IEEE Awards Booklet - 2016 - 25

2016 ieee technical field awards

IEEE Photonics Award

IEEE Robotics and Automation Award

Sponsored by the IEEE Photonics Society

Sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society

Mark e. thompson

raffaello d'andrea

For scientiﬁc and technical leadership in
the conception, demonstration, and development of phosphorescent materials
in organic light-emitting diode (OLED)
displays

For pioneering contributions to design
and implementation of distributed, cooperative robotics and automation systems
for commercial applications

The highly efficient photonic materials developed by Mark E.
Thompson have advanced organic light-emitting diode (OLED)
technology from a laboratory curiosity to a booming commercial
success, providing low-power, high-resolution displays for mobile
devices and the newest generation of flat-panel televisions.With a
previous device efficiency of only 25%, OLED performance was
severely limited. During the late 1990s, Thompson overcame the
limitations by introducing iridium and platinum as materials for
electrophosphorescent emitters, which through further development now provide practically 100% device efficiency. Less than
10 years after Thompson's introduction, electrophosphorescent
OLEDs were commercialized and are now featured in the very
popular Samsung Galaxy smartphones, among other products.
An American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and
National Academy of Inventors Fellow, Thompson is a professor
with the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern
California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Spanning academics, business, and the arts, Raffaello D'Andrea's
career is built on his ability to bridge theory and practice. He
was the faculty advisor and system architect of the Cornell Robot Soccer Team, four-time world champions at the international
RoboCup competition. He was one of the first in the controls
community to use a multi-vehicle testbed for research. At ETH
Zurich, his research redefines what autonomous systems are capable of. He is cofounder of Kiva Systems, a robotics company
that revolutionized material handling by deploying thousands of
autonomous mobile robots in warehouses. He recently founded
Verity Studios, a company developing a new breed of interactive
and autonomous flying machines.
An IEEE Fellow, D'Andrea is professor of dynamic systems and
control at ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.

IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award

IEEE David Sarnoff Award

Sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

Sponsored by SRI International Sarnoff

ronald r. Yager

Hiroyuki Matsunami

For contributions to the theory of fuzzy
sets and systems

For contributions to the development of
silicon carbide (SiC) crystals and devices
for advanced power electronics

With almost 40 years of groundbreaking contributions, Ronald
R.Yager is one of the most highly cited researchers in the field of
computational intelligence. Of major impact has been Yager's introduction of the Ordered Weighted Averaging operator that has
been applied to multicriteria decision making, information fusion,
database retrieval, and pattern recognition. His methodology for
finding linguistic summaries of large data collections makes data
easier to understand and has been integral to data mining applications. He also developed a generalized class of logical "and" operators, known as the Yager family of t-norms, that have been widely
used to model the intersection of fuzzy sets. Yager's pioneering
work on fuzzy-set-based approaches for social network and recommender systems has been important to web applications.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Yager is a professor with the Machine
Intelligence Institute at Iona College, New York, NY, USA.

Recognizing early on the potential that silicon carbide (SiC) held
for outperforming conventional semiconductor materials in advanced power electronics, Hiroyuki Matsunami has developed many
critical breakthroughs to provide SiC-based energy-saving devices.
Important to the adoption of SiC for power devices was Matsunami's step-controlled epitaxial growth technique, which enabled
single-crystal growth and overcame the barrier of polytype mixing
problems. His demonstration of the first high-voltage SiC Schottky
barrier diodes for reducing power dissipation during energy conversion is considered a milestone in SiC power device development.
Matsunami also played a pioneering role in establishing SiC power
metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor technologies. The
devices made possible by Matsunami's innovations are being utilized
today in trains, high-speed elevators, and hybrid vehicles and are realizing huge energy savings benefitting the environment.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Matsunami is a Professor Emeritus with
Kyoto University,Yawata, Kyoto, Japan.

25 | 2016 IEEE AWARDS BooKLET

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2016