Two Micro-Electronics Research Laboratory (MERL) internship high school students Andrew Zheng (Watchung Hills Regional High School, Warren) and Andrew Mu (Academy of Allied Health and Science, Scotch Plains) became the Semifinalists in the 2015 Siemens Competition Math : Science : Technology!

The information on Siemens Competition Math: Science: Technology can be found in http://www.siemens-foundation.org/en/competition.htm.

The Siemens Competition is the nation's premier competition in math, science and technology. The Siemens Competition promotes excellence in math, science and technology. High school students submit innovative individual and team research projects to regional and national levels of competition as they vie for college scholarships ranging from $1,000 up to $100,000.The Siemens Competition honors the best and brightest students for their accomplishments in math and science students who are changing the world for the better.

In this year, 466 2015 Siemens Competition Semi-finalists are selected from over 1700 research projects submitted by student teams from USA, China, India, and South Korea. These students will further compete for the final lists.

MERL hosted and supported Andrew's research project for last two summers. Professor Yicheng Lu and MERL staff member Dr. Pavel Reyes supervised the students through the entire project. The CINJ also collaborated in this research.

The paper entitled "Coordinated Dynamic Spectrum Management of LTE-U and WiFi Networks" by a WINLAB team just received the best paper award at IEEE DySpan2015 held this week in Stockholm.

Shweta Sagari (ECE PhD student) was the first author, and the other authors areSamuel Baysting, Dola Saha, Wade Trappe, Ivan Seskar and D. Raychaudhuri.

IEEE DySpan is the premier conference on spectrum policy and technology and is sponsored by NSF and several WINLAB sponsor companies.

Vishal Patel and his co-authors received Top 10% Paper Award at IEEE ICIP 2015 for their paper entitled "Material classification and semantic segmentation of railway track images with deep convolutional neural networks," by X. Gibert-Serra,V. M. Patel, and R. Chellappa.

The IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) is the premier forum for the presentation of technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied image and video processing.

Image courtesy icip2015.org.

The paper "Printing Single-Sheet Touch Interfaces" by ECE PhD student Cagdas Karatas and Prof. Marco Gruteser received a Honorable Mention award at UbiComp 2015 in Osaka, Japan. Thanks also to Emiliano Miluzzo (Apio Systems) and Rich Howard for their help on this project and for helping with the circuit design.

UbiComp 2015 is a highly selective conference sponsored by both ACM SIGMOBILE and ACM SIGCHI. To receive a honorable mention award the paper must be in the top 5% of submissions.

Vishal Patel received two awards at the IEEE International Conference on Biometrics Theory, Applications and Systems,BTAS 2015 in Arlington, VA.

1)   Best Poster Award: "A deep pyramid deformable part model for face detection" by R. Ranjan, V. M. Patel, and R. Chellappa.

2)   Best Paper Award (Bronze): "Attribute-based continuous user authentication on mobile devices" by P. Samangouei, V. M. Patel, and R. Chellappa.

The IEEE Seventh International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS 2015), was held September 8th -11th.

BTAS 2015 is a premier research conference focused on all aspects of biometrics. It is intended to have a broad scope, including advances in fundamental signal processing, image processing, pattern recognition, and statistical and mathematical techniques relevant to biometrics.

Areas of coverage include biometrics based on voice, fingerprint, iris, periocular, face, handwriting, gait and other modalities, as well as multi-modal biometrics and new biometrics based on novel sensing technologies. Submissions will be rigorously reviewed, and should clearly make the case for a documented improvement over existing state-of-art. Experimental results for contributions in established areas such as voice, face, iris, fingerprint, and gait are encouraged to use the largest and most challenging existing publicly available datasets.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to: 3D face recognition, anti-spoofing methods, biometric databases, biometric encryption, cancellable biometrics, covariate analysis, DNA biometrics, ear biometrics, face recognition, facial aging effects, fingerprint, gait, hand geometry, iris biometrics, large scale deployments, multi-biometric fusion, novel biometrics, novel sensors, ocular recognition, palmprint, performance evaluation, security and privacy, social impact analysis, soft biometrics, speaker recognition, template aging, template protection, usability studies and writer recognition.