Babak Ayazifar

Lecturer PSOE

Research Areas

• Education (EDUC), Signal processing and systems theory >>EDUCATION<<: Development of pedagogical techniques and assessment tools.
• Theory (THY), Spectral Graph Theory and Network Dynamics
• NOTE: I CAN NEITHER CONSIDER NOR REPLY TO INTERNSHIP REQUESTS FROM APPLICANTS OUTSIDE UC BERKELEY.

Teaching Schedule (Spring 2008)

• EE 20N. Structure and Interpretation of Systems and Signals, TuTh 1230-2P, 277 Cory

Biography

Babak Ayazifar received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 1989 from the California Institute of Technology, and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. From 1992-1994 he was an Associate Member of the Technical Staff at the David Sarnoff Research Center, Communications Research Laboratory, in Princeton, New Jersey. While there he participated in the development of DirecTv, a significant portion of its development having been subcontracted to the Sarnoff Center, and contributed to the U.S. HDTV Grand Alliance, of which Sarnoff was a member. Following his stint with Sarnoff, he returned to MIT to obtain the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2002. 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, Dr. Ayazifar 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 joining the Berkeley EECS faculty as a Lecturer in the spring of 2005, Prof. Ayazifar has taught EE 20N, Structure and Interpretation of Systems and Signals; EE 120, Signals and Systems; and EE 301, Teaching Techniques for Electrical Engineering. In all cases, his teaching effectiveness ratings have been consistently high, as one might expect given his considerable, and award-winning, teaching experiences while 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 EECS Department to which a graduate student could be promoted and which entailed teaching assignments ordinarily reserved for faculty. Dr. Ayazifar 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 his outstanding teaching ability.

Prof. Ayazifar 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.

Selected Publications

• B. Ayazifar, "Graph Spectra and Modal Dynamics of Oscillatory Networks," MIT, Sep. 2002.