News

Professor Derya Malak has won the Best Paper Award at the 20th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt 2022). Malak, who is currently an assistant professor in the Communication Systems Department at EURECOM, was recognized for her solo-authored paper, “Throughput and Energy Tradeoffs for Retransmission-based Random Access Protocols.” The paper extends work on the fundamentals of massive Internet of Things uplink communications that Malak conducted during her Ph.D. and in collaboration with Howard Huang of Nokia Bell Labs.

The Aviation Week Network recently announced the winners of this year’s 20 Twenties Award. WNCG student Hailey Nichols was among the students chosen for the class of 2022.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin hosted Celebrate ECE on Monday, May 9, 2022. The event honored students for valuable contributions to the Texas ECE community. Two WNCG students were among the award winners for the 2021-2022 academic year:  Marius Arvinte, a fifth-year doctoral student advised by Prof. Jon Tamir., won the Graduate Acheivement Award in Recognition of Outstanding Academic Acheivement.

WNCG student Hailey Nichols won first place in the Graduate/Postdoc category at last month’s Female Founder Pitch competition. The event was hosted by the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute and the Texas Innovation Center.

WNCG student Philip Tan was among the winners of the 2021 Catalyst Award, part of the first phase of the Healthy Longevity Global Competition. Winners were announced by the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) last month at the inaugural Global Innovator Summit.

WNCG researchers and alumni were selected as Best Paper Award Runners-up at this year’s ACM MobiHoc: International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing. WCNG postdoctoral fellow Daniel Vial’s paper, “Robust Multi-Agent Multi-Armed Bandits,” was one of the papers selected as a runner-up. Co-written by Sanjay Shakkottai and R. Srikant, this paper develops algorithms for online collaborative learning in a setting where malicious agents might inject false information into the learning system.

WNCG alumni were among the recipients of major paper awards from the Communications Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE ComSoc). The awards were presented at the International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC), which took place virtually last month.

WNCG students Marius Facktor and Abhinau Venkataramanan and WNCG alumnus Praful Gupta from Prof. Al Bovik’s Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering (LIVE) have been named Phase 2 winners in the Enhancing Computer Vision for Public Safety Challenge. The challenge is hosted by the Public Safety Communications Research Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The competition aims to support public safety missions by advancing computer vision algorithms and no-reference (NR) metrics that assess image or video quality.

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 Philip Tan has been selected as a Fellow of the National Science Foundation’s 2021 Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). GRFP recognizes outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or in STEM education. The program supports these students in pursuing full-time research-based degrees through a five-year fellowship. A full list of this year's recipients can be found on the GRFP website.