From November 16 to 20, 2020, Professor Rui Zhang from National University of Singapore participated in three online academic activities held by College of Communication Engineering. The lectures were chaired by Professor Hu Fengye and synchronously conducted via online and offline platforms. More than 200 students and teachers participated in the activities.
On November 16, 18 and 20, Professor Rui Zhang respectively gave three academic reports under the topic of “Towards Smart and Reconfigurable Radio Environment: Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Communication”, “Signal Processing and Optimization in UAV Communication and Trajectory Design” and “Wireless Power Transfer Meets Communication: An Overview”.
At the first lecture, Professor Rui Zhang introduced the research significance and the hardware structure of Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) and fully explained the main function and application of IRS reflecting and channel model. He also compared IRS with other existing wireless communication technology to help us further understand IRS. The lecture also describe the existing challenges and the progress direction of research on IRS.
The second lecture given by Professor Rui Zhang mainly focused on the academic research on the combination of UAVs and wireless communications. Professor Rui Zhang introduced the research motivation and significance and fully explained the current research progress on terrestrial communication. He also described two major challenges in signal processing and carried out a prospect on future research.
At the third lecture, Professor Rui Zhang reported the research review on wireless energy transfer and wireless communications. He made a thorough explanation on the motivation, application and model of wireless energy transfer and concluded the current research progress of this technology. At last Professor Rui Zhang forecast the future development of the technology objectively.
During the meeting, participating students and teacher made active engagement in discussions and Professor Rui Zhang answered all questions carefully and patiently. After the activities, many participants said that they learned a lot from the activities.
Dr. Rui Zhang (IEEE Fellow) received the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in electrical engineering. When studying for Ph.D. degree at Stanford University, he was guided by John M. Cioffi and worked at Dynamic Spectrum Management Lab. From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a researcher at the Institute for Infocomm Research, ASTAR, Singapore. Since January 2010, he has joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of National University of Singapore, where he is now a Professor in the Faculty of Engineering. His current research interests include energy and efficiency collection in UAV/satellite communication, wireless power transfer, reconfigurable MIMO, Cognitive Radio, Smart Grid and optimization methods. He has published over 200 papers, which have been cited more than 9,000 times. He was the recipient of the 6th IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Region Best Young Researcher Award in 2011, and the Young Researcher Award of National University of Singapore in 2015. . He served for over 30 international conferences as the TPC Co-Chair or an Organizing Committee Member. He now serves as an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society SPCOM and SAM Technical Committees, and the Vice Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Board Technical Affairs Committee. Dr. Rui Zhang also serves as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC), IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (TSP) and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC).
