News

WNCG students Marius Facktor and Abhinau Venkataramanan and WNCG alumnus Praful Gupta from Prof. Al Bovik’s Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering (LIVE) have been named Phase 2 winners in the Enhancing Computer Vision for Public Safety Challenge. The challenge is hosted by the Public Safety Communications Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The competition aims to support public safety missions by advancing computer vision algorithms and no-reference (NR) metrics that assess image or video quality.

WNCG professor Aryan Mokhtari has been awarded an Early Career Program (ECP) award from the Army Research Office (ARO), an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory, for his research on "Accelerating Adaptivity under Limited Data and Computation: A Meta-Learning Approach."

WNCG alumnus Arjun Anand and WNCG professors Gustavo de Veciana and Sanjay Shakkottai have been awarded the 2021 William R. Bennett Prize from the IEEE Communications Society. The prize is awarded annually to the authors of a single paper published in either in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking or the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. The paper must have been published within the last three years prior to the award.

It's no secret that WNCG produces stellar industry and academic professionals. This summer, WNCG members are staying busy! Here’s where some of our students and new graduates are headed (in many cases, remotely!) for internships, academic positions, and full-time employment.  - recent graduate  - WNCG industrial affiliate   Academe Ramakrishna Sai Annaluru - MIT Lincoln Labs   Full-Time Positions Ziqi Ke - Bloomberg L.P.  William Lies - UHU Technologies  Liu Liu - Tencent AI Lab

WNCG professor Jeff Andrews has received the Gordon T. Lepley Teaching Award from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

WNCG alumnus Dr. Qi Lei has received the 2021 Oden Institute Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her winning dissertation, “Provably effective algorithms for min-max optimization," proposes optimization algorithms to find the equilibrium point of two-player zero-sum games. Read the dissertation abstract and find the link to the full text via the University of Texas Libraries. At WNCG, Lei was advised by Prof. Alex Dimakis; she was co-advised by Dr. Inderjit Dhillon from the University of Texas Department of Computer Science.

IBM recently announced the awardees of this year’s IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program. WNCG student Tianlong Chen was among only 16 students selected worldwide for 2021. According to IBM, the Fellowship Awards Program is “intensely competitive.” Awardees are exceptional Ph.D. students conducting research in promising and disruptive technologies, particularly: Hybrid Cloud; Quantum Computing / Quantum Systems; Artificial Intelligence; Cloud / Open Source Technologies; Security / Cyber Security; Data Science; and Systems.

WNCG professor Nanshu Lu's work on wearable electronic tattoos was featured in a BBCNews piece on the future of light-emitting tattoos. Prof. Lu and her team have shown that their tattoo-like system can measure blood flow in the fingertips and they hope to demonstrate that the same technology could also be used on the neck, head and muscles, with data transferred to a nearby computer via a Bluetooth chip built into the device. Read the article on BBCNews.

In his research paper, “RTSense: RFID based Temperature Sensing,” WNCG alumnus Dr. Swadhin Pradhan and Prof. Lili Qiu explore how passive RFID tags could address the problem of battery-dependent sensory devices. 

WNCG professor Andrea Thomaz appeared on The Robot Brains Podcast this week to talk about her research, her robots, and how her company Diligent Robotics has been changing healthcare during the pandemic. The podcast is hosted by renowned artificial intelligence researcher, professor and entrepreneur Pieter Abbeel. Pieter is joined by leading experts in AI Robotics from all over the world as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines and rational robots.  Listen to the episode on The Robot Brains Podcast website.