News

WNCG professor Atlas Wang has received several grants for his work on artificial intelligence. 

WNCG alumnus Dr. Qi Lei has received the 2021 Oden Institute Outstanding Dissertation Award. Her winning dissertation, “Provably effective algorithms for min-max optimization," proposes optimization algorithms to find the equilibrium point of two-player zero-sum games. Read the dissertation abstract and find the link to the full text via the University of Texas Libraries. At WNCG, Lei was advised by Prof. Alex Dimakis; she was co-advised by Dr. Inderjit Dhillon from the University of Texas Department of Computer Science.

WNCG professor Aryan Mokhtari has received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study Computationally Efficient Second-Order Optimization Algorithms for Large-Scale Learning. The project “lays out an agenda to develop a class of memory efficient, computationally affordable, and distributed friendly second-order methods for solving modern machine learning problems.”

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.

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.