-film perovskites. The A-site cation halide salt treatments presented in this paper double the film mobility, enabling increased photocurrent, and led to a record certified quantum dot solar cell efficiency of 13.43%.

Alex Mamishev

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Robotics and Controls, EPIQS, Power and Energy Systems

Publication: “Design of an RFID-based battery-free programmable sensing platform,” IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, 2008 (co-authored with UW ECE and Allen School Professor Joshua Smith)

Number of citations: 1,121

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper presented the wireless identification and sensing platform, or WISP, which is a programmable, battery-free sensing and computational platform designed to explore sensor-enhanced radio frequency identification, or RFID, applications. WISP was the first fully programmable computing platform that could operate using power transmitted from a long-range (UHF) RFID reader and communicate arbitrary multibit data in a single response packet.

Mari Ostendorf

Role at UW ECE: System Design Methodologies Professor

Research focus: Data Science

Publication: “ToBI: A standard for labeling English prosody,” Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 1992

Number of citations: 1,878

Why was this publication so highly cited?

Prosody is the patterns of stress and intonation in a language. It is accepted to be central to our understanding of language. While much of language can be transcribed into words and represented as text, usual text transcriptions do not transcribe prosody. This paper offered an approach to transcribe prosody, which became a standard, greatly benefiting the field of natural language processing.

Research Assistant Professor Max Parsons headshot

Max Parsons

Role at UW ECE: Research Assistant Professor

Research focus: Electronic, Photonic, and Integrated Quantum Systems

Publication: “Order of magnitude smaller limit on the electric dipole movement of the electron,” Science, January 2014

Number of citations: 1,233

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper describes precision work measuring the roundness of an electron to a factor of 10 times better than anyone else had ever done it before. It was research that landed on the January 2014 cover of Science, one of the most prestigious journals in the world.

Shwetak Patel

Role at UW ECE: Washington Research Foundation Endowed Professor

Research focus: Biosystems, Data Science, Computing and Networking

Publication: “Experimental security analysis of a modern automobile,” 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

Number of citations: 2,588

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper was the first to show an actual over-the-air attack of the embedded systems infrastructure in a modern automobile. The paper received a 2020 IEEE Test of Time award in addition to a number of other honors. The paper is highly cited because it contributed in large part to launching the auto security field. The U.S. Department of Transportation has adopted several guidelines from the paper, and this work is now integral in the automobile industry.

Professor Radha Poovendran headshot

Radha Poovendran

Role at UW ECE: Professor, former Department chair

Research focus: Data Science, Computing and Networking

Publication: “SeRLoc: Secure range-independent localization for wireless sensor networks,” Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Wireless Security, 2004

Number of citations: 1,002

Why was this publication so highly cited?

In many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSN), sensors are deployed un-tethered in hostile environments. For location-aware WSN applications, it is essential to ensure that sensors can determine their location, even in the presence of malicious adversaries. This paper addresses the problem of enabling sensors of WSN to determine their location in an untrusted environment. It was the first work that provided a security-aware range-independent localization scheme for WSN.

Sumit Roy

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Computing and Networking

Publication: “Data mules: Modeling and analysis of a three-tier architecture for sparse sensor networks,” Ad Hoc Networks, 2003

Number of citations: 2,736

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This was the first analytical model for the impact of mobile ubiquitous local area network extensions, or MULES, collecting data in what was then the very new and emerging field of sensor networking. MULES can pick up data from sensors when in close range, buffer it and pass data off to wired access points. Because of the close range, this approach allowed for large power savings at the sensors and therefore became an important part of modern sensor networking.

Georg Seelig

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Biosystems

Publication: “Enzyme-free nucleic acid logic circuits,” Science, 2006

Number of citations: 1,702

Why was this publication so highly cited?

In DNA computing, scientists and engineers try to identify a minimal set of rationally designed molecular building blocks that enable them to reconstruct the kind of molecular computation performed by cells and living organisms. The goal of this work was not to understand biology but to develop reliable engineering paradigms for molecular systems that were also transparent because they were man-made, rather than having evolved over millions of years. This paper introduced such a systematic approach based on DNA strand displacement. The approach has since been used widely and effectively, and it provides the foundation for today’s dynamic DNA nanotechnology.

Linda Shapiro

Role at UW ECE: Professor

Research focus: Data Science, Biosystems

Publication: Book, Computer and robot vision, Addison-Wesley Longman, 1991

Number of citations: 7,345

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This two-volume set became the authoritative reference for a comprehensive introduction to computer vision. It provided a comprehensive background on theory and algorithms while also linking to real-world applications.

Joshua Smith

Role at UW ECE: Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor in Entrepreneurial Excellence, PMP Coordinator

Research focus: Biosystems, Photonics and Nano Devices, Power and Energy Systems

Publication: “Analysis, experimental results, and range adaptation of magnetically coupled resonators for wireless power transfer,” IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 2010

Number of citations: 2,255

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper provides a new visualization of the state space of high Q-coupled resonator wireless power transfer systems. The visualization immediately suggests a simple control scheme that can keep the transferred power level constant despite disturbances. The paper showed experimentally that the control scheme actually worked — with the counter-intuitive net result of wireless power transfer that doesn’t drop off with distance.

Michael Taylor

Role at UW ECE: Associate Professor

Research focus: Computing and Networking

Publication: “The raw microprocessor: A computational fabric for software circuits and general-purpose programs,” IEEE Micro, 2002

Number of citations: 1,404

Why was this publication so highly cited?

This paper presented the first physically scalable multicore microprocessor design and implementation, foreshadowing how many multicores are designed today. The challenge faced by very large-scale integration (VLSI) designers was: How can chip designers leverage growing quantities of chip resources even as wire delays become substantial? This paper provided the influential architecture that achieved the maximum amount of performance and energy efficiency in the face of wire delay.

Adjunct and affiliate faculty members with research publications cited over 1,000 times

Adjunct faculty

Cecilia Aragon

Professor, Human Centered Design & Engineering; Adjunct Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Adjunct Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; Adjunct Professor, iSchool

Optimization by simulated annealing: An experimental evaluation; part I, graph partitioning

Albert Folch

Professor, Bioengineering; Adjunct Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

The upcoming 3D-printing revolution in microfluidics

Dieter Fox

Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; Adjunct Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Probabilistic robotics

Emily Fox

Amazon Professor, Machine Learning; Assistant Professor, Statistics; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Data Science Fellow of the eScience Institute

Stochastic gradient hamiltonian monte carlo

Shyamnath Gollakota

Associate Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering; Adjunct Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Ambient backscatter: wireless communication out of thin air

Hannaneh Hajishirzi

Adjunct Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Assistant Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering

Bidirectional Attention Flow for Machine Comprehension

Shih-Chieh Hsu

Associate Professor, Physics; Adjunct Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

The ATLAS simulation infrastructure

Tadayoshi Kohno

Short-Dooley Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; Adjunct Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Adjunct Associate Professor, Information School

Robust physical-world attacks on deep learning visual classification

Richard Ladner

Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering; Adjunct Professor Emeritus, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Improving generalization with active learning

Su-In Lee

Assistant Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; Assistant Professor, Genome Sciences; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

A unified approach to interpreting model predictions

Yin Tat Lee

Assistant Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering; Adjunct Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Visiting Researcher, Microsoft Research AI

Sparks of artificial general intelligence: Early experiments with gpt-4

Henrique (Rico) Malvar

Marina Meila

Professor, Statistics; Adjunct Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Comparing clusterings—an information based distance

Mehran Mesbahi

Professor, Aeronautics & Astronautics; Adjunct Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Graph theoretic methods in multiagent networks

Rajesh P.N. Rao

CJ & Elizabeth Hwang Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering; Adjunct Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering; Adjunct Professor, Neuroscience

Predictive coding in the visual cortex: a functional interpretation of some extra-classical receptive-field effects