Former Faculty Affiliated with CACT
Charlie Steele
A founding faculty member of the Computer Science Department at UMass Lowell. His work focused of algorithms and advised research in visualization, signal processing, and software engineering.
Venkatarama Krishnan
He was born in Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu, India on October 20, 1929 and was the son of B. Venkataraman and Dharmambal. After getting his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from India, he was awarded a Fulbright Travel Grant to come to the USA for his graduate education. He completed his Masters in Science from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
He started his teaching career as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Villanova University. Over the course of his decades in academia, he has taught various graduate and undergraduate classes in Electrical Engineering. He, ultimately, retired as a full Professor and founding co-Director of CACT, at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2002. Unable to stay away from teaching, he became a Visiting Professor of Engineering at Smith College for the Spring of 2003.
His dedication to his field led to the publication of his books, most notably, NonLinear Filtering and Smoothing and his magnum opus, Probability and Random Processes.
Ioannis Raptis
Ioannis Raptis joined the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2019. He is the director of the Autonomous Robotic Systems Laboratory (ARSL). Dr. Raptis received his Dipl-Ing. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and his Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2003 and 2006, respectively. In 2010 he received his Ph.D. degree in the department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida. Before joining NC A&T State University, Dr. Raptis held a Postdoctoral Fellow position at Georgia Institute of Technology, with a joint appointment in ECE and AE, and an Assistant Professor position in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Patricia Wirth
Patricia Wirth grew up on a farm outside Nebraska City. Earned a B.A. degree in mathematics in three years with honors from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1971. She received the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1978 and 1981 respectively.
In 1981 Pat joined AT&T Bell Laboratories and in 1990 she was promoted to Head of the Department of Teletraffic Theory and System Performance.
Pat also chaired the AT&T Labs Fellowship Program that provided financial and mentoring support to women and minorities pursuing doctorates in the sciences and engineering; this program was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring and supported nearly 100 students during her tenure. She has received the YWCA Tribute to Women and Industry Award, the Women of AT&T Management Executive Award and was honored as a “Master” by the University of Nebraska. In 1997 she was the first woman to be named an AT&T Fellow, the highest technical award given at AT&T, “for the application of teletraffic theory, network performance modeling and systems analysis leading to the world-class performance of the global AT&T network.”