I know this is Bob’s thing, but he’s busy doing real engineering work at the moment.

This semester has gone by extremely quickly. Unbelievably, I’ve been in WSIL for six months already. Amazing.

I’ll first present the latest news. Sumohana Channappayya successfully defended his dissertation and will be heading to San Diego to join the real world as a newly anointed Ph.D. Congratulations, Sumo!

Along similar lines, Caleb Lo and Chan-Byoung Chae both successfully passed quals yesterday. These two, along with Kaibin Huang, are next in line to graduate.

Further, we have published, submitted, or have had accepted numerous papers on topics ranging from prototyping to information theory. In particular, we published the following seven journal papers this semester:

  • R. Chen, J. G. Andrews, R. W. Heath, Jr., and A. Ghosh, “Uplink Power Control in Multi-Cell Spatial Multiplexing Wireless Systems,” IEEE Trans. on Wireless, vol. 6, no. 7, pp. 2700-2711, July 2007. [IEEE Xplore]
  • A. Forenza, D. J. Love, and R. W. Heath, Jr., “Simplified Spatial Correlation Models for Clustered MIMO Channels with Different Array Configurations,'’ IEEE Trans. on Veh. Tech., vol. 56, no. 4, part 2, pp. 1924-1934, July 2007. [IEEE Xplore]
  • K. Huang, R. W. Heath, Jr., and J. G. Andrews, “Space Division Multiple Access with a Sum Feedback Rate Constraint”, IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, pp 3879-3891, Jul. 2007. [IEEE Xplore]
  • B. Mondal and R. W. Heath, Jr., “Quantization on the Grassmann Manifold,'’ IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, vol. 55, no. 8, pp. 4208-4216, Aug. 2007. [IEEE Xplore]
  • V. Raghavan, R. W. Heath, Jr., and A. Sayeed, “Systematic Codebook Designs for Quantized Beamforming in Correlated MIMO Channels,'’ IEEE Journal on Sel. Areas in Comm., Special Issue on Optimization of MIMO Transceivers for Realistic Communication Networks: Challenges and Opportunities, vol. 25, no. 7. pp. 1298-1310, Sept. 2007. [IEEE Xplore]
  • M. R. McKay, I. B. Collings, A. Forenza, and R. W. Heath, Jr., “Multiplexing/Beamforming Switching for Coded MIMO in Spatially Correlated Channels Based on Closed-Form BER Approximations,'’ IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 56, no. 5, part 1. pp. 2555-2567, Sept. 2007. [IEEE Xplore]
  • D. Gesbert, M. Kountouris, R. W. Heath, Jr., C. B. Chae, and T. Salzer, ‘Shifting the MIMO Paradigm: From Single User to Multiuser Communications,’ IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 5, pp. 36-46, Oct., 2007 [IEEE Xplore]

Also, first year grad student Alvin Leung taught us all a ping pong lesson in the first annual WSIL ping pong tournament. His skills will surely diminish as grad school takes over his life.

There really was so much more to this semester. In many ways, Fall 07 will be remembered as a semester where a lot of work was put into projects that other semesters will be able to claim to have finished, as this semester did with the above journal papers. We submitted far more journal papers than we published. We welcomed 6 new members and said goodbye to only 1. And we put in hundreds of hours into projects whose payoffs are still months away. In that way, you might say it was a blue-collared semester.

If anyone else has something to add (feel free to toot your own horn), please comment.