Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / About ITS / Awards / FY 2021 ITS Peer Awards

FY 2021 ITS Peer Awards

The ITS peer-nominated, peer-adjudicated "internal" awards are a decades-old tradition to allow ITS employees to recognize contributions made by their colleagues during the prior fiscal year that they consider outstanding.

  • The Outstanding Publication Award, granted for one journal publication and one NTIA Publication, recognizes outstanding publications that clearly, accurately, and concisely describe the solution to a significant problem, present new data or a unique interpretation of data, or represent an especially comprehensive treatment of a subject
  • The Outstanding Technical Achievement Award is given to an individual or group to recognize an outstanding technical, engineering, and/or scientific achievement
  • The Director's Cornerstone Award is given to an individual or group to recognize outstanding support that assists other staff members in carrying out the operations of ITS

Although ITS remained in maximum telework status during FY 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, ITS was able to accomplish an impressive body of research. This was reflected in a number of nominations being submitted in each category for adjudication by a panel of peers.

  • Outstanding Publication:

    • Stephen D. Voran received the Outstanding Publication Award (Outside Publication) for his article “Full-Reference and No-Reference Objective Evaluation of Deep Neural Network Speech,” delivered virtually at QoMEX 2021. The nominator and panel identified this paper as concise and well-written proof of how Steve is at the cutting edge of speech recognition research that is of critical importance in a broad range of applications but especially in safety-of-life systems.

    • Robert J. Achatz received the Outstanding Publication Award (NTIA Publication) for a Special Report prepared for a sponsor and still subject to dissemination controls. The nominator and panel cited the report's clear, concise, systematical, and thorough approach to addressing a difficult link budget research question. Extensive data gathering, site surveys, and measurements went into the effort, and experimental validation of results showed less than 1 dB difference between measurement and model. The approach documented for this sponsor serves as an exemplar for future spectrum sharing modeling.

    • Kenneth Brewster, John Dumke, John Ewan, Brian Lain, Anna Paulson, Savio Tran, Linh Vu, and Jeffery Wepman shared an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for development and deployment of a new advanced system with precision geolocation for mmWave spectrum measurements. The system design integrated an ITS-developed high precision geolocation system and used a modular approach that supports future flexibility, allowing core components to be reconfigured to support lower frequency measurements and upcoming work on a wide-band channel sounder. This will be the core system to support planned future activities, including clutter measurements, allowing increased path distances in high loss environments and solving positional issues in prior clutter measurements.

    • Anthony Romaniello received an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for development and deployment of a new advanced system with precision geolocation for mmWave spectrum measurements, a critical contribution to meeting milestones and deliverables for a project requested by NTIA's Office of Spectrum Management. He conducted CBRS mobile measurements in three locations in Colorado and distill the large amount of measurement data into easily understandable geospatial visualizations, providing valuable insights and data for other projects.

    • Lilli Segre received the Director's Cornerstone Award for sustained assistance to her peers during a disruptive transition period.