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A legacy of wireless engineering innovation

By Joe McAdory

Samuel Ginn’s $25 million gift to the college in 2001 not only helped fund a wireless engineering degree program — but it continues to pay dividends. Wireless engineering faculty Shiwen Mao and Xiaowen Gong’s research combined to generate $540,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

Mao, professor and director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center, was awarded $320,000 by the NSF for “Data Augmentation and Adaptive Learning for Next Generation Wireless Spectrum Systems.” Through the research, Mao will devise innovative approaches through machine learning that enable wireless researchers and practitioners to acquire data more efficiently and at a reduced cost. 

Gong, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, was awarded $220,000 by the NSF for his study, “Quality-Aware Distributed Computation for Wireless Federated Learning: Channel-Aware User Selection, Mini-Batch Size Adaptation, and Scheduling.” The study explores innovative, cross-disciplinary research at the intersection of wireless networking and machine learning, studying wireless federated learning in order to achieve collaborative intelligence within wireless networks. 

The project is expected to inspire further research and stimulate more insights to support various and emerging machine learning/artificial intelligence applications over wireless networks.