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 alumnus Xingqin Lin is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE Vehicular Technical Society Early Career Award. The annual award recognizes outstanding scientists or engineers under the age of 35 who have contributed to the field of mobile radio, motor vehicles, or land transportation. Lin was commended for his “contributions to mobile communication systems and connected aerial vehicles.”

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 Namyoon Lee has been named recipient of the 2021 IT Young Engineer Award, an IEEE-IEIE Joint Award. The annual award recognizes an engineer under the age of 40 whose contributions to the field have made a significant impact on society.

WNCG alumnus Arjun Anand and WNCG professors Gustavo de Veciana and Sanjay Shakkottai have been awarded the 2021 William R. Bennett Prize from the IEEE Communications Society. The prize is awarded annually to the authors of a single paper published in either in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking or the IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management. The paper must have been published within the last three years prior to the award.

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.

In his research paper, “RTSense: RFID based Temperature Sensing,” WNCG alumnus Dr. Swadhin Pradhan and Prof. Lili Qiu explore how passive RFID tags could address the problem of battery-dependent sensory devices. 

Nitin Jonathan Myers has accepted a position at the Delft University of Technology, in Delft, the Netherlands. He will join the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC), with a focus on signal processing. He received his Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of WNCG advised by Prof. Robert Heath. Since graduating, Myers has worked as a Senior Engineer with Samsung Semiconductor on the 5G modem research and development team.

Texas ECE sat down with WNCG alumna Dr. Kalpana Seshadrinathan (PhD, 2008) to discuss her career in electrical and computer engineering. Seshadrinathan is part of the team that received a 2020 Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award. TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOURSELF.

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.