News

WNCG Associate Professor Andrea Alù has been elected toFellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) for outstanding contributions to the fields of photonic metamaterials, plasmonic phenomena and devices, cloaking and scattering suppression.'

WNCG graduate student Francesco Monticone and WNCG Assistant Professor Andrea Alu received the Best Student Paper Award at Metamaterials 2013 in Bordeaux, France. The title of Francescos paper with Andrea is 'On the Physical Bounds of Cloaking and Invisibility'. Metamaterials 2013 is the most visible international conference in the field of artificial materials and metamaterials, and this year it celebrated its 20th anniversary. Francesco Monticone is advised by Dr. Andrea Alu.

WNCG Assistant Professor Alex Dimakis gave the keynote Address at the First International Workshop on Big Dynamic Distributed Data (BD3), in conjunction with the 39th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), in Trento, Italy on August 30, 2013. Prof.

WNCG Associate Director Sanjay Shakkottai and WNCG Assistant Professor Sujay Sanghavi received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award for their work on 'NeTS: Small: Inverse Problems from Cascades: Structure, Causation and Opinions.'Shakkottai and Sanghavi aim to develop a new theoretical and algorithmic understanding of these classic processes. They focus on using cascades as an inference and learning tool, instead of merely a mathematically convenient model.

The Wireless Networking and Communications Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin is part of a team that has been awarded a $1.4 million grant for the development of a Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) by the USDOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA) to advance cutting-edge research and educational programs that address critical transportation challenges facing our nation.

A group of UT Austin and Stanford faculty members led by Prof. Gustavo de Veciana (UT ECE, WNCG) in collaboration with Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai (UT ECE, WNCG),  Lili Qiu (UT CS, WNCG),  and Ramesh Johari (MS&E, Stanford Univ.) have recently been awarded an NSF grant totaling $978,000. This project supports research in 5G wireless networks.

Prof. Sujay Sanghavi and Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai of UT ECE have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award for their work on "NeTS: Small: Inverse Problems from Cascades: Structure, Causation and Opinions." Professors Sanghavi and Shakkottai aim to develop a new theoretical and algorithmic understanding of these classic processes. Their  focus is on using cascades as an inference and learning tool, instead of merely a mathematically convenient model.

Prof. Joydeep Ghosh of UT ECE was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Workshop on Divergences and Divergence Learning (WDDl), held in Atlanta, June 2013. In his talk, entitled "Learning Bregman Divergences for Prediction with Generalized Linear Models," which reflects joint work with ECE and WNCG student Sreangsu Acharrya,  an efficient approach to learning a broad class of predictive models was introduced. What is most remarkable about this approach is that model parameters can be estimated even when the loss function is unknown.

Prof. Jeff Andrews has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications  (TWC) for the period January 1,  2014 to December 31, 2015. The IEEE TWC is one of the premier venues for publishing theoretical and practical innovations in wireless communications. The journal is a collaboration between the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Prof. Andrews is the latest addition to a group of distinguished ECE faculty members who have served as EICs of major IEEE journals.

WNCG student Ardavan Pedram, co-advised by WNCG professor Andreas Gerstlauer and professor Robert van de Geijn in Computer Science, has received the Best Poster Award at the Ph.D. Forum of the 27th IEEE International Parallel Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). IPDPS is the flagship conference of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing and among the premier venues for parallel, distributed and cloud computing. It was held May 20-24 in Boston, Massachusetts. Ardavan's poster and Ph.D.