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Professor Al Bovik of Texas ECE has been selected to receive the 2019 Progress Medal from the Royal Photographic Society (RPS). The Progress Medal is the oldest and most prestigious honor in the field of photography, having been given annually since 1878. It is awarded in recognition of any invention, research, publication or other contribution which has resulted in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense. 

Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a milestone in modern wireless and cellular telecommunications, creating a radically smaller, more efficient radio wave circulator that could be used in cellphones and other wireless devices, as reported in the latest issue of Nature Physics. The new circulator has the potential to double the useful bandwidth in wireless communications by enabling full-duplex functionality, meaning devices can transmit and receive signals on the same frequency band at the same time.

A team of researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Unversity of Texas at Austin (UT ECE) led by Prof. Andrea Alù has built the first-ever circulator for sound. The team’s experiments successfully prove that the fundamental symmetry with which acoustic waves travel through air between two points in space (“if you can hear, you can also be heard”) can be broken by a compact and simple device.