January 2022
Academic Member Questionnaire
By: Athina Petropulu; Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
The Basics
Name: Athina Petropulu
Title: Distinguished Professor, ECE
Company/Institution: Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
How many years have you been with your current company/institution?
First job? 12 years at Rutgers and prior to that, 18 years at Drexel University
Where were you born? I was born in Kalamata, Greece
Where did you grow up? I grew up in Kalamata, Greece
Why is ECEDHA important to you?
I am very happy to interact again with the ECEDHA members, and would like to send all my best wishes for the New Year! I was involved with ECEDHA during my terms as chair of the ECE Department at Rutgers, and was honored to be ECEDHA President in 2015. ECEDHA is an organization that brings the leaders of ECE departments together to exchange views, compare best practices, learn about cutting edge research and teaching trends, interact with industry and network with their peers. As ECE chair, I felt very fortunate to have access to the inclusive, supportive and resourceful ECEDHA ecosystem.
What have you found to have been most rewarding in your experience with ECEDHA?
I really enjoyed the interactions with the other chairs and learned a lot from them. I also appreciated the panel discussions on branding and the visibility of the ECE field. I took back to my department at Rutgers our ECEDHA discussions on how to make ECE more attractive to women and underrepresented minorities, and with my colleagues we created a new interpretation of ECE as “Experience Creative Engineering”. This indeed was very effective in helping us to almost double the percentage of females in our department, and also made ECE by far the largest department in the Rutgers School of Engineering.
During my involvement with ECEDHA we started the iREDEFINE ECE (Improving the Diversity of Faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering) project, which tackles the lack of women and under-represented minorities on the faculty of ECE departments. This lack represents failure to tap into a large pool of talent, and hurts our ability to attract a diverse student body and deliver a diverse workforce. The vision of iREDEFINE was to redefine the field of ECE by making it more diverse at the professorial level. The project was funded by NSF and included an annual workshop and mentoring activities specially designed for women or underrepresented graduate students. I chaired the workshop and oversaw the follow-up teleconferences during the first two years of the project, i.e., 2017 and 2018. The project was a big success in motivating and preparing students for academic positions, as indicated by follow up surveys. By June 2020, from the 66 student participants in the 2017 and 2018 cohorts, 36.4% followed academic careers. I am thrilled to see the iREDEFINE ECE initiative still going strong, and applaud the efforts of the ECEDHA leaders and support staff. An article on the iREDEFINE project can be found in [1].
If you had to choose another profession, what would you choose?
I cannot not think of a more exciting and fulfilling profession than being an ECE faculty. I really value the academic freedom to conduct research on problems of my own choice and advance the state-of-art. Academics are entrepreneurs, who produce innovative, basic or applied research. They have the power to create research trends, which can bring researchers together to solve important problems. Electrical engineering is a versatile discipline that can tackle the most important challenges our world is facing, from the environment, health care, security, and the joy of living (per the National Academy of Engineering).
Equally important to research, is the contribution of an academic to education and human development. As faculty, we develop the workforce of the future by training future engineers to think critically and be able to solve open-ended problems. We also train PhD students, who by the time they graduate have pushed the envelope of their research topic, and have become confident, independent researchers, ready to contribute to the advancement of their fields.
Was there a defining moment in your life that made you choose ECE as a profession?
Growing up in small city of Greece, in the seventies, I did not know much about the various career paths. But I really loved math and physics and attended a very competitive public high school and extracurricular math groups. Solving math and geometry problems always gave me a thrill. However, the defining moment for me to choose electrical engineering was when my grandmother told me that electrical engineering was not for women. After that moment I was on a mission to prove everybody wrong. At the time, to be admitted to any university one had to take a country-wide exam, with the EE department at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece, requiring the highest scores. When I made it to EE NTUA I felt I was on the right path to accomplish my mission.
What has been your personal biggest challenge, or most significant achievement since the pandemic?
Aside from the immense cost in human life and inconvenience, the pandemic taught us a lot. Most important, it taught us that we, academics, are capable of change. Who would have thought three years ago that we could switch to online teaching literary overnight. But we did, without any arguments or fuss. There are a lot of things in need of change in our education system, and now we know that we can pursue bold new ideas.
In 2020 I started my term as President-Elect of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS), which is my professional society. The President at that time was Ahmed Tewfik, who also used to be an ECEDHA member. SPS is one of the largest IEEE societies, with 19,000 members around the world. I was the first SPS President-Elect directly elected by the SPS membership, due to the SPS Board of Governors urging a stronger member voice in elections.
SPS had to embrace a lot of changes to navigate the unknown territory. However, two years later, SPS is very strong, and has discovered new ways to improve its reach and impact. As of January 2022, I am SPS President. Over the next two years, with the SPS volunteers and staff we will work towards raising the visibility of signal processing, support cutting-edge technical and educational activities, publications, conferences, and keep members abreast of the latest information and technologies.
Signal processing (SP) is the brain of technologies that changed the course of history, e.g., the wireless phone, computer vision, robotics, medical imaging, speech processing, just to name a few. SP is also in the heart of tools that are now revolutionizing our ability to extract information from data, like machine learning, bringing a unique perspective that promises to improve the interpretability and reliability of machine learning algorithms. While SP may have been a somewhat esoteric field for the general public to appreciate, the covid crisis has created a unique opportunity to change this perception. The pandemic has precipitated the digital transformation of almost every aspect of our lives, from the way we communicate, conduct business, receive our education, interact with health providers. The role of signal processing in technologies that support such transformation is at the front and center, and SP-able personnel are in high demand in order to maintain and advance those technologies. We will leverage those opportunities to boost SP awareness and attract more talent to the signal processing field.
In the publications arena, we will have to embrace open access (OA), which has the potential to allow unrestricted flow of knowledge to every corner of the world, and thus substantially boost scientific discovery. However, new financial models will be needed to assure that publishing is not limited only to authors who can afford to pay, and sustain our publications operation. New trends are in the horizon for our conferences too. With the pandemic preventing us from physical gatherings, we discovered the power of virtual events, which allowed us to reach far wider audiences. While we are all looking forward to returning to face-to-face conferences and workshops, virtual components in our meetings will continue to offer ways to be far more inclusive than before. Of course, we need to find ways to encourage face-to-face participation. We are also considering public outreach components to our conferences, that will socialize SP to high-school students, college counselors and the general public.
I am very excited about our ongoing efforts to create new educational opportunities at all levels, starting from precollege students to practitioners in need of reskilling or retraining. We will work on better engaging industry to our activities. We are at the planning stages of an entrepreneurial forum that will create pathways for SP innovations to impact real-world problems.
I am also excited about our plans and efforts underway to be more inclusive, further diversify the SPS membership and create a welcoming environment for all who wish to join our society. Enabling unrestricted flow of talent to SP will infuse the field with a multitude of ideas and perspectives, all necessary elements for achieving innovation. However, unlike in the US, diversity at the international stage is a concept not equally appreciated by all countries, and promoting diversity is a very broad mission.
While we are making progress in appreciating the issues women face when trying to be integrated, we have not paid enough attention to the issues LGBTQ+ people face. Such underrepresented groups experience a range of hardships, from misgendering to job insecurity to violent hate crimes and prosecution in some counties. We are already trying to take steps to increase inclusion. For example, we are working to ensure convenient gender-neutral bathrooms at all our events, including pronouns on name tags and speaker bios, and actively developing policy against bullying and harassment. We are also planning to send out a survey to identify key problems in our society.
We are actively considering new initiatives to target underserved populations. One of these new initiatives is the SPS PROGRESS (PROmotinG diveRsity in Signal ProcESSing) Workshop [2], which basically scales up the iREFEFINE project at an international level. It aims to motivate and prepare women and underrepresented minorities from around the world to pursue academic careers in signal processing. PROGRESS (www.ieeeprogress.org) is now integral part of the two largest annual conferences of SPS, i.e., ICASSP and ICIP. It offers motivational talks by high profile individuals, and panel discussions on topics like “why academia,” faculty experiences, faculty hiring, and preparing for the academic job market. SPS, in partnership with funding agencies and corporate sponsors offers grants for aspiring as well as current members to attend. PROGRESS offers an international forum that has been an eye opening experience for panelists as well as attendees, as they compare notes with colleagues from other countries. The workshop aims to influence people who make hiring decisions as well as students. Having representatives from different countries discuss how diversity is viewed and supported in their own country has been very educational for all. It has been very rewarding to hear several of the panelists publicly acknowledge that they need to do more to improve diversity. SPS would love to work together with ECEDHA on promoting diversity.
My favorite class to teach is of course signal processing. I love how signal processing brings together math and physics to solve important problems in a wide range of applications. Signal processing is also my area of research and I try to incorporate elements from my research in my teaching.
[1] Petropulu and S. Lord, Improving the Diversity of Faculty in Electrical and Computer Engineering (iREDEFINE ECE)," Proceedings of the IEEE, February 2018.
[2] Petropulu, “IEEE Signal Processing Society PROGRESS: Support for Underrepresented Talent in the Field of Signal Processing,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Volume: 38, Issue: 3, Year: 2021.