WSA 2018

Aylin Yener joined Penn State Electrical Engineering in January 2002 as an assistant professor. She was promoted to associate professor with tenure in July 2006 and to full professor in July 2010. Dr. Yener has been the principal investigator on numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense. Her research interests are in networked systems, in particular characterizing the fundamental limits of these with applications to wireless and wired networks, green communications, multi-genre networks and information security. Her core expertise areas are in communications, information theory, signal processing and network science. She has about 250 publications in books, journals, and conference proceedings to date.

Dr. Yener currently serves on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society as an elected member for the term 2015-2017. Pr Previously, she served on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society as its Treasurer in 2012-2014, and was the chair of the Student Committee of the IEEE Information Theory Society in the years 2007-2011. She served as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications in the years 2009-2012, and an editor and a member of the editorial advisory board of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in the years 2001-2012. Dr. Yener also served as the technical program-chair for several symposia in IEEE conferences in years 2005-2014.

Emina Soljanin received the PhD and MS degrees from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 1989 and 1994, and the European Diploma degree from University of Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1986, all in Electrical Engineering. From 1986 to 1988, she worked in the Energoinvest Company, Bosnia, developing optimization algorithms and software for power system control. After graduating from Texas A&M in 1994, she joined Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, where she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Mathematics of Networks and Communications research department.

Emina's research interests are broad, but mainly concern efficient, reliable, and secure storage and transmission networks. In the course of her twenty year employment with Bell Labs, she has participated in a very wide range of research and business projects.

These projects include designing the first distance enhancing codes to be implemented in commercial magnetic storage devices, first forward error correction for Lucent's optical transmission devices, color space quantization and color image processing, quantum computation, link error prediction methods for the third generation wireless network standards, and anomaly and intrusion detection. Her most recent activities are in the area of network and application layer coding.

Emina served as a Technical Proof-Reader, 1990-1992, and as the Associate Editor for Coding Techniques, 1997-2000, for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. She has been serving as a Co-Chair for the DIMACS Special Focus on Computational Information Theory and Coding. She spent 2008 as a visiting researcher at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne ( EPFL ), in Switzerland. Dr. Soljanin is a member of the editorial board of the Springer Journal on Applicable Algebra in Engineering, Communication and Computing AAECP ), and a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Mohamed-Slim Alouini was born in Tunis, Tunisia. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA, in 1998. He served as a Faculty Member with the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA, then with the Texas A&M University at Qatar, Doha, Qatar, before joining the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, as a Professor of electrical engineering in 2009.

Professor Alouini’s research interests are in the modeling, design, and performance analysis of wireless communication systems with current emphasis on MIMO, diversity, and adaptive modulation systems, cognitive radio systems, cooperative/collaborative communication systems, multi-hop communication systems, physical-layer security, MIMO RADAR systems, optical wireless communications, device-to-device communications, green communications systems and networks, and small cell/heterogenous networks.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a member of the Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge list of Highly Cited Researchers, and of the Elsevier/Shanghai Ranking list of Most Cited Researchers,​ an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society, and a co-recipient of best paper awards in ten IEEE conferences (including ICC, GLOBECOM, VTC, PIMRC and DySPAN).