News

WNCG affiliate company Viavi Solutions today announced its new 6G Forward program, designed to "provide vital expertise, technology, and funding to promising avenues of research, which may lead to breakthroughs for the next generation of wireless technology." VIAVI joined WNCG's Industrial Affiliate Program this summer, supporting the newly-launched 6G@UT center.

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.

This Spring, WNCG welcomes Intel, NEC, and Western Digital as the newest WNCG Industrial Affiliates Program members. All three companies enter as Level 2 members. Since WNCG’s founding, the Industrial Affiliates Program has played a vital role in the group’s success. It facilitates “cooperation and mutual assistance” between WNCG and Affiliate companies. This collaboration between academia and industry embodies the group’s mission to “support research, provide highly relevant education and opportunities, [and] promote technical innovation, imagination and entrepreneurship.”

Virginia-based company, General Dynamics Mission Systems (GDMS) recently joined the WNCG Industrial Affiliate Program as a level one member. GDMS is a business unit of General Dynamics, the global aerospace and defense company and a leading provider of mission critical systems across land, sea, air, space and cyber domains. The company has a global presence in secure communications and networking, command and control systems, imagery sensors and cyber. They are particularly interested in WNCG’s expertise in wireless research, mobile security and antenna design.

WNCG student Debarati Kundu and her advisor, Prof. Brian Evans, have been selected for a top 10% paper award for the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2015. The conference will take place in Quebec City, Canada in September. The paper "Full-Reference Visual Quality Assessment for Synthetic Images: A Subjective Study" deals with conducting a series of subjective experiments to aid in better understanding how humans perceive synthetic images encountered in computer graphics.

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.