Pratt School of Engineering
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EDUCATION
  • PhD, Rice University, 2005
  • MS, Rice University, 2002
  • BSE, Duke University, 2000

Rebecca Willett
  • Office Location: FCIEMAS 3463
  • Office Phone: (919) 660-5544
  • Email Address: rebecca.willett@duke.edu

    • Rebecca Willett completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2005. In addition to studying at Rice, she has worked as a Fellow of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, as a visiting researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), and as a member of the Applied Science Research and Development Laboratory at GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare). She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship , the Rice University Presidential Scholarship, and the Society of Women Engineers Caterpillar Scholarship.

    Specialties
    • Sensing and Sensor Systems
      Homeland Security
      Medical Imaging
      K-12 Education in Science & Mathematics
      Signal Processing
      Photonics
      Distributed Systems

    Research Areas

      As the prevalence of sophisticated and inexpensive data collection technology increases, so does our need for accurate and efficient data transmission, storage, analysis, and interpretation. Critical applications such as medical imaging, astrophysics, bioinformatics, communication networks, data mining, and pattern recognition all hinge on our ability to process very large collections of data. The extraction of useful information from data which may be distorted, error riddled, corrupted, or partially irrelevant, or "information processing", is a fundamental challenge faced by diverse fields, from engineering and homeland security to advertising, search engine development, and environmental monitoring. Both my teaching and research are focused on fundamental methodological and theoretical aspects of information processing with a wide variety of important and exciting applications.

    Recent Publications More Publications

    1. A. Wagadarikar and R. John and R. Willett and D. Brady, Single disperser design for coded aperture snapshot spectral imaging, Applied Optics, vol. 47 no. 10 (2008), ppt. B44 -- B51 [abs]
    2. M. Shankar and R. Willett and N. Pitsianis and T. Schulz and R. Gibbons and R. T. Kolste and J. Carriere and C. Chen and D. Prather and D. Brady, Thin infrared imaging systems through multichannel sampling, Applied Optics, vol. 47 no. 10 (2008), ppt. B1 -- B10 [abs]
    3. J. Silva and R. Willett, Hypergraph-based anomaly detection in very large networks, , (Submitted, 2007)
    4. R. Willett, Multiscale intensity estimation for marked Poisson processes, , (2007)
    5. C. Scott and G. Bellala and R. Willett, Genearlization error analysis for FDR controlled classification, , (2007)

    Awards, Honors, and Distinctions

    • Distinguished Texas Instruments Scholarship
    • Fellow, Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA
    • NSF Early CAREER Award, National Science Foundation
    • NSF Graduate Research Fellow, National Science Foundation
    • Rice University Presidential Scholarship
    • Society of Women Engineers Caterpillar Scholarship