News

Constantine Caramanis, professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been elevated to Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for 2023. Caramanis was honored "for contributions to robust statistics and optimization in high dimensions."

Professor Derya Malak has won the Best Paper Award at the 20th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2022). Malak, who is currently an assistant professor in the Communication Systems Department at EURECOM, was recognized for her solo-authored paper, “Throughput and Energy Tradeoffs for Retransmission-based Random Access Protocols.” The paper extends work on the fundamentals of massive Internet of Things uplink communications that Malak conducted during her Ph.D. and in collaboration with Howard Huang of Nokia Bell Labs.

WNCG professors Alex Dimakis and Sriram Vishwanath have been elevated to Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for 2022. Prof. Alex Dimakis was honored for “contributions to distributed coding and learning."  Prof. Sriram Vishwanath was honored for “contributions to information theory and coding for wireless communication systems."

WNCG researchers and alumni were selected as Best Paper Award Runners-up at this year’s ACM MobiHoc: International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing. WCNG postdoctoral fellow Daniel Vial’s paper, “Robust Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandits,” was one of the papers selected as a runner-up. Co-written by Sanjay Shakkottai and R. Srikant, this paper develops algorithms for online collaborative learning in a setting where malicious agents might inject false information into the learning system.

WNCG alumni were among the recipients of major paper awards from the Communications Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE ComSoc). The awards were presented at the International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC), which took place virtually last month.

WNCG alumni Chan-Byoung Chae and Kaibin Huang have been elevated to Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for 2021. Elevation to Fellow is a prestigious distinction conferred upon select members of the institute whose “extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting” for the accolade. Chae was honored for contributions to MIMO design and prototypes for emerging communication systems; Huang for contributions to wirelessly powered communications and multi-antenna communications.

WNCG alumnus Rajiv Khanna and his colleagues Michal Derezinski and Michael W. Mahoney received the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2020. Their winning paper, “Improved Guarantees and a Multiple-Descent Curve for Column Subset Selection and the Nyström Method,” was presented in the conference’s Learning Theory track. The paper was one of three to receive the distinction for 2020. The award committee chose the winners in a two-stage selection process which considered the research’s impact, creativity, and “potential to endure,” along with its scientific and academic rigor.

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.”

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.

WNCG Prof. Lili Qiu has been named an IEEE Fellow. She is being recognized for “contributions to wireless network management.” The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one-percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.