Two UCF professors are being honored as 2022 fellows by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a prestigious national distinction. The IEEE announced its new cohort of 311 fellows earlier this month.
Their fellowships bring the total number of IEEE fellows at UCF to 17, underscoring the national prominence of UCF professors among their peers in research involving advanced electrical and computer systems and methods.
Professor Jun Wang has achieved fellow status for outstanding contributions to low-power computer disk storage system design. Pegasus Professor Greg Welch has been honored for his outstanding contributions to tracking methods and augmented reality applications.
Jun Wang
A computer scientist and engineer, Wang is a professor in UCF’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint faculty appointment in UCF’s Department of Computer Science. As co-director of UCF’s Computer Architecture and Storage System Laboratory, Wang is widely known for his efforts in making computers work faster and more efficiently with advanced methods, as well as developing open-source tools, hardware and platforms.
For more than 20 years Wang has been making significant contributions to massive storage and computer architecture. He has co-authored more than 150 publications on his research, which includes massive storage and file system, memory and disk architecture, data-intensive computing, and high-performance computing.
Wang is best known for his pioneering research in low-power disk system design. He has developed a low-power disk array prototype showing real-time power and energy conservation with 30-50% savings at scale without degrading performance. IBM, Google, and Western Digital make energy-efficient storage products inspired by Wang’s work.
His contributions to data storage systems enables scientists and engineers to conduct big data analyses with complex access patterns in faster and easier ways. His pioneering solution on redundancy-reuse design also opens up a new data deduplication direction in memory and storage research at the early stage of the big data era.
A widely recognized global expert in massive storage and file technology, Wang has received numerous awards including U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator Award. He received Editorial Excellence and Eminence Award (EEE) of IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing in 2018.
Greg Welch
The computer scientist and engineer is the AdventHealth Endowed Chair in Healthcare Simulation in UCF’s College of Nursing. He is also co-director of the UCF Synthetic Reality Laboratory, and holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer Science and UCF Institute for Simulation and Training.
He has co-authored more than 150 publications on his research, which includes virtual and augmented reality, virtual beings, motion tracking displays, and healthcare technology. His contributions to tracking methods includes the development of a computational approach to combining sensor measurements that has improved the efficiency and accuracy of changing images in head-mounted displays, commonly known as headsets or glasses.
But one of his most widely used — and seen — contributions is in augmented reality. He co-developed methods for using computers and digital projectors, such as those in a conference room, to dynamically change the appearance of real physical objects. Spatial augmented reality, which is commonly called projection mapping, is today used from advertising to concerts to decorations and stage effects — such as changing the appearance of Cinderella’s castle during evening shows at the Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom Park.
The innovator is a widely recognized global expert in simulation and modeling, and has received numerous awards including two previous honors from IEEE — the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Long Lasting Impact Paper Award in 2016 and the Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee in 2018.
Most recently Welch, who holds 18 patents — 10 at UCF, was named to the National Academy of Inventors and with colleagues earned an Innovation award at TechConnect World Conference. In 2020, he was honored by UCF as a Pegasus Professor — the highest faculty distinction at the university.
