Congratulations to Dr. Aakash Arora, a now graduated doctoral researcher of the University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), who has been awarded the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR) Outstanding PhD Thesis Award.
After completing two Master’s degrees in India, Dr. Arora has been a member of the Signal Processing and Communications (SIGCOM) research group since joining SnT in 2017. He wrote his thesis supervised by SnT’s director, Prof. Bjorn Ottersten, on the topic of “Efficient and Scalable Optimization Algorithms for Multiantenna Signal Processing”.
The 2022 FNR awards ceremony took place on Thursday 20 October, at the Maison des Arts et des Etudiants in Belval. The award for Outstanding PhD Thesis is conferred to a person who has completed their PhD with a dissertation of outstanding scientific quality. The award featured four finalists, of which two were from SnT. Dr. Alireza Haqiqatnejad, was also a finalist, having completed his PhD thesis with the SIGCOM research group on the subject of Enhanced Signal Space Design for Multiuser MIMO Interference.
The motivation of Dr. Arora’s thesis is the situation that the future generation of wireless communication will employ many antennas at the transmitter and at the receiver. This will be required to increase the capacity of the system to enable data-intensive use cases, such as virtual reality. However, the system design with a large number of antennas becomes a challenging task. Thereby requiring the development of efficient and scalable signal processing algorithms. Dr. Arora’s project explored how to design signal processing algorithms that can be applied to the vastly growing number of antennas in future wireless communications systems.
“The University of Luxembourg and SnT provided me with a very good environment for my work. I learned so much from my supervisor’s experience and from the productive exchange in the research group. It was an excellent experience and I feel very honoured to receive this award,” said Dr. Arora.
The FNR annually presents awards in four categories: Outstanding Mentor, Outstanding PhD Thesis, Outstanding Promotion of Science to the Public, and Outstanding Scientific Achievement. The purpose of these awards is to encourage communication between researchers and promote science-related activities for the general public, as well as young people. Both scientists and their institutions are recognised by the FNR awards.