Grad student Yihong Wu receives Marconi Award
Yihong Wu is one of three students worldwide to be honored by the prestigious Marconi Society. He was selected a Marconi Young Scholar for work including his focus on how to maximize compressed sensing by minimizing noise and waste in transmissions. As the leading organization devoted to recognizing and encouraging scientific contributions to communication sciences and the Internet, the Marconi Society annually honors young scholars who already are engaged in influential work and are likely to transform their fields in some significant way. Yihong's advisor is Sergio Verdu.
Wu’s research is intended to further the practical goal of improving transmission via compressed sensing. His work aims to identify the fundamental limits of modern data acquisition, processing and communication, revealing the best parameters that compressors can possibly achieve. One real-world application would be to improve the MRI medical scans, used by doctors to obtain visual images of, for example, brain activity. Wu’s research could reduce the number of measurements required and expedite the whole process by using more sophisticated techniques to recover the original signal image from these few measurements.
As a teenager, Wu won first prize in the Chinese Olympiad Physics Competition in 2001. After attaining his bachelor’s in electrical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, he earned a master’s in that field at Princeton and is on track to achieve his doctorate as well, having garnered Princeton’s Wallace Memorial honorific fellowship, the highest award in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The Marconi Young Scholar Awards are named in honor of Baran, a Marconi Fellow famous for helping devise the technical inner-workings of the Arpanet, the government-sponsored precursor to the Internet.
The Marconi Society was established in 1974 through an endowment set up by Gioia Marconi Braga, daughter of Guglielmo Marconi, the Nobel laureate who invented radio (wireless telegraphy). Through symposia, conferences, forums and publications, the Marconi Society promotes awareness of major innovations in communication theory, technology and applications with particular attention to understanding how they change and benefit society.
