Bilal Akin and Team Receive IEEE Prize Paper Award
Dr. Bilal Akin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, was honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Industry Applications Society (IAS) with a first place Society Prize Paper Award for his article entitled “Aging Precursor Identification and Lifetime Estimation for Thermally Aged Discrete Package Silicon Power Switches.”
Akin, who won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2015 to support his work, will be honored at the IAS annual conference in September 2018 along with other researchers who contributed to the paper.
“The transaction prize paper award is one of the most prestigious IEEE awards,” Akin said. “We are honored that our paper was selected from among outstanding papers reporting original and high-quality research.”
The IAS supports electrical engineers and other professionals who work in applied electronics, particularly those who create applications for use in industry and commerce. The Society Prize Paper Awards are given to the top papers published throughout the previous year in the IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications for originality and contribution.
Akin and his team of researchers investigated incipient faults of silicon (Si) power semiconductor devices and created fault diagnosis and failure prognosis tools. Continuously monitoring certain systems is essential to prevent shutdowns and failures, especially those which may result in fatal accidents or other significant losses. According to Akin, their ultimate goal is to lay the foundations for self-monitoring, smart-energy conversion systems that can recognize signs of failure at the earliest stage and prevent catastrophic failures.
Akin was previously a research and development engineer at Texas Instruments Inc. and Toshiba Corp. before joining the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science as a research professor. He serves as associate editor for both the IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications and Transactions on Vehicular Technology. He has also received a Jonsson School Faculty Research Award as well as the Top Editors Recognition Award from the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology Society.
Article also published at UT Dallas Newscenter.