Parhi Awarded IEEE CAS Society John Choma Education Award
Data science graduate faculty member Keshab Parhi is a recipient of the 2021 IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society John Choma Education award “for contributions to VLSI signal processing education.” Parhi is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Edgar F. Johnson Professor of Electronic Communications in the University of Minnesota's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineerin. The award ceremony was held in May at the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS). The John Choma Education award recognizes individuals who have made exceptional contributions to education in a field within the scope of the CAS Society. Contributions are quantifiable by publication of textbooks, research supervision of both graduate and undergraduate students, short course development, and personal participation in continual education within the field.
Parhi has made significant contributions to education in the field of circuits and systems. Key among them are a textbook (the only one of its kind on the subject), educational content for tutorials at conferences, and mentorship of a large number of graduate students and young professionals in the IEEE CAS Society.
Textbook on VLSI Digital Signal Processing
No textbook existed in the field of very large-scale integration (VLSI) digital signal processing prior to 1999. Parhi created and taught new classes on VLSI digital signal processing at the University by compiling journal and conference papers into a course reader. These course notes eventually led to his textbook “VLSI Digital Signal Processing Systems: Design and Implementation,” published in 1999 by John Wiley and Sons. More than half of the technical content in this book can be credited to Parhi who has been a pioneer in the field. The book, which has also been translated to Chinese, is used in many universities worldwide, and by practicing engineers. Slides of the textbook are available on his research site.
Lectures and tutorials
In 1996, Parhi was invited to be a visiting professor at Delft University, the Netherlands, to teach a new course on VLSI digital signal processing. In 1999 Lund University in Sweden extended him an invitation to teach the topic using the just published textbook. In 2017, he taught a course on the same subject at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, where more than 2000 students attended the class live via video streaming. Parhi has also taught short courses on VLSI signal processing at Ericsson in Stockholm, at Broadcom in Irvine, and at Medtronic in Minneapolis. He has served as distinguished lecturer of the IEEE CAS Society twice: from1996 through 1997 and 2018 through 2021. Starting in 1995 through 2020, he has presented 15 tutorials at conferences including 12 at ISCAS. He has shared his expertise through 175 invited and keynote talks, 19 book chapters that he has authored or coauthored, 230 journal papers, and 420 conference papers. His research has been cited more than 23,000 times (Google Scholar) and his h-index is 80. His text book has been cited more than 2400 times.
Graduate student mentorship
Parhi has graduated 48 PhD students and 65 MSECE research students, and supervised 19 post-doctoral and pre-doctoral visitors. His former doctoral students have served or are currently serving as faculty members at leading institutions within the United States and abroad such as University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Ohio State University, Rutgers University, Nanjing University, China, Chonbuk National University, Korea, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan, Cairo University, Egypt, and others. Other former students have been employed by Naval Research Laboratory, MIT Lincoln Labs and technology companies that include IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, Boston Scientific, Minnetronix, Medtronic, Netflix, Volvo, and several others.
Parhi is the recipient of several awards that recognize his brilliant contributions. The most recent ones include elevation to ACM Fellow (2020), induction as fellow to the National Academy of Inventors (2020), the Mac Van Valkenburg Award by IEEE CAS Society (2017), and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017). The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is proud of Professor Parhi’s achievements and congratulates him on the IEEE CAS Society Jon Choma Education award.