IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019 - 12

2019 Ieee medAls

IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal

Sponsored by Nokia Bell Labs

David Ngar Ching Tse

Teresa H. Meng

For seminal contributions to wireless
network information theory and
wireless network systems

For technical contributions to and
leadership in the development of
wireless semiconductor technology

Known for his unique ability to pioneer theoretical concepts that
have a substantial practical impact on wireless networks, David
Ngar Ching Tse's work has profoundly impacted wireless data
transmission by increasing wireless channel capacity and combatting interference. His contributions to an approximation approach to network information theory, diversity-multiplexing
tradeoﬀ in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless
communication, opportunistic scheduling, and scaling laws for
ad-hoc networks have helped enable the wireless data boom we
take for granted today. Tse developed an opportunistic scheduler
and demonstrated that one can harness fading to increase network capacity, contrary to the conventional thinking that fading
was detrimental. He showed that by scheduling the users with
the "best" channels, along with appropriate fairness guarantees,
one could increase the system throughput as well as individual
throughput significantly. This was part of the Qualcomm EvDO
high-data-rate wireless system and was subsequently incorporated
into all 3G and 4G cellular systems. In collaboration with Pramod
Viswanath and Rajiv Laroia, Tse later extended this idea to slowly changing channels by using the idea of multiple antennas to
induce fading and therefore enabling opportunistic scheduling.
In joint work with Lizhong Zheng, he pioneered the diversity-multiplexing tradeoﬀ framework to design MIMO systems,
which optimally extracts diversity and multiplexing benefits from
wireless fading channels. The approximation approach to wireless network information theory (a collaboration with Salman
Avestimehr and Suhas Diggavi) has made significant progress
in resolving many important open questions within a universal
approximation constant. This approach tackled a long-standing
problem by resolving the capacity of the Gaussian interference
channel up to 1 bit.Tse has made a positive impact on education
with his book Fundamentals of Wireless Communication (coauthored
with Pramod Viswanath), which is used in over 60 institutions
around the world.
An IEEE Fellow and recipient of the IEEE Information Theory Society's Claude E. Shannon Award (2017), Tse is the Thomas
Kailath and Guanghan Xu Professor of Engineering at Stanford
University, Stanford, CA, USA.

Teresa H. Meng's vision, technical leadership, and perseverance led
to the success of CMOS-based radio frequency (RF) technologies that fueled the wireless revolution by enabling low-cost, lowpower, and robust local-area networks (LANs). During the late
1990s, wireless networks were expensive, highly power consumptive, and not very robust. Meng's vision was that an approach based
on CMOS, where many functions can be integrated on a single
chip, combined with intensive digital signal processing to improve
channel utilization, could be competitive with and eventually
surpass approaches using discrete components. Many in industry,
however, thought her approach was too ahead of its time.To realize
her vision, Meng founded Atheros to commercialize her CMOSbased wireless technology. Meng led a world-class team and drove
the technical development at Atheros. Her relentless pursuit of
new approaches to achieving high bandwidth, low power, and low
costs was critical and, in less than 2 years, Atheros had accomplished what many experts thought would take 5 to 8 years. Her
innovations greatly accelerated the deployment of Wi-Fi as we
know it today. The engineering team at Atheros championed the
concept that with proper digital compensation techniques, digital
CMOS processes could be used to implement high-performance
RF analog circuits. In 2001 Atheros announced the industry's first
CMOS transceiver at 5 Ghz, an 802.11a wireless LAN chipset
ready for volume production. The successful demonstration of an
integrated wireless communication system-on-a-chip in CMOS
established the technological foundation on which all future Wi-Fi
devices were to be designed and initiated the industry's interest in
wideband wireless data networks. Meng's recent work on wireless
power transfer has enabled deployment of semiconductor technologies in applications that had previously been impractical due
to their power requirements.These innovations have been applied
to the evolution of the Internet of Things, where connectivity and
power consumption continue to be critical considerations. She has
also made major contributions in neural signal processing and implantable biomedical devices.
An IEEE Fellow and member of the U.S. National Academy of
Engineering, Meng is the Reid Weaver Dennis Professor of Electrical Engineering, Emerita, at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

Scope: For exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems, and technology.

Scope: For exceptional contributions to communications and networking sciences and engineering.

12 | 2019 IEEE awards bookLET

IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019