News

Jubin Jose Wins 2001 Student Leadership Award' This year's winner of the WNCG student leadership award was Jubin Jose. Jubin has shown initiative and leadership in a number of areas important to WNCG, including student life, scholarship, and the WNCG organization itself. Perhaps most impressively, Jubin has been critical in revitalizing the WNCG student seminar series & a forum for our students to share ideas, and more importantly, to convey to one another the excitement for research, scholarship, and collegiality.

The EURECA program, an NSF funded undergraduate research experience for undergraduates (REU), commenced its 6th summer program on June 6th this year. A nine-week program led by Professors Bard and Vishwanath, it draws undergraduates from across the nation to participate in graduate-level cutting-edge research in networking, wireless, robotics, control and signal processing. This year's program has a special emphasis of bridging research and entrepreneurship for the program participants.

Prof. Bovik Presents Keynote Address at IST/SPIE Electronic Imaging Symposium' Professor Al Bovik delivered the Keynote Address at the 2011 IST/SPIE Electronic Imaging Symposim, held in San Francisco, California in January. In this talk Professor Bovik discussed the current state of research on automatic quality assessment of visual signals, pointing out that future improvements are likely to be driven by modeling temporal human behavior, and by the development of regular statistical video models. As he was leaving the stage, the organizers surprised Prof.

Dr. Rahul Vaze and Professor Robert W. Heath Jr. received the EURASIP 2011 Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking Best Paper Award for their paper: 'End-to-End Joint Antenna Selection Strategy and Distributed Compress and Forward Strategy for Relay Channels.' In this paper, the authors show how a small amount of feedback could be used to configure a multi-hop relay channel to achieve good reliability and high throughput, achieving the optimum diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. This confirms the vital role of feedback in wireless networks, a theme of much of Prof. Heath's research.

Cellular networks are at the beginning of a major transition from coverage-centric master-planned deployments to deployments that roll out organically over time in order to provide capacity where it is needed through low-power and small form-factor base stations like picocells and femtocells.

Professor Robert Heath and Former UT ECE Student Dr. Rahul Vaze Receive EURASIP 2011 Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking Best Paper Award

Janet Preuss, Senior Administrative Associate for the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) in UT ECE has been named a recipient of the 2011 University of Texas at Austin Outstanding Staff Award. Janet is one of only thirty staff member across all of UT Austin to be recognized for 2011. She will be honored by President Powers in an awards ceremony on May 13, 2011 in the Texas Union and also receive a generous honorarium.

UT ECE Professor Constantine Caramanis Receives NSF CAREER Award Professor Constantine Caramanis of UT ECE was awarded an NSF CAREER award for his work at the intersection of robust optimization, networks, statistics and machine learning. The award will support his work on "High Dimensional Statistics - Adaptive Networks, Structure and Robustness," to develop a new methodological framework to understand high dimensional complex phenomena from potentially corrupted and incomplete data.

Dallas-based subsidiary of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., has recently become an Industrial Affiliate sponsor of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) at The University of Texas. Samsung Telecommunications America researches, develops and markets wireless handsets and telecommunications products throughout North America.

On January 1, 2011 WNCG Associate Director and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Robert W. Heath Jr., was elevated to IEEE Fellow, the highest grade of IEEE membership.From the IEEE Fellow Web page, the elevation to IEEE Fellow is 'a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.' Dr.