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PRESS RELEASE: New 6G Research Center Unites Industry Leaders and UT Wireless Experts Teaming up with industry titans including Samsung, NVIDIA, and more, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are launching 6G@UT, a new research center to lay the groundwork for 6G, the next generation of wireless technology.

WNCG students Marius Facktor and Abhinau Venkataramanan and WNCG alumnus Praful Gupta from Prof. Al Bovik’s Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering (LIVE) have been named Phase 2 winners in the Enhancing Computer Vision for Public Safety Challenge. The challenge is hosted by the Public Safety Communications Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The competition aims to support public safety missions by advancing computer vision algorithms and no-reference (NR) metrics that assess image or video quality.

First-year graduate student Joshua Ebenezer has received the Nilanjan Ganguly Memorial Award for his undergraduate thesis on haze- and fog-affected images and videos. The award designates the “best B.Tech thesis in the Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering Department” at IIT Khargapur and is given annually to a single student. The award also includes a cash prize for the recipient from the Ganguly family. 

WNCG Alumnus Vishal Monga has led two teams of researchers to success at the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) worldwide competition. Monga received his Ph.D.EE from Texas ECE in 2005, advised by Prof. Brian L. Evans at WNCG. He now runs the Information Processing & Algorithms Laboratory at Penn State’s College of Engineering and holds the title of Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

WNCG is happy to announce our newest faculty member, Prof. Nanshu Lu! Prof. Lu joins us from The University of Texas at Austin’s Departments of Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering. She has been with the University of Texas at Austin since 2011 and currently holds the title of Associate Professor. Prof. Lu's research focuses on the mechanics and manufacture of flexible, stretchable, and bio-integrated electronics. Her research team, comprised of 11 PhD students and one postdoctoral researcher, concentrates on four major areas: mechanics of flexible and stretchable structures,

WNCG student Ahmed Kord won a 2018 Graduate Fellowship award from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) for his research on Magnetless Circulators for Full-Duplex Radios. Kord has been researching this topic at WNCG since 2015, advised by Prof. Andrea Alu. Their team hopes to develop “new concepts and circuit architectures for magnetless circulators based on spatio-temporal modulation (STM) of resonant three-port junctions.” In 2017, Kord won the IEEE MTT-S student design competition for a project on a related topic.

Texas ECE Professor Al Bovik’s neuroscience-based Visual Information Fidelity (VIF) picture quality measurement tool has been built into the core of Netflix’s quality system which controls the quality of every video streamed by Netflix to all customers world-wide. VIF is a full reference image quality assessment index that is based on natural scene statistics, and on a model of the type of image information that is extracted by the human visual system. It was developed by Prof.

Effective February 2015, WNCG is pleased to announce the introduction of a new Level III membership option in its Industrial Affiliate Program. The Industrial Affiliate Program allows companies to become stakeholders in WNCG and to participate in the growth and direction of the center. Initially founded to significantly lower the cost of pre-competitive research for each sponsor, the program maximizes benefits to each sponsoring company.

In recognition of his outstanding performance as a summer intern, Qualcomm awarded WNCG Ph.D. student Tianyang Bai the Roberto Padovani Fellowship.  The fellowship was created in 2008 to recognize Qualcomm’s corporate research and development interns who demonstrate superior technical performance during their summer internship. Roberto Padovani was Qualcomm’s chief technology officer for nearly 10 years and was a leading innovator for the company.

Modern communication systems rely on multiple antennas that enhance the performance of network links using a series of techniques known as Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). However, new technology is needed to meet the demands of a rapidly increasing number of wireless devices and enable the next generation of cellular systems. Known as Massive MIMO, this adaptation of traditional MIMO techniques presents challenges to research and development teams worldwide.