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Four Viterbi Faculty Elected IEEE Fellows

"I am absolutely thrilled to have four new IEEE fellows on our already distinguished faculty," said Dean Yannis C. Yortsos.
Bob Calverley
December 03, 2009 —

Four faculty from the Viterbi School have been elected fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the organization's highest level of membership and one of its most prestigious honors.

The four new fellows, all professors, are Theodore Berger, from the Department of Biomedical Engineering; Danny Cohen from the Department of Computer Science, and Bart Kosko and Gerhard Kramer, from the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering. The additions raises the total number of faculty in the Viterbi School who are IEEE fellows to more than 40.

"I am absolutely thrilled to have four new IEEE fellows on our already distinguished faculty," said Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. "Danny Cohen, Ted Berger, Bart Kosko and Gerhard Kramer are three very talented and exceptional individuals with outstanding records of academic achievement, and I offer my heartiest congratulations to them."

Danny Cohen
Cohen, who serves as an adjunct professor of computer science in addition to serving as a Distinguished Engineer for New Technology Adoption at Sun Microsystems,is a former researcher at the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute. There he made fundamental contributions to Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet, insights he later developed at Myricom, a company he co-founded. The citation for his Fellowship notes his "contributions to protocols for packet switching in real-time applications."

Theodore Berger
Berger, who holds the David Packard Chair in Engineering, is the director of the USC Center for Neural Engineering and part of the National Science Foundation Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems Engineering Research Center where he has been developing a prosthesis to replace damaged or diseased tissue in the brain.  A member of the USC faculty since 1992, he has received an NIMH Senior Scientist Award, was awarded the Lockheed Senior Research Award, is a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, received a Person of the Year "Impact Award" from the AARP and in 2006 was awarded USC’s Associates Award for Creativity in Research and Scholarship.

"Ted was given this award for his seminal contributions to the nonlinear systems modeling of neural tissue and the development of neural prostheses," said Michael Khoo, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering.  "This recognition of his pioneering efforts in neuroengineering is long overdue."

Berger earned his Ph.D. at Harvard where his thesis won the James McKeen Cattell Award from the New York Academy of Sciences. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Irvine from 1977-1978, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow at The Salk Institute from 1978-1979.

Bart Kosko
The IEEE Fellow citation for Bart Kosko notes his "contributions to neural and fuzzy systems."  His research concerns the foundations of uncertainty reasoning, neural networks, nonlinear signal processing and noise benefits in physical systems.  He is an elected governor of the International Neural Networks Society, is a past director of the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute and has chaired several international conferences on neural and fuzzy systems.  He is also the immediate past intellectual property liaison for the USC Academic Senate.

Kosko is a widely published author in both academic and popular realms including textbooks, edited volumes and general science. His Fuzzy Thinking was an international bestseller. Other popular books include Heaven in a Chip and Noise.  He also wrote a cyber thriller, Nanotime

In 1982, Kosko received bachelor's degrees from USC in philosophy and in economics.  He earned a master's degree in applied mathematics from UC-San Diego and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UC-Irvine.  He also has a J.D. degree from Concord Law School and is a California licensed attorney.

"Bart Kosko's election as IEEE Fellow is a great achievement and recognition of his accomplishments in research and education," said Alexander Sawchuk, systems chair of the Ming Hsieh Department.  "Our department joins me in congratulating him."

Kramer 1
Gerhard Kramer
Gerhard Kramer's citation as IEEE Fellow notes his "contributions to coded modulation, iterative decoding, and cooperative communications."  His research focuses on information theory and communications theory. 

He earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Manitoba and the Dr.Sc. technical degree at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH).  He has received the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award, a Bell Labs President's Gold Award and an ETH Medal.  Kramer joined the Ming Hsieh Department in January 2009 from Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent.

"Gerard Kramer's election as IEEE Fellow is an excellent recognition of his accomplishments and stature in communications, coding and information theory research," said Sawchuk. "Our faculty joins me in congratulating him on this honor."