Electrical Engineering Professor Steven Kay has taught voice recognition techniques to CIA analysts so they can identify audio recordings of Osama bin Laden.  He helped develop a heart pump for cardiac patients, and he was part  of a team tasked with designing an underwater acoustic camera that can detect  a mine on the hull of a ship.

Yet the URI researcher claims his work is mostly about statistics.  Kay’s field of study is called signal processing, a discipline in which  signals are processed digitally for applications like submarine detection,  wireless communication, robotics, and medical ultrasound testing.  For his  pioneering contributions to signal processing education, Kay was recently  recognized with the Signal Processing Education Award from the Signal  Processing Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers  (IEEE).

 

The URI educator received the award for having written three of the most  important textbooks in the field of signal processing, and for teaching short  courses about signal processing to engineers in many disciplines, including  those employed by defense contractors, NASA and the CIA. Kay was also recently  recognized as one of the most highly cited researchers in any engineering  discipline.