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A student team supervised by WNCG professor Robert Heath won the first runner-up prize at the Signal Processing Society Five-Minute Video Clip Contest (5-MICC).

Five WNCG faculty members were among the top 100 most influential scholars on the AI 2000 lists. The rankings are based on the Tsinghua AMiner academic data, which indexes more than 133 million expert profiles and 270 million publications. Jeffrey Andrews and Robert Heath came in at the top of the Most Influential Scholars in the Internet of Things category, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 respectively. Recognized as Honorable Mentions for Internet of Things were Sriram Vishwanath at No. 82 and Constantine Caramanis at No. 90.

Texas ECE is on the front lines of the global response to the coronavirus pandemic. Our researchers are racing to develop innovations to support the fight against COVID-19. Here are some Texas ECE research projects being developed to address the coronavirus pandemic: Deployment of a real-time trustworthiness assessment to ensure only the best, most reliable sources and associated data are used for monitoring the incidence of COVID-19, providing confidence to citizens and health care workers alike. Dr. Suzanne Barber

Few-shot classification, the task of adapting a classifier to unseen classes given a small labeled dataset, is an important step on the path toward human-like machine learning. I will present what I think are some of the key advances and open questions in this area. I will then focus on the fundamental issue of overfitting in the few-shot scenario. Bayesian methods are well-suited to tackling this issue because they allow practitioners to specify prior beliefs and update those beliefs in light of observed data.

Abstract: In this talk, we aim to quantify the robustness of distributed training against worst-case failures and adversarial nodes. We show that there is a gap between robustness guarantees, depending on whether adversarial nodes have full control of the hardware, the training data, or both. Using ideas from robust statistics and coding theory we establish robust and scalable training methods for centralized, parameter server systems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we prove that robustness is impossible when a central authority does not own the training data, e.g., in federated learning systems.

Only 13 percent of engineers in the workforce are women, according to the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). The same analysis shows that over 32 percent of women switch out of STEM degree programs in college. Encouragement and support for women in STEM fields has grown in the past few years; however, there’s still work to be done to continue building an environment where female engineers can flourish. Texas ECE and WNCG student Sandy Saab is doing her best to be a part of that effort.

WNCG student Ian Roberts has been awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF program identifies researchers “anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering.”

WNCG continues to grow; this spring, Assistant Professor Jonathan Tamir and Professor José del R. Millán were welcomed to the group. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_preview","fid":"1761","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"180","width":"180"}}]] Dr. Jonathan Tamir holds a joint appointment with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Dell Medical School’s Department of Diagnostic Medicine. He is also affiliated with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences.

Four Texas ECE students have been awarded Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.

Research done by WNCG alum Matthew Murrian was featured on the cover of the InsideGNSS January/February 2020 volume. Murrian, the lead author on the paper, conducted the work along with Lakshay Narula and Radionavigation Lab director Prof. Todd Humphreys. In 2017, the Radionavigation lab placed a custom software-defined receiver onboard the International Space Station as part of a larger effort to study GNSS signals in the low Earth orbit environment. Over a two-year period, the researchers analyzed data from the receiver and identified multiple sources of GNSS interference.