Babak Ayazifar

Lecturer SOE

Research Areas

• Education (EDUC), Signal processing and system theory EDUCATION: Development of pedagogical techniques and assessment tools.
• NOTE: BABAK AYAZIFAR CAN NEITHER CONSIDER NOR REPLY TO INTERNSHIP REQUESTS FROM APPLICANTS OUTSIDE UC BERKELEY.

Teaching Schedule (Spring 2012)

• CS 302. Designing CS Education, M 1:00-3:00P, 606 Soda
• EE 20N. Structure and Interpretation of Systems and Signals, TuTh 1230-2P, 105 Stanley
• EE 120. Signals and Systems, TuTh 4-6P, 101 Moffitt

Biography

Dr. Babak Ayazifar received his undergraduate education at the California Institute of Technology, and his Master's and doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), all in Electrical Engineering (EE). From 1992-1994 he was an Associate Member of the Technical Staff in the Communications Research Laboratory of the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He participated in the development of DirecTV and contributed to the U.S. HDTV Grand Alliance. Following his stint with Sarnoff, he returned to MIT to pursue his Ph.D. studies in EE. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in the spring of 2002, prior to receiving his doctorate, to teach a graduate-level course in digital signal processing. From 2003-2005, Babak was involved in patent prosecution as a Technical Specialist in the Intellectual Property & Technology Group for the corporate law and litigation firm of Ropes & Gray in Boston. Since spring 2005, when he joined the Berkeley EECS faculty as a Lecturer, Babak has taught Structure and Interpretation of Systems and Signals (EE 20N); Signals and Systems (EE 120); and Teaching Techniques for Electrical Engineering (EE 301). In all cases, his teaching effectiveness ratings have been consistently high, as one might expect given his considerable, and award-winning, teaching experience at MIT. His teaching honors and awards include the Goodwin Medal (1999), MIT's top teaching award for graduate students; and promotion to Instructor-G (1996), the highest rank in the MIT EECS Department to which a graduate student could be promoted and which entailed teaching assignments ordinarily reserved for faculty. Babak was also the recipient of the Harold L. Hazen Teaching Award (1995), another Departmental award given annually to a graduate-student instructor in acknowledgment of outstanding teaching ability and performance. Babak is co-inventor on one patent, Method and apparatus for providing scalable compressed video signal ( U.S. Patent no. 5,387,940). He is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, and Eta Kappa Nu, the electrical engineering honor society. Babak's Teaching Evaluations: UC Berkeley Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) Course Surveys

Selected Publications

• 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.