An Engineer and an Architectural Historian Win the 2021 Excellence in Research Awards

Nirwan Ansari, an electrical and computer engineer who is a pioneer in the field of communications networks, and Gabrielle Esperdy, an architectural historian and trailblazer in the digital humanities, are the winners of the Board of Overseers Excellence in Research award for 2021.

Atam Dhawan, senior vice provost for research, called the two awardees “exceptionally consequential researchers.”

“Both Nirwan Ansari and Gabrielle Esperdy have made fundamental contributions – they’re both gamechangers in their distinctive ways – in very different arenas,” Dhawan said. “What links them is the impact of their research. The innovative systems and technologies they created have proved to be significant resources for fellow researchers and inventors and foundations for future breakthroughs in the sciences and the humanities.”

In congratulating the winners, NJIT President Joel Bloom pointed to NJIT’s designation in 2019 as an elite R1 research institution, indicating “very high research activity.”

“These are the people who helped get us there,” he said.

Ansari’s early research into communications networks produced part of the backbone for broadband access and later FIOS networks. His first patent on ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks, which relay voice, video and data from one location to another, helped fuel the rise of bandwidth-intensive applications in online entertainment, banking, telemedicine, education and teleworking, to name a few areas.

He is also a noted expert in “green communications,” who responded to the rise in power-draining electronic communications by devising methods to conserve energy that is lost on the way to the user as it moves across the transmission and distribution lines of the communications grid. He developed mechanisms, for example, to make the so-called “last mile” of the telecommunications system — the section of both optical and mobile networks that connects to consumers — more energy-efficient.

Ansari’s intellectual curiosity and flexible skills led to significant achievements in other fields. His research on image processing and computer vision laid the foundation for new discoveries and applications used in thousands of authentication applications such as anti-counterfeiting and fingerprinting.

Ansari’s patented “Simultaneous Contrast and the Persistence of Vision CAPTCHA” relies on the human capacity to process rapidly displayed, discrete images as continuous animation. Moviegoers, for example, are able to read frames passing by at the rate of 24 per second as a coherent narrative because a visual imprint of the passing frame remains briefly in the brain, allowing it to segue seamlessly to the next. The technology also depends on the eye’s tendency to interpret colors differently if they are set against a contrasting background, adding an extra hurdle for computers.

Together with his NJIT colleague, Yun-Qing Shi, he first described reversible data hiding in images that can recover the original images without distortion from the marked images after the hidden data have been extracted. Their patented invention was included in the International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission standard applied in image security. Their paper on this invention has been cited by researchers more than 3000 times.

Over his career, he has been granted 42 U.S. patents; his inventions have been licensed for use in technologies that trace and mitigate cyberattacks; improve the energy efficiency of 5G networks; manage resources and reduce energy usage in data center networks; and enhance intelligent control of power transmissions in smart grids. He is a Fellow of IEEE and of the National Academy of Inventors.

In accepting his award, he acknowledged “the many folks who helped shape my research, from colleagues, to students, to doctoral advisees.”

Gabrielle Esperdy, a professor of architectural and urban history who finds revelatory themes in what she calls the “everyday, unextraordinary” buildings that dominate the American built landscape, is also a pioneer in the digital humanities who has devised new methods for finding, aggregating and organizing architectural data to pursue historical research.

Her first book, Modernizing Main Street (2008), examined efforts to use modernist architecture to transform shopping districts and commercial strips in the 1930s as an antidote to the Great Depression. The book challenged two standard historical narratives: that modernism did not exist in the United States in a significant way until after World War II, and that the 1929 stock market crash caused the near cessation of all private building activity in the subsequent decade.

“Everyday buildings tell us about ourselves in ways that monuments, which are like our ‘Sunday best,’ don’t,” notes Esperdy, who hunts for and digitizes images and relevant information in publications and archives kept by diverse corporations and industries, including movie theater and grocery store chains and oil and gas companies, among others. 

She is currently a project researcher working with the Getty Research Institute’s Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive, a partly digitized collection of photographs of midcentury buildings the pop artist captured from a moving vehicle. She collaborates with a data scientist at Yale to comprehend stasis and change along noted commercial thoroughfares, including Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards.

She also examines the social, economic, and political factors that inform architectural production and urban development. Her recent book, American Autopia, which focuses on car culture and urban and suburban development from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis, considers how designers, planners, critics and theorists constructed “an automobile utopia” as a place and an idea.

She is the founding editor of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) Archipedia, an open-access encyclopedia on the history of the built environment in the U.S., which to date contains histories, photographs and maps for more than 20,000 structures and places, including buildings, landscapes, infrastructure and monuments. 

The foundation content for SAH Archipedia was collected from the book series, Buildings of the United States, which Esperdy and her team converted into a dynamic web-based resource, a task that entailed transforming 20 years of text-based historical interpretation and analysis into a dynamic data structure. Since 2013, she has supervised teams of scholars across the country who are producing new digital content that leverages the database she and her collaborators constructed.

In accepting her medal, she recalled her move from an architecture firm to a university campus and how her new setting “started to get under my skin and changed my practice. It’s a testament to the power of what it means to be in a research institution.”

In closing remarks, Daniel Henderson, the new chair of the Board of Overseers Excellence in Research Medal Committee, thanked the honorees for providing “leadership and inspiration for the generations that will come through these doors.” Of his predecessor on the medals committee, Emil Herkert, he noted, "I've got big shoes to fill."