University of Texas at Dallas Professors Conferred With Prestigious Awards
Dr. Naofal Al-Dhahir, the Erik Jonsson Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, has been elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA).
The academy has 2,000 members worldwide, including 35 Nobel Prize winners, who are nominated by other EASA members and elected for their outstanding contributions in science, arts and governance. Al-Dhahir, who is associate head of electrical and computer engineering for undergraduate education in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, will be inducted at an April ceremony in Salzburg, Austria.
In addition, Al-Dhahir recently was elected as a fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association. He also received the 2022 technical recognition award from the Radio Communications Committee (RCC) of the IEEE Communications Society. The award recognizes society members who have made outstanding contributions to the technological advancement of radio communications.
“I’m honored to receive these three recognitions this fall. It is truly humbling that previous winners of the RCC award include pioneers like professors Thomas Kailath and Arogyaswami Paulraj, who introduced me to radio communications through their graduate courses at Stanford University,” Al-Dhahir said.
Al-Dhahir’s research focuses on wireless communications, localization and sensing. Al-Dhahir, holder of 43 U.S. patents and co-recipient of five IEEE best paper awards, is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and of the IEEE. He also received the 2019 IEEE Signal Processing and Computing for Communications technical recognition award.
Information Systems Professor Honored
Dr. Sumit Sarkar
Dr. Sumit Sarkar, Charles and Nancy Davidson Chair and professor of information systems at The University of Texas at Dallas, has been recognized by the Association for Information Systems (AIS) for his outstanding contributions in research.
Sarkar, director of PhD programs in the Naveen Jindal School of Management, received a 2022 AIS Fellow Award for his extensive body of research that spans multiple decades and for several service roles for the association. He was one of 12 award recipients representing universities from around the world.
Sarkar said that this award is meaningful because the recognition comes from his peers.
“First of all, I am both humbled and delighted by the recognition. When my peers recognize me for my contributions, it’s a little different from my superiors’ recognition,” he said. “These are not people for whom I am doing work in a more direct manner. My supervisor may give me tasks, and I may do them well, and they might recognize me; but with an award like this one, I’m doing work in a community with a lot of different people in different capacities. If they have chosen to recognize me, it means, at the end of the day, that I have been able to make some difference to the larger community.”
Sarkar has served on editorial boards of leading academic journals including Management Science, Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly. He also has served as the program chair for multiple conferences, including the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems and the AIS’ International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). His research encompasses topics that include knowledge management, personalization and recommendation systems, crowdsourcing, data privacy, software project management, and information quality.
The AIS Council and the ICIS Executive Committee established the annual award in 1999. The award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to information systems in research, teaching and service. Fellows need not have excelled in all three categories, but they are expected to have made exceptional contributions in at least one of them and to have made significant contributions in the other two.
Art Historian Gets Getty Grant for Study Project
A University of Texas at Dallas art historian has received a grant from the Getty Foundation to study a 14th-century panel painting that could provide insights into the devotional use of such art, as well as female patronage.
Dr. Sarah Kozlowski, clinical assistant professor of art history and associate director of the UT Dallas Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History (EODIAH), will study the “Diptych of Delphine de Signe,” which is housed at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty Foundation’s $3,000 grant will allow Kozlowski to spend more than two weeks at the museum in February.
“Sitting down with conservators and conservation scientists at the Getty will help me understand more about the physical condition of this object — how it was held, touched, manipulated and used,” she said. “That’s where the magic happens for me as an art historian.”
Kozlowski, who is also the director of EODIAH’s Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities in Naples, Italy, said the “Diptych of Delphine de Signe” likely was created around 1340 in Naples by a workshop of painters who worked in Naples and Genoa. The piece consists of two panels, held together with hinges, and features painting on the front as well as the reverse side. She said it is among relatively few surviving examples of panel painting from Naples.
In addition to studying how the piece was folded, shown and transported, Kozlowski is interested in the patronage that allowed the piece to be created.
“It’s kind of a confluence of things — an object that seems to be a painting but not a painting, in a folding format, with a female patron, and the fact that it traveled from Italy to southern France,” she said.
Kozlowski’s research focuses on late medieval and Renaissance Naples in its broader geographic and cultural contexts, exploring how artworks’ mobilities, materialities and formats generate meaning.