COSMOS team member and Columbia Electrical Engineering former PhD student Tingjun Chen received the ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-up, for his PhD thesis titled “Algorithms and Experimentation for Future Wireless Networks: From Internet-of-Things to Full-Duplex”. This award recognizes his “contributions to ultra-low-power wireless networks based on energy harvesting, and to the theory and practice of full-duplex wireless networks”. The SIGMOBILE committee also highlighted “the depth and rigor of theoretical and experimental investigations reported in the dissertation, and with their real-world validation in the COSMOS open-access testbed”.
During his studies towards the PhD at Columbia and after his graduation, Tingjun has been playing a key role in the design and deployment of the COSMOS testbed. In particular, he has contributed to and has been leading several experiments across the wireless, optical, and edge cloud domain, including the integration of programmable millimeter-wave radios (see [link] and a recent WiNTECH’21 paper [link to the WiNTECH’21 news item]) and open-access full-duplex radios (see [link]), and experimentation with SDN-based convergent optical-wireless systems (see [link]). Due to his contributions to the COSMOS testbed, Tingjun was featured in the Columbia Engineering Student Spotlight with a video highlight parts of the COSMOS pilot deployment process. The COSMOS Sandbox 2 (sb2) is also named after Tingjun in recognition of his contributions to the testbed (see a previous news item).
“The recognition is very well deserved because of Tingjun’s fundamental research results on emerging core wireless technologies (full-duplex, beamforming, millimeter-wave), along with demonstrated key contributions to major integrative wireless system projects such as the COSMOS testbed currently being deployed in NYC,” said Rutgers Distinguished Professor and WINLAB Director Dipankar Raychaudhuri, the COSMOS project PI.
Tingjun completed his MS/PhD in the Wireless & Mobile Networking (WiMNet) Lab, where he was advised by Professor Gil Zussman. While studying towards the PhD, Tingjun received the Facebook Fellowship, the Wei Family Private Foundation (WFPF) Fellowship, and the Columbia University Electrical Engineering Armstrong Memorial Award and Jacob Millman Award. Early this year, he also received the Columbia Engineering Morton B. Friedman Memorial Prize for Excellence and the Columbia University Eli Jury Award.
After graduation, Tingjun was a postdoctoral associate at Yale University during 2020-2021. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, where he continues to explore and push the frontiers of next-generation wireless networks. He is also a recent recipient of the 2021 Google Research Scholar Award and the 2021 IBM Faculty Award.
