Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / About ITS / Awards / 2020 Bronze Medal Awards
2020 Bronze Medal Awards
Douglas Boulware, Michael Cotton, Justin Haze, Bradley Eales, Todd Schumann, Adam Hicks, John Ewan, Max Hollingsworth, and Peter Mathys shared a Bronze Medal Group Award for leading the four-year development and implementation of the IEEE 802.15.22.3 standard for Spectrum Characterization and Occupancy Sensing (SCOS). SCOS establishes a universal standard for command and control across sensor networks; eliminates vendor-lock in and reduces system development and integration time and cost; enables spectrum monitoring to scale across low-cost, heterogeneous, distributed sensors to provide persistent automated sensing across large geographic areas; and provides a data/metadata transfer specification that describes the provenance of the data to promote data sharing and reuse.
William Kozma, Christopher Behm, Paul McKenna, and Nicholas DeMinco shared a Bronze Medal Group Award. The group was honored for development, test, release, and global adoption of the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) Propagation Code Library for use by experts and non-experts. The code library establishes a common and standardized set of propagation software tools for the wireless community to develop, test, and improve. Updates and changes to the models are reviewed and validated by the ITS Propagation Focus Group to ensure good science underlying the models. Because ITS code signs the software, users can be confident that the products originate at ITS and have not been tampered with.
Angela McCrory, Gerardo Saqueton, Rajpreet Grewal and Anton Nguyen-Vu shared a Bronze Medal Group Award for persistently applying deep expertise to verify through testing that responders can maintain Wireless Priority Services (WPS) communications in disaster conditions. This ITS Priority Services testing team verified for the first time that WPS users could successfully complete LTE Inter-eNB handovers into a cell experiencing extreme loading and that these calls maintained proper priority markings during handover. This testing supports Department of Homeland Security efforts to ensure that national security and emergency preparedness personnel can communicate in affected areas during an emergency.
Irena Stange, Todd Schumann, Bruce Ward, Mustafa Yilmaz, and Jaydee Griffith shared a Bronze Medal Group Award for their work in support of the Department of Transportation (DOT). For several years, this test and evaluation team supported DOT’s investigation into the use of new technology for vehicle to vehicle (V2V) safety communications in the 5.9 GHz spectrum. Despite extremely tight time frames and rapidly changing project requirements, the test team consistently met DOT’s expectations and provided data generated from testing of real devices to inform DOT’s position on pending FCC regulatory action on this critical technology designed to prevent tens of thousands of yearly deaths on U.S. roadways.
Eric Nelson and Robert Ballard shared a Bronze Medal Group Award. In only six months’ time, they replaced an aging Microsoft Access back-end financial tools database with a modern, robust, stable Microsoft SQL Server production database that meaningfully reduces project managers’ rework and planning time.
Along with staff from other NTIA offices, Jacob Neal, Brian Lain, and Michael Cotton shared in a Bronze Medal Group Award for establishing the standard process and structure for IT Common Security Control inheritance. In so doing, the group improved the efficiency of, and eliminated duplicate efforts in, the annual security assessment and authorization of 16 NTIA Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) systems.
Along with staff from other NTIA offices, Andrew Thiessen shared in a Bronze Medal Group Award for playing a key role in implementing the Secure 5G Act, ensuring that U.S. consumers and industry will have secure access to 5G networks, and assisting the White House in the implementation of the National Strategy to Secure 5G and Beyond.