Dr. Xi Zhang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been recently selected as the winner of the prestigious Best Paper Award at the IEEE GLOBECOM 2014 conference held earlier this month in Austin, Texas.
Zhang and his Ph.D. student co-author, Jingqing Wang, won the IEEE GLOBECOM 2014 Best Paper Award for their paper "3D Percolation Theory-Based Exposure-Path Prevention for Optimal Power-Coverage Tradeoff in Clustered Wireless Camera Sensor Networks." This research is the part of projects sponsored by Zhang’s U.S. National Science Foundation grants.
Zhang, the founding director of the Networking and Information Systems Laboratory and an expert in wireless networks and information systems, joined the Texas A&M faculty upon receiving his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science (electrical engineering systems) from The University of Michigan. He was with the Networks and Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hills, New Jersey, and with AT&T Laboratories Research in Florham Park, New Jersey.
Zhang has published more than 300 research papers, one book, several book chapters and presented more than 20 keynote/plenary and tutorial talks at IEEE leading conferences. He received the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2004. He is both IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer and IEEE Vehicular Society Distinguished Lecturer. He received Best Paper Awards at IEEE GLOBECOM 2014, IEEE WCNC 2010, GLOBECOM 2009, IEEE GLOBECOM 2007, respectively. He also received a TEES Select Young Faculty Award for "Excellence in Research Performance” from the college of engineering at Texas A&M in 2006. Zhang receives multimillion-dollar research funds from U.S. NSF and U.S. DoD for his research in Wireless Networks.
He is serving or has served as editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology and IEEE Communications Letters. He also was guest editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Communications Magazine, and IEEE Wireless Communications. He is serving or has served as TPC chair for IEEE GLOBECOM 2011, TPC area chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2012, general vice-chair for IEEE WCNC 2013, TPC vice-chair for IEEE CCNC 2013, TPC vice-chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2010, among others.
His research interests include wireless networks and communications systems, multimedia transmissions over wireless networks, network protocol design and modeling, statistical communications, random signal processing, information theory and control theory and systems.
IEEE GLOBECOM is the most important flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society, where Zhang was the general Technical Program Committee (TPC) chair for IEEE GLBEOCOM 2011 in Houston. The conference meets once a year in North America and attracts more than 2,000 leading scientists and researchers and industry leaders from all around the world. IEEE GLOBECOM is therefore one of the most significant scientific events of the networking and communications community, a must-attend event for scientists and researchers from industry and academia.