Graduate Student Miaomiao Ma won the Best Student Paper Award, 2nd place, in the student paper competition of the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Wireless Information Technology and Systems (ICWITS) and Applied Computational Electromagnetics (ACES), held in Honolulu, Hawaii in March 13-17, 2016. Her paper was titled “HSS-Matrix Based Fast Direct Volume Integral Equation Solver for Electrodynamic Analysis.” Miaomiao Ma is advised by Professor Dan Jiao.

The Student Paper Competition Committee selects the top 10 student papers submitted for presentation at a Special Student Papers Session. The top 5 student papers presented at this special session are announced at the Symposium Banquet. The first, second, third, fourth, and fifth place winners are awarded cash prizes of $500, $400, $300, $200, and $100, respectively.

In this paper, the dense system of volume integral equation (VIE) is represented by an HSS (Hierarchically Semiseparable) matrix. The structure of the HSS matrix is then exploited to develop a fast direct VIE solver. This solver has O(NlogN) complexity in factorization, O(N) complexity in matrix solution as well as memory irrespective of electrical size. For solving electrically small problems whose rank is constant, its complexity is strictly O(N) in both time and memory. The HSS-representation has a controlled accuracy; and the direct solution of the HSS matrix does not involve further approximation. Numerical simulations of large-scale scattering problems involving millions of unknowns on a single core CPU have demonstrated its complexity and accuracy.