Research Prizes 2006 at the Centre

Each year, the Centre for Communication Systems Research runs the Research Excellence competition for its full-time researchers, PhD students and research fellows. The aims of this competition are:

• To reward research excellence.
• To highlight and develop best practice in research.
• To encourage positive competition.
• To further industrial relevance and interaction.

These awards are judged and provided by our sponsors with whom the Centre has close research links. This year we had five sponsors: Inmarsat, Nokia, Thales, Vodafone and Motorola. We received 15 applications in total, 10 of which were shortlisted for presentation.

The criteria used to award the prizes was based on: (i) Originality and potential of the research, (ii) Progress achieved over the 12-month period, (iii) Publications accepted in major conferences and journals; (iv) Patents awarded and (v) resulting research contracts.

This year the awards ceremony was held on Thursday 24th February and it was attended by all members of CCSR as well as Professor M. Kearney – Head of School. All the members of the panel commented on the very high standards of research that they were asked to judge, which made the selection of the five winners a very difficult task.

This year’s five prizes of £1,000 each were awarded to:

• INMARSAT: Mr Zaheer Ahmad For "H2.64 Header compression-based video quality enhancement for wireless communications"
• NOKIA: Mr Mohammad Abaii For "Load matrix; an efficient resource allocation scheme for B3G cellular mobile systems"
• THALES: Dr Banu Gunel For "Sound source and reflection localization using a compact microphone array"
• MOTOROLA: Dr Siva Sivavakeesar For "SCOUR: Stabilised constraint-based on-line unicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks"
• VODAFONE: Mr Yajian Liu For "Integrated radio resource allocation for multi-hop cellular networks with fixed relay stations"