The Marconi Society recognized three researchers for its Young Scholar Award which celebrates innovative young pioneers in communications technology. Candidates are nominated by their academic advisors. Winners are selected by an international panel of engineers from leading universities and companies.
“The power of connectivity, as well as the need to bring the opportunity of the network to everyone, has never been more apparent than it is today,” said Vint Cerf, Chair of the Marconi Society. “Our Young Scholars are the brain trust that will put the speed, security and applications of next generation networks into the hands of billions.”
Dr. Yasaman Ghasempour of Rice University was recognized for her innovations to bring high-speed terahertz networks to consumers by efficiently connecting devices that will serve that spectrum. Ghasempour’s contributions will “make it possible for people to easily and economically use new ultra high-speed wireless networks by coordinating the connections from devices, such as computers, mobile phones and autonomous vehicles, to the network and efficiently maintaining these connections in mobile environments,” the award reads.
“With my technology, we can create a next generation Internet of Things (IoT) by interweaving many more devices — thousands of times more than are connected to today’s wireless web — and providing them with faster streams of data,” Ghasempour said.
The second winner, Vikram Iyer, is a PhD candidate in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington and was recognized for his creativity in developing bio-inspired and bio-integrative wireless sensor systems. Iyer’s contributions enable traditionally stationary Internet of Things (IoT) devices to move, putting a new and scalable category of data collectors into the world to help understand the environment at scale and with a fine degree of detail. Iyer reportedly developed a wireless sensing platform light enough to be deployed on bumblebees.
“We could use this platform to study micro-climates on large farms, to answer questions about insects’ behavior or to collect air quality data at a highly granular level so that we can understand the correlation between environment and demographics,” said Iyer.
The third recipient, Piotr Roztocki, a PhD candidate at Canada’s Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), was honored for his ground-breaking work in developing scalable quantum resources that can be used within existing telecommunications networks. Piotr’s contributions take quantum photonics, which can offer major advances in next-generation information security, from the lab to global telecommunications networks.
“While quantum mechanics gives rise to this security problem, we can also leverage its unique physics to help realize future-proof security,” says Roztocki.
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