Babak Ayazifar
Research Areas
- Education (EDUC), Signal processing and system theory EDUCATION: Development of pedagogical techniques and assessment tools.
- Signal Processing (SP), Graph signal processing
- NOTE: BABAK AYAZIFAR CAN NEITHER CONSIDER NOR REPLY TO INTERNSHIP OR SUMMER RESEARCH REQUESTS FROM APPLICANTS OUTSIDE UC BERKELEY.
Teaching Schedule
Spring 2025
- EECS 16A. Foundations of Signals, Dynamical Systems, and Information Processing, MoWe 18:30-19:59, Pimentel 1
- EECS 16A-106L. Foundations of Signals, Dynamical Systems, and Information Processing, Tu 14:00-16:59, Cory 140
Biography
At MIT, Babak received the Harold L. Hazen Award for outstanding teaching (1995). He advanced to the rank of Instructor-G, which conferred teaching assignments ordinarily reserved for faculty (1996). He won the Goodwin Medal—MIT's most prestigious award for a graduate student who "has performed above and beyond the norm, and whose teaching efforts can truly be characterized as `conspicuously effective'" (1999). In spring 2002, he was appointed as a Senior Lecturer in MIT’s School of Engineering, teaching a graduate course in Digital Signal Processing.
Prior to his arrival at Berkeley, Babak was a Technical Specialist in the Intellectual Property and Technology Group of Ropes & Gray, LLP in Boston. His patent prosecution and related activities spanned a range of technologies, such as mechanical devices, intravascular MRI, DNA Microarray data analysis, and encrypted communication using chaotic systems. Babak is a patent agent, registered to practice before the US Patent and Trademark Office (Reg. No. 56793).
Babak is co-inventor on the patent Method and apparatus for providing scalable compressed video signal: U.S. Patent no. 5,387,940. This stemmed from his work as an Associate Member of the Technical Staff in the Communications Research Laboratory at David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton.
At Berkeley Babak has focused on teaching, student learning, curriculum development and reform, mentoring TAs, and sharing his pedagogical innovations and insight at conferences, workshops, and other forums.
In 2008 Babak received the UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering Division's Outstanding Teaching Award.
And he received the 2012 IEEE Education Society’s Mac Van Valkenburg Early Career Teaching Award. His citation reads
"For creative, lively, challenging, and caring teaching that has sparked broad excitement and engagement among his students, even in the largest core courses."
From Jan 2013 to Jul 2014 Babak spent an extended sabbatical as a Visiting Senior Lecturer at MIT-EECS, where he was the instructor for 6.041/6.431: Probabilistic Systems Analysis and a recitation instructor for 6.02: Digital Communication Systems.
Babak is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the National Engineering Honor Society, and Eta Kappa Nu, the EE Honor Society. He has been a faculty co-advisor for Tau Beta Pi since 2009.
Babak's Teaching Evaluations at UC Berkeley
He insists that you Just Call Him Babak!
Education
- 2003, Ph.D., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 1989, B.S., Electrical Engineering, Caltech
Selected Publications
- B. Ayazifar, "Google's PageRank and the Pedagogy of Linear Dynamic Systems," in 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2020.
- D. Carrano, I. Chugunov, J. Lee, and B. Ayazifar, "Self-Contained Jupyter Notebook Labs Promote Scalable Signal Processing Education," in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’20), 2020, pp. 1409-1416.
- V. N. Ekambaram, G. C. Fanti, B. Ayazifar, and K. Ramchandran, "Spline-Like Wavelet Filterbanks for Multiresolution Analysis of Graph-Structured Data," Signal and Information Processing Over Networks, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 268-278, Dec. 2015.
- V. N. Ekambaram, G. C. Fanti, B. Ayazifar, and K. Ramchandran, "Critically-sampled perfect-reconstruction spline-wavelet filterbanks for graph signals," in Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP), 2013 IEEE, 2013, pp. 475-478.
- V. N. Ekambaram, G. C. Fanti, B. Ayazifar, and K. Ramchandran, "Wavelet-regularized graph semi-supervised learning," in Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP), 2013 IEEE, 2013, pp. 423-426.
- V. N. Ekambaram, G. C. Fanti, B. Ayazifar, and K. Ramchandran, "Circulant structures and graph signal processing," in Image Processing (ICIP), 2013 20th IEEE International Conference on, 2013, pp. 834-838.
- V. N. Ekambaram, G. C. Fanti, B. Ayazifar, and K. Ramchandran, "Multiresolution Graph Signal Processing via Circulant Structures," in Digital Signal Processing and Signal Processing Education Meeting (DSP/SPE), 2013 IEEE, 2013, pp. 112-117.
- B. Ayazifar, "The Elegant Geometry of Fourier Analysis," in Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Proceedings of 2012 IEEE International Symposium on, 2012, pp. 2933-2936.
- J. Vandewalle and B. Ayazifar, "ISCAS 2011 Special Sessions on Education Innovations and Experiences," in 2011 IEEE International Symposium of Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2011, pp. 591-594.
- B. Ayazifar, "Rethinking Fourier’s Legacy in Signals and Systems Education," in Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Proceedings of 2011 IEEE International Symposium on, 2011, pp. 599-602.
- H. Liu, J. Kotker, and B. Ayazifar, "A first lab in filter design: Power line hum suppression in an ECG signal," in Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Proceedings of 2010 IEEE International Symposium on, 2010, pp. 2812 -2815.
- B. Ayazifar, "Can we make signals and systems intelligible, interesting, and relevant?," Circuits and Systems Magazine, IEEE, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 48-58, March 2009.
- B. Ayazifar, "Graph Spectra and Modal Dynamics of Oscillatory Networks," MIT, Sep. 2002.
