A paper authored by recent Purdue Ph.D. students Sooyoung Hur and Taejoon Kim, and Professors David J. Love and James V. Krogmeier has been awarded the 2016 IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize in the field of communications theory. Dr. Hur now works at Samsung and Dr. Kim is an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong.

The recognized paper is: “Millimeter Wave Beamforming for Wireless Backhaul and Access in Small Cell Networks”, IEEE Transactions on Communications, Volume 61, No. 10, pp. 4391-4403, October 2013. Additional co-authors were Timothy Thomas and Amitava Ghosh from Nokia. Thomas is also a 1997 Purdue Ph.D. graduate.

The award is only given to one paper each year, and is named for Stephen O. Rice, a pioneer in the fields of information theory and communication theory, who worked for nearly 40 years at Bell Labs. Rice is best known for his work showing that noise can be modeled probabilistically, first developed in his classic two-part paper “Mathematical Analysis of Random Noise”, which was published in two parts in the Bell System Technical Journal in 1944 and 1945.  Rice’s research insights continue to shape the development of a wide array of research fields.