People, papers and presentations

Edward Knightly, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and professor of computer science, and his colleagues earned best-paper honors at two recent conferences. Knightly and graduate student Xu Zhang’s paper “WATCH: WiFi in Active TV Channels” was named Best Paper of the Proceedings of ACM MobiHoc 2015 conference in Hangzhou, China. A second paper titled “Scaling Multi-User MIMO WLANs: The Case for Concurrent Uplink Control Messages” by Knightly, graduate student Oscar Bejarano, research engineer Sadia Quadri and Ben Gurion University’s Omer Gurewitz, adjunct lecturer of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, was named Best Paper of the Proceedings of IEEE SECON 2015 meeting in Seattle. Both papers are available online at the Rice Networks Group home page.

Vikas Mittal, the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business and head of the school’s Energy Initiative, was highlighted by Poets and Quants, a national news website covering business schools, as a top MBA student’s favorite professor. Mittal was commended for being demanding. “He (Mittal) is very consistent with his approach and personality,” the site quoted Jones School MBA alumnus Kevin Bentley ’15. “He pushed me to think a lot deeper than the ‘how’ to solve problems and made me really explore the ‘why’ to solving problems. He drove my thought process and equipped me with tools to take a deeper dive into problems.”

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies and of the Rice Institute for Biosciences and Bioengineering, was chosen as an AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassador by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Lemelson Foundation. The AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassadors program strives to help cultivate a new and diverse generation of inventors and increase global understanding of the role of invention in creating new products and building new businesses and the importance of inventors and invention education in building economies and fostering innovation.

William Symes, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics and a professor of Earth science, received the 2015 Desiderius Erasmus Award from the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers for outstanding contributions to exploration seismology. Symes has pioneered sophisticated seismic modeling systems to study subsurface formations and locate oil and gas deposits.