IEEE Awards Booklet - 2015 - 11

2015 ieee medals

IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal

IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr.
Education Medal

Funded by Cirrus Logic, Inc.

Sponsored by MathWorks, Pearson,
and the IEEE Life Members Fund

lynn Conway

richard g. Baraniuk

For contributions to and leadership in design
methodology and pedagogy enabling rapid
advances and dissemination of VLSI design
tools and systems

For fundamental contributions to open educational resources for electrical engineering
and beyond

The groundbreaking contributions of Lynn Conway created a
revolution in very large scale integration (VLSI) technology that
has profoundly impacted computer chip design as one of the most
widely used techniques for building microprocessors and other
computer components. Her creation of simplified VLSI prototyping techniques and design methods were key to educating a new
generation of VLSI designers who continue to enable innovations in VLSI systems today. Ms. Conway co-authored the seminal textbook Introduction to VLSI System Design (Addison-Wesley,
1979) with Carver Mead that started the wave of Mead-Conway
courses at universities around the world. Her focused leadership
and efforts in developing the concepts, writing many chapters of
the book, editing the entire textbook, creating the course syllabus
and class notes, and devising the rapid chip implementation of the
student designs were all essential to the success of the first MIT
VLSI design course in 1978. Her persistence led the subsequent
rapid spread of the VLSI course to students at more than 100
universities. She organized and ran the first three multiproject
chip (MPC) fabrication runs that demonstrated successful designs
of working semiconductor chip systems to a skeptical worldwide
technical audience. Combining several circuit designs onto a
single chip, MPCs substantially reduced the cost of VLSI fabrication and opened up accessibility, allowing ordinary engineers
without specialized silicon fabrication knowledge to create, have
fabricated, and then operate interesting systems on chips of their
own design. Her MPC technology became the foundation for the
Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service (MOSIS)
System, which has evolved since 1981 as a national infrastructure
for fast-turnaround prototyping of VLSI chip designs by universities and researchers.
An IEEE Life Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Ms. Conway is Professor Emerita of EECS
at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.

A visionary who is actively developing the future of technologyenabled education, Richard G. Baraniuk's pioneering open-education initiatives are changing the way students learn by sharing
teaching materials and knowledge freely online. In 1999, Prof.
Baraniuk launched "Connexions," the world's first open-education project, offering free open-source textbooks via the Internet. He saw the limited impact of traditional textbooks, where
students are often unable to see how concepts link together and
how to later apply them to real-word situations. When the time
came for him to write a new textbook for his Signals and Systems
class at Rice University, instead of creating a traditional textbook,
Prof. Baraniuk developed a new model that broke material down
into smaller, interchangeable modules, each dealing with a singular topic. These modules could be combined and customized
as needed, providing dynamic learning linked via the Internet to
enable interactive and immersive experiences among a global audience. And it was his goal to make these modules and supporting
software free and open-source to allow the broadest possible use.
Implementing a digital publishing platform with features years
ahead of their time, such as XML semantic markup, open-content
licenses, a digital textbook publishing pipeline, and a scalable approach to postpublication peer review, Connexcions was born. It
has since evolved into an extensive online repository known as
"OpenStax CNX" used by millions of students around the world.
In 2012, Prof. Baraniuk launched "OpenStax College" to help
lower the cost of college textbooks to zero. It offers a library of
free textbooks for the most common college courses featuring
professionally developed, peer-reviewed content created under
the guidance of prestigious editorial boards.
An IEEE Fellow and American Association for the Advancement of Sciences Fellow, Dr. Baraniuk is currently the Victor E.
Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
Rice University, Houston, TX, USA.

Scope: For groundbreaking contributions that have had an exceptional impact on the development of electronics and electrical
engineering or related fields

Scope: For a career of outstanding contributions to education in
the fields of interest of IEEE

11 | 2015 IEEE AWARDS BOOKLET

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2015