Personal-Narrative:Melba Crawford

About Melba Crawford

An IEEE Life Member, Melba Crawford, is the Nancy Uridil and Francis Bossu Professor of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. Her field of specialty is geomatics engineering. She received a B.S.C.E. (1970) and M.S.C.E. from the University of Illinois, in 1970 and 1973, respectively, and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University in 1981. Crawford’s field of specialty is geomatics engineering. Her pioneering work in the development and application of algorithms to analyze remote sensing data has resulted in vital new capabilities to address urgent problems in agriculture, geotechnical engineering, and environmental mapping and monitoring. Crawford is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal “for contributions to remote sensing technology and leadership in its application for the benefit of humanity.”

The IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal was established in 2019 by the IEEE Board of Directors and is named in honor of the late Mildred Dresselhaus, recipient of the 2015 IEEE Medal of Honor, a Life Fellow of IEEE, and Institute Professor and Professor Emerita of physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

About the Interview

MELBA CRAWFORD: An Interview Conducted by Tanya Steinhauser, IEEE History Center, 7 September 2023.

Personal Narrative #002 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Copyright Statement

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It is recommended that this personal narrative be cited as follows:

Melba Crawford, a personal narrative conducted on 7 September 2023 by Tanya Steinhauser, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: Melba Crawford

INTERVIEWER: Tanya Steinhauser

DATE: 7 September 2023

PLACE: Virtual

Steinhauser:

My name is Tanya Steinhauser. You’re Melba Crawford, and we’re going to be doing a firsthand oral history [a personal narrative], mostly about your award, and your career, and just a couple things about what it means to you and IEEE. The first question I’ll ask you is just a little bit about your family background and how you started your current career. That’s like a very long road, but if you talk about your family background first and your childhood influences, that would be great.

Crawford:

I was raised on a farm in Illinois. My father was a grain farmer. The interesting part of this was my mother said that I was such a busy person that she couldn’t get anything done, so she sent me with my father a lot. So, I spent early years out with my dad a lot of times, not continuously, but on the tractor, in the truck just watching him. My father did not have a college education, but he had a very strong knowledge for a high school student. He had received all kinds of offers to go to universities and scholarships, but it was a time when his family needed him. His father needed him to work on the farm, so he said, “I’ll stay another year or two, and the I’ll go to college.” Well, you know what that means. They never get around to it.

Steinhauser:

Of course.

Crawford:

He had a passion for his children to have college educations. I think a part of my interest in engineering related topics came from just being around him, and seeing what he could do. He would design something, build it, and farmers do that all the time; although it’s becoming more complex as the machines become much more complicated and more electronics, etcetera. I went to a two-room school for the first eight years of my schooling. No, it was actually two rooms for four years and then four rooms for the next four years.

Steinhauser:

Wow.

Crawford:

It was really small. It sounds like I’m always watching somebody, listening to somebody, and that was the case because if you were bored in first grade, you could engage with second or third grade in this room. Somehow, this miraculous teacher kept us all going.

When I was in high school, I was still in a small, consolidated school. I was thinking, oh well, maybe I’ll study chemistry; maybe I’ll study biology; maybe I’ll study physics, although I really didn’t know that much about physics. But he [my father] recognized that maybe I had a lot of my interest and sort of capability aligned with engineering, in general, so he encouraged me. This is really unusual. I think that was unusual to have an opportunity at that stage of my development, the junior year. Between my junior and senior year in high school, the University of Illinois had a six-week program, it was a residential program for students that were interested in engineering. They came from all over the country. There were like forty of us, and we rotated through some math related materials through each of the engineering disciplines. We had a project. And at the end of that, I came away, look, I want to be an engineer. At the time, I thought I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer because I was so enthralled with the space program. It was something that was very exciting in those days. The first year, you’re in really basic courses. The thing that attracted me the most was really environmental related opportunities, so I switched, if you will, although in your first year, you’re really in a broad base.

Crawford:

I decided that I would major in civil engineering within that environmental engineering. Like any discipline, mechanical, electrical, there’s a broad base of courses within that discipline. So, as I progressed, I stayed really very much interested in the environment. I was kind of an activist. The College of Engineering at the University of Illinois had a publication. It was a slick paper publication every month, and it was called The Technograph. We would solicit articles from people outside. I called up Ralph Nader and got his answering machine, and I said, “I’m a student at the University of Illinois.” Of course, he was all about safety and the environment, so I asked if he would write an article, and he did. It’s hard to imagine that. He sent it to us, of course, typed. So, that was interesting. But this whole engagement in activism continued because people were beginning to be really concerned about water quality, air quality, etc.

Steinhauser:

Incredible.

Crawford:

Then I decided I’d go to grad school. Pretty soon, I realized in grad school, you’re either going to do experimental work or theoretical work, in general, some sort of modeling. Well, the experimental laboratory work was not my thing. I was much better at modeling, the mathematics, so I pursued that, and I developed a simulation model for my master’s thesis. I decided, okay, for my Ph.D., now I’m going to pursue that, but with still a look at the environment. My Ph.D. was in industrial engineering. It was really operations research, which is applied mathematics, and if you want to think of it that way, that’s one component of industrial engineering. My Ph.D. involved developing methodology for evaluating baseline studies for the Clean Air Act because it was just being implemented. You have this legislation that you are going to now enforce, but how do you decide what’s your baseline? I developed some new methodology for actually establishing that.

Then in my academic career, I taught, initially, at the University of Texas in their operations research program, which happened to be within mechanical engineering. It was a separate program. I was studying space-time processes. All right, you have the air quality, it’s changing over time, it’s spatially distributed, so from the mathematical point of view, there are advances you could make. But from an application point of view, somehow, I was introduced to the field of sensing, remote sensing, which from a spatial point of view collects information, spectral point of view, temporal point of view. The best way to get that data in those days, on a regular basis, was from satellites. What started as a source of data from modeling, using space-time approaches, then became, over the years, the major focus of my career because there’s all kinds of sensors. They have different characteristics. You need to develop methods for analyzing the data. Since then, over time, that just progressed.

Then the next thing was, okay, are you doing the work just on the data, for the data? And I began, because I was working in this field, and becoming known at the university. I was approached by other people, who [said], “Well I have this problem. Can this kind of data be used to help with my problem?” One of the first ones had to do with tracking the characteristics of vegetation over extended areas, and it happened to be in Texas. It was related to heat and drought which is still a common issue. I think one of the most remarkable opportunities I had, though, was someone who was an ecologist, actually a herpetologist, came to me and he said, “I’m studying fire. I’m studying fire in the desert in Australia and the goal is the impact on diversity of the species. But I can only cover so much ground when I go to the field and fires are large. They’re in the Great Victoria, mostly started by lightning. Do you think remote sensing could be used to help me?” I went from being a person that was focused on one kind of data, to a somewhat different kind of data for a different problem. But for a person that is an algorithm person, that’s what we do. We develop algorithms, and they’re not any good unless you use them for something. Many times, the algorithm is motivated by something someone else can’t do readily at that point, so, that was fine. Data were available all the way back to 1976. The technology has changed. The way I got data was I would send a FAX to Alice Springs and ask about the data. Then they would send it to me on 9-track tapes, and we would analyze it. But there was one more piece [because] he said “You can’t really understand this problem, the fire. What you do would be study the vegetation before the fire, and after the fire, you looked at the regeneration to see what had changed.” He was way ahead of his time at that stage. You need to link the models for the vegetation to the animal population, and then you can do predictions. Then he said, “But there is one more piece. You can’t really understand this unless you come to the desert, unless you come help with the field work.” Never having done this, I pack up all of my GPS equipment, which was pretty bulky in those days, get on a plane, and go to Sydney, and then to Perth. Then we get in a truck, and we drive into Kalgoorlie, and then 100 more kilometers into the desert. You’re going to be there for a month, and yes, during that month, I really learned a lot because working in the field is something that requires experience. There’s a lot of things that can happen. He brought a technician from the Western Australia Museum. He dug traps and collected lizards, and I went out and set up reflectors that we could use for the satellite data, so we could geolocate it better. Anyway, after that, then I realized all right, it’s one thing to sit in the lab and have data delivered to you, and you analyze it, and it’s quite another to really understand what is in that data. That was an epiphany for me. We had a good collaboration and to this day, I wonder how the National Science Foundation and NASA ever thought we could get this job done. That was the beginning.

Other kinds of opportunities presented themselves internationally. They were always with people from a different discipline, so my work became very interdisciplinary, and in terms of the utilization of the methodology that we developed, it was quite diverse.

Another project was in Africa. I was on a science mission for NASA, and we had all these different projects to study these different phenomena. I was going to study forestry. I was looking at the impact of a hurricane, actually, in Central America, and that was supposed to start in May. Well, the satellite had a problem, and it didn’t launch until the fall. A lot of the problem that you want to study in the northern hemisphere is during the summer, and there’s nothing to look at in the winter of interest. They decided, okay, this mission isn’t going to last very long. It’s maybe three to five months, a year at most. It’s just a new technology mission, so everybody better be busy. All right, we’re all going to the southern hemisphere, and the Australians were already onboard. Some people wanted to go to South America. There was a big project that was a possibility in Africa, in Botswana. I said, “okay, I’ll go.” I think that the consistent thread through this is, okay, I’ll try. I worked with the science team there, and we were studying the flooding of the Okavango and the impact on vegetation there. I’ve had other opportunities that have been international.

As the years went on, then one of the fields that has I would say, leveraged remote sensing, and in an increasing way at multiple scales, from satellites, from airborne platforms, from UAVs on wheeled vehicles is agriculture. And with climate change, right now there is a huge push to develop new hybrids that are heat and drought tolerant. If you’re thinking of sorghum, then they’re interested. It’s a main food crop in parts of Africa, maize similarly, soybeans. In order to develop these hybrids they need to grow multiple series if you want to think of it, multiple crops of a given hybrid, to see how it performs. They plant these in little fields with little plots, with an experimental design. They have an army of students or people that go out and have to make the measurements, the measurements associated with height, with various chemical responses, etcetera, and then ultimately the yield, in order to decide, okay, which ones of these hybrids can go to the next level. This whole area is called phenotyping. That’s a lot of work. It’s expensive, time consuming, and quite manual. Then what can remote sensing do at that stage? Then, as we move along, the spatial resolution of the satellites is getting better. They’re putting up constellations. But that’s still not good enough for this problem. UAVs are coming onboard. What do I know about UAVs? I know about the sensors, and I didn’t have access to a platform. But then a Brazilian company said, “hey, we’re doing a little bit of this. We’ll give you a UAV and you can put your camera on it.” I was able to negotiate a big discount on a hyperspectral camera which has really good chemistry. It can sense chemistry very well. Then we developed it, we integrated it, and we tried to fly it. Well, that wasn’t very successful. We had to launch it off my car. We had my bike rack. Yes, - - okay, how do we solve this problem? Put it on my car. We gunned the car. We released the plane. It was too big to take off from the ground. Then we’d fly it. Well, that didn’t turn out to be the best strategy. But over time, we developed better strategies and better platforms. The last seven or eight years, that arena has been a major focus of my career; it’s been agriculture, forestry. What can we do at high resolution in order to sense phenomena over time? Just as this one thing begins to, I won’t say reach a mature state, something else happens. In the meantime, people are saying, yes, these UAVs are great for high resolution, but you can’t stay in the air very long. What we want to do is we want to be able to integrate the information from high resolution to improve lower resolution acquisitions. That whole field had developed or is still developing. We’re working in that, and it brings to bear artificial intelligence. We’re trying to then generate the models using data from high resolution and low resolution. What is the relationship? Then you can use that relationship to improve the data that’s lower resolution over a more extended area. So that’s where we are. You probably hear of generative adversarial networks, GAMs, and that is a field that is under a lot of review, positively and negatively right now, in terms of what you can do with the simulated data. Most recently you just sort of, as I said, approach a point where maybe things are steady state, and someone approaches you and says, “I think I could put a radar on a UAV, I think it could be a low-cost opportunity, and by the way, you can use radar when it’s cloudy.” Then I said, “okay, we’ll try it.” It is, again, this sort of ‘let’s go for it,’ and in this process, the thing that is the most important is I couldn’t do any of this alone. I had a piece of the action. I had some capability. And of course, that’s advanced over time. But the experience I’ve had and what I’ve learned from the ecologist, from the people who were studying vegetation and changes in it, in the Okavango, from people who are crop scientists, has just been an amazing experience.

Relative to the award [IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal], it’s not an award for me; it’s an award, I think, for what we all have accomplished, we are colleagues, what I’ve learned from them, what they’ve learned from me and our students. The best outcome can be to have students that then are able and interested in that next step because someone will have to move forward. That’s sort of the big story.

Steinhauser:

Yes, I love it. I feel like I just learned so much. I read a lot about your work and it’s still not the same as hearing it directly from you, explained in that way.

Crawford:

If you can just imagine, though, sitting in a chair. The ecologist always wanted to hire me. Like, I’m going to hire your lab to do something. Well, you can’t just do that. It’s not like producing something. You have to work in collaboration. But if you can just imagine me sitting at a desk, and him coming in, a person who is an ecologist. His name was Dr. Eric Pianka. If you ever want to Google him, you’ll see. I have great pictures of him holding lizards -- and just contemplating this project. I mean, it’s very exciting. It was very intimidating, too.

Steinhauser:

Yes, but you had something that he needed.

Crawford:

Right.

Steinhauser:

And you were able to work together to figure out a solution, which is what engineering is all about.

Crawford:

That’s what we have in common, you know, in engineering, there is a problem --how can you address it, and what tools do you have? I have not, in my case, always had all of the tools that are needed. Therefore, collaborating with someone else, not just a plant scientist, who might have motivated the work, but there might have been someone in database management or someone in visualization, or chemistry, who had knowledge that was needed. That’s how you build the teams.

Steinhauser:

Right. I’m curious about this. I’m obviously not an engineer of any kind or a farmer, but the farmers who utilize this data, is it free for them, or do they have to pay for it, like a standard?

Crawford:

It depends. Data is not knowledge, and there’s a space that’s being filled now. Farmers have a lot to do, they don’t acquire in general. Now some of them might have a UAV, but they’re not the ones that seriously are going to be out there acquiring data every week, etcetera. Now, the plant breeders -- there’s the research end of this, where people are developing new hybrids. Large-scale operational farmers have a crop they have to plant, manage throughout the season, and harvest. They might have a UAV for fun, but they will contract with someone that acquires data, airborne data. Now more and more there are companies that are flying, and then they process the data and produce a product that will show where your crop is healthy, where it might be having issues, as a tool that could be used. Farming now, much more than when I was a child, all farmers work on computers now, so these data services, whether they’re from weather or they’re the remote sensing data, or the outcome, in terms of a prediction of yield or whatever, there’s a space. It’s an area that there’s a lot going on, in terms of development of new companies and of people, of companies that are expanding to handle this aspect of remote sensing as a data product source.

Steinhauser:

Right. And that’s another thing I think about is now everyone wants to buy from the local farmer, from the organic farms and things like that, and that are smaller, so the remote sensing is better for the larger companies who have a larger amount of space to get information on.

Crawford:

It depends. That’s a very good question. If you have a large-scale row crop farm, your field is large, the spatial resolution doesn’t have to be as good as if you have a small farm. Plus, small holder farmers often don’t have extensive resources to put into this.

Steinhauser:

Right.

Crawford:

Well, let’s go back. You’re right about large scale farmers using this technology from satellites and airborne platforms, manned aircraft as the two primary sources. There are other sensing technologies that are not that expensive that small holder farmers are using, and actually, many of them are getting into the low-end UAV arena because as the technology advances, the cost goes down. I’ve worked with people in Mexico and small farms in Ecuador. There’s a limit. Now the other thing is, you can’t see everything that you might want to measure from above, so this whole field is also moving into robotics, where you have wheeled vehicles that go between the rows and do a lot of measurements. The higher the value of the crop, the more likely someone is going to be using advanced technology. As you go to the extreme, viticulture has really advanced in its utilization of remote sensing, not just from space, because if you think about vineyards, they have sort of a different geometric structure. They do a lot from wheeled vehicles. They do a lot with robotics. It’s a very high value crop, so it can be worth it for them.

Steinhauser:

Right, the vineyards for the wines.

Crawford:

Disease detection is another one. How do you manage how much fertilizer you use? You want to use as much as you need, but no more. There are all kinds of issues as you know with eutrophication in the Gulf of Mexico due to over-fertilization.

Steinhauser:

And then the pesticide issue, and the GMOs.

Crawford:

Well, yes. Precision farming, in general, is a big category that wants to do much more targeted applications, and cost is a part of it, but the overall environmental impact all fits in there together, so it’s within the agricultural arena. There’s not a single solution. But it would be wrong to basically say that small farms and farms in developing countries are not using this technology. I have applications for full rides from people, regularly. I have a new student from Ghana. I have a student who is trying to get on a full ride to come here from Egypt. He is actually working in agriculture currently. They want to use what they have in the most effective way.

Steinhauser:

Yes.

Crawford:

Now I’m not the expert, in terms of plant science, so that’s why I collaborate with people. Usually, I’ll work with a student in agriculture, and we’ll co-supervise them. It will be somebody who is a specialist. It could be diseases. It could be pests. There’s an awful lot with growing issues with new kinds of pests that are coming in on airplanes, on ships. Just to manage those invasives is a really big problem.

Steinhauser:

Yes, and there’s probably new species that are coming and it’s so crazy. But the environment is everchanging, and obviously it’s a problem, or it can be a problem if we don’t get ahead of it. It’s hard to get ahead of it.

Crawford:

I think one of the most important things is if data can be acquired and used wisely for developing good policy. Policies, in terms of regulations, should evolve as we know more, and sometimes they’re more restrictive, sometimes not so. But I think the only way to really be effective at the end goal is really to have adequate data and be informed, data informed decisions, yes.

Steinhauser:

Right. Use the data. That’s why everyone talks all about Europe, and the difference between the U.S. and Europe, and how they’re using the data, and how their policies have changed, based on their data and how we are more concerned with money and making more crops with less, or with less resources. I’m not sure if I’m even articulating that correctly because there is a big controversy and debate about our food quality and things like that.

Crawford:

Yes. I think that’s where data comes to bear. Now there is also the flip side, where as long as I’ve been working in this business then, people at the large scale would monitor crops in other countries, internationally. The data, you ask what’s free. In the United States, the civilian data is primarily from the U.S. Geological Survey and NOAA depending on whether it’s atmospheric, oceanographic, land-based, and it is free, and anybody can access that data. The higher-resolution data is typically commercial, and companies need to survive and make money, so that’s a different model. In Europe, the models are still different, public, private; and their farms are smaller, too. They really have invested in these kinds of technologies to get the most out of their productive systems because they’re smaller. Everybody knows that eventually somebody has to feed this growing population during a time of heat and of climate change. There are many opportunities, but there are many challenges.

I’m sorry if I got sidetracked by myself. People in the beginning were not that sophisticated, but they were used to predicting what yield would be and then influence the markets. So that people would know there’s going—and I’m sure you’ve read about this—there’s a drought in Argentina. Production is predicted, based on this remote sensing, to be down by so much, and that influences then what the trading has got to be. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but with this kind of data it’s like the emperor has no clothes.

Steinhauser:

Yes. My goodness. Do you think that you’ll stay in agriculture? What’s next for you? Are you seeing yourself shift or are you waiting for the next opportunity and see what happens and who else needs this technology?

Crawford:

Well, I was hired at Purdue because of a long history in the College of Engineering and the College of Agriculture of working in remote sensing. Back in the 1970s and 1980s Purdue was really at the forefront, in terms of algorithm development. They were also, honestly, flying their own aircraft. They had film, and it wasn’t like everything was digital. They were flying all over the U.S. and associated with that time, there was a blight. Over time, technology evolved, and the applications evolved. This had been a major focus. I had not worked in agriculture, per se. I had always been more in the broad-based environment arena, deforestation. What is the change in vegetation associated with some phenomena? But there is a link. The very senior people that were at Purdue were retiring, and they wanted to develop a vision for the next decade or two, so that was why I was recruited to Purdue. The agriculture piece was, again, one of these just say yes kind of things. My father laughingly said, “Do they know you don’t know anything about agriculture?” I mean, I did, but I was not a specialist, of course. I was joining a team, and we have evolved, in terms of what we do in agriculture here. I’m also working in forestry now. The methodology I use and developed can be used for a lot of other problems. At this stage in my career, I would expect to stay in forestry, agriculture, and environmental kind of work, not you know, urban systems infrastructure, for example. Other people are interested in that, but it’s still a very broad field.

Steinhauser:

You’re doing a great job doing this, so you can stick with it and that will be good.

Crawford:

I have that in my past. I have also worked on issues related to national defense. Those are opportunities that, again, you need to be in an area and have enough knowledge to develop a reputation, in order to have a sustained reputation in an area. Some of the things, the very high-resolution work we do, could be used for some of these other applications, but I’m not going to be shifting around. I just gave you a couple examples.

Steinhauser:

As far as the IEEE is concerned, can you talk a little bit about how the society or the societies you’ve been a part of—and I know you have so many papers with IEEE. What has that meant to you and kind of what advice would you give someone starting out, in whether or not to join IEEE or basically the benefits of something like that?

Crawford:

That’s evolving, as you well know. Professional societies are evolving in response to a number of things. IEEE is, first of all, known on the outside for its publications, the high quality of the publications, and the diversity of them. There are lots of people who are material scientists, people like me, who are trained in modeling. There are just all kinds of applications: power, energy, different kinds of sensing systems radar, etcetera. When I joined, it was focused on a particular society because of the remote sensing. It was an opportunity to engage with other people, both at my level and who had been in the field longer. It was also an opportunity to build an international network, which is easier in some senses now and because of technology and engagement. You can engage either through the internet or all kinds of other social media. And the thing that it has done, because of the publication piece, is they will have an IEEE subscription. Now they’re moving to open access as well. People think of IEEE in terms of the knowledge they need to gain, so it’s a pull kind of a model. Why do I need to join? I can download these papers. I can read them. My home society is the [IEEE] Geoscience Remote Sensing Society, but I also am a member of the [IEEE] Signal Processing Society, which fits, I think, very naturally. I’m engaged with a couple of other councils. I think that the engagement with other people, and particularly in person, although it need not be, is really the value. Together you can do more. It’s either a thousand individual points of light, in general, or some of the big initiatives then, it provides a vehicle. The other thing that IEEE provides, of course, in addition to publications are standards. Those are really important, and that’s continuing to evolve. I think that for me it meant something different than it does now. It also provided an opportunity for developing leadership capability, and I see that in my society.

I went to a conference, and how do we engage with our young professionals, as well as the students if they’re there. Depending on their level, they’re maybe considered a young professional or not, so engage with them and help them understand the value of the network and participation. Now of course, all this doesn’t come without cost when you go to a conference. For example, I think the personal engagement, MGA does that geographically, and Technical Activities does it in terms of the technology, and then trying to bring that together because many people play in both MGA and TAB, Technical Activities. Then of course, some people that work in some areas are very knowledgeable about the necessity of standards, and if they’re very close to it, what might need to be done to establish standards, so that’s a separate kind of category. It just depends on the topic because there’s standards in IEEE about all kinds of things. We think of them mostly in terms of communication and computing, but there are all kinds of standards.

Steinhauser:

Yes. I used to work in IEEE Standards before I joined the awards department. I was there five years, editing standards, actually.

Crawford:

They’re amazing when they have all these people working on this standard, over a period of time.

Steinhauser:

Yes, it’s their baby for like four years, sometimes two, three, four, or five years. It depends. I edited and helped with standards, the publication of it from the MEC, all the way through publication. It’s a process.

Crawford:

It is. I think that you know I said we’re well known for publications. I think that you know that there are journal publications, and then there are conference publications. Of course, the conference pubs are affiliated with that conference experience as well, typically one way or another. We kind of got out of that with the pandemic and had all these virtual conferences that were many times prerecorded papers. You just really didn’t have the same connection that you would have in person for sure.

Steinhauser:

I was just going to say that we just announced our next location for the VIC Summit and the IEEE Honors Ceremony is going to be in Boston.

Crawford:

Oh, that’s great.

Steinhauser:

Yes.

Crawford:

I was so impressed with the Honors Ceremony. I had attended awards banquets before because it would be associated with some bigger function, so you might be able to go to the awards banquet. But I hadn’t been for some time. I mean, we’re all senior people. We’re all very grateful for the award. But the extent to which this was planned and executed in detail just was really surprising to me.

Crawford:

It was like the Academy Awards or something, you know.

Steinhauser:

I know. Well, I think that’s why they created the separate awards department, versus they wanted to stand out, aside from just regular society awards and even TFA awards. The medal and recognitions were special and so much different than others that they wanted to create an event that was very memorable and make sure that the folks that receive the awards. The recipients of the awards and the medal of honor is that it is the IEEE’s highest award, that that’s why we try to set ourselves apart, and I think we are doing a good job. Obviously, we always, get feedback, but I think every year it’s going to just get better. And then we actually might go international in in the next couple years.

Crawford:

Particularly for this award, I knew I had been nominated, but you have no expectation. When I received the information, when I saw it was from Awards, I said oh yes, it’s time to nominate people for awards again. I didn’t really pay attention to it for a couple of days, and I was so surprised, particularly with this one being the Mildred Dresselhaus award [IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal]. She’s in a totally different field. People who knew her would write to me. They might have been students at MIT, or they might have been colleagues or people that knew of her work. They would refer to her as Millie and just an incredible person. One person came running up to me and said, “I don’t know.” He said, “Do you realize that she was the queen of carbon nanotubes?” I’m from a totally different field, but this award had been set up for a broader base. I mean, you look at the individuals who had received it so far. They’re very different, whereas some of the other awards, they will have made a contribution in a technical field and it aligns more with expectations.

Steinhauser:

Yes, that’s a great honor. She’s a legend.

Crawford:

People who had known her had as students at MIT talked about her from that point of view. Some people who are now senior faculty, they’re young senior faculty, she had interacted with them at some point during the early stage of their career and had an impact, so they had a special perspective as well. So, it makes you feel motivated as well -- someone who is so incredible, then to be deserving of such an award. You better step it up.

Steinhauser:

Yes, that’s what Vint [Vinton Cerf] said. He’s like, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Crawford:

Wasn’t that funny? He started off the stage, and then he came back, and he leaned over.

Steinhauser:

Yes, that was good. That was very good. It’s going to be really hard to top that guy.

Crawford:

Oh, and then he comes on and tells everybody he was late because he had to go back and put on a tux.

Steinhauser:

Yes, I know. I remember telling him that these are the professional pictures. He was like yes, let’s take them. And I said, “are you okay with not changing first?” He decided, no, I’ve got to get my tux!

Crawford:

Then there were people that had been there for a couple days before a number of activities, so there was an opportunity to engage with some students along the way and that was fun.

Steinhauser:

Yes, with the Knowledge Alliance Program. Were you part of that mentor-mentee program?

Crawford:

I was. The person that I was assigned, she was there for an earlier program, so we only interfaced for one day. She was in computer science, but most of her interests were biomedical, even though imaging is really very broad based. This morning, I told my class, “Look, what I teach, in terms of analyzing the data, is the same tools that you would get if you were in biomedical engineering.” So, they’re kind of generic. But anyway, I work I would say in a narrower area, but perhaps, I think at these functions, a lot of times students are going to be from more general signal processing, computer engineering, which is fine.

Steinhauser:

Right. Then maybe that’s how they’ll get their spark of what they might be interested in, just by talking to someone in a more specific field.

Crawford:

Yes. And I think just being there, I could see on the students’ faces, participating, in general is exciting for them.

Steinhauser:

Yes, exciting. Great. Well, I think we’ve covered everything, really. I really appreciate your time.