News

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.

Prof. Andrea Alù was recently appointed as a Simons Investigator in Physics. This program aims to provide a stable base of support for outstanding scientists, and enables them to undertake long-term investigations of fundamental questions in their fields. Each year, the Simons Foundation invites nominations from universities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom for the Simons Investigators in Mathematics, Physics, Theoretical Computer Science and the Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems (MMLS) programs.

The third annual Simons Conference will explore the mathematics of stochastic processes and graphs for large graphs. The four-day conference, which will take place from May 9-12, 2016 at the Blanton Museum of Art on the UT Austin campus, brings together top researchers from various communities to provide a global picture of this broad subject. Each year, the Simons program alternates between an emphasis on either mathematics or network applications.

WNCG student Debarati Kundu and her advisor, Prof. Brian Evans, have been selected for a top 10% paper award for the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2015. The conference will take place in Quebec City, Canada in September. The paper "Full-Reference Visual Quality Assessment for Synthetic Images: A Subjective Study" deals with conducting a series of subjective experiments to aid in better understanding how humans perceive synthetic images encountered in computer graphics.

Hosted by the Department of Mathematics and the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) at the University of Texas at Austin, the Simons Conference on Networks and Stochastic Geometry is an annual event that brings together a diverse set of world-class researchers from various scientific communities to foster interdisciplinary engagement. The multi-day conference focuses on the intersection of mathematics and applications to drive the future of wireless, transportation, social and distribution networks. Simons Conference 2015 was chaired by WNCG Profs.

Modern communication systems rely on multiple antennas that enhance the performance of network links using a series of techniques known as Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). However, new technology is needed to meet the demands of a rapidly increasing number of wireless devices and enable the next generation of cellular systems. Known as Massive MIMO, this adaptation of traditional MIMO techniques presents challenges to research and development teams worldwide.