News

WNCG Professor Sujay Sanghavi received a Young Investigator Award from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Within the Department of Defense (DoD) and the U.S. Strategic Command, the DTRA leads the effort to combat the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Every year, DTRA makes about 15 Young Investigator Awards to researchers from various science and engineering fields; the purpose is primarily to support fundamental research. The award, which goes up to five years, recognizes and furthers Prof. Sanghavi's research on cascades in networks.

The 20th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), was held on the UT Austin campus October 30 through November 2, 2012. ICNP is one of the premier conferences in the computer networking field and deals with all aspects of communication protocols, from design and specification, to verification, testing, performance analysis, and implementation. There was a strong presence of UT faculty at the conference. Prof. Lili Qiu (WNCG faculty) served a general co-chair, Prof. Yin Zhang served as a TPC co-chair, Prof. Sriram Vishwanath (WNCG faculty) served as Local Arrangement Chair.

WNCG Ph.D. student Chao Jia and his advisor Prof. Brian L. Evans received a Top 10% Paper Award at the 14th IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop held in September. Their paper was entitled Probabilistic 3D Motion Estimation for Rolling Shutter Video Rectification from Visual and Inertial Measurements. This paper addressed the long-standing problem of warping artifacts that appear during video recording on smart phones and many other handheld digital cameras.

WNCG graduate student Jason Soric won third place in the student paper competition at the 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC-URSI National Radio Science Meeting in Chicago on July 11, 2012. This meeting is the premier international symposium on antennas and propagation. His paper, Experimental Demonstration of a Conformal Mantle Cloak for Radio-Waves, was also authored by Dr. Andrea Alu, as well as Research Associates Dr. Aaron Kerkhoff and Dr. David Rainwater.

With the guidance of Assistant Professor and WNCG newcomer Andrea Alù, researchers have demonstrated for the first time that it's possible to make a 3-D object invisible to microwaves. This is a discovery that could bring us a step closer to hiding large and diverse objects from being detected by the visible eye or radar, such as stealth planes and even sensing devices used in nanoscale research. This WNCG research team used a method known as 'plasmonic cloaking' to hide an 18-centimeter cylindrical tube from microwaves.

We are very excited to announce the preliminary list of speakers for the 2012 Texas Wireless Summit. It will be held on Friday, October 26, 2012 at The University of Texas at Austins ATT Executive Conference Center. This interactive event is co-hosted by the WNCG and the Austin Technology Incubator, and features many leading wireless innovators and thought leaders. This years themes are video over wireless networks and location-based services and applications. Bernard Briggs CTO and Vice President, T3 Kevin Duffy CEO, Fastback Networks Dr.

WNCG welcomes Alex Dimakis, who joined the research unit in January 2013. Dimakis is at the forefront of distributed coding research, the topic for which he was recently awarded the joint IEEE ComSoc Information Theory best paper award. His expertise will complement existing WNCG research in many ways, particularly in the areas of coding, communications, information theory, and our push towards cloud computing, storage, and BigData. Dimakis has been a faculty member in Electrical EngineeringSystems at the University of Southern California since 2009. He received both his M.S. (2005) and Ph.D.

UT ECE graduate student Michelle Saad has been named a winner of a 2012 Intel PhD Fellowship for her work on Natural Scene and Motion Statistics Model-Based Video Quality Assessment. Michelle's work is supervised by Dr. Alan Bovik in the Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering (LIVE) and Wireless and Networking Communications Group (WNCG). According to Intel, the Intel PhD Fellowship program focuses on research in Intel’s technical areas; Hardware Systems Technology and Design, Software Technology and Design, and Semiconductor Technology and Manufacturing.

In June, a WNCG team under the direction of Dr. Todd Humphreys demonstrated for the first time that a civilian, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) can be commandeered in mid-flight by a civil GPS spoofing attack. The result will likely factor into the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) plans to draw up rules for integrating UAVs into U.S. airspace by 2015.

Prof. Jeff Andrews joined the IEEE Communications Society Committee on Emerging Technologies as one of the two new members for 2012. The committees mandate is to identify and nurture research activities on nascent but potentially disruptive topics. The committee is chaired by Andrea Goldsmith of Stanford University, and includes luminaries from many different subareas of the society.