Electrical engineering

Jerzy W. Rozenblit is University Distinguished Professor, Raymond J. Oglethorpe Endowed Chair in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and Professor of Surgery in the College of Medicine at The University of Arizona. From 2003 to 2011 he served as the ECE Department Head. During his tenure at the University of Arizona, he established the Model-Based Design Laboratory with major projects in design and analysis of complex, computer-based systems, hardware/software codesign, and simulation modeling. The projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, US Army, Siemens, Infineon Technologies, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, NASA, Raytheon, and Semiconductor Research Corporation. He has extensive teaching experience and conducts a vigorous graduate program as evidenced by many successful PhD and MSc students and Best Teacher awards. Dr. Rozenblit has been active in professional service in capacities ranging from editorship of ACM, IEEE, and Society for Computer Simulation Transactions, program and general chairmanship of major conferences, to participation in various university and departmental committees. Among several visiting assignments, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar and Visiting Professor at the Institute of Systems Science, Johannes Kepler University, Austria, Research Fellow at the US Army Research Laboratories, Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Munich, University of Perugia, and Fulbright Senior Specialist in Cracow, Poland. Over the years, he has developed strong associations with the private sector and government entities. His management and project experience includes over $20 million in externally funded research. He had served as a research scientist and visiting professor at Siemens AG and Infineon AG Central Research and Development Laboratories in Munich, where over the years he was instrumental in the development of design frameworks for complex, computer-based systems. Currently, jointly with the Arizona Surgical Technology and Education Center, he is developing computer guided training methods and systems for minimally invasive surgery. Co-author of several edited monographs and over two hundred publications, Jerzy holds the PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science from Wayne State University, Michigan. He presently serves as Director of the Life-Critical Computing Systems Initiative, a research enterprise intended to improve the reliability and safety of technology in healthcare and life-critical applications.

Dr. Enikov's area of expertise is the design of micro-actuators, MEMS devices, and sensors. After completion of his training, he established the Advanced Micro- and Nanosystems Laboratory at the University of Arizona, where they have carried out numerous research projects involving precision assembly of micro-systems under optical feedback, development of wet actuators using ion-exchange polymers, pressure sensors, and accelerometers. In the last 8-years, his research has applied micro-technology to the development of medical devices. More specifically, they have developed a through-the-eye lid tactile tonometer capable of estimating intraocular pressure using an array of MEMS sensors. A second invention pertains to the development of an implantable ventricular peritoneal shunt with flow sensing capabilities. The present project represents a major focus of his laboratory. They have completed several early-stage studies on tactile tonometery supporting the present application. Given Dr. Enikov's technical background and prior effort in the area of tactile tonometery, he believes he is uniquely qualified to lead the proposed effort.

Ali Bilgin, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Medical Imaging at the University of Arizona. Dr. Bilgin received the B.S. degree in electronics and telecommunications engineering from Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, M.S. degree in electrical engineering from San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.Dr. Bilgin’s research interests are in the areas of signal and image processing, and include image and video coding, data compression, and magnetic resonance imaging. He has authored/ co-authored over 250 research papers in these areas and has twelve granted and several pending patents. Dr. Bilgin was on the organizing committees of numerous conferences, and was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters from 2010 to 2012, the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing from 2010 to 2014, and the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging from 2014 to 2019.

Kobus Barnard, PhD, is an associate professor in the recently formed University of Arizona School of Information: Science, Technology, and Arts (SISTA), created to foster computational approaches across disciplines in both research and education. He also has University of Arizona appointments with Computer Science, ECE, Statistics, Cognitive Sciences, and BIO5. He leads the Interdisciplinary Visual Intelligence Lab (IVILAB) currently housed in SISTA. Research in the IVILAB revolves around building top-down statistical models that link theory and semantics to data. Such models support going from data to knowledge using Bayesian inference. Much of this work is in the context of inferring semantics and geometric form from image and video. For example, in collaboration with multiple researchers, the IVILAB has applied this approach to problems in computer vision (e.g., tracking people in 3D from video, understanding 3D scenes from images, and learning models of object structure) and biological image understanding (e.g., tracking pollen tubes growing in vitro, inferring the morphology of neurons grown in culture, extracting 3D structure of filamentous fungi from the genus Alternaria from brightfield microscopy image stacks, and extracting 3D structure of Arabidopsis plants). An additional IVILAB research project, Semantically Linked Instructional Content (SLIC) is on improving access to educational video through searching and browsing.Dr. Barnard holds an NSF CAREER grant, and has received support from three additional NSF grants, the DARPA Mind’s eye program, ONR, the Arizona Biomedical Research Commission (ABRC), and a BIO5 seed grant. He was supported by NSERC (Canada) during graduate and post-graduate studies (NSERC A, B and PDF). His work on computational color constancy was awarded the Governor General’s gold medal for the best dissertation across disciplines at SFU. He has published over 80 papers, including one awarded best paper on cognitive computer vision in 2002.