Radio Club of America Awards Armstrong Medal to Wireless Communications Researcher and Educator Theodore Rappaport
September 28, 2018
Armstrong Medal Honors Founder of NYU WIRELESS Research Center for His Lasting Contributions
BROOKLYN, New York, Friday, September 27, 2018 – The Radio Club of America (RCA) announced that Professor Theodore “Ted” Rappaport, founding director of NYU WIRELESS and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, will receive the Armstrong Medal for demonstrated excellence and lasting contributions to radio arts and sciences.
Rappaport conducted seminal research, most recently in the millimeter wave (mmWave) radio spectrum. He advanced commercialization of this 5G technology that will bring broadband speeds to wireless communication – thereby potentially revolutionizing medicine, enabling autonomous vehicles, inexpensively connecting rural communities to the digital world, and more.
The RCA, the oldest worldwide organization of wireless communications professionals, also cited Rappaport for his lifelong contributions as an educator. In addition to his position as the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical Engineering at NYU Tandon, he is also on the faculty of the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Radiology Department of the School of Medicine.
Rappaport joins a distinguished group of past recipients of the Armstrong Medal — all luminaries in the wireless industry — including Arthur Collins, Walter Cronkite, Harold Beverage, Morgan O’Brien, and Major Edward H. Armstrong himself, who laid the foundations for much of the modern radio, including circuitry and the FM radio system.
In 1991, Rappaport was named an RCA Fellow at the age of 30, making him one of the youngest in recent history.
In 2012, Rappaport launched NYU WIRELESS at NYU Tandon, the first U.S. academic center to merge wireless engineering research with computer science and medicine. Since its founding, NYU WIRELESS has remained at the frontier of next-generation mobile technology, with undergraduate, graduate, and faculty researchers transforming the wireless field through their research into mmWave technology, channel modeling, Massive MIMO, beyond-5G technologies, circuits, and nano devices. The center pioneered mmWave frequencies for mobile communications and acted as an accelerant for the technology by bringing together leading businesses, institutes, and academic researchers at the annual Brooklyn 5G Summit.
Before Rappaport’s seminal paper “Millimeter Wave Mobile Communications for 5G Cellular: It Will Work!” many researchers disregarded the potential of the mmWave spectrum. It was Rappaport’s research that demonstrated to the world the viability of mmWave radio frequency bands, central to implementing 5G wireless technology.
In addition to the Armstrong Medal, Rappaport has received many prestigious honors throughout his career, including the Marconi Young Scientist Award (1990) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology Sir Monty Finniston Medal (2011). In addition to authoring and co-authoring more than 200 papers and 20 books in wireless communications, Rappaport holds more than 100 U.S. and international patents, founded two of the world’s largest academic wireless research centers prior to NYU WIRELESS, and founded and advised multiple wireless companies.
“Ted Rappaport has shown the world the future of wireless communications, not only through his work on mmWave technology but as a leader, researcher, and educator in the wireless field,” said Jelena Kovačević, dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. “The RCA’s recognition of Ted, particularly with the Armstrong Medal, demonstrates how instrumental his work is on a global scale. His immense contributions have placed NYU Tandon on the map as a leader in wireless technology.”
Rappaport will receive the Armstrong Medal at the club’s November 17 Banquet and Awards Ceremony in New York City, where he will also serve as the keynote speaker.
Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/radio-club-america-awards-armstrong-medal-wireless-communications-researcher-and-educator
On International Day of Democracy, International Leaders Call for More Open Public Institutions
September 13, 2018
The GovLab at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Publishes the CrowdLaw Manifesto, Collects Signatures in Support of Principles to Spread Democracy through Digital Collaboration
BROOKLYN, New York, Thursday, September 13, 2018 – As the United Nations celebrates the International Day of Democracy on September 15 with its theme of “Democracy Under Strain,” The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering will unveil its CrowdLaw Manifesto to strengthen public participation in lawmaking by encouraging citizens to help build, shape, and influence the laws and policies that affect their daily lives.
Among its 12 calls to action to individuals, legislatures, researchers and technology designers, the manifesto encourages the public to demand and institutions to create new mechanisms to harness collective intelligence to improve the quality of lawmaking as well as more research on what works to build a global movement for participatory democracy.
The CrowdLaw Manifesto emerged from a collaborative effort of 20 international experts and CrowdLaw community members. At a convening held earlier this year by The GovLab at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, government leaders, academics, NGOs, and technologists formulated the CrowdLaw Manifesto to detail the initiative’s foundational principles and to encourage greater implementation of CrowdLaw practices to improve governance through 21st century technology and tools.
Beth Simone Noveck, professor in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at NYU Tandon and director of The GovLab, explained the timely significance of the CrowdLaw Manifesto as governments around the globe face greater public distrust and threats to democracy.
“This manifesto shares what we see as the future of governing, which moves beyond viewing public opinion and petitions as the main form of civic engagement,” Noveck said. “Technology enables us to collectively ask and answer how we should redesign our governing practices to solve the complex policy challenges of the 21st century at local, national, and global levels. We ask citizens throughout the world to join us as signatories to this manifesto and thereby encourage democracy to put down strong roots in communities everywhere.”
The global embrace of CrowdLaw principles is demonstrated by international launches planned for the Crowd Law Manifesto: at Reworks Agora in Agora, Greece — the birthplace of democracy — on September 16, and at Nesta’s Designing Collective Intelligence event in London on September 17.
More than 30 organizations and 80 individuals working on citizen engagement and democracy worldwide have already signed the manifesto. Signatories include
Madrid City Council
Sabine Romon, chief smart city officer, General Secretariat, Paris City Council
Ben Kallos, New York City Council member, District 5 (Upper East Side, Roosevelt Island, East Midtown, East Harlem), New York City Council
Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan
Raffaele Lillo, chief data officer, Digital Transformation Team, Government of Italy
Mukelani Dimba, civil society co-chair, Open Government Partnership
“The successes of the CrowdLaw concept — and its remarkably rapid adoption across the world by citizens seeking to affect change — exemplify the powerful force that academia can exert when working in concert with government and citizens,” said NYU Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević. “On behalf of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, I proudly sign the CrowdLaw Manfesto and congratulate The GovLab and its collaborators for creating these digital tools and momentum for good government.”
“One of the most urgent debates of our time is about the exact role that these new technologies can and should play in our societies and particularly in our public decision-making processes,” said Victoria Alsina, research professor in the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at NYU Tandon and coordinator of the CrowdLaw Initiative at The GovLab. “By exploiting technology to engage a broader and more diverse constituency in the lawmaking process, CrowdLaw has the potential to enhance the quality of lawmaking practices and to transform fundamentally the source of authority undergirding the legislative process.”
In July 2018, the GovLab debuted the CrowdLaw Catalog as an online platform to bring together real-world examples of CrowdLaw projects from 39 countries. With over 100 cases of public participatory lawmaking listed, the online portal aims to help civic leaders create new projects or bolster existing ones, and encourages users to continue adding more CrowdLaw cases to increase research and evaluation of these practices.
To complement its work on CrowdLaw, The GovLab at NYU Tandon together with NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge is launching a lecture series, “The Future of Democracy.”
Drafters and signatories of the CrowdLaw Manifesto explained its importance in spreading democracy:
“CrowdLaw is an exciting new concept that seeks to encourage deep citizen engagement throughout each phase of law and policy-making processes. Instead of passive participation in public governance through democratic rituals such as voting every four or five years. CrowdLaw innovations enable active citizenship continuously. I believe this can be an essential part of the arsenal for pushing back against the retreat of democracy that seems to have become a defining feature of politics globally.” – Mukelani Dimba, co-chair, Open Government Partnership
“Democratic governance institutions need to experiment and adapt if they are to harness rapid technological change rather than be overwhelmed by it. CrowdLaw provides just that sort of innovation by delivering with a wide range of tools that elected officials can use to engage citizens in policy-making processes. The Design4Democracy.org coalition — a growing group of democracy and human rights organizations, which NDI supports — is committed to ensuring the technology industry embraces democracy as a core design principle. CrowdLaw is a shining example, the embodiment of this philosophy.” – Scott Hubli, director of governance programs, NDI
"In a time of major threats to democracy, such as populism, technological manipulation, and greater complexity, CrowdLaw is the most interesting and inspiring idea I've ever heard on how we can improve the quality of our laws and public decisions, and save democracy." – Josep Lluis Marti, vice-rector and associate professor, Pompeu Fabra University
"I have signed it. You have all my good wishes and support. I think this is a good idea and needs to be expanded.” – Sam Pitroda, chairman, Pitroda Group, and former advisor to the prime minister of India on public information, infrastructure and innovation
To learn more about CrowdLaw, visit crowd.law or contact [email protected].
To sign the CrowdLaw Manifesto, visit http://manifesto.crowd.law.
Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/international-day-democracy-international-leaders-call-more-open-public-institutions
Researchers Pair Robotics and Information Theory to Better Understand Predator and Prey Relationships
July 18, 2017
BROOKLYN, New York – With help from robotic fish, researchers at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering are demonstrating how information theory can offer insight into the cause-and-effect relationships between predator and prey in the animal kingdom.
In a paper published in the American Institute of Physics’ Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, the research team led by Maurizio Porfiri, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU Tandon, validated the use of information theory to study predator-prey interactions. Through the use of robotic fish, the research provides a foundation for controlled experiments of causation within such interactions.
“Within a context of two entities — the predator and prey — seeking entirely different outcomes, robotics provides us with a tool for validating the concept of transfer entropy to discover cause-and-effect relationships and to answer certain biological questions,” Porfiri said. “The question we want to ultimately understand is, if we put together a predator and its prey, how they are influencing each other? How does the predator’s behavior change due to the presence of the prey, and how does the presence of the predator change the response of the prey?”
Transfer entropy examines the transfer of information between two entities and has become widely applied in fields such as neuroscience and economics, but it is only recently emerging as a tool for studying animal behavior. The research detailed in the paper explores how a combination of robotics and transfer entropy can offer new insight into the analysis of predator-prey interactions and improve our understanding of fear and anxiety.
The paper, “Information Theory and Robotics Meet to Study Predator-Prey Interactions,” was written by Porfiri, Visiting Research Fellow and lead author Daniele Neri, NYU Tandon Dynamical Systems Laboratory Manager and Research Scientist Tommaso Ruberto, and Tandon undergraduate researcher Gabrielle Cord-Cruz.
In previous experiments, Porfiri and fellow researchers demonstrated the validity of robotic stimuli for experiments on animal behavior, showing that zebrafish exhibited an equivalent response to both live and robotic replicas of other zebrafish and predators.
Their robotics-based platform allows for manipulating and precisely controlling interactions better than is possible when using only live animals. In the case of their latest experiments, the team exposed live prey — zebrafish — to both a live red tiger oscar and a 3D version of the predator fish. The zebrafish swam freely within an arena-like setup around both the real and robotic predator, which in both cases was confined to the middle of the tank. The robot travelled on a dynamic and customizable trajectory that was pre-programmed to mimic the live fish’s typical predatory movements to incite a response within the zebrafish.
The researchers tracked the zebrafish responses to both the replica and the live predator. By eliciting a controlled fear response within the zebrafish from the robotic stimulus, the research demonstrated how transfer entropy can isolate the one-directional cause-and-effect relationship between a robotic replica and the zebrafish. On the other hand, experimenting with live predators, they found a two-directional interaction between the zebrafish and the predator, in which each was influencing the behavior of the other.
Further developments to their innovative robotic platform included engineering the robotic predator to react to the zebrafish’s movements in real time for future experiments. This will allow researchers to further manipulate the interaction between the robotic predator and the zebrafish such that the zebrafish will cause the behavior of the predator.
Porfiri and his team said they hope future studies will reveal more about how animals communicate with one another, as well as provide insights into the evolutionary aspects of social behavior and what determinants elicit fear and anxiety-related responses among zebrafish and even other animals, including humans.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation. The research paper is available at aip.scitation.org.
Note: Images available at http://dam.engineering.nyu.edu/?c=1966&k=7a52a85aaa
About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering
The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly). A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention and entrepreneurship and dedicated to furthering technology in service to society. In addition to its main location in Brooklyn, NYU Tandon collaborates with other schools within NYU, the country’s largest private research university, and is closely connected to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. It operates Future Labs focused on start-up businesses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and an award-winning online graduate program. For more information, visit engineering.nyu.edu.
Originally published at: https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/researchers-pair-robotics-and-information-theory-better-understand-predator-and-prey
