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IEEE GLOBECOM is one of two flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc), together with IEEE ICC. Each year the conference attracts about 3,000 submitted scientific papers and dozens of proposals for industry events. A technical program committee of more than 1,500 experts provides more than 10,000 reviews, and from this a small fraction of the submitted papers are accepted for publication and presentation at the conference.

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.