News & Events
Alum Louis Scharf Honored with 2016 IEEE Kilby Medal
UW EE alum Louis Scharf (Ph.D. ’69) has been honored with a 2016 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for his contributions to statistical signal processing. The Kilby Medal was established in 1995 in honor of Jack S. Kilby, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the integrated circuit (the chip).
The award recognizes outstanding theoretical, technological, or commercial achievements in signal processing, one of the technologies enabled by Kilby’s invention. Scharf’s research focus is statistical signal processing, as it applies to radar, sonar, imaging and wireless communication. He is best known for his work on modal analysis, invariance theories for subspace signal processing, and for his recent work on coherence statistics for space-time signal processing.
Scharf’s work on modal analysis has been applied to mode tracking in power systems, and his work on matched and adaptive subspace detectors has been applied in radar, sonar and hyperspectral imaging. He is the author of two graduate-level texts on statistical signal processing.
A previous recipient of the Technical Achievement and Society Awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Scharf is also the recipient of the Donald W. Tufts Award for Underwater Acoustic Signal Processing. He received a Millennium Medal from IEEE in 2000.
Scharf received his B.S, M.S, and Ph.D. degrees from UW Electrical Engineering. The annual UW EE Lytle Lecture series was made possible by a fundraising campaign led by Scharf, to honor the late Professor Dean W. Lytle, who was Scharf's Ph.D. advisor.
Scharf is currently Research Professor of Mathematics and Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Scharf has also taught at the University of Rhode Island and the University of Colorado.
