News

WNCG students Wenguang Mao and Mei Wang, along with their advisor, WNCG Professor Lili Qiu, won the “Best Paper” award at this year's ACM MobiSys, which took place over the summer in Munich, Germany. According to the conference website, MobiSys “seeks to present innovative and significant research on all aspects of mobile systems, applications, and services. The conference values technical contributions with working implementations and practical evaluations.” Mao, Wang and Qiu’s paper, titled “AIM: Acoustic Imaging on a Mobile,” was chosen from 40 papers accepted to the conference.

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.