Two George R. Brown School of Engineering professors—Edward W. Knightly and Moshe Y. Vardi—have been named 2009 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) fellows.
Knightly, a professor in electrical and computer engineering, was recognized for his contributions to multi-hop wireless networks, the IEEE board said.
Knightly’s research interests are in the areas of mobile and wireless networks and high-performance and denial-of-service resilient protocol design. He leads the Rice Networks Group. The group’s current projects include deployment, operation, and management of a large-scale urban mesh network in a Houston under-resourced community. The group is also developing a clean-slate-design hardware platform for high-performance multi-hop wireless. The platform is now operational, and ongoing research includes cross-layer design and implementation of medium access protocols.
Knightly received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996 and was recognized with a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1997. He has been a Sloan Fellow since 2001.
Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, was recognized for his contributions to the development of logic as a unifying framework for modeling computational systems.
He chaired the Department of Computer Science at Rice from January 1994 until June 2002. Prior to joining Rice in 1993, he was at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where he managed the Mathematics and Related Computer Science Department. Vardi’s research interests include database systems, computational-complexity theory, multi-agent systems, and design specification and verification.
Vardi received his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1981. He is the author and co-author of more than 300 technical papers, as well as two books, “Reasoning about Knowledge” and “Finite Model Theory and Its Applications,” and the editor of several collections. Among his many honors and awards, he has been named co-winner of the 2006 LICS Test-of-Time Award and the 2008 ACM PODS Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award. He is a recipient of the 2008 ACM SIGMOD Codd Innovation Award, the European Academy of Sciences’ 2008 Blaise Pascal Medal for Computer Science and a 2008 ACM Presidential Award.
By Dwight Daniels, School of Engineering Office of Communications