Alan V. Oppenheim and Russell Keith Raney received IEEE awards in a June 16 ceremony in Philadelphia.

Oppenheim received the IEEE 2007 Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing medal. This medal recognizes his visionary leadership and exceptional contributions to the field of digital signal processing (DSP), which have impacted a variety of scientific disciplines including speech coding and recognition, seismic signal processing, artificial intelligence, radar and sonar, communication systems and biomedical signal analysis.

Considered one of the founding fathers of DSP, Oppenheim was honored for his research contributions to DSP and his leadership role in helping others to advance the field. His research has impacted virtually every area of DSP. His early work on homomorphic systems played a key role in many of the digital signal advancements that were to follow. He was a key originator and developer of the complex cepstrum, which found widespread use in speech and seismic processing and which remains, to this day, a foundation of speech-coding systems.

Oppenheim helped define the concept of knowledge-based signal processing (KBSP), which highlights how DSP and artificial intelligence technologies are complementary and could be integrated to produce better overall systems. Many recent advancements in this field have origins that point back to Oppenheim's work in KBSP. More recently, he and his students broke new ground by publishing papers on a signal-processing algorithm inspired by quantum mechanics and by biology.

Oppenheim joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 1964, He is a principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics; Ford Professor of Engineering in the department of electrical engineering and computer science; and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He is also affiliated with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

He is co-author of the textbooks, “Discrete-Time Signal Processing” and “Signals and Systems” and the editor of several advanced books on signal processing. Oppenheim has authored and co-authored numerous papers on DSP and has won many awards for his work in the field.

An IEEE Life Fellow, Oppenheim received his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. He is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University, which was conferred upon him in 1995.

Another IEEE medal honoree, Russell Keith Raney, received the 2007 IEEE Dennis J. Picard medal for radar technologies and applications. Raney received the medal for his contributions to improved technology for space-based radars and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems that have contributed to observational programs by several space agencies of Venus, the Moon and the Earth.

Sponsored by Raytheon Company, the medal recognizes Raney for innovation and technical leadership in the implementation and application of earth-observing and planetary radars.

Some of Raney's most noteworthy contributions include his instrumental role in the development of the European Space Agency's CryoSat, two lunar radars being implemented by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization, and his work on the Magellan spacecraft, which NASA used from 1990-1994 to research the surface of Venus by way of radar imaging.

Raney began his career working on SAR systems, including the first dual-aperture airborne moving-target-indicating SAR. In addition, he wrote his thesis on quadratic filter theory, which provides the foundations for formal principles of conservation for SAR systems. He then moved to the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS). His leadership and innovation at CCRS led to the development of the RADARSAT, Canada's first space-borne radar satellite, and the invention of chirp-scaling SAR processing.

Included in Raney's contributions to radar technologies are six patents and approximately 400 papers published in referenced journals and symposia proceedings. Raney is a member of the principal professional staff in the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Space Department at Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Md. and assistant supervisor of the Ocean Remote Sensing Group. An IEEE Life Fellow, he received a bachelor of science from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., a master's degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., and a doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

For more information, visit www.ieee.org.