Marconi Society Names Three 2019 Paul Baran Young Scholars

Innovative researchers from around the world create breakthroughs
to scale 5G networks and the Internet of Things

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/5G?src=hash” target=”_blank”gt;#5Glt;/agt;–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 (URLLC) 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 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
also focused on 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.

Note to Editors: Photos Available Upon Request

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. Subscribe.
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Contacts

Hatti Hamlin
Hattihamlin@MarconiSociety.org
925.872.4328

Paula Reinman
Preinman@MarconiSociety.org
415.254.2004