San Francisco, CA, April 30, 2019
The Marconi Society, dedicated to furthering scientific achievements in communications and the Internet, has named three 2019 Paul Baran Young Scholars, honoring them for their outstanding research and academic performance. The three will be recognized at the Society’s annual awards ceremony in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 17.
Min-Yu Huang, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, is selected for his work to enable future ultra-reliable low-latency communications over 5G and beyond wireless networks. His research focuses on innovative system architectures that combine mathematical, physical and IC engineering approaches to overcome many inherent challenges for future communications and achieve state-of-the-art performance for emerging low-latency applications. These include commercial uses like virtual reality, augmented reality, machine-type or vehicle-to-vehicle communications and defense uses, such as fast-moving drone radar/sensing and emergency services.
Huang’s advisor, Professor Hua Wang at Georgia Tech, says, “We believe these applications will stimulate the next-generation wireless communication research, and we have been building the related topics as a major research theme in my groups. New ideas are leveraged from every part of our connected world, from fiber optic communications to machine learning, 5G and information theory.”
Dr. Vasuki Narasimha Swamy, a Research Scientist at Intel Labs and UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate, is recognized for her work to design robust wireless protocol frameworks for ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Many of the most compelling Internet of Things applications, such as affordable precision agriculture, smart energy-efficient cities and advanced flexible manufacturing, depend on large-scale, highly reliable, low latency networks. Narasimha Swamy created a fundamentally different way to design these networks by identifying the worst-case scenario in each assumption in a simple wireless channel model and determining which assumptions are most critical to refine to make the network deliver the required performance.
Narasimha Swamy’s advisor and UC Berkeley Professor Anant Sahai explains her process. “To provide system-level reliability that exceeds the trust we have in our models, Vasuki did three radically different things. She adapted the modeling philosophy of nominal model + quantified-unmodeled-uncertainty from robust control to URLLC. Second, she revisited the classical Jakes’ model for multipath fading and revealed that, in the context of URLLC, the fading processes is not well-enough approximated by something quasi-static (contradicting conventional wisdom). Third, she brought simple machine learning to bear on the problem and showed that when the latencies are very short, multipath fading can be predicted well enough based on past measurements to support high system-level reliability via appropriate redundancy.”
Bichai Wang is a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University who is being recognized for her work to help increase capacity and cost benefits of 5G networks and their applications. As service providers around the world test and launch 5G networks to deliver next generation communications services to billions, it is clear that conventional network access schemes cannot meet the radical spectrum efficiency and connectivity requirements of 5G. Many in the industry are looking to Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) to meet these needs. The standard-setting body for 5G, the 3GPP, currently has 15 NOMA schemes before it, making it difficult to standardize on how to deliver specific use cases. Wang proposed the first-ever unified framework to systematically compare the different schemes by looking at features, spectral efficiency, receiver complexity and other key criteria to help the industry understand the tradeoffs between different schemes and where to focus.
“Bichai has won several very prestigious and challenging awards, including the IEEE ComSoc Asia-Pacific Outstanding Paper Award in 2018,” says her Tsinghua University advisor, Professor Linglong Dai. “I hope that her excellent achievements will attract more outstanding female researchers to participate in research on wireless communications.”
Young Scholar candidates are nominated by their academic advisors. Winners are selected by an international panel comprised of engineers from leading universities and companies and receive a $5000 prize plus expenses to attend the annual awards event. This year’s Young Scholars will be honored at the annual Marconi Awards Dinner where cryptographers Taher Elgamal and Paul Kocher, who developed SSL/TLS and other contributions to the security of communications, will share the $100,000 Marconi Prize.
About the Marconi Society
Established in 1974 by the daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel Laureate who invented radio, the Marconi Society promotes awareness of key technology and policy issues in telecommunications and the Internet and recognizes significant individual achievements through the Marconi Prize and Young Scholar Awards. More information may be found at www.marconisociety.org. Follow: LinkedIn,Twitter and Facebook.
