2022 IEEE President K.J. Ray Liu Honored for His Leadership

Unlike many budding engineers, K.J. Ray Liu wasn’t inspired to enter the field by tinkering with electronics or following in the footsteps of a family member. Growing up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his government’s call for students to become electrical engineers to help manufacture semiconductors in the 1970s, when the country’s economy was struggling. “Students who were good in math, science, and physics all wanted to be an electrical engineer because that was the top priority of the government,” Liu says. “That’s how I got into engineering. Now Taiwan is a world leader in semiconductors.” K.J. Ray Liu Occupation Retired professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park Member grade Fellow Alma maters National Taiwan University; University of Michigan; UCLA But by the time he graduated from university in 1983, semiconductor facilities were still under construction, so there were no jobs available. Instead, he went on to have a successful career as an educator and entrepreneur in the United States. For 31 years, he was a professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park until he retired in 2021. Liu was the chairman, CEO, and CTO of Origin Wireless, a startup he founded in Rockville, Md. Origin, which was acquired by ADT in February, pioneers artificial intelligence for wireless sensing and indoor tracking. Liu, an IEEE Fellow, is an active IEEE volunteer who served as the organization’s president in 2022. IEEE honored him with this year’s Haraden Pratt Award for “transformative and impactful leadership.” Liu is credited with increasing the diversity of nominees for IEEE’s Fellow program, which is the highest level of membership. He also led the effort to realign the organization’s regions geographically to ensure more equitable global representation on the IEEE Board of Directors. He received the Pratt honor on 24 April during a ceremony in New York City. The IEEE Foundation sponsored the Board-level award. “More than anything, I share the honor with the volunteers and staff I had the privilege to work alongside,” he says. “Our hard work is fueled by our shared devotion to this professional home we love and care for so much.” Making the switch to signal processing In the 1970s, Taiwan’s policymakers decided to improve the country’s economy by pivoting from making products such as shoes and umbrellas to manufacturing electronics. The industry got its start in 1976 when RCA, a major electronics company at the time, agreed to transfer licensed semiconductor processes to Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute. ITRI spun off several semiconductor-related companies including the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC, launched in 1987, is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry. Liu graduated in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, in Taipei. At the time, there were no semiconductor companies to work for, he says. “Nowadays, many of the country’s university graduates go right to TSMC to get a job,” he says. “But back then, there was no real job market. “Most of my classmates—including me—came to the U.S. for graduate studies. Many of us stayed and, over the last three to four decades, contributed to the development of electronic computer communication technology in the U.S.” Liu left Taiwan after a two-year mandatory stint in the Republic of China Armed Forces to attend the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, where in 1987 he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering. “If I can help make IEEE a better professional home for future members, that is something that I can pay back to IEEE.” He went on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering in 1990 from the University of California, Los Angeles. His interest in digital signal processing and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) was sparked while at UCLA. Today VLSI powers all modern electronics. “When I was a graduate student, there was no wireless communication. Everybody had a landline,” he explains. VLSI was an important, active research field at the time. “My research interest was digital signal processing,” he says. “One day I saw a book on VLSI signal processing on my professor’s bookshelf. I immediately thought to myself: That is the field I want to pursue. “VLSI is one lane, digital signal processing is the other, and there is a bridge linking the two. I was interested in both areas, so I did my Ph.D. thesis on VLSI signal processing.” After graduating, Liu joined the University of Maryland, where he is credited with establishing its signal processing research program. In addition to teaching, he conducted research on a broad range of signal processing and communication aspects. The topics include bioinformatics, game theory, signal processing algorithms and architectures, and wirel

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