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As an interdisciplinary research center, WNCG supports research with applications in several areas. Our faculty and students are leading the way in topics from 6G to artificial intelligence and machine learning, to healthcare technology and beyond. WNCG graduate students showcased some of their work in a virtual open house for affiliates last fall. In lieu of a traditional poster session, the students filmed five-minute videos introducing their research. Check out a curated selection of our students’ research videos on WNCG’s YouTube channel here.

WNCG students Akash Doshi and Manan Gupta have been named winners in the 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) North America Program. Doshi and Gupta proposed the project “Federated Generative Learning for Channel Estimation in mmWave and THz systems.” The pair was one of 16 winners chosen from 43 teams of finalists. “We are extremely honored to have been selected as the recipients of this prestigious fellowship,” Gupta said. “We look forward to working with Qualcomm to develop impactful and innovative wireless technology.”

IBM recently announced the awardees of this year’s IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Program. WNCG student Tianlong Chen was among only 16 students selected worldwide for 2021. According to IBM, the Fellowship Awards Program is “intensely competitive.” Awardees are exceptional Ph.D. students conducting research in promising and disruptive technologies, particularly: Hybrid Cloud; Quantum Computing / Quantum Systems; Artificial Intelligence; Cloud / Open Source Technologies; Security / Cyber Security; Data Science; and Systems.

WNCG student Nithin Ramesan received the Best Student Paper Award at the 18th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2020).  This is the second year in a row that the award has gone to a WNCG student. Ramesan’s winning paper, "Wireless Queues in Poisson Interference Fields: the Continuum Between Zero and Infinite Mobility," was co-authored with his advisor, Prof. François Baccelli.

WNCG student Lakshay Narula received the Walter R. Fried Memorial Award for Best Paper at the 2020 IEEE/ION PLANSx Conference. The award recognizes “substantial contribution to the technology of navigation and positioning equipment, systems, or practices” judged on criteria including technical content, innovation, importance of topic, and writing quality. Narula’s winning paper, “Automotive-Radar-Based 50-cm Urban Positioning,” demonstrated how self-driving cars can use commercially-available, low-cost automotive radars to improve navigation.

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.”

Ph.D. student Jessica Hoffmann received second place in the INFORMS Nicholson Student Paper competition. She received the award for her recent paper "Learning Graphs from Noisy Epidemic Cascades" with her advisor, WNCG professor Constantine Caramanis.Epidemics are a powerful framework for modeling human and computer viruses, as well as influence, rumors, information and disinformation.

As an interdisciplinary center for research and education, WNCG is home to many talented minds. The group has grown steadily since its inception over 15 years ago and now comprises 23 faculty members and over 150 students and research staff. The upward trends don’t stop simply at the number of group members. Over the years, WNCG has built an exceptional network of industry partners, increased the number of its sponsored research projects yielding groundbreaking results, and successfully graduated Masters and Ph.D. students who go on to a wide range of careers in industry and academia.

The University of Texas Graduate Engineering Council hosted their annual Graduate and Industry Networking event (GAIN) on February 5.

WNCG student Hyoyoung Jeong represented The University of Texas at Austin at the inaugural Engineering Ph.D. Summit in Lausanne, Switzerland. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, or EPFL) hosted the summit, which was held November 7.