News

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).

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 Prof. Siddhartha Banerjee has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. Banerjee received his doctorate from Texas ECE in 2013. As a member of WNCG, he was advised by Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai and Sujay Sanghavi. He is currently an Assistant Professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University, and he also serves as a technical consultant for popular rideshare service Lyft.

Evdokia Nikolova, Assistant Professor in Texas ECE, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for her work on "AitF: Collaborative Research: Algorithms and Mechanisms for the Distribution Grid.”  The goal of this project is to “help the distribution grid and its participants transition from its current functionality of serving mostly traditional consumers, to the future grid that needs to sustainably integrate prosumers, renewables and distributed energy resources.”

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 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.