Rice University’s Richard Baraniuk has won a five-year fellowship from the U.S. Department of Defense, valued at up to $3 million for “blue sky” basic research that could produce new technologies. Baraniuk is one of 13 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows. The program provides extensive, long-term financial support for basic research by distinguished U.S. university scientists and engineers. It was launched in 2008 as the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship program and renamed this year in honor of Vannevar Bush, an American engineer and inventor who headed U.S. scientific research during World War II and later helped found the National Science Foundation. Baraniuk, a Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is one of the world's leading experts on compressive sensing, a branch of signal processing based on mathematical techniques developed in 2004 that enable engineers to glean useful information from far fewer data samples than would typically be required. Baraniuk holds 28 U.S. patents and six foreign patents in signal processing and acquisition including a dozen related to compressive sensing. "There are nearly 1 trillion internet-connected sensors on Earth, and the resulting deluge of data from all those sensors stresses our capability to process, understand and make decisions in real time, all of which are important for national security," Baraniuk said. "Compressive sensing is one of most exciting new approaches for solving these problems, but there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about it. Compressive sensing is not a panacea, but it does afford opportunities to profoundly rethink signal models, dimensionality reduction and recovery algorithms. Our Bush Fellow research program will explore, characterize, optimize and introduce new sensing trade-offs that aim to broaden the applicability of the concept, improve its performance in the wild and enable radically new sensing and processing capabilities."