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. 

This Spring, WNCG welcomes Intel, NEC, and Western Digital as the newest WNCG Industrial Affiliates Program members. All three companies enter as Level 2 members. Since WNCG’s founding, the Industrial Affiliates Program has played a vital role in the group’s success. It facilitates “cooperation and mutual assistance” between WNCG and Affiliate companies. This collaboration between academia and industry embodies the group’s mission to “support research, provide highly relevant education and opportunities, [and] promote technical innovation, imagination and entrepreneurship.”

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.

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.

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.

Each year, in conjunction with the Texas Wireless Summit, WNCG hosts a board meeting for its Industrial Affiliate members. This meeting invites affiliates to weigh in on current and future research directions and provides them with direct access to students for recruitment and research purposes. Affiliate members also receive sneak peeks into current faculty research.

Every few years, WNCG welcomes a new Director and Associate Director from among its faculty ranks. With an academic culture that encourages openness and research collaborations among equals, the rotation of Directors provides each faculty member with the opportunity to lead WNCG.

The annual WNCG Board Meeting brings together Industrial Affiliates, Board Members, Students and Faculty to share research and successes of the previous year, as well as to discuss the future of WNCG. Two representatives from each affiliate member company attend to keep up-to-date with the latest happenings and groundbreaking research in WNCG.