News

WNCG student Nithin Ramesan received the Best Student Paper Award at the 18th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2020).  This is the second year in a row that the award has gone to a WNCG student. Ramesan’s winning paper, "Wireless Queues in Poisson Interference Fields: the Continuum Between Zero and Infinite Mobility," was co-authored with his advisor, Prof. François Baccelli.

WNCG's annual signature event, typically held in the fall, has been postponed to spring 2021. Texas Wireless Summit brings together leaders from industry and academia in an annual forum on emerging technology. First conceived in 2003 as the "Wireless Networking Symposium," the event has continued to grow and evolve over the years. Each year’s theme explores possible waves of transformative technologies and the research that will make them a reality.

WNCG alumnus Harpreet S. Dhillon has received the 2020 IEEE ComSoc Radio Communications Committee (RCC) Early Achievement Award for contributions to radio communications. According to IEEE, the award “recognizes members of the IEEE Communications Society who have achieved early career visibility in the field through research and service to the RCC.” Candidates must have completed their Ph.D. within 10 years of their nomination. The award is conferred once a year at the International Conference on Communication.

WNCG student Yun Chen won Best Paper in the Wireless Networks track at the 2020 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference. Chen received the award for her paper “Efficient Drone Mobility Support Using Reinforcement Learning.”

WNCG student Lakshay Narula received the Walter R. Fried Memorial Award for Best Paper at the 2020 IEEE/ION PLANSx Conference. The award recognizes “substantial contribution to the technology of navigation and positioning equipment, systems, or practices” judged on criteria including technical content, innovation, importance of topic, and writing quality. Narula’s winning paper, “Automotive-Radar-Based 50-cm Urban Positioning,” demonstrated how self-driving cars can use commercially-available, low-cost automotive radars to improve navigation.

Each year, WNCG presents the Student Leadership Award to an outstanding student—or students—who not only displays excellence in research and academic activities, but also embodies the spirit of the group’s mission to create a collaborative research environment. This year, the award goes to two students: Ahmad AlAmmouri and Jessica Hoffmann.

Dr. Yarden Mazor has accepted a faculty position at Tel-Aviv University. He will join the Physical Electronics department in the School of Electrical Engineering as a Senior Lecturer—a tenured position roughly equivalent to the rank of Associate Professor in the North American academic system. 

It's no secret that WNCG produces stellar industry and academic professionals. As we come to the end of an unusual spring semester, WNCG members are staying busy! Here’s where some of our students and alumni are headed (in many cases, virtually!) this summer for internships, academic positions, and full-time employment: Academe: Christopher Snyder* - University of Texas Medical Branch (School of Medicine)   Full-Time Positions:  Adam Allevato* - Pensa Systems Aditya Jain* - SparkCognition Erik Lindgren* - Google

Prof Alan Bovik, Prof. Sriram Vishwanath and their students have been awarded 2020 European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) Best Paper Awards. Lixiong Liu, Yi Hua, Qingjie Zhao, Hua Huang, and Prof. Alan Bovik won the 2020 EURASIP Best Paper Award for the Image Communication Journal for their paper "Blind image quality assessment by relative gradient statistics and adaboosting neural network", Image Communication, Volume 40, January 2016, Pages 1-15. Ankit Singh Rawat, Arya Mazumdar, and Prof.

The European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) has announced the winners of the 2020 Best Paper Awards. Two of the four winning papers were written by WNCG faculty members with their students and postdoctoral fellows.  EURASIP-sponsored journals each give their own award—either annually or biennially, depending on the number of papers published per year. A sub-committee for each journal evaluates the papers according to relevance, quality, style, and originality in order to select a winner.