EECS Collects Best Paper Awards

April 30, 2015 - Electrical engineering and computer science professor Syed A. Jafar and two of his former graduate students have won best paper awards recently. Tiangao Gou and Chenwei Wang (image gallery, on left) won the Young Author Best Paper Award from the Signal Processing Society for “Aiming Perfectly in the Dark – Blind Interference Alignment through Staggered Antenna Switching.”

The paper was published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 59, No. 6, in June 2011. The award honors the authors of “especially meritorious” papers dealing with a subject related to the society’s technical scope and written by authors younger than 30 years old.

Gou (image gallery, on right) along with his professor, Jafar, was also awarded the Heinrich Hertz Award for Best Communications Letter by the IEEE Communications Society, for their paper “Optimal Use of Current and Outdated Channel State Information – Degrees of Freedom of the MISO BC with Mixed CSIT.” The work was published in IEEE Communications Letter, Vol. 16, No. 7, in July 2012.

The Heinrich Hertz Award recognizes an outstanding manuscript published during the previous three years, which “opens new lines of research, envisions bold approaches to communication, formulates new problems to solve and essentially enlarges the field of communications engineering,” according to the award website. The award, along with a $500 honorarium for each author, will be presented at the IEEE ICC 2015 Conference June 8-12, in London, U.K.

Gou, who earned his doctorate in 2012, is now a senior engineer with Samsung Semiconductor, Inc., in San Diego; Wang, who also received his doctorate in 2012, is a research engineer at DOCOMO Innovations, in Palo Alto.