ECE Professor Biing Hwang (Fred) Juang and his research team have won the 2022 Fred W. Ellersick Prize Paper Award for their paper “Deep Learning in Physical Layer Communications.” The paper was published in IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, vol. 26, no. 2 in April 2019. The award will be recognized this month at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in Seoul, South Korea.

The IEEE Fred W. Ellersick Prize is awarded annually by the IEEE Communications Society (IEEE ComSoc) for a best original paper published in any Communications Society Magazine in the previous three calendar years.

In addition to Prof. Juang, the paper’s authors include Geoffrey Li (Imperial College London and former ECE professor), Hao Ye (Qualcomm Inc. and former ECE Ph.D. student), and Zhijin Qin (Queen Mary University of London).

The award-winning paper provides an overview of the recent advancements in Deep Learning (DL)-based physical layer communications, which have shown a great potential to revolutionize communication systems. DL adopts a deep neural network (DNN) to find data representation at each layer, which could be built by using different types of machine learning (ML) techniques. In recent years, DL has shown its overwhelming benefit to many areas, such as computer vision, robotics, and natural language processing, due to its advanced algorithms and tools in learning complicated models.

In the paper, the team teaches applications of DL in various physical layers of modern communications systems, which can be a block-structured or an end-to-end integrated design. The team has published extensively in the related technical area, including several highly-cited papers. Potential research directions were further identified to boost intelligent physical layer communications.