News

WNCG students Sarabjot Singh and Harpreet Dhillon, along with their advisor Jeff Andrews, received a Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Communications in Budapest, Hungary. It appeared in the Wireless Communications Symposium, which comprised approximately 170 technical papers selected from approximately 500 submissions.

Dr. Christos Argyropoulos, WNCG postdoctoral researcher, recently received the 2013 Raj Mittra Travel Award. This award is assigned every year to one junior scientist based upon the candidate's potential or demonstrated aptitude for research in the areas of electromagnetics, antennas and propagation. Argyropoulos will receive this prestigious recognition at the awards dinner of the joint 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI National Radio Science Meeting in Lake Buena Vista, Florida in July 2013. Dr. Christos Argyropoulos is supervised by Dr. Andrea Alu.

President Powers and The University of Texas at Austin Faculty Council have selected Professor Brian Evans to serve a three-year term (2013-2016) on the Faculty Advisory Committee on Budgets. Professor Susan Klein from the School of Law was also selected for the same term. This committee reviews university budgets and makes appropriate recommendations to the president and provost. Dr. Brian L. Evans is a professor with WNCG, and is the Engineering Foundation Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.

Professor Gustavo de Veciana presented a keynote speech titled 'Rethinking Video Transport' at the 14th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks. He discussed some of the core aspects of resource allocation and quality adaptation algorithms for video transport.

This years Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) will take place on Friday, October 18. It will be hosted on The University of Texas at Austins campus in the Peter ODonnell building. As in past years, TWS is co-hosted by the Austin Technology Incubator and The University of Texas at Austins Wireless Networking and Communications Group. The Summit is a frontier of bold thinking and new ideas, bringing together direct access to cutting-edge research and the latest in innovation from industry leaders, investors, and startups.

Professor Brian Evans and his students Karl F. Nieman, Jing Lin, and Marcel Nassar have received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Powerline Communications and Its Applications (ISPLC). The paper is titled 'Cyclic Spectral Analysis of Power Line Noise in the 3-200 kHz Band,' and was co-authored with Freescale engineer Dr. Khurram Waheed. The IEEE ISPLC was held on March 25-27, 2013, in Johannesburg, South Africa. The paper concerns Smart Grid communications from smart meters to the local utility over power lines.

WNCG would like to welcome DOCOMO Innovations, Inc. as itsnewest industrial affiliate. The mission of DOCOMO Innovations, Inc. is to take advantage of communicating andcollaborating with business partners and research laboratories engineers inorder to find triggers for developing innovative products and servicesglobally. The company is very interested in WNCG's cutting edge research on dataanalytics and storage, networking and wireless communications. WNCG isexcited tocollaborate with DOCOMO Innovations, Inc. on exciting new projects.

Millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum may be the solution to the spectrum gridlock in cellular systems. WNCG director Robert Heath and former WNCG professor Ted Rappaport organized an invited session on millimeter wave cellular communication at theIEEE International Conference on Communications. The sessionfeatured presentations from Heath, Rappaport, Dr. Ali Sadri (Intel, WiGig), Dr. Amithava Ghosh (Nokia Siemens Networks), Dr. Wonil Roh (Samsung), Dr. David Astley (Ericsson), and Dr. Nader Zein (NEC Labs). At the workshop, there was a debate on the role of mmWave in future cellular systems.

Professor Alan Bovik delivered one of four keynotes at the 11th IEEE Image, Video and Multidimensional Signal Processing Workshop at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. Boviks discussion related to how the human visual system and brain perceive 3D images (such as those viewed at the theatre, on 3D televisions, and on 3D wireless video devices). It focused on models of the natural statistics of the 3D worldwhich are remarkably regularand how this regularity can be used as powerful statistical priors to evaluate and improve the quality of 3D images.

Three recent research papers from professor Andrea Alu's group were selected as Editors Suggestion on Physical Review Letters. The editors of Physical Review Letters each week make a small number of Suggestions for readers to examine particular Letters, highlighting their importance and impact on current research.