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The Wireless Networking and Communications Group is home to some of the brightest minds at The University of Texas at Austin. The Student Leadership Award is presented annually to the student or students who best embody WNCG’s mission and values: academic excellence, leadership, service, and a commitment to innovative and collaborative research. The 2023 award went to two very deserving graduates: Drs. Joshua Ebenezer and Ian Roberts.

Each year, WNCG presents the Student Leadership Award to an outstanding student—or students—who not only displays excellence in research and academic activities, but also embodies the spirit of the group’s mission to create a collaborative research environment. This year, the award goes to two students: Ahmad AlAmmouri and Jessica Hoffmann.

As an interdisciplinary center for research and education, WNCG is home to many talented minds. The group has grown steadily since its inception over 15 years ago and now comprises 23 faculty members and over 150 students and research staff. The upward trends don’t stop simply at the number of group members. Over the years, WNCG has built an exceptional network of industry partners, increased the number of its sponsored research projects yielding groundbreaking results, and successfully graduated Masters and Ph.D. students who go on to a wide range of careers in industry and academia.

Prof. Robert Heath of Texas ECE along with his former students Jeonghun Park, Chan-Byoung Chae and their co-author Min Soo Sim have received the 2018 Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award. The winning paper was “Compressed Channel Feedback for Correlated Massive MIMO Systems” that appeared in the February 2016 regular issue of the Journal. The award will be be presented during the Award Luncheon at ICC 2018, May 21, in Kansas City.

Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE and his former students Anish Mittal and Rajiv Soundararajan have received the 2017 Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award for their paper " “Making a “Completely Blind” Image Quality Analyzer” first published in IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Volume 20, No. 3, March 2013. Prof. Bovik and his students will receive the award at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Calgary in April 2018.

Each year, WNCG faculty nominate one outstanding student to receive the WNCG Student Leadership Award. The award is presented to a student based on their cumulative contributions to the center, including their representation of WNCG to the greater community, their mentorship of fellow students, their research visibility and recognition from external organizations.

Xinnian Zheng, Ph.D student at Texas ECE along with Prof. Lizy John and Prof. Andreas Gerstlauer received the Best Research Paper Award at the 53rd Design Automation Conference (DAC) held in Austin, Texas in early June. The paper titled, “Accurate Phase-Level Cross-Platform Power and Performance Estimation” received the honor at the leading conference in electronic design automation (EDA).

Prof. Al Bovik and his former student Rajiv Soundararajan have been named recipients of the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award for 2016. The award recognizes their 2013 paper “Video Quality Assessment by Reduced Reference Spatio-Temporal Entropic Differencing,”  which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology in April 2013.

Texas ECE student Xinnian Zheng has received the "Stamatis Vassiliadis Best Paper Award" at the 15th International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, Modeling and Simulation (SAMOS) that took place in Samos, Greece on July 20-23, 2015. Xinnian's paper entitled "Learning-Based Analytical Cross-Platform Performance Prediction" employs machine learning techniques to predict the performance of a software workload running on a target machine using execution statistics collected while running the same application on a host platform.

UT ECE graduate student Romain Fleury has been named the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in Engineering Acoustics at at the 168th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Indianapolis for his work on "Non-Reciprocal Acoustic Devices Based on Spacio-Temporal Angular-Momentum Modulation.” Romain had already been named the recipient of the "Young Presenter Award in Noise" at ASA earlier last month. Romain is supervised by Prof. Andrea Alù.