J.W. Bruce, Ph.D.

Biography

J.W. Bruce (S`88, M`94, SM`03) was born in Jackson, Mississippi on April 23, 1970. He received the B.S.E. from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1991, the M.S.E.E. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1993, and the Ph.D. from the University of Nevada Las Vegas in 2000, all in electrical engineering. Dr. Bruce has served as a member of the technical staff at the Mevatec Corporation providing engineering support to the Marshall Space Flight Center Microgravity Research Program. He also worked in the 3D Workstation Graphics Group at the Integraph Corporation. Dr. Bruce is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University.
His research interests include digital signal processing applications and VLSI implementations for digital signal processing and data conversion. He is currently investigating low harmonic distortion data converter designs and their analysis. Dr. Bruce is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, American Society of Engineering Education, Eta Kappa Nu, and Tau Beta Pi.
In early 1994, Dr. Bruce, along with three colleagues, formed the multimedia software start-up company, DiAcoustics, where he served as vice-president. The company's first product, MIDI Renderer, was a software-only music synthesis package utilizing frequency modulation, additive synthesis, ADSR wavetable, non-homogeneous multisampling, synthesis-by-analysis and physical modeling. The software included support for majority of MIDI command set, multiple tuning systems, and easy end-user customization. The software provided the highest polyphony available at the time and was popular with video editors and music theorists. Dr. Bruce was a key designer in the company's second product, Drum Action, one of the industry's first commercially available software-only real-time music synthesis systems for the Microsoft Windows environment.

In 1994, Dr. Bruce developed quasi-steady, low frequency and broadband microgravity environment accelerometer signal data analysis software for NASA's Space Science Laboratory Microgravity Research group. Dr. Bruce designed the electrical and optic subsystems of fluid diffusion experiments that flew on the Space Shuttle's "glovebox" experiment platform.

During 1995-1996, Dr. Bruce worked as a Sr. Computer Engineer in Intergraph's Workstation 3D Graphics Group (later named Intense3D and subsequently purchased by 3DLabs). This design group, including Dr. Bruce, created the first product and the foundation of the "Wildcat" 3D graphics technology still in use today. Dr. Bruce developed software device driver support for the first OpenGL graphics accelerator for Microsoft Windows NT. This product included dedicated hardware texture mapping, 2 megapixel resolution, and support for dual screens. Following this work, Dr. Bruce was the principal device driver and firmware designer for the sequencer processor embedded subsystem on the world's first OpenGL geometry accelerator for Microsoft Windows NT. This seven MIMD processor PCI card allowed the Wildcat products to deliver performance of over 1 million filled 3D triangles per second -- an industry-first and a significant acheivement at the time. In 1996, Dr. Bruce worked on the design team that improved the Wildcat products to include an industry-first 32-bit Z-buffers for OpenGL and the Microsoft Windows platform.

Since 2000, Dr. Bruce has served as Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University. Dr. Bruce has contributed to the research areas of data converter architecture design and embedded systems design. Dr. Bruce has secured funding and has been active in the research activities of the Microsystems Prototyping laboratory. His research has resulted in more than 25 technical publications (see CV). Dr. Bruce has taught numerous courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. He has also developed two laboratory design courses at the undergraduate level and developed one course at the graduate level (see CV) Dr. Bruce has served as the major advisor for seven students who have successfully completed their Master’s degrees. He currently serves as the major dissertation advisor for one Ph.D. student and three Master’s students. Finally, Dr. Bruce was named the James W. Bagley College of Engineering Outstanding Engineering Educator in 2003.

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