Clark School Faculty Team Wins a UMD Invention of the Year Award

A team of Clark School researchers has been honored in the 2012 UMD Invention of the Year Awards. The awards honor the university's most promising faculty innovations.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering's Min Wu, Ravi Garg and Avinash L. Varna won in the Information Science Category with "Environmental Signatures for Forensic Analysis and Alignment of Media Recordings." In this project, the researchers created a novel natural timestamp for audio and visual recordings.

Runners up in this category included Clark School teams from ECE made up of Pamela Abshire (also ISR) and David Sander ("Next-Generation Image Sensors") and Shuvra Bhattacharyya, Chung-Ching Shen and William Plishker ("Functional Dataflow Interchange Format (Functional DIF)").

Teams featuring Clark School researchers also were runners up in the Physical Sciences Category. The Department of Mechanical Engineering's Reinhard Radermacher, Omar Abdelaziz and Ahmed Abdelaziz entered the competition with their project "High-Density Thermal Storage Based Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) System." Charles Tahan (ECE) and Rousko Hristov and Oney Soykal (both of physics) entered "Phonitons as a Sound-Based Analogue of Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics."

For more information about this year's awards, please visit the UMD web site.

Published April 18, 2012