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The UT Austin Villa Robotics Team recently won third place at the RoboCup@Home 2017 competition, in the category of Domestic Standard Platform League. The competition was held in Nagoya, Japan. Robocup was originally founded by Japanese researchers to develop robots that could play soccer well enough to eventually defeat world champion players. The idea was playfully implemented in order to fuse robot engineering with artificial intelligence and development. Now the original goal of the competition has expanded to include other areas and goals of robotics.

WNCG Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr. recently received the 2017 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications for his work entitled “Spatially Sparse Precoding in Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems,” published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in March 2014. The IEEE Guglielmo Marconi Best Paper Award is an annual award for an original paper in the field of Wireless Communications published in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Only papers published within the last three calendar years are eligible for this award. 

WNCG Postdoctoral Fellow Junil Choi recently began a position as Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea.

5G technology will play a major role in the future of automotive systems. Exactly how this technology will be implemented is still up for debate. To discuss current research and possible directions for 5G, industry experts met in New York for the Brooklyn 5G Summit in April 2016. The annual summit, jointly organized by Nokia Networks, the NYU WIRELESS Center and the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, discussed next steps for making 5G a commercial reality, which includes channel models, millimeter wave communication, regulatory aspects and the evolving Internet-of-Things (IoT) space.

In January 2016, WNCG welcomed two new faculty to its ranks - the husband and wife dynamic duo of research, Profs. Andrea and Edison Thomaz. “It is an incredibly exciting time to be at UT Austin,” Prof. Edison Thomaz states. “And WNCG exemplifies the type of forward-thinking that makes UT stand out. Having graduated from UT myself many ages ago, I could not pass up the opportunity to come back, contribute and be part of this transformation.”

IEEE GLOBECOM is one of two flagship conferences of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc), together with IEEE ICC. Each year the conference attracts about 3,000 submitted scientific papers and dozens of proposals for industry events. A technical program committee of more than 1,500 experts provides more than 10,000 reviews, and from this a small fraction of the submitted papers are accepted for publication and presentation at the conference.

Texas Wireless Summit (TWS) 2015 explored next generation wireless networks in a day-long event focused on The View to 5G: From Applications to the Air Interface. The 13th annual TWS provided a forum on emerging technology and business models for industry leaders and academics. Hosted by WNCG, TWS offered direct access to cutting-edge research and innovations from industry leaders, investors, academics and startups. Through keynote and panel-driven discussions, leading business and technology executives and top academics shared entrepreneurially-oriented research. WNCG Profs.

WNCG student Ken Pesyna was selected as a 2015 Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar. The award recognizes Pesyna’s academic achievements and leadership in the field of communications and information science. Pesyna was selected because his outstanding work in centimeter-accurate and power-efficient smartphone positioning, his excellent academic record and his demonstrated entrepreneurial capabilities.

As communication systems embrace ever wider bandwidths and the FCC seeks to codify next-generation standards, Analog-to-Digital-Converters (ADCs) struggle to meet rate, resolution and power requirements for these systems. The massive antenna arrays under consideration for next-generation wireless, which include tens or even hundreds of receiver channels, only exacerbate the problem.

As mobile wireless communications progress, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is exploring technologies that could lead to the emergence of a new generation of millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless spectrum by the year 2020. Before mmWave carrier frequencies can be applied to cellular networks, spectrum allocations and regulatory frameworks must be determined.