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On December 15, 2011, Professor Heath delivered a Plenary talk at the Fourth International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing. The CAMSAP workshop is dedicated to theoretical topics such as convex optimization and relaxation, computational linear algebra, distributed algorithms, and sparse signal processing as well as their applications to array processing, communication systems, sensor networks, biomedicine, computational imaging, and emerging topics. Prof. Heath's talk was entitled The Limited Feedback Revolution in Wireless Communication.

Three WNCG faculty were promoted from Associate Professor to Professor in December 2011 (new title effective Sept. 2012). Robert Heath, Jeffrey Andrews, and Sanjay Shakkottai joined UT Austin in 2002. They were the only three faculty in ECE promoted to Professor this year, and all were 'early' promotions. Constantine Caramanis, on the faculty since 2006, received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor.

As of Jan. 15, Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr. became the fourth Director of the WNCG. Sanjay Shakkottai, who became Associate Director a year ago, will continue in his role as the Associate Director. Prof. Heath has been with UT Austin since January 2002 and was recently promoted from Associate Professor to Professor, official as of September 2012. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D from Stanford University. Prof. Heath brings his experience in working in industry, government, and military funded projects to the leadership of WNCG. Prof.

WNCG graduate Dr. Chun Hung Liu has joined the faculty of National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan as an Assistant Professor. NCKU is one of Taiwan's top universities in most rankings and in size, and its Electrical Engineering department was recently rated in the top 10 in the world by one international ranking. Dr. Liu joins an ever-growing club of WNCG alumni holding faculty positions in top US, Asian, and European universities. Dr. Liu's dissertation, entitled 'Distributed Transmission Strategies in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: A Transmission-Capacity Perspective,' was supervised by Prof.

Prof. Gustavo de Veciana was given the 'best technical talk award' by Cisco and Intel at their two day Video-Aware Wireless Networks (VAWN) Conference in San Jose, CA. The VAWN program was established in 2010 to help Intel and Cisco develop new ways for coping with the rapidly escalating demand for video consumption over wireless networks, and includes academics from USC, UCSD, Cornell, UT Austin, and Moscow State, as well as participation by Intel and Cisco engineers, and Verizon. The UT Austin team is leading an effort to re-engineer wireless networks by optimizing for perceptual quality.

WNCG welcomes its newest faculty member, Joydeep Ghosh, Ph.D. Dr. Gosh joined the UT-Austin faculty in 1988 after being educated at IIT Kanpur, (B. Tech '83) and The University of Southern California (Ph.D). He is the founder-director of IDEAL (Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Lab) and a Fellow of the IEEE. His research interests lie primarily in intelligent data analysis, data mining and web mining, adaptive multi-learner systems, and their applications to a wide variety of complex engineering and AI problems. Dr.

by kyle wesson Over the past decade, GPS security researchers have repeatedly warned that civil GPS is insecure and that users trust its signals at their peril. Disruption created by intentional generation of fake GPS signals, a type of attack against GPS receivers known as a spoofing attack, could have serious economic consequences. The deepening dependence of the civil infrastructure on GPS---especially for timing and synchronization---and the potential for financial gain or high-profile mischief make civil GPS spoofing a gathering threat.

Professor Al Bovik gave the Keynote Address at the European Workshop on Visual Information Processing that was held in Paris, France in July 2011. The title of his talk was Perceiving Distortions in Visual Signals. In this talk, Professor Bovik delivered his opinions on the current state and future of video quality assessment. He opined that significant future gains are likely to be found in modeling human perception of video distortions, but also modeling human behavioral reactions to distortion.

Crown Castle International Corp. (NYSE:CCI), one of the country's largest independent owners and operators of shared wireless infrastructure, recently became an Industrial Affiliate of the WNCG at The University of Texas at Austin. Crown Castle owns, operates, and leases towers and other infrastructure for wireless communications. The company offers significant wireless communications coverage to 92 of the top 100 US markets and to substantially all of the Australian population.

Prof. Todd Humphreys recently won an STTR Phase 1 award from the Navy. The STTR is collaboration between the Radionavigation Laboratory (part of WNCG) and Coherent Navigation. Dr. Humphreys's proposal was entitled Emitter Geolocation Enhancements for Time-Sensitive Targeting and Naval Battlespace Awareness. This proposal ranked number one out of 28 submitted proposals.