News:

· Research group alumnus Deniz Gunduz is the recipient of the Alexander Hessel Award for the Best Ph.D Dissertation in Electrical and Computer Engineering for the year July 2007-June 2008.

· New NSF grants:

- “MRI: Acquisition of an Experimental Platform for Wireless Multimedia Networking,” 2007-2010.

- “CRI: IAD Cooperative Networking Testbed,” 2007-2009.

- “Joint Source and Channel Coding for Wireless Networks,” 2007-2010.

· The paper “Diversity-multiplexing tradeoff in half-duplex relay systems,” by M. Yuksel and E. Erkip is selected as the Best Paper of the Communication Theory Symposium of ICC 2007.

· The paper “Minimum expected distortion in Gaussian joint source-channel layered broadcast coding with successive refinement,” by C.T. K. Ng, D. Gunduz, A. J. Goldsmith and E. Erkip is selected for the Student Paper Award at ISIT 2007.

Biography:

Elza Erkip received the Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and the B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Turkey. She joined Polytechnic University in Spring 2000, where she is now an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. During 1996-1999 she was with Rice University. She is currently on sabbatical leave at Princeton University.

Dr. Erkip received NSF CAREER award in 2001 and IBM Faculty Partnership Award in 2000. Her papers (co-authored with Andrew Sendonaris and Behnaam Aazhang) “User cooperation-diversity: Part I and II” won 2004 Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Paper Prize in the Field of Communications Theory, as the best original papers published in IEEE Transactions on Communications in 2003. Her paper (co-authored with Melda Yuksel) “Diversity-multiplexing tradeoff in half-duplex relay systems” was selected as the Best Paper of the Communication Theory Symposium, ICC 2007 and her paper (co-authored with Chris Ng, Deniz Gunduz and Andrea Goldsmith) “Minimum expected distortion in Gaussian joint source-channel layered broadcast coding with successive refinement,” won the Student Paper Award, ISIT 2007.

Dr. Erkip is a Senior Member of IEEE. She is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications, a Publications Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and a Guest Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on Signal Processing for Multiterminal Communication Systems. She organized Workshop on Cooperative Communications, sponsored by WICAT, an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center at Polytechnic University. She was the Technical Area Chair for the "MIMO Communications and Signal Processing" track of 41st Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, and the Technical Program Co-Chair of 2006 Communication Theory Workshop. She has also served on Technical Program Committees of numerous IEEE Conferences. Her general research interests are in wireless communications, information theory and communication theory.