2002-03 - Best Paper Awards Asad Abidi, professor of electrical engineering, and student Sohrab Samadian won a Low Power Design Contest Award for their paper on "Demodulators for a Zero IF Receiver for Bluetooth" at the 2002 International Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design. Two students working with chemical engineering professor Panagiotis Christofides received Best Presentation in Session Awards at the American Control Conference. Nael El-Farra spoke on "Hybrid Predictive Control of Nonlinear Systems with Guaranteed Stability Region" and Dong Ni on "A Method for Real-Time Control of Thin Film Composition Using OES and XPS." Enver Cavus and electrical engineering professor Babak Daneshrad placed first in the Operational Category at the 2003 DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest for "A Computationally Efficient ASIC Implementation for the Decoding of Space-Time Block Codes." Petros Faloutsos, computer science professor, won a 2001 Best Paper Award for his work, "The Virtual Stuntman: Dynamic Characters with a Repertoire of Autonomous Motor Skills," which was published in Computer and Graphics magazine. Professor Bahram Jalali's OECS group received the DARPA Best Paper Award for Data Conversion at the IEEE Measurement and Instrumentation Technology Conference (IMTC 2003) for the paper "Ultra-wideband Microwave-photonic Arbitrary Waveform Generator" (J. Chou, Y. Han and B. Jalali). The International Society for Optical Engineering awarded the Best Paper Award 2002 to mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Ajit Mal, his student Feng Feng, professors Michael Kabo and Jeffrey Wang from UCLA Orthopedic Surgery, and Yoseph Bar-Cohen from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper was titled "Interaction of Focused Ultrasound with Biological Materials." Electrical engineering professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii's student Natanan P. Sakungew received the Antenna Measurement Techniques Association 2002 Student Paper Award for "On the Question of Planar Holographic Imaging of the Interior Fields of a Luneberg Lens." Ali Sayed, professor of electrical engineering, and his former student V. H. Nascimento were awarded a 2002 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the paper "On the Learning Mechanism of Adaptive Filters," which appeared in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing in June 2000.