The 2019 IEEE North Jersey Advanced Communications Symposium (NJACS) was held at the Babbio Center, Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, NJ, on Saturday, September 14, 2019. The symposium consisted of four keynote presentations and a parallel poster session contest with nearly a dozen local student posters participating. The symposium was well attended with close to 75 attendees, speakers, and volunteers from the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area.
The symposium started at 9:30 am when the registration desk opened, participants got together for networking, and the posters were set up. The program started at 10:00 am with welcome remarks given by Symposium Chair Dr. Adriaan van Wijngaarden, Nokia Bell Labs. Acknowledgments and thanks to the many technical and financial supporters were given by Mr. Amit Patel, IEEE North Jersey Section ComSoc Chapter Chair. Symposium Program Chair and Stevens Professor, Dr. Yu-Dong Yao delivered opening remarks. Additional co-sponsors for the event included the IEEE North Jersey Section, ComSoc Chapter (which had received additional financial support from the IEEE Communications Society), and its Information Theory, Vehicular Technology and Computer Chapters.
Dr. Yao then gave program remarks and introduced this year’s theme: “Continued Deep Learning”. The morning program began with Dr. Jin Yu (Signify, Phillips Lighting) giving the first lecture on “Audio Recognition with Lighting IoT Systems”. This was followed by Drs. Shang Li, Velin Kournev, and Gaurav Thakur (AT&T Research Labs) on “Deep Learning and Computer Vision for Radio Access Network Planning”. During the lunch break, there was time for discussions with the participants, speakers and with poster presenters. Poster judges also reviewed the materials and student presentations.
The afternoon program started with “Towards More Autonomous UAVs Using Deep Learning” by Dr. Marcus Pendleton (Air Force Research Lab). This was followed by a lecture on “An Introduction to Blockchain-Based Distributed Learning” by Professor Shucheng Yu (Stevens Institute of Technology). Abstract summaries and speaker biographies for all presentations can be found at https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/m/200499.
In the closing remarks following the technical program, program chair Dr. Yao introduced the Poster Committee Chair, Dr. Hannah Zhao (Fairleigh Dickinson University), who announced the winners of the poster competition. The symposium’s Poster Committee had invited students and postdocs during the months prior to the symposium to prepare a poster presentation on recent research work and cutting edge developing technologies for this year’s theme. Undergraduates, Master students, Ph.D. students and postdocs were all encouraged to participate. The symposium’s Poster Committee had accepted a number of high-quality posters from local universities. The poster topics ranged from applications of machine learning for speaker verification biometrics, deep learning for baby detection, fake news detection methods, noise classification using deep learning and others. The poster session provided student researchers with direct interactions with faculty, industry researchers and regional IEEE officers and volunteers. It served as an excellent platform and opportunity to network for future collaborative research and career advancement. The posters were on display all day and special exhibition times were scheduled for all attendees. The poster committee, chaired by Hannah Zhao and further consisting of judges Adrian van Wijngaarden and Stephen Wilkowski, evaluated the posters. The chair emphasized that all posters had been of an extremely high quality and demonstrated the wide range of subject matter and domains to which machine and deep learning was being applied. After a rigorous review process, the following posters were selected to receive poster awards. Third place was a three way tie between three separate poster teams:
First Place: Fangzhou Wang, “Joint Waveform and Receiver Design for Co-Channel Hybrid Active-Passive Sensing with Timing Uncertainty”.
Second Place: Yudi Dong, “Multimodal Biometrics for Speaker Verification Leveraging mmWave Radar”.
Third Place: Nicholas Donatelli, Timothy Flynn, Michael Macari, “CELLS Test Bed”; Yuan Jiang, “Deep Learning Denoising Based Line Spectral Estimation”; and M. Hopwood, S. Wu, A. Wurst, “Deep Learning for Detecting Emotion of Human Voice”.
The first, second, and third place winners received prizes of $200/$150/$100 respectively (one prize per winning participant). All poster presenters received participation certificates.
In his closing remarks, Dr. van Wijngaarden thanked Stevens Institute of Technology for hosting the symposium and for the use of the Babbio Center, which provided an excellent venue for the symposium. Additional thanks went to all co-organizers and volunteers for their hard work that made the symposium a success, including Michael Newell, Registration Chair; Hong Man, Local Arrangements; and Bennet Meyer, CEU coordinator. Please contact the organizing committee or volunteers for any additional follow up questions or feedback on the event.