News

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 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 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.

First-year graduate student Joshua Ebenezer has received the Nilanjan Ganguly Memorial Award for his undergraduate thesis on haze- and fog-affected images and videos. The award designates the “best B.Tech thesis in the Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering Department” at IIT Khargapur and is given annually to a single student. The award also includes a cash prize for the recipient from the Ganguly family. 

WNCG alumnus Prof. Siddhartha Banerjee has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. Banerjee received his doctorate from Texas ECE in 2013. As a member of WNCG, he was advised by Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai and Sujay Sanghavi. He is currently an Assistant Professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University, and he also serves as a technical consultant for popular rideshare service Lyft.

Evdokia Nikolova, Assistant Professor in Texas ECE, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for her work on "AitF: Collaborative Research: Algorithms and Mechanisms for the Distribution Grid.”  The goal of this project is to “help the distribution grid and its participants transition from its current functionality of serving mostly traditional consumers, to the future grid that needs to sustainably integrate prosumers, renewables and distributed energy resources.”

Student Harpreet Dhillon and former visiting researcher Ralph Tanbourgi receive Best Student Paper Award in the 20th European Wireless Conference in Barcelona, Spain. Their paper was chosen from among 180 papers presented at the conference. Dhillon, advisded by Prof. Jeffrey Andrews, will join Virginia Tech this fall as an Assistant Professor.