Professor Peter M Grant
University of Edinburgh
Peter M. Grant was born in St Andrews, Scotland. He received the BSc degree in electronic engineering from the Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1966, the PhD degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1975, and honorary DEng’s from the Heriot-Watt in 2006 and from Napier University in 2007.
He worked in radiocommunications for the Plessey Company, before he was appointed to a research fellowship at the University of Edinburgh to study the applications of surface acoustic wave and charge-coupled devices in communication systems. He was subsequently promoted through to a full professor of Electronic Signal Processing and on to Departmental chair. He served from 2002-2008 as head of the School of Engineering and Electronics at Edinburgh with direct responsibility for 85+ academic (teaching) staff, 50 support staff, 60 Post Doctoral researchers, 150 Research students, 80 MSc and 1000+ undergraduate students.
During academic year 1977-1978, he was a visiting professor at the Ginzton Laboratory, Stanford University, and in 1985-1986 he was a visiting staff member at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He was awarded the 82nd (2004) Faraday Medal by the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) for his work on CDMA receiver designs and adaptive filters. In 1974, and again in 1977, he was awarded the Bulgin Premium from the then Institution of Electronic and Radio Engineers, and in 1982, their Lord Mountbatten Premium. In 1994 he was awarded the IEE Marconi and Langham Thompson Premia.
Throughout the 1980s he supervised studies on the design of digital adaptive filters. This covered the use of linear tapped transversal, lattice, frequency domain ‘fast convolution’ and neural network based nonlinear equaliser techniques. This latter work has investigated both Volterra series and radial basis function (RBF) structures. The work on adaptive RBF structures provides quantifiable and significant performance improvements over linear adaptive filters and this fact has been recognised by the above awards. His particularly significant 1991 IEEE Trans NN paper on the orthogonal least squares processor design has received almost 1200 citations, due to its widespread applicability in the training of linear-in-the-parameter neural networks and adoption by researchers in the sparse signal representation community as a computionally efficient method for orthogonal matching pursuit.
With the resurgence of interest in civilian spread spectrum or code division multiple access (CDMA) systems he instigated the investigation of new receiver designs. These offer increased subscriber capacity through adaptive interference cancellation, and achieve improved performance in multipath propagation scenarios, through receiver adaptive filtering and array processing. The Edinburgh group is recognised for its contributions on CDMA multi-user detection techniques. Also their contribution to cellular basestation array (MIMO) processing, in association with Nortel Networks, through the use of advanced DSP techniques for reducing the spatial interference, are also well recognised.
Professor Grant was president of EURASIP in 2000-2002, he was chairman of EUSIPCO-94 and technical programme chairman for ICASSP-89. In 1998 he was appointed by the the IEEE Signal Processing Society as a distinguished lecturer on DSP for Mobile Communications, presenting at twenty-five locations over five continents. He was a Member of Microwave Systems Committee, Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, IEEE 1978-1985.
He served from 1980-1996 as an honorary editor of IEE Proceedings title "Vision Image and Signal Processing". He was a member in 1992 and 1996 and was chair of the 2001 Universities Funding Council research assessment panel for the UK Electrical Engineering Departments. He has been invited as research auditor: Queensland University of Technology, University of West Australia, City University Hong Kong and ETHz in Zurich. In 1994 he was member of the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology "Technology Foresight" panel for IT and Electronics. He was a member of the Scottish Science Advisory Committee from 2002-2007.
He holds fellowships of the IEEE, IEE, Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.