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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. 

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.”