Bo Li, a recent PhD graduate (2017) of the Rutgers Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department, has won the 2017 Robert T. Hill Memorial Best Dissertation Award, given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS).
The Best Dissertation Award, in honor of Robert T. Hill, is an annual AESS award to recognize candidates that have recently received a Ph.D. degree and have written an outstanding Ph.D. dissertation that has made particularly noteworthy contributions in a field of interest of the Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society. Its purpose is to grant international recognition for the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation by an AESS member in the year she/he is nominated. The award consists of an honorarium of $1,000 and a plaque, and will be presented at the 2018 IEEE Radar Conference that will be held in Oklahoma City in April 2018.
In his thesis titled “Topics in MIMO Radars: Sparse Sensing and Spectrum Sharing," Bo studied sparse sensing in the context of MIMO radars, and provided efficient algorithms and rigorous theoretical analysis of performance. Bo also did groundbreaking work on spectrum sharing between commercial wireless communication systems and radars, a topic that has been attracting increasing attention after plans of regulatory agencies to release spectrum, previously earmarked for radar, for shared use by communication systems and radars. Bo's work enables radar-communication coexistence via a novel use of sparse sensing at the radar, and also use of optimal precoding at both systems. He proposed a novel system framework, which allowed him to systematically address the challenges of coexistence, and propose a novel, efficient physical layer methods for spectrum sharing.
Bo was a member of the Communications and Signal Processing Laboratory (CSPL) at ECE Rutgers, and did his PhD under the supervision of Distinguished Professor Athina Petropulu. His work was funded by the National Science Foundation and Raytheon. He joined Rutgers in 2012, after receiving a MS degree from Peking University and undergraduate degree from Lanzhou University. He is currently with Qualcomm Inc, Corporate Research & Development in San Diego CA.
It is the second year in a row that a Rutgers ECE graduate has received the Robert T Hill Dissertation Award. Shunqiao Sun (2016 PhD), also a CSPL member, was the recipient of the 2016 Robert T Hill Dissertation Award.
Congratulations to Bo and his advisor Prof. Athina Petropulu !