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The UT Austin Villa Robotics Team recently won third place at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League. The competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Robocup was originally founded by Japanese researchers to develop robots that could play soccer well enough to eventually defeat world champion players. The idea was playfully implemented in order to fuse robot engineering with artificial intelligence and development. Now the original goal of the competition has expanded to include other areas and goals of robotics.

In January 2016, WNCG welcomed two new faculty to its ranks - the husband and wife dynamic duo of research, Profs. Andrea and Edison Thomaz. “It is an incredibly exciting time to be at UT Austin,” Prof. Edison Thomaz states. “And WNCG exemplifies the type of forward-thinking that makes UT stand out. Having graduated from UT myself many ages ago, I could not pass up the opportunity to come back, contribute and be part of this transformation.”

IEEE GLOBECOM is one of two flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society, together with IEEE ICC. Each year the conference attracts about 3000 submitted scientific papers. 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. The conference meets once a year in North America and attracts roughly 2000 leading scientists and researchers and industry leaders from all around the world.

Recent WNCG Alumnus Prof. Chun-Hung Liu won the Best Paper award at the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Heterogeneous and Small Cell Networks, held in conjunction with IEEE Globecom in Austin, Texas.   His paper was entitled "Adaptive Downlink CoMP in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks with Imperfect Overhead Messaging”, which is on utilizing several base stations to coordinate their transmissions to boost signal power and reduce other-cell interference, while having imperfect and limited connections between them. Prof. Liu was the sole author.