News

The spring semester is in full swing, and as WNCG continues on the forefront of research, the group has welcomed a new director. Professor Constantine Caramanis began his three-year term as WNCG Director at the start of the new calendar year. Prior to that, he served as the group’s associate director. With Caramanis stepping into the new role, Professor Alex Dimakis was chosen among WNCG faculty to serve as associate director. WNCG’s leadership system allows the associate director to learn the ropes over the course of the term before serving their own term as director. 

Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE and his former students Anish Mittal and Rajiv Soundararajan have received the 2017 Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award for their paper " “Making a “Completely Blind” Image Quality Analyzer” first published in IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Volume 20, No. 3, March 2013. Prof. Bovik and his students will receive the award at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing in Calgary in April 2018.

Dr. Ahmed Tewfik, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been named the recipient of the 2017 IEEE Signal Processing Society technical Achievement Award.

Envision an early cubist painting by the famous artist Pablo Picasso. To the untrained eye, the painting can look like a jumbled series of boxes overlapping and intertwining with each other. But the art of cubism is about exploring the world from multiple perspectives. The painting, which at first looks like boxes, is actually a city seen from multiple perspectives.

WNCG Alumni Ahmed Alkhateeb and Omar El-Ayach recently received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award for 2016. Their paper, “Channel Estimation and Hybrid Precoding for Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems,” originally appeared in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing in October 2014. Their co-authors on the project include their former advisor, Prof. Robert Heath, and Professor Geert Leus of Delft University of Technology. Dr. Alkhateeb is now a Wireless Communications Researcher at Facebook and Dr.

The Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) is a unique event that brings the high profile of a world-class conference right to UT Austin’s front door. Hosted by WNCG, TWS offers direct access to cutting-edge research and innovations from industry leaders, academics, investors and startups. The 14th annual TWS saw record high attendance with nearly 300 participants consisting of academics, industry partners, business leaders, researchers and students from across the world.