Prestigious award to professor Gerald Q. Maguire Jr
Published Dec 12, 2012
Professor Gerald Q. Maguire Jr., KTH, School of Information and Communication Technology, has been named an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to mobile networks and cognitive radio systems. IEEE is the world's largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.
According to the IEEE, “The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one-percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. 298 individuals have been elevated to IEEE Fellow for 2013.”
Congratulations Professor Gerald Maguire. What does this kind of award mean for a researcher?
The most important aspect is that it represents recognition from my peers of some of my contributions. I have generally followed my own path in research and some of my work has not been popular with others, especially when it destroyed the status quo and was not a delta of epsilon contribution.
How important is this kind of association for the benefit of the researcher community?
To gauge the impact of IEEE, one need only consider that: (1) the IEEE publishes 30% of the world’s literature in the electrical and electronics engineering and computer science fields, (2) IEEE working groups have developed >900 industry standards (including the widely used standards for both wired and wireless local area networks), and (3) IEEE sponsors or co-sponsors ~400 international technical conferences each year. From a personal point of view, it means that I typically review papers for conferences and publications of IEEE and ACM, while generally declining to review papers for for-profit publishers, as the former are more likely to have a larger impact than the later.
Which are the most interesting challenges for researchers in the field of mobile networks and cognitive radio systems today?
One of the most important and difficult challenges is to change the way we think about wireless communication. There is a very traditional telecommunications driven approach, which has focused on classical engineering and economics thinking and regulations. In contrast, cognitive radio and wireless local area network technologies both take a more computing based approach; which is both more dynamic and potentially more wasteful. One of the very difficult changes is that just as integrated circuit chip design advanced rapidly due to the ability to waste transistors, in the next decade we have to understand how to waste communications resources to find a different operating point or points that is/are quite different than what one would utilize in a traditional approach. For example, as local storage increases it is clear that we can avoid transferring things over a communications link because we have them locally stored, but it also means that we can and probably should transfer things that the user might want before they request it, that we can decouple the quality of the multimedia output from the bandwidth of the communications link, and that rather than optimizing systems in terms of bandwidth and utilization we will increasingly optimize systems to maximize the user’s experience.
