News

Prof. Alex Dimakis of Texas ECE will be one of the three keynote speakers at the 15th Canadian Workshop on Information theory to be held in Quebec City, Canada, June 11-14th. 

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.

The FCC recently announced new spectrum for millimeter wave. The new rules open nearly 11 gigahertz of high-frequency spectrum for mobile and fixed wireless broadband, which include 3.85 GHz of currently licensed spectrum and 7 GHz of unlicensed spectrum. This decision could prove critical for the U.S. to retain its leadership in the field of wireless communications.

Prof. Andrea Alù was recently appointed as a Simons Investigator in Physics. This program aims to provide a stable base of support for outstanding scientists, and enables them to undertake long-term investigations of fundamental questions in their fields. Each year, the Simons Foundation invites nominations from universities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom for the Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Theoretical Computer Science and the Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems (MMLS) programs.

The third annual Simons Conference will explore the mathematics of stochastic processes and graphs for large graphs. The four-day conference, which will take place from May 9-12, 2016 at the Blanton Museum of Art on the UT Austin campus, brings together top researchers from various communities to provide a global picture of this broad subject. Each year, the Simons program alternates between an emphasis on either mathematics or network applications.

Hosted by the Department of Mathematics and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) at the University of Texas at Austin, the Simons Conference on Networks and Stochastic Geometry is an annual event that brings together a diverse set of world-class researchers from various scientific communities to foster interdisciplinary engagement. The multi-day conference focuses on the intersection of mathematics and applications to drive the future of wireless, transportation, social and distribution networks. Simons Conference 2015 was chaired by WNCG Profs.

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.