2021 Excellence in Research Prize and Medal Recipient - Nirwan Ansari

Nirwan Ansari ’82, a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, is a pioneer in the field of communications networks whose research produced part of the backbone for broadband access and later FIOS networks.

His first patent on ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks, which relay voice, video and data from one location to another, helped fuel the rise of bandwidth-intensive applications in online entertainment, banking, telemedicine, education and teleworking, to name a few areas.

More recently, he has become a noted expert in “green communications” in response to the surge in power-draining electronic communications and the growing amount of energy that is lost on the way to the user as it moves across the transmission and distribution lines of the grid. Ansari developed mechanisms to make the so-called “last mile” of the telecommunications system — the section of both optical and mobile networks that connects to consumers — more energy-efficient.

What links his research, beginning with his 1988 Ph.D. dissertation on programs that enable computers to recognize patterns and objects, is computational intelligence – methodologies inspired by nature for solving complex problems. His research on image processing and computer vision laid the foundation for new discoveries and applications used in thousands of authentication applications such as anti- counterfeiting and fingerprinting.

Ansari’s patented “Simultaneous Contrast and the Persistence of Vision CAPTCHA” relies on the human capacity to process rapidly displayed, discrete images as continuous animation. Moviegoers, for example, are able to read frames passing by at the rate of 24 per second as a coherent narrative because a visual imprint of the passing frame remains briefly in the brain, allowing it to segue seamlessly to the next. The technology also depends on the eye’s tendency to interpret colors differently if they are set against a contrasting background, adding an extra hurdle for computers.

Together with his NJIT colleague, Yun-Qing Shi, he first described reversible data hiding in images that can recover the original images without distortion from the marked images after the hidden data have been extracted. Their patented invention was included in the International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission standard applied in image security. Their paper on this invention has been cited by researchers more than 3000 times.

Over his career, he has been granted 42 U.S. patents; his inventions have been licensed for use in technologies that trace and mitigate cyberattacks; improve the energy efficiency of 5G networks; manage resources and reduce energy usage in data center networks; and enhance intelligent control of power transmissions in smart grids. He is a Fellow of IEEE and of the National Academy of Inventors.

Ansari has served on the editorial and advisory boards of more than 10 scientific publications, including as the associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Wireless Communications, and was elected to serve on the IEEE Communications Society Board of Governors as a member-at-large. He recently authored Green Mobile Networks: A Networking Perspective with Tao Han.