School of Information Sciences

Martin Weiss, professor, awarded three-year grant from NSF

10/21/2016

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced that they had awarded $12 million dollars to 11 different projects that are focusing on radio spectrum research. Martin Weiss, professor and Informatics & Networked Systems program chair, was among the awardees for his research titled, “Automated Enforcement in Spectrum Sharing: Technical Challenges and Policy Considerations.” Dr. Weiss will conduct this research with Taieb Znati, chair and professor of Pitt’s Department of Computer Science, and Jung-Min Park, assistant professor at Virginia Tech.

The NSF has invested heavily—$60 million over the past three years—in the area of radio spectrum research, as it offers the opportunity to both enhance utilization of the spectrum for current users and to expand its capabilities in under-resourced (in terms of wireless technologies) parts of the country. As the spectrum is a finite, yet critical resource, the NSF has underwritten a wide variety of research projects that “represent bold new approaches with the potential to contribute to improvements in the efficiency of radio spectrum utilization while protecting passive sensing services, and allowing traditionally underserved Americans to benefit from current and future wireless-enabled goods and services,” explains Jim Kurose, head of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directors of NSF.

Parts of the spectrum are dedicated to radio astronomy, passively monitoring the environment, and offering public safety and national defense systems. Protecting these sections must be a priority, while still expanding access to other parts, which will facilitate reliable and low-cost wireless access for all residents of the U.S.

“We’re extremely proud that the potential of our work has been recognized by the NSF,” explains Weiss. “This is a critical endeavor for the United States, one that will permit more and better use of spectrum frequencies while protecting critical systems that already use that spectrum. Our work will help to deploy a systematic enforcement regime that can be fully automated, allowing the enforcement processes to occur in near real time and at scale. This will result in efficiencies in both utilization and in costs.”

To read more, visit NSF’s Web site.

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