Professor Soltanalian receives prestigious EURASIP award
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ECE Assistant Professor Mojtaba Soltanalian is a rising star in the electrical and computer engineering community. His PhD Thesis entitled “Signal Design for Active Sensing and Communications” has been selected for the 2018 European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) Best PhD Award. It is one of only two selected for the award by the board of directors (BoD).
Every year a panel of experts nominated by the EURASIP BoD select theses related to different areas of signal processing to be awarded. The selection process is based on the evaluation of the impact of the thesis, its subsequent journal and conference publications, related citations received, and the review reports of three independent reviewers as well as on the download statistics.
In order to select the 2018 best PhD theses, the years 2013 through 2015 were considered. Soltanalian’s thesis maintained its position as the most popular PhD thesis since its publication in 2014.
“The award is for my PhD work on signal design and optimization, with far-reaching impact in many applications including sensing, communications, biomedicine, and life sciences,” said Soltanalian. “Man-made active sensing systems such as active radar and sonar have been a vital part of our civilization’s advancement in navigation, defense, meteorology, and space exploration.”
“Moreover, the fast-growing communications technology has changed each and every aspect of our everyday lives. While there are broader impacts, the main focus of this thesis is on signal design for improving the performance of active sensing and communication systems. The central idea is that target detection and estimation performance of the active sensing systems can be considerably improved by a judicious design of the probing signals. Similarly, signal design has a crucial role in the implementation and efficiency of communication systems,” he added.
The European Association for Signal Processing maintains one of the most extensive libraries of PhD theses in all areas of signal processing worldwide.
This was the second major award the young professor won for his research. Earlier in 2018, he received the “IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Award” during the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in Calgary, Canada. The prestigious award was presented to Soltanalian by IEEE Signal Processing Society President, Professor Ali H. Sayed, during the opening ceremony of the conference.
The award honors the author of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the society’s technical scope and appearing in one of the society’s solely owned transactions or the Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and who, upon the date of submission of the paper, is less than 30 years of age.
Learn more about Soltanalian’s research at Waveform Optimization (WaveOPT) Laboratory.