Ph.D. student Yunfei Ma wins third place in student paper competition at IMS 2015

Ma wins for his paper entitled “Passive Ranging by Low-Directivity Antennas with Quality Estimate”.

Yunfei Ma, a Ph.D. candidate in ECE recently won third place in Student Paper Competition at the 2015 IEEE MIT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS) for his paper entitled “Passive Ranging by Low-Directivity Antennas with Quality Estimate”.

Yunfei is working to build a real-time locating system by RF backscattering—an indoor radar system. He is using a passive RFID tag with efficient broadband harmonic backscattering, significantly reducing indoor multi-path interference. Signal processing algorithms that take the advantages of indoor channel fading and coherence bandwidth further improve the accuracy and reliability of tag locating to submillimeter resolution and submillisecond sampling speed.

Yunfei’s winning paper deals with using antennas with low-angle directivity in such RF locating systems, but provides a method to evaluate the angles of arrival to establish a measurement quality estimate between line-of-sight and multi-paths.

The International Microwave Symposium—also called Microwave Week—is the premier conference and largest gathering in IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), and has occurred annually since 1957. The 2015 conference was held May 17-22 in Phoenix, Arizona.

The conference saw participation of 8626 attendees from 56 countries, over 75 technical sessions, workshops, and panels sessions, and a record-breaking exhibition with 620 exhibiting companies. Engineering students played a large part in the event through numerous presentations as well as a student design competition, student paper competition, Ph.D. Initiative, and Project Connect.

IMS received 302 submissions for the Student Paper Competition, with just 35 finalists and 5 winners. Students are required to give a technical talk of 25 minutes and participate in a three-hour poster session with 20 judges.

Yunfei Ma received a B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei, China in 2010, and an M.S. degree from Cornell University in 2013, both in electrical engineering. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Cornell University. Yunfei was the recipient of the 2010 Irwin and Joan Jacobs Scholar Fellowship from Cornell University, the 2010 Best Undergraduate Thesis Award from USTC, and the 2009 National Scholarship from the Ministry of Education, China. He works under the direction of Professor Edwin Kan.

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