MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Marconi Society, dedicated to furthering scientific achievements in communications and the Internet will honor four 2016 Paul Baran Young Scholars for their outstanding research and innovations in networking. The awards will be presented at a gala on November 2 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, where Brad Parkinson, the “father of GPS,” will receive the $100,000 Marconi Prize.
Dinesh Bharadia, a Stanford PhD and native of India who is currently a graduate researcher at MIT, was selected for his work on full duplex radios. The 28-year-old has developed a solution that effectively doubles available radio spectrum in a bandwidth-constrained world. Solving a problem that has stumped scientists for almost 150 years, Bharadia’s work provides effective self-interference cancellation technology that enables radios to transmit and receive on the same frequency.
Stanford Prof. Sachin Katti, says Bharadia’s work has other important implications. “Dinesh’s work enables a whole host of new applications, from extremely low-power Internet of Things connectivity to motion tracking. It has the potential to be used for important future applications such as building novel wireless imaging that can enable driverless cars in severe weather scenarios, help blind people to navigate indoors, and much more.”
Italian researcher Stefania Bartoletti, PhD., was selected for her work in network localization and navigation. The 27-year-old researcher at the University of Ferrara, who also is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Global Research Fellow, focuses on providing accurate location of people and things in environments where current technologies, such as GPS, are unavailable or insufficient. Bartoletti recently joined MIT as a visiting researcher, where she will expand her work by developing learning techniques for analyzing the behavior of people and things in different environments. This behavior analysis will find application in intelligent transportation, smart buildings, business intelligence, and Internet of Things.
“Stefania’s research embraces communication, localization, and information theories together with statistical inference and optimization for solving real-world problems. On an anecdotal note, Stefania conducted her research a stone’s throw away from the villa where Marconi made his first experiments,” said Andrea Conti, Associate Professor at the University of Ferrara.
George MacCartney, Jr., a PhD candidate at New York University (NYU), was chosen for his outstanding work in millimeter wave wireless communications. The 27-year-old American researcher is being honored for his outstanding academic achievements that pave the way for 5G, the next generation of wireless networks that will significantly increase bandwidth and capacity globally.
“George has developed foundational knowledge that has truly changed the future of wireless communications,” says NYU Wireless Professor Theodore Rappaport, MacCartney’s advisor. “Using novel measurement equipment that he built from scratch, he proved to the world that millimeter wave wireless communications could work well in urban non-line-of-sight conditions at frequencies above 70 GHz -- something that was not believed to be true before he did it. He literally has influenced the world's standard bodies with his work.” The FCC’s recent vote approving millimeter wave communications above 70 GHz is based partly on his work, according to Dr. Rappaport.
The fourth Paul Baran Young Scholar selected is Junwen Zhang, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The 28-year-old researcher is being honored for advancements to high-speed fiber and wireless technology that will deliver higher speeds, better quality and more responsive services to business and consumers around the world, helping expand coverage areas that promising new standards like 5G will require. His contributions include achieving record-breaking transmission speeds in 400G optical transport systems and developing a robust wireless link system that can maintain stable data throughput in diverse weather environments.
“Dr. Zhang has distinguished himself with a unique ability to identify research challenges and create innovative solutions through a rigorous thought process. His work will support advanced communications systems that provide high-speed services and enhance network quality. He is highly productive, publishing more than 130 peer-reviewed technical papers in the last eight years in prestigious journals and conferences,” said Zhang’s nominator, Dr. Gee-Kung Chang, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and the Byers Eminent Scholar Chair Professor in Optical Networking at Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Bob Tkach, Director of Advanced Photonics Research at Bell Laboratories and chairman of the Young Scholar Selection Committee, says, “2017 was a remarkable year in which we received an exceptionally large group of impressive nominations, almost all of which were award-worthy. The four we selected are on track to make spectacular contributions to our field. We look forward to seeing their careers blossom.”
Young Scholar candidates are nominated by their academic advisors and selected by an international panel comprised of engineers from leading universities and companies.
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. Follow: Twitter, Facebook