Andreas Molisch, a professor in the Communication Sciences Institute of the Electrical Engineering Department at USC, has won the Wireless Educator of the Year award from the Global Wireless Education Consortium.

Andreas F. Molisch received the Dipl. Ing., Dr. techn., and habilitation degrees from the Technical University Vienna (Austria) in 1990, 1994, and 1999, respectively. From 1991 to 2000, he was with the TU Vienna, becoming an associate professor there in 1999. From 2000-2002, he was with the Wireless Systems Research Department at AT&T (Bell) Laboratories Research in Middletown, NJ. From 2002-2008, he was with Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Cambridge, MA, USA, most recently as Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and Chief Wireless Standards Architect. Concurrently he was also Professor and Chairholder for radio systems at Lund University, Sweden. Since 2009, he is Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Dr. Molisch has done research in the areas of SAW filters, radiative transfer in atomic vapors, atomic line filters, smart antennas, and wideband systems. His current research interests are measurement and modeling of mobile radio channels, UWB, cooperative communications, and MIMO systems. He has authored, co-authored or edited four books (among them the textbook "Wireless Communications, Wiley-IEEE Press), eleven book chapters, more than 110 journal papers, and numerous conference contributions, as well as more than 70 patents and more than 60 standards contributions.

Michael J. Neely, an assistant professor in the Communication Sciences Institute within the Electrical Engineering Department at USC, has a recent journal paper in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control that is marked as the 2 millionth paper published online at IEEE Explore. This marks a milestone in online IEEE publications. The paper appears in the March 2009 issue of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and is entitled "Intelligent Packet Dropping for Optimal Energy-Delay Tradeoffs in Wireless Downlinks." A free copy of the paper can be found here: PDF of article.

Michael J. Neely received B.S. degrees in both Electrical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997. He then received a 3 year Department of Defense NDSEG Fellowship for graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received an M.S. degree in EECS in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2003. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Communication Sciences Institute (CSI), within the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Southern California. His research interests are in the areas of stochastic network optimization and queueing theory, with applications to wireless systems, mobile ad-hoc networks, and switching systems. Michael received the NSF Career award in 2008. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Phi Beta Kappa.

Bilal Shaw, a Ph.D. student in Quantum Information Processing working with Prof. Todd Brun, has won the Best Student Presentation Award in Quantum Information Theory at the American Physical Society (APS) March Meeting. The March Meeting is one of the largest Physics conferences in the world and it took place March 10-14, 2008, in New Orleans, LA.

Shaw won for his presentation of the work done in "Encoding One Logical Qubit Into Six Physical Qubits." This work was done in collabration with Mark Wilde, Ognyan Oreshkov, Issac Kremsky and Daniel Lidar. The award includes a cash prize, sponsored by the Group for Quantum Information (GQI) with funds from the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It also includes an invitation to visit the Perimeter Institute and give a full-length version of the winning talk.

Michael Neely, assistant professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). This prestigious award supports the early career-development activities of faculty who most effectively integrate research and education within their academic institutions.

Prof. Neely's project is entitled "Analysis and Control of Network Delay," and concerns fundamental research on the analysis and control of delay in stochastic data networks, including wired networks and wireless networks with mobile nodes. While algorithms to optimize energy use and throughput in networks have been studied, little work has been done on the optimization of the most important parameter to the average user: delay. This is due to the complex models that must be employed. His novel approach recognizes that the solution of these difficult problems is related to optimization techniques applied to a different set of problems, and that energy-delay and utility-delay bounds can be obtained. His work also uses these bounds to find adaptive, low complexity procedures to achieve them for various types of applications.

Prof. Neely completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, and was appointed as assistant professor in January 2004. His research areas are in queueing analysis, dynamic optimization and resource allocation for both wired and wireless networks.

Alexander A. (Sandy) Sawchuk, Systems Chair of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering said "our faculty joins me in congratulating Mike Neely on his selection as an NSF CAREER awardee and its recognition of his research accomplishments in network modeling and analysis."

Professor Solomon Golomb has recently been named "Distinguished Professor" of Electrical Engineering and Mathematics department by Provost C.L. Max Nikias. This title is a recognition for his outstanding contributions across multiple disciplines.

Professor Golomb has had a long and an illustrious career and has won many awards including the Claude E. Shannon Award and the Richard W. Hamming Gold Medal of the IEEE. Professor Golomb has over 250 publications and has made significant contributions in the areas of communication theory, information theory, combinatorial analysis and number theory. Professor Golomb has been at USC since 1963.

Left to Right: Prof. Urbashi Mitra, Satish Vedantam, Ozgun Bursalioglu, Marcus Urie, Prof. Keith Chugg and Prof. Giuseppe Caire.

Three Communication Sciences Institute graduate students - Ozgun Bursalioglu, Marcus Urie and Satish Vedantam - are the recipients of USC Annenberg Fellowships for doctoral students. These three students are among 100 graduate students who are collectively known as the USC Annenberg Fellows funded by $4 million a year in funding. The Annenberg Fellows conduct research in the areas of communication and digital media research. Three schools at USC participate in the Annenberg Fellows program: the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Annenberg School of Communication and the School of Cinematic Arts.

Ozgun is originally from Turkey and she is advised by Prof. Giuseppe Caire. Her research centers on joint source channel coding techniques for lossy transmission of analog sources over noisy channels. In particular, she is investigating the use of rateless codes for transmission of encoded images and video over binary-input output symmetric channels.

Marcus, who received his BSEE from Brigham Young University in Utah, works with Prof. Keith Chugg. His research focuses on cyclic graphical modeling for the design of complex systems. His work has applications in error correction coding, circuit design, and general inference problems.

Satish Vedantam, a native of India, is investigating the fundamental limits of joint communication and sensing for various types of wireless networks. His research has relevance for cognitive radio, underwater acoustic communications and radar networks. Satish is advised by Prof. Urbashi Mitra.

The NSF CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.

The IEEE LEOS has approximately 8,000 members world-wide, approximately 75% of LEOS members have a Ph.D. degree, and nearly half the members are from outside the United States. The IEEE LEOS sponsors or co-sponsors over 30 international technical conferences and 6 technical journal publications.

The (NSF) CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative, career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution.

Successful CSI Review

Representatives of fourteen corporations and research organizations attended the 2004 CSI Research Review on Feb. 26, 2004. The program included a Keynote talk by Dr. Roberto Padovani, CTO of Qualcomm, Inc., research presentations by six CSI faculty, and 24 poster presentations by CSI graduate students. More information on the review can be found here with presentation videos and slides available in the affiliates-only section.

Zhen Zhang named IEEE Fellow

Professor Zhen Zhang has been named IEEE Fellow for "contributions to source coding theory and information inequalities".

Alan Willner named IEEE Fellow

Professor Alan Willner has been named IEEE Fellow for "contributions to the fundamental understanding and mitigation of key limitations of lightwave transmission systems and networks". Prof. Willner is also a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.

Professor Keith Chugg and his Ph.D. student Mingrui Zhu were awarded the Fred W. Ellersick Award for best paper in the unclassified program at the IEEE Conference on Military Communications (MILCOM). The paper, entitled "Iterative Message Passing Techniques for Rapid Code Acquisition," was presented at MILCOM in Boston, on October 16, 2003 by Prof. Chugg. The work was supported by the Army Research Office via a Multi-University Research Inititive (MURI) grant lead by Professor Robert Scholtz.

Urbashi Mitra Part of Team Awarded $5.5 Million for Wireless Network Research

USC, in partnership with five University of California campuses and the University of Delaware, has won a National Science Foundation Networking Research Testbed grant of over $5.5 million. WHYNET, a wireless hybrid networked testbed, will provide a testbed for researchers to evaluate the impact of new technologies on application level performance, using scalable and realistic scenarios. USC will be providing infrastructure and research on the Ultrawideband portion of the testbed.

The Fred H. Cole Professorship in Engineering will be held by Robert Scholtz, professor of electrical engineering systems. A faculty member for 40 years, the much-honored Scholtz began the first university research program in ultra-wideband radio, a promising technology with applications in wireless networks, security systems and consumer electronics. C. Nikias, dean of the School of Engineering said: “Bob Scholtz has created and mentored a credible and successful research effort in both spread spectrum communications and ultra-wideband radio that reaches far beyond the wrought iron fences of our campus.”

Emeritus Professor Lloyd R. Welch, recipient of the 2003 Claude E. Shannon Award, presented the Shannon Lecture at the International Symposium on Information Theory, held in Yokohama, Japan, June 29-July 4, 2004.

The Shannon Award is the highest honor granted by the IEEE's Information Theory Society. It is given for "consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory".

Professor Robert A. Scholtz and his coauthors Jean-Marc Cramer and Moe
Win have been chosen as the recipients of the 2003 A. Shelkunoff
Transactions Prize Paper Award of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation
Society.

Sol Golomb Elected to National Academy of Sciences

Sol Golomb, a 40-year faculty member, becomes only the third person affiliated with the School to hold dual membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

USC School of Engineering - Article

Alan Willner's Optical Communications Lab Awarded $3.6 Millon Grant

A team of faculty from five major research groups in the School of Enineering recently received a $3.6 million award from the Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA).