Rebecca Willett
Associate Professor
Rebecca Willett is an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. She completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2005. Prof. Willett received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007, is a member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group, and received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award in 2010. Prof. Willett has also held visiting researcher positions at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA in 2004, the University of Wisconsin-Madison 2003-2005, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in 2003, and the Applied Science Research and Development Laboratory at GE Healthcare in 2002. Her research interests include network and imaging science with applications in medical imaging, wireless sensor networks, astronomy, and social networks. Additional information, including publications and software, are available online at http://www.ee.duke.edu/~willett/.
Contact Information:
- Office Location: FCIEMAS 3463
- Office Phone: (919) 660-5544
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Email Address:
- Web Page:
Education:
| PhD | Rice University | 2005 |
| MS | Rice University | 2002 |
| BSE | Duke University | 2000 |
Curriculum Vitae
Research Interests:
My research interests include network and imaging science with applications in medical imaging, wireless sensor networks, astronomy, and social networks. One central theme of my research is data-starved inference for point processes -- the development of statistically robust methods for analyzing discrete events, where the discrete events can range from photons hitting a detector in an imaging system to groups of people meeting in a social network. When the number of observed events is very small, accurately extracting knowledge from this data is a challenging task requiring the development of both new computational methods and novel theoretical analysis frameworks. This body of research has led to important insights into the performance of compressed sensing in optical systems, tools for tracking dynamic meeting patterns in social networks, predictions of future IED locations in Afghanistan, and novel sparse Poisson intensity reconstruction algorithms for night vision and medical imaging.
Specialties:
Sensing and Sensor Systems
Homeland Security
Medical Imaging
K-12 Education in Science & Mathematics
Signal Processing
Photonics
Distributed Systems
Awards, Honors, and Distinctions:
- Young Investigator Award, Air Force Office of Scieintific Research, 2010
- NSF Early CAREER Award, National Science Foundation, 2007
- Computer Science Study Group, DARPA/IDA, 2006
- Fellow, Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, 2004
- Society of Women Engineers Caterpillar Scholarship, 2004
- Distinguished Texas Instruments Scholarship, 2000-2005
- Rice University Presidential Scholarship, 2000-2004
- NSF Graduate Research Fellow, National Science Foundation, 2000-2003
Courses Taught:
- ECE 189 - DIG IMAGE/MULTIDIM PROCESSING
- ECE 299 - ADVANCED TOPICS IN ECE
- ECE 282 - DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESS
Representative Publications: (More Publications)
- E. Wang, J. Silva, R. Willett, and L. Carin, Time-Evolving Modeling of Social Networks, ICASSP (2011) [abs].
- C. Horn and R. Willett, Online anomaly detection with expert system feedback in social networks, ICASSP (2011) [abs].
- R. Willett, Errata: Sampling Trajectories for Sparse Image Recovery (2011) [abs].
- M. Raginsky, N. Kiarashi, and R. Willett, Decentralized online convex programming with local information, Proceedings of American Control Conference (2011) [abs].
- E. Wang, J. Silva, R. Willett, L. Carin, Dynamic Relational Topic Model for Social Network Analysis with Noisy Links, Statistical Signal Processing Workshop 2011 (2011).
