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Erika Susana Alcorta and Matthew Barondeau of Texas ECE have been named winners of 2023 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships for North America. The QIF program "is focused on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring innovative PhD students across a broad range of technical research areas, based on Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork. QIF enables graduate students to be mentored by our engineers and supports them in their quest towards achieving their research goals."

WNCG student Zhiwen Fan and his teammate Rishov Sarkar (Georgia Tech) were among the winners of this year's Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships for North America. The pair's winning project studied "Real-Time Visual Processing for Autonomous Driving via Video Transformer with Data-Model-Accelerator Tri-Design."

WNCG students Akash Doshi and Manan Gupta have been named winners in the 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) North America Program. Doshi and Gupta proposed the project “Federated Generative Learning for Channel Estimation in mmWave and THz systems.” The pair was one of 16 winners chosen from 43 teams of finalists. “We are extremely honored to have been selected as the recipients of this prestigious fellowship,” Gupta said. “We look forward to working with Qualcomm to develop impactful and innovative wireless technology.”

A team of Texas ECE students has been named a winner of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2020 (North America) competition. The team of Khurram Mazher and Andrew Graff won for their project "Radar-to-radar Interference: System Level Analysis and Solutions." Khurram and Andrew were one of 13 winning teams selected from 42 finalists. The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship began in 2009, and "has continued to grow with the addition of more universities, more candidates, and expansion to our research centers internationally."

A student team supervised by WNCG professor Robert Heath won the first runner-up prize at the Signal Processing Society Five-Minute Video Clip Contest (5-MICC).

Today in Austin, pedestrians and cyclists account for more than 50% of all traffic deaths, even though they only make up about 20% of travelers on the roads. While the push towards automated vehicles could reduce these deaths, unless vehicles receive help from pedestrians, automated cars could become too cautious and risk avoidant to function efficiently.

WNCG Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr. recently received the 2017 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications for his work entitled “Spatially Sparse Precoding in Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems,” published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in March 2014. The IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award is an annual award for an original paper in the field of Wireless Communications published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Only papers published within the last three calendar years are eligible for this award. 

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.

WNCG student Ahmed Kord received a 2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for his project entitled, “Fully-Integrated Reconfigurable Magnet-less Non-reciprocal Components for Next-Generation Wireless Communication Systems.” The project was completed in collaboration with Negar Reiskarimian at Columbia University.

WNCG Profs. François Baccelli, Jeff Andrews and Robert Heath were recently awarded a $1,000,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation for research on Millimeter Wave (mmW) cellular networks. The project is entitled "Fundamental Properties of Millimeter Wave Networks: Signal, Interference, and Connectivity” and will develop new mathematical and analysis tools to uncover the potential of mmW cellular networks.