Congratulations to SnT research associate Wallace Alves Martins for winning the best paper award at the 2020 Brazilian Symposium on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (SBrT).
The paper, “Diffusion-based Virtual Graph Adjacency for Fourier Analysis of Network Signals”, proposes a new approach to modeling pairwise relations on a network. First author Vitor R.M. Elias, a PhD student under Martins’ supervision, spearheaded the research while additional support was provided by co-supervisor Prof. Stefan Werner of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU, Norway). The paper’s approach takes into account the possibility that network nodes may be adjacent even though there is no direct connection between the pair because of so-called “virtual dependencies” (indirect relationships between a pair) across the network — an increasingly common phenomenon as networks become more distributed and complex. By accounting for these virtual dependencies and the adjacencies that they reveal in a network, Martins and his team were able to improve the accuracy of weather-station network anomaly detection efforts by 28%.
The annual Brazilian Symposium on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (SBrT) is Brazil’s premier forum for signal-processing and telecommunications research. The SBrT draws participants from across South America and Europe, but most especially from within Brazil itself. This year, around 400 professionals from academia, industry, and service sectors gathered remotely to discuss the possibilities — and challenges — that educational, governmental, commercial, and civilian institutions will encounter with the introduction of 5G. This year the conference published over 200 full papers.
Wallace Alves Martins holds a D.Sc. in electrical engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ, Brazil). He’s a tenured associate professor at UFRJ’s Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering Program, and is on sabbatical as a research associate with Prof. Bjorn Ottersten’s Signal Processing and Satellite Communications group at SnT. Martins has published over 70 papers in scientific journals and at conferences and he has co-authored the book “Block Transceivers: OFDM and Beyond”. He is a member (Associate Editor) of the editorial board for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters and an IEEE Senior Member.
“As researchers, we dedicate a significant part of our lives to solving new problems and formulating effective questions. But as time goes by, the opportunity to guide young researchers along their own journeys through the scientific landscape becomes an increasingly rewarding part of our jobs. This award is special to me because it is the first time I’ve won together with a PhD student under my direct supervision. I am very proud of Vitor [R.M. Elias] and the outstanding work he put into this paper. And I am very grateful for Vitor’s co-supervisor, Prof. Werner (NTNU, Norway), who also helped guide this paper to its ultimate success.”