Director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT (LIDS), Alan S. Willsky has been selected as the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award to be presented at the ICASSP (IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing) in March 2010.
Alan Willsky is the Edwin S. Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT which he joined in 1973, and leads the Stochastic Systems Group. From 1974 to 1981 Dr. Willsky served as Assistant Director of LIDS. He is an IEEE fellow. He is also a founder and member of the board of directors of Alphatech, Inc. (now BAE Systems Advanced Information Technologies). In 1975 he received the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council and in 2005, he was recipient of the Doctorat Honoris Causa from the University of Rennes.
Willsky has held visiting positions at Imperial College, London, L'Universite de Paris-Sud, and the Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systemes Aleatoires in Rennes, France. Willsky is author of the research monograph Digital Signal Processing and Control and Estimation Theory and co-author of the widely used undergraduate text Signals and Systems. In 1979 Willsky was awarded the 1979 Alfred Noble Prize by the ASCE and in 1980 he was selected for the Browder J. Thompson Memorial Prize Award by the IEEE for a paper excerpted from his monograph. He was also the recipient of the 2004 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award.
Willsky's present research interests are in problems involving
multidimensional and multiresolution estimation and imaging, and
particularly in the development and application of advanced methods of
estimation and statistical signal and image processing. Methods he has
developed have been successfully applied in a wide variety of
applications including failure detection in high-performance aircraft,
advanced surveillance and tracking systems, electrocardiogram analysis,
computerized tomography, and remote sensing and more recently in target
tracking, oil exploration, oceanographic remote sensing and groundwater
hydrology.
