Plenary Speakers
Yahya Rahmat-Samii
Distinguished Professor
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Plenary Talk:
CubeSats and SmallSats: New Paradigms for Ingenious Antenna Developments
Yahya Rahmat-Samii is a Distinguished Professor, a holder of the Northrop-Grumman Chair in electromagnetics, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, the winner of the 2011 IEEE Electromagnetics Field Award, and the Former Chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA, USA. He was a Senior Research Scientist with the Caltech/NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has authored or coauthored more than 1000 technical journal articles and conference articles and has written over 35 book chapters and six books. He has more than 20 cover-page IEEE publication articles. Dr. Rahmat-Samii is a fellow of IEEE, AMTA, ACES, EMA, and URSI. He was a recipient of the Henry Booker Award from URSI, in 1984, which is given triennially to the most outstanding young radio scientist in North America, the Best Application Paper Prize Award (Wheeler Award) of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation in 1992 and 1995, the University of Illinois ECE Distinguished Alumni Award in 1999, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal and the AMTA Distinguished Achievement Award in 2000. In 2001, he received an Honorary Doctorate Causa from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He received the 2002 Technical Excellence Award from JPL, the 2005 URSI Booker Gold Medal presented at the URSI General Assembly, the 2007 IEEE Chen- To Tai Distinguished Educator Award, the 2009 Distinguished Achievement Award of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society, the 2010 UCLA School of Engineering Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2011 campus-wide UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. He was also a recipient of the Distinguished Engineering Educator Award from The Engineers Council in 2015, the John Kraus Antenna Award of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society and the NASA Group Achievement Award in 2016, the ACES Computational Electromagnetics Award and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation S. A. Schelkunoff Best Transactions Prize Paper Award in 2017, and the prestigious Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2019. The medals are awarded annually to a group of distinguished U.S. citizens who exemplify a life dedicated to community service. These are individuals who preserve and celebrate the history, traditions, and values of their ancestry while exemplifying the values of the American way of life and are dedicated to creating a better world. He has had pioneering research contributions in diverse areas of electromagnetics, antennas, measurement and diagnostics techniques, numerical and asymptotic methods, satellite and personal communications, human/antenna interactions, RFID and implanted antennas in medical applications, frequency-selective surfaces, electromagnetic band-gap and meta-material structures, applications of the genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimizations. His original antenna designs are on many NASA/JPL spacecrafts for planetary, remote sensing, and Cubesat missions. He is the Designer of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society logo which is displayed on all IEEE AP-S publications. He was the 1995 President of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society and 2009–2011 President of the United States National Committee (USNC) of the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). He has also served as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer presenting lectures internationally.
CubeSats and SmallSats have resulted in tremendous amounts of excitement within research, industry and defense communities. They are responsible for a remarkable revolution in the arena of satellites for diverse applications. Their small size and low cost have enabled space missions which seemed impossible with the conventional satellites. To further enhance the potential of CubeSats and SmallSats ingenious antenna developments play paramount roles in meeting the demanding data-rate and spatial resolution requirements for future missions. To achieve these objectives tradeoff between mechanical complexity and RF performance are resulting into amazing opportunities for antenna engineers to be innovative. Many of the earlier missions have utilized low-gain antennas due to their ease of mechanical integration; however, emerging CubeSats and SmallSats missions require high-gain antennas that can be stored in a small volume during launch and deploy reliably in space. This plenary talk highlights the challenges and opportunities that CubeSats and SmallSats create for antenna engineers. Notably emphasis will be on some out-of-the-box concepts that have been recently developed to facilitate advanced space missions. The talk will focus on the design of deployable high gain aperture antennas that can meet the demands of remote sensing, deep space missions and Internet of Space (IoS) with particular importance to the design tradeoffs based on some ingenious concepts relying on mesh deployable reflector antennas, reflectarray antenna, 3-D printed lens antennas and others. With the outlooks of affordable space missions and global connectivity becoming a reality, we must look forward to many more developments in the field of antenna engineering tailored for CubeSats and SmallSats. Some representative papers published by the speaker are listed below for the interested readers.
Christophe Fumeaux
Professor
University of Adelaide, ADELAIDE, Australia
Plenary Talk:
Reconfigurable Antennas with Compound Functionalities
(M’03–SM’09–F’19) received the Diploma and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. From 1998 to 2000, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the School of Optics, University of Central Florida, Orlando. In 2000, he joined the Swiss Federal Office of Metrology, Bern, Switzerland, as a Scientific Staff Member. From 2001 to 2008, he was a Research Associate and Lecturer with the Laboratory for Electromagnetic Fields and Microwave Electronics at ETH Zurich. Since 2008, he has been with The University of Adelaide, Australia, where he is currently a Professor with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. His current main research interests concern antenna engineering, THz technology and the application of RF design principles to optical micro/nano-structures. Prof. Fumeaux was the recipient of the ETH Medal for his doctoral dissertation. From 2011 to 2015, he was a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council. He was the recipient of the 2018 Edward E. Altshuler Prize, the 2014 IEEE Sensors Journal and the 2004 ACES Journal best paper awards. He also received best conference paper awards at the 2012 Asia-Pacific International Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility (APEMC 2012) and the 17th Colloque International sur la Compatibilité Electromagnétique (CEM 2014). More than ten of his students have received student awards with joint papers at IEEE conferences. He was the recipient of the University of Adelaide Stephen Cole the Elder Award for Excellence in Higher Degree by Research Supervisory Practice in 2018. He served as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques from 2010 to 2013. From 2013 to 2016 he served as a Senior Associate Editor and later as the Associate Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Since March 2017, he has been serving as the Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.
Jeanne T. Quimby
Researcher
NIST, Boulder, USA
Plenary Talk:
Channel Sounding Measurement and Metrology
Jeanne T. Quimby (M’99-SM’19) received a B.S. degree from the University of California of San Diego in 1998 and her M. S.in 2001 and Ph.D. in 2005 from The Ohio State University. In 2006, she joined the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (now known as the NIWC-Pacific) as a communication expert and researcher. Since 2015, she has been working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Communication Technology Laboratory (CTL). Her current research focuses on the metrology of channel sounding, propagation in manufacturing facilities, and physical layer measurements on telecommunication devices’ performances. She has developed a flexible, portable millimeter-wave measurement system to support the design and repeatable laboratory testing of 5G wireless communications devices. She has also launched enhanced channel sounder verification through the formation of the IEEE standard 2982 working group. She was the recipient of the Department of Commerce Bronze award in 2019 for recognition for developing innovative measurement methods, a state-of-the-art testbed, and extensive first-in-class measurement data sets that led to a comprehensive Guide to Industrial Wireless Systems Deployments. She is the current Commission A chair for the United States National Committee for Union Radio Scientifique Internationale (USNC URSI). Since 2021, she has been serving as the current secretary for the USNC URSI Women in Radio Science Chapter.
Wireless communication sensors and devices must operate efficiently in a heavily trafficked radio propagation channel. The internet of things projected to have upward of one trillion sensors. This explosion of wireless sensor and communication devices demands that communication engineers rely heavily on knowledge of the radio propagation channel’s statistical variation to enable for effective spectrum sharing. The ability to capture the statistical variation of the propagation channels falls onto the capabilities of channel sounding and rigorous and concise measurement and modeling science.
Poor performing channel sounder’s hardware leads to errors in the channel measurements. Signals passing through real hardware components, introduce distortion at every step of the process, from signal generation and transmission to signal reception and demodulation. This distortion degrades the channel measurements.
Stemming this tide of errors is measurement best practices. Obtaining robust and accurate measurements involves verifying the channel sounder’s hardware and data post-processing with thorough documentation of the measurement campaign. Channel-sounder verification involves rigorous measurement practices and statistical models to identify sources of the components of uncertainty in a channel sounder’s measurements. Knowledge of these sources enables the separation of measurement uncertainty from the channel variations, allowing for accurate measurement of the channel. Consequently, measurement best practices for verification of the channel-sounder hardware and post-processing is a fundamental building block for wireless communication sensors and devices efficiently use of the spectrum.