Five ECE professors receive CFI grants

January 8, 2014

Five ECE professors receive CFI grants.
From left to right: Professors Betz, Draper, Liscidini, Taylor and Yuan receive CFI grants.

Five professors in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering have won grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). In total, University of Toronto projects have been awarded a total of $12.1 million for infrastructure that will advance research in everything from water treatment to cancer.

ECE’s recipients and their projects are:

  • Vaughn Betz, “Enhancing Programmable Silicon: Increasing Efficiency and Ease-of-Use and Broadening Its Application”
  • Stark Draper, “Infrastructure to support algorithm development, verification, and proof of principle for wireless and computing systems”
  • Antonio Liscidini, “Wireless Transceiver Characterization Facility”
  • Joshua Taylor, “Real-time digital simulation of large, renewable powered distribution systems with energy storage”
  • Ding Yuan, “Failure Diagnosis Testbed.”

“With the CFI’s generous support, my research team will be able to move our work in communication theory and algorithm design towards implementation significantly faster,” said Professor Draper. “The CFI infrastructure will be used to train a generation of students with expertise that will span communication theory, algorithmic implementation, and computer architecture. These are areas of expertise that don’t typically mix in academia but that are regularly mixed in industry. The CFI infrastructure will provide a unique academic training environment for our students—developing theories and approaches tightly linked to industrial relevance.”

“Congratulations to all the winners,” said Professor Paul Young, U of T’s vice-president (research and innovation). “ CFI funding has been essential to our ability to attract the world’s best researchers, and has, in turn, allowed those researchers to make progress on some of the most pressing problems of our time.”

See the complete list of University of Toronto’s CFI grant recipients.

More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca