Recording, presentation slides available for Radio Shop Chat featuring Gregory Hellbourg, of Caltech and Owens Valley Radio Observatory

Christina Clark on July 5, 2023

SpectrumX’s Radio Shop Chat series regularly features speakers from across the electrical engineering, telecommunications, and spectrum sciences presenting on pressing topics and areas of innovation. On June 27, 2023, Gregory Hellbourg, Scientist and Spectrum Manager at Caltech and Owens Valley Radio Observatory, joined the series presenting “The Deep Synoptic Array DSA-2000.”

October SpectrumX Center Meeting a Success

Christina Clark on October 24, 2022

The SpectrumX Center Meeting on October 3 and 4, held at the University of Virginia (UVA), brought together over 65 learners and leaders for cross-cutting discussions on timely and interdisciplinary topics.

“The meeting provided an opportunity for students, researchers, stakeholders, and professionals in policy making to come together at UVA to discuss some of the most important subjects in our field,” said Bobby Weikle, SpectrumX Steering Committee Chair and Radio and Network Technologies Research Lead, and Professor at the University of Virginia. “UVA has a long history of collaboration with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and it was a great opportunity to bring their teams and our center together in-person and online.”

Susan Avery

Christina Clark on June 14, 2022

Susan K. Avery is president emerita of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder (UCB). She served as a faculty affiliate in the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at UCB and as a Distinguished Visiting Faculty at the University of MA, Boston.  She recently completed two terms as a member and chair of the board of trustees of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Currently she serves on the Exxon Mobil Corporation Board of Directors, the Board of the American Institute of Physics, the Board of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and on the advisory committee for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  Dr. Avery holds a PhD in atmospheric sciences from the University of Illinois and a BS in physics from Michigan State University. 

Her scholarship interests include atmospheric circulation and precipitation, climate variability and water resources, and the development of new radar techniques and instruments for remote sensing. Over the course of her career, she has mentored 17 Ph.D. students. The author or co-author of over 110 peer-reviewed articles and reports, she has given scientific presentations to a wide variety of lay and professional audiences. She has been active in Congressional outreach, including testimony and briefings; in US and international consortia dedicated to ocean and atmosphere research, observation, and applications; and worked with the Governor’s committee to develop the Massachusetts Green Economy plan. 

Dr. Avery is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Meteorological Society, for which she also served as president.  Awards and recognition include honorary degrees from Michigan State University and the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth; charter membership of the National Associate Program in the National Academy of Sciences; and a Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois. 

Danijela Cabric

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Research and Teaching Interests:

Wireless communications system design, machine learning for wireless communications, sensing and security, performance analysis and experiments on embedded platforms and software defined radios
Awards and Recognitions:
2020 Qualcomm Faculty Award
2018-2019 IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer
2012 NSF Career Award
2012 Hellman Fellow
2009 Okawa Foundation Award
2008 Samueli Fellow

Bert Hochwald

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Bertrand Hochwald, Ph.D., serves as the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Electrical Engineering and Co-Director of the Wireless Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Hochwald has invented and co-invented technologies and published research articles that have become mainstays of communication theory and practice, including differential multiple-antenna methods, linear dispersion codes, channel estimation analysis, and multi-user vector precoding methods.

He is currently working on high-frequency radio circuits, sixth-generation cellular technologies, and methods to reduce human exposure to electromagnetic radiation from cell phones. Hochwald also oversees one of the Wireless Institutes flagship projects, the RadioHound spectrum sensing platform, currently on its third version. This multi-year project is unique in that the sensors have been designed and implemented predominantly by a team of graduate students, and have been deployed in trials run by the Federal Communications Commission and the US Postal Service.

He holds 47 U.S. patents in wireless communication and is the recipient of several achievement awards while employed at the Department of Defense and the Prize Teaching Fellowship at Yale University. He has more than 125 publications, several of which have been listed by Thomson ISI as most-cited over multiple years. Hochwald has also served as an editor for several Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) journals. He has received several paper awards, including the 2018 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society’s Harold A. Wheeler Applications Prize Paper with student Ding Nie. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors. Thomson Reuters has awarded Hochwald “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” multiple times for the significant global impact of his work.

Hochwald believes that wireless communications methods are, after their first 100 years, still in their infancy, and if everyone understood their smartphones a little better, they would all want to design their own.

Whitney Lohmeyer

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Whitney Lohmeyer is an Assistant Professor of Engineering at Olin College and a Research Affiliate at MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics. She leads the Olin Satellite + Spectrum Technology & Policy (OSSTP) Group, and manages and contributes to the field of satellite communications systems. She also works closely with industry to advise on end-to-end system design, antenna systems, RF power amplification, radiation tolerance and spectrum strategy. Whitney is passionate about enabling affordable Internet access in order to generate economic growth and improve healthcare and education. Whitney was the first engineer hired at OneWeb, a company launching hundreds of low earth orbit communications satellites to provide global broadband and bridge the digital divide. While at OneWeb, she held a variety of roles both technical and policy-focused. As a Systems Engineer, she designed the RF Link Budget, and worked on the end-to-end communications system design, focusing on the LTE waveform and the user terminal antenna. In addition, she actively contributed to policy reform at the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and United Nations (UN) International Telecommunications Union (ITU), and represented OneWeb on the U.S. Delegation to the 2015 World Radio Conference, the culmination of a three-year regulatory review cycle. Prior to joining the OneWeb team, she worked as a hardware engineer at Google, and spent time in technical roles at Inmarsat and NASA. Whitney received her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2015, and her M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 2013, both funded by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. She earned her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from NC State University in 2011, as the only female in her class of approximately ninety students, and now currently serves on the board of North Carolina State University’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Department. She has been invited to speak at a variety of events including NC State’s 2018 MAE Commencement Ceremony, the UN Women’s Gender Equality and Mainstreaming (GEM) The Internet of Women: Challenge or Opportunity? and the UN’s and ITU’s Women’s Leadership Workshop on Empowering Women in Radiocommunications Negotiations.

INTERESTS

  • Satellite Communications
  • Wireless Communications
  • Satellite Systems
  • International Spectrum Policy
  • Principles of Wireless Communications

Anant Sahai

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Biography

Anant Sahai did his undergraduate work in EECS at UC Berkeley, and then went to MIT as a graduate student studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Course 6 in MIT-speak). After graduating with his PhD, and before joining the Berkeley faculty, he was on the theoretical/algorithmic side of a team at the startup Enuvis, Inc. developing new adaptive software radio techniques for GPS in very low SNR environments (such as those encountered indoors in urban areas).He currently serves also as faculty adviser to UC Berkeley’s chapter of Eta Kappa Nu. He has previously served as the Treasurer for the IEEE Information Theory Society.

His research interests span information theory, decentralized control, machine learning, and wireless communication — with a particular interest at the intersections of these fields. Within wireless communication, he is particularly interested in Spectrum Sharing and Cognitive Radio, very-low-latency ultra-reliable wireless communication protocols for the Internet Of Things, and how agents could learn how to communicate with each other without the need for heavy-handed standards. Within control, he is interested in decentralized control and how agents could learn how to cooperate and interact with unknown environments. He is also interested in the foundations of machine learning, particularly as it pertains to why overparameterized models do or do not work.

Education

  • 2001, PhD, EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 1996, SM, EECS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 1994, BS, EECS, University of California, Berkeley

Research Areas

Nikolaos Sidiropoulos

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Nikos Sidiropoulos earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland–College Park, in  1992. He has served on the faculty of the University of Virginia,  University of Minnesota, and the Technical University of Crete, Greece, prior to his current appointment as Chair of ECE at UVA. His research interests are in signal processing, communications, optimization, tensor decomposition, and factor analysis, with applications in machine learning and communications. He received the NSF/CAREER award in 1998, the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Best Paper Award in 2001, 2007, and 2011, served as IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2008-2009), and currently serves as Vice President – Membership of IEEE SPS. He received the 2010 IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award, and the 2013 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Maryland, Dept. of ECE. He is a Fellow of IEEE (2009) and a Fellow of EURASIP (2014).

Education:

B.S. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, 1988

Ph.D. University of Maryland, College Park, 1992

Awards:

  • NSF/CAREER Award, 1998
  • IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, 2001, 2007, 2011
  • Students received three best student paper awards at IEEE conferences SPAWC 2012, ICASSP 2014, CAMSAP2015
  • Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2008-2009
  • Fellow, IEEE, for contributions to Signal Processing for Communications, NOV. 2008
  • IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award “for dedicated service and leadership in the field of signal processing for communications and networking, 2010
  • Distinguished Alumni Award, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of Maryland, College Park, 2013
  • Fellow, European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP), for contributions to tensor decomposition and signal processing for communications, 2014
  • Appointed ADC Endowed Chair, University of Minnesota, 2015
  • Appointed Vice President, Membership, IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2017

Research Interests:

  • Signals, Systems, and Data Science
  • Machine Learning
  • Communications
  • Cyber-Physical Systems

Keith Gremban

Yvonne Chang on January 19, 2022

Data and Machine Learning Project Team Lead
COLORADO CENTER FOR ASTRODYNAMICS RESEARCH (CCAR)

Focus Area:

Remote Sensing, Earth & Space Science

Education:

PhD, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
MS, Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
MS, Applied Mathematics, Michigan State University
BS, Mathematics, Michigan State University

Professional Experience:

2020 – Present, Program Manager, 5G-to-NextG Initiative, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, US Department of Defense
2020 – Present, Research Professor, Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder
2020 – Present, Senior Fellow, Silicon Flatirons Center, University of Colorado Boulder
2019 – 2020, Research Professor, Technology, Cybersecurity, and Policy Program, University of Colorado Boulder
2015 – 2019, Director, Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, National Telecommunications and Information Administration
2014 – 2015, Founder, Shavano Systems LLC
2011 – 2014, Program Manager, Strategic Technologies Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
2009 – 2010, Director, Computer Systems Research, SET Corporation, a Science Applications International Corporation Company
2007 – 2009, Director, Denver Advanced Technology Division, SET Corporation, a Science Applications International Corporation Company
2006 – 2007, Assistant Vice President and Division Manager, Science Applications International Corporation
2002 – 2006, Senior Scientist, Science Applications International Corporation
1998 – 2002, Senior Research Engineer, SRI International, Englewood, CO
1997 – 1998, Senior Systems Engineer, Computing Devices International (CDInt)
1995 – 1998, Senior Scientist, CTA Incorporated
1988 – 1995, Graduate Student and Research Assistant, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
1980 – 1988, Staff Engineer, Martin Marietta Corporation

Awards (Selected):

Senior Fellow, Silicon Flatirons Center, University of Colorado Wolf School of Law

Research Interests:

RF noise measurement and analysis
Spectrum monitoring
Spectrum sharing
Internet of Things