Center for Advanced Communication Researchers Continue Winning Ways

Villanova Engineering PhD graduate Dr. Si Qin

For the third time in only nine months, researchers in Villanova University’s Center for Advanced Communications have earned an IEEE best paper award, with all three papers appearing in different journals.  "Generalized Coprime Array Configurations for Direction-of-Arrival Estimation" was published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and has been selected to receive the 2018 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award. The recipient is Dr. Si Qin, who graduated with a PhD from Villanova in 2016 and is now with Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing. The paper was co-authored by Drs. Moeness Amin, director of the CAC, and Yimin Zhang, a former research professor with the Center. 

The IEEE SPS Young Author Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the Society’s technical scope and appearing in one of its publications: Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, Transactions on Computational Imaging or Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks. On the date of submission of the paper, the author must be younger than 30 years of age. Eligibility is based on a three-year window. For the 2018 award, the paper must have appeared in one of the Society’s Transactions between 2015 and 2017. Publications are judged on general quality, originality, subject matter and timeliness. The prize consists of $500 per young author and a certificate.

Dr. Amin, director of the Center for Advanced Communications, believes that the three recent best paper awards over only one year “must be unprecedented, especially when these papers cover different topics and three technical areas.” He adds, “It is a testament of how we take tremendous pride in our research work, breaking the ice in different fields and technical areas and advancing the state-of-the art.”