Two Institute Affiliates Promoted to Full Professorship
Two of the 16 faculty recently promoted to the rank of full professor on the Charles River Campus are closely connected to the Hariri Institute and have been supported through the Hariri Research Awards and Junior Faculty Fellows programs. Prakash Ishwar, professor of electrical and computer engineering and systems engineering in the College of Engineering has received full professor status, as well as Richard West, professor of computer science in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Ishwar, who is an appointed Faculty Fellow of the Hariri Institute, was a previous Junior Faculty Fellow with the Institute. Currently, he serves as a Co-PI on Statistically Principled and Scalable Computational Tools for Transforming Research. The project, which is currently sponsored by a Hariri Research Award, aims to explore reliable methods of analyzing big data in social contexts in communication research, analyzing ways to detect topics on Twitter and other social platforms. Prakash also served as co-chair for the 2016 inaugural BU Data Science Day, bringing together faculty and students from across the University to build and strengthen BU’s diverse community of data scientists.
Ishwar’s expertise is in network information theory, information-theoretic security, machine learning, and visual information processing. A past NSF CAREER Award recipient and winner of ENG’s Dean’s Catalyst Award, he has received numerous NSF grants, and is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Ishwar is the author of dozens of journal articles.
West is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute as the PI on Interdiscplinary Development of a Biokinematic Data Acquisition System. His research focuses on data acquisition and analysis tools that track the positions of ice hockey players. The research is meant to help answer field questions in physical therapy, engineering research in unmanned air vehicles, and the optimization and development of microprocessing platforms.
West specializes in the building of computer and advanced operating systems, especially embedded and real-time computing. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is leading the development of the Quest real-time operating system for multi-core processors (circuitry that performs a computer program’s instructions). He has published 10 journal articles and dozens of conference papers. In 2015, he was general chair of the IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium. The recipient of numerous NSF grants, West holds four patents.