College of Engineering students garner "Best Team Award" in the Wright Brothers Institute & Air Force Research Lab annual Beyond 5G Challenge.
/filters:quality(90)/prod01/production-cdn-pxl/media/umassdartmouth/college-of-engineering/news/beyond-5g-challenge-team-1.jpg?text=945+WebP)
A student team led by Dr. Ruolin Zhou in the Electrical Engineering department at UMass Dartmouth's College of Engineering recently competed in the Beyond 5G Challenge. In collaboration with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), Wright Brothers Institute (WBI) hosts an annual competition to explore, research, and innovate applications of software-defined radio (SDR) and software-defined networks (SDN).
This competition, known as the Beyond 5G Challenge, is extended to universities across the nation. Teams from prominent universities draft a proposal for research and work for half a year in close communications with researchers from both the AFRL and WBI. In May, each team showcases their research, and awards are given to the top teams.
The College of Engineering team competed with other top universities such as Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Ohio State University, and Case Western Reserve University. The proposed research was to leverage incremental learning to classify radio jammers in real-time and to autonomously adapt when jamming technologies change. Incremental learning is an emerging technique in machine learning, that allows continual learning, which means that when a new jamming technique is encountered, the radio learns and remembers it.
The team consisted of the following:
- Dr. Ruolin Zhou, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Todd Morehouse, 3rd-year Ph.D. Student
- Charles Montes, 2nd-year Ph.D. Student
- Michael Bisbano, Senior in Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Jin Feng Lin, Senior in Electrical and Computer Engineering
During the competition, the team showcased their design in a demonstration of their research to adapt to a dynamic and challenging environment. The team was awarded the Best Team Award in the constrained category. Additionally, a student member, Todd Morehouse, won the Travel Grant Award, to fund trips to publish future research. Watch the video.