IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019 - 27

2019
2019 Ieee
Ieee technIcAl
technIcAl fIeld
fIeld AwArds
AwArds

IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award

IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award

Sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

Sponsored by the IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society

Erkki Oja

Sanjiv "Sam" Gambhir

For contributions to neural networks and
unsupervised learning

For the development of nuclear and
optical science in the field of molecular
imaging and cancer treatment

For automatic analysis of large data masses, the pioneering accomplishments of Erkki Oja in developing artificial neural networks
to tackle today's overwhelming amount of digital data have been
critical in extracting reliable and useful information. He introduced a fundamental learning rule that enables a neural network
to find the principal components of input data, leading to eﬃcient compression and feature extraction, known as "Oja's Rule."
Oja improved upon the Independent Component Analysis (ICA)
technique with his FastICA method, which he applied to biomedical signal and images and demonstrated that very eﬃcient
source separation of artifacts from actual brain signals was possible.
His work on self-organizing maps has been used to classify both
still pictures and videos and even for indexing nonverbal data.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Oja is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering with Aalto University,
Espoo, Finland.

Sam Gambhir combined the field of cell and molecular biology with
that of biomedical imaging to form the field of multimodality molecular imaging of living subjects. He developed and translated strategies for merging nuclear and optical sciences for improved cancer
detection and management, the imaging of gene and cell therapies
through positron emission tomography (PET), and multimodality
reporter gene technology. He also developed multimodality imaging
agents for applications involving the brain, gastrointestinal tract, and
the prostate. His approaches also use novel cell and molecular biology to force cancer cells to reveal themselves through both in vitro
and in vivo diagnostics. His work has enabled laboratories around
the world to utilize molecular imaging to study fundamental biological processes in both animals and humans.
Gambhir is the Virginia & D.K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and the Chair of the Department of Radiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.

IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award
Sponsored by Hitachi, Ltd. and the IEEE Computer Society

Andy Vidan, Paul Breimyer, and
Gregory G. Hogan

For development of real-time collaborative and distributed emergency response and recovery systems

Andy Vidan, Paul Breimyer, and Gregory G. Hogan's development
of the Next-Generation Incident Command System (NICS) is
transforming emergency response eﬀorts during disasters using
advanced distributed information technology to increase response
eﬃciency and eﬀectiveness. While at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, the trio worked closely with emergency management agencies to understand how technology could support
traditional ICS systems that were often not interoperable. Their
creation of NICS provides a common operational platform across
organizations and command echelons at a national scale that enables collaborative sharing of real-time data. NICS incorporates
a web-based infrastructure designed to integrate applications into
toolsets that are simple to learn and use, allowing responders to

focus on the task at hand. NICS enables virtual collaboration,
integrated sensing, resource monitoring, and mobile applications
to provide real-time situational awareness and reduce the need for
face-to-face meetings.
An IEEE Senior Member, Vidan is chief executive oﬃcer and
cofounder of Composable Analytics, Inc., Cambridge, MA, USA.
Breimyer is director of software engineering with Audible Inc.,
an Amazon Company, Cambridge, MA, USA.
An IEEE member, Hogan is an associate leader of the Advanced
Sensors and Techniques Group with the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA, USA.

27 | 2019 IEEE awards bookLET

IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019