GoKawiilUnlike many budding engineers, K.J. Ray Liu wasn’t inspired to enter the field by tinkering with electronics or following in the footsteps of a family member. Growing up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his government’s call for students to become electrical engineers to help manufacture semiconductors in the 1970s, when the country’s economy was struggling.
“Students who were good in math, science, and physics all wanted to be an electrical engineer because that was the top priority of the government,” Liu says. “That’s how I got into engineering. Now Taiwan is a world leader in semiconductors.”
K.J. Ray Liu Occupation Retired professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park Member grade Fellow Alma maters National Taiwan University; University of Michigan; UCLA
But by the time he graduated from university in 1983, semiconductor facilities were still under construction, so there were no jobs available.
Instead, he went on to have a successful career as an educator and entrepreneur in the United States.
For 31 years, he was a professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park until he retired in 2021.
Liu was the chairman, CEO, and CTO of Origin Wireless, a startup he founded in Rockville, Md. Origin, which was acquired by ADT in February, pioneers artificial intelligence for wireless sensing and indoor tracking.
Liu, an IEEE Fellow, is an active IEEE volunteer who served as the organization’s president in 2022.
IEEE honored him with this year’s Haraden Pratt Award for “transformative and impactful leadership.”
Liu is credited with increasing the diversity of nominees for IEEE’s Fellow program, which is the highest level of membership. He also led the effort to realign the organization’s regions geographically to ensure more equitable global representation on the IEEE Board of Directors.
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