2009 Sigma Xi Research Awards
IIT Today May 04, 2009

(left to right) Junior faculty Sigma Xi winner Xiaoping Qian, student winner Paritosh Mokhasi, and senior faculty winner Xian-He Sun

The Graduate College is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2009 Sigma Xi Research Awards. The Sigma Xi Research Awards recognize exemplary accomplishments in research, scholarship, and creative activity by faculty members and graduate students at IIT. The faculty awards were presented at the Faculty Awards reception, held on April 22, and the student award was presented at IIT Research Day, held on April 28.



Senior Faculty Division Xian-He Sun, Computer Science

Xian-He Sun is a renowned scientist who has made remarkable contributions to the field of computer science, especially in the field of high performance computing and communication. He is an authority on scalable computing, where computing power can be scaled up to meet a user’s demand by harnessing computing resources on the network.


Sun has authored or co-authored more than 120 publications, and much of his work has had lasting impact. For instance, he was one of the first researchers to provide a theoretical treatment of data implication, where one date query may imply another query. After more than 15 years, this work is still relevant and applicable to fields where memory is limited and many of the data requests must be served off-line via query implication. These fields include databases, information retrieval, and even cell phone design.



Sun was one of the first researchers to identify the "memory wall," the disparity between advancement of computing and memory technologies. CPU performance has doubled every eighteen months, but memory performance has only improved at an average rate of nine percent per year for the last twenty years. Thus, data access performance is the new bottleneck to sustained system performance rather than computing power. Sun has presented a formulation to describe the memory impact on performance, and his work is well recognized in the computer science community.



Sun received a Ph.D. in computer science from Michigan State University in 1990. He joined IIT in the fall of 1999 as an associate professor of computer science and in 2002 was promoted to the rank of professor. During his career, Sun has received more than 25 grants, two patents, and has been actively involved in educating IIT students. He has supervised 12 Ph.D. students, more than 20 master’s students, and several undergraduate students. Sun also serves on the editorial board of five professional journals, and has organized more than 20 professional conferences and workshops, including the flagship conference in supercomputing, IEEE SuperComputing.



Junior Faculty Division Xiaoping Qian, Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering
Xiaoping Qian researches in the area of computational design and manufacturing. He specifically focuses on 3D sensing and modeling and its application in product design and manufacturing; and tip-based nano-imaging and nano-manipulation. Qian’s work in heterogeneous object modeling has been widely cited, and he has been invited to many institutions to speak on this topic. Due to his pioneering work in direct product design and manufacturing from acquired-point cloud data, he was invited to guest edit a special issue on Point-based Computational Techniques in Computer-Aided Design, a flagship journal in the CAD/CAM area.



Qian joined IIT in the fall of 2004 as an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. He received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from University of Michigan in 2001. After graduating from University of Michigan, Qian worked as a research scientist for General Electric in its Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York.



In his short time at IIT, Qian has received more than $1.8 million in external research funding from both government and private sources. He has also supervised four Ph.D. students, five Master’s students, and created two new courses in the MMAE department. Qian is also an Associate editor of SME Journal of Manufacturing Systems and has assisted in organizing several conferences.



Student Division Paritosh Mokhasi, Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering
Paritosh Mokhasi received a B.E. in mechanical engineering from College of Engineering and Technology in Karnataka, India in 2000. In 2004, he received a Master of Science in mechanical and aerospace engineering from IIT. His master’s thesis focused on the development of low-dimensional models for the simulation of contaminant dispersion. Among the key features of the types of models that he developed is the ability to predict the evolution of a contaminant plume, both forwards and backward in time, based on data acquired from a minimal number of flow sensors.



Mokhasi will receive his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering in May 2009. He has authored or co-authored six journal articles and has given a number of tutorials in MATLAB to undergraduate students. His Ph.D. thesis continues the work of his master’s thesis in the area of low-dimensional models for turbulent flows in complex geometries. During his research, Mokhasi re-discovered a variant of the method of proper orthogonal decomposition. Through an extension of this method, he was able to extract characteristic modes of turbulent flows that describe the spatio-temporal evolution of the flow within so-called "episodes." Additionally, Mokhasi has developed a series of increasingly sophisticated models for the dynamics of complex flows, which can accurately model the dynamics of such systems based on time series analysis, non-linear systems prediction, and an innovative application of radial basis function methods.