Wireless Innovation Forum Announces 2012 Award Winners and 2013 Board of Directors

Weightless, Jeffrey Reed of Virginia Tech and John Glossner of Optimum Semiconductor Technologies Take Home Awards; Board Welcomes Three New Members
Jan. 17, 2013 - PRLog -- WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Wireless Innovation Forum (www.WirelessInnovation.org), today announced the winners of its annual Achievement Awards and its newly elected Board of Directors as presented at the Wireless Innovation Forum Conference on Communications Technologies and Software Defined Radio (SDR- WInnComm 2013) and 74th Technical Interchange Meeting. This premier event for the software defined radio (SDR), cognitive radio (CR) and dynamic spectrum access community was held 8-11 January 2013  in Washington, D.C. and sponsored by Platinum Sponsors General Dynamics C4 Systems, Harris Corporation, Indra Sistemas, Objective Interface Systems and Selex ES, Gold event sponsors included Pentek and General Dynamics C4 Systems.

The Technology of the Year award is presented to an individual or organization for a breakthrough product or technology in the field of Software Defined or Cognitive Radio as nominated and selected by the Forum members. This year’s award was awarded to Weightless, a proprietary, royalty-free, open standard for wireless machine-to-machine communications using TV white-space spectrum. The use of white-space spectrum, together with the unique characteristics of M2M traffic compared to human traffic means that the use of existing standards is far from optimal. The Weightless standard is optimized for this specific scenario and provides TDD operation with a wide range of provided data rates depending on the application, range and operating environment. The standard was designed to minimize cost and power consumption, featuring a chipset cost of less than $2, a range of up to 10km and a battery life of 10 years.

The Forum International Achievement Award is presented to an individual, group of individuals, or organization that made especially significant contributions to international furtherance or acceptance of Software Defined or Cognitive Radio. This year’s winner, Dr. Jeffrey Reed and his colleagues and students at Wireless@Virginia Tech, has been instrumental in leading the way for research and academic collaboration in the areas of SDR and CR. The impact on the community has been tremendous, including multiple companies in the industry founded by VT graduates. VT has also hosted the Software Defined Radio Design Challenge in collaboration with the Wireless Innovation Forum to provide a challenging academic exercise for grad and undergrads in the area of SDR and CR. The contribution of Wireless@Virginia Tech has been extremely rich and fruitful over the years.

Dr. John Glossner of Optimum Semiconductor Technologies won the Presidents’ Award, chosen by the Forum’s Board Chairman and presented to individuals in recognition of their sustained outstanding contributions in support of the Wireless Innovation Forum and its activities. Dr. Glossner has played an active role in the Forum for several years serving on the Board of Directors and has driven key work products and activities for the Forum.  He has organized and chaired the SDR WInnComm technical conference for the last three years, is currently the Technical Director for the Forum and has led the update of the Top 10 Most Wanted Innovations, which is the most downloaded file from the Forum’s file library.  He has been an active proponent for the utilization of Open Source for reconfigurable radios.

Also at SDR-WInnComm, The Forum membership voted on new Board of Director positions. Board members returning to their current positions include: Ruediger Leschhorn (Rohde & Schwarz) as Forum Vice-Chair, Mark Turner (Harris) as Treasurer, John Glossner (Optimum Semiconductor Technologies) as Chief Technical Officer (formerly titled Technical Director), Manuel Uhm (Coherent Logix) as Chief Marketing Officer (formerly titled Markets/User Requirements Committee Chair), Vincent Kovarik (PrismTech) as a Member at Large, Claudio Armani (Selex ES) as Large Company Representative, James Neel (CR Technologies) as Small Company Representative, and David Renaudeau (Thales) as ITU Region 1 Representative.

Board members changing positions include Bruce Oberlies (Motorola) from Forum Chair to Board of Directors Chair, Eric Christensen (General Dynamics C4 Systems) from Board of Directors Chair to Forum Chair, Bob Schutz (Datron World Communications) from Secretary to Medium Company Representative, Hiroshi Harada (National Institute of Information and Communications Technology) from Member at Large to Government/Non-Profit Group Representative, Kuan Collins (SAIC) from Member at Large to Secretary, R. Muralidharan (Tata Power SED) from Medium Company Representative to ITU Region 3 Representative, and Terry Anderson (ITT Exelis) from ITU Region 2 Representative to Member at Large.

In addition, the Board of Directors welcomes the following new members:

Keith Nolan (CTVR) has been elected as Chief Regulatory Officer (formerly titled Regulatory Chair). Keith is a Research Fellow with the Telecommunications Research Centre (CTVR) headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Nolan received his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering in 2005 from Trinity College Dublin. Dr. Nolan chairs a working group on economic aspects of CR/SDR regulation within a European collaborative project called COST-TERRA. He also acts as a liaison officer between the Forum and COST-TERRA & COST-IC0902. Dr. Nolan is actively involved in regulatory and CR/DSA test & trial activities and has published widely in academic and industry publications. He founded and organised the world's first collaborative public trials and demonstrations of SDR, CR, and DSA systems held as part of the 2007 IEEE DySPAN symposium. He also co-founded and is Vice-Chair of the IEEE UK and Rep. of Ireland Vehicular Technology Society Chapter. More recently, Dr. Nolan has served as the Forum's Regulatory Committee Vice-Chair representing ITU Region 1.

Peter Stanforth (Spectrum Bridge) has been elected ITU Region 2 Rep. As CTO, Mr. Stanforth is responsible for managing intellectual property development and aspects of Product Development and Operations. Prior to co-founding Spectrum Bridge, Mr. Stanforth was co-founder and CTO of MeshNetworks, Inc, where he was responsible for managing the strategic business and technical aspects of product development and operations. Prior to MeshNetworks Mr. Stanforth held a variety of engineering and management roles in telecommunications startups an Fortune 100 equipment manufacturers.  Mr. Stanforth has authored over 25 US Patents on wireless technologies. Mr. Stanforth has published numerous papers on Telecommunications Technology and Strategy. Mr. Stanforth Holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Teesside.

Gerd Aschied (RWTH Aachen University) has been elected Academic Representative. Gerd received his Diploma and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering (Communications Eng.) from RWTH Aachen University. In 1988 he started as a co-founder CADIS GmbH which successfully brought the system simulation tool COSSAP to the market. From 1994-2003 Gerd Ascheid was Director / Senior Director with Synopsys, a California-based EDA market leader, In 2002 he was co-founder of LisaTek whose processor design tools are now part of the Synopsys product portfolio. Since April 2003 Gerd Ascheid heads the Institute for Integrated Signal Processing Systems of RWTH Aachen University. He is also coordinator of the UMIC (Ultra-high speed Mobile Information and Communication) Research Centre at RWTH Aachen University. His research interest is in wireless communication algorithms and application specific integrated platforms, in particular, for mobile terminals.

The Board would like to thank the following outgoing members for their service: Boya Lu (Huawei) who served as ITU Region 3 Representative, John Powell (National Public Safety Telecommunications Council) who served as the Government/Non-Profit Group Representative, Paul Sutton (CTVR) who served as the Academic Group Representative, Paul Kolodzy (Kolodzy Consulting) who served as a Member at Large and Pekka Heikkinen (Elektrobit) who served as Member at Large.
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