Outreach

 

Outreach:

  • Due to the COVID situation, most of the outreach activities over the past year happened online. The terahertz teams in both PI Knightly’s lab and PI Mittleman’s lab organized a regular biweekly cross-group meeting for research idea discussion and knowledge exchange for several months. Postdocs and graduate students, more than 10 people in total, participated in the regular cross-group meeting and continue their discussions after the meetings. These discussions develop new collaboration and visiting plans once it is safe to travel.
  • In the past year, PI Knightly, PI Mittleman, and Knightly’s PhD student Chia-Yi, who works on the physical layer security of leaky-wave antenna links, reached out to Prof. Muriel Médard at MIT to seek collaboration for designing secure coding scheme for leaky-wave antenna transmission. The three parties (Rice, Brown, MIT) now have regular weekly meetings on developing secure transmit schemes considering the physical properties of the antennas.
  • Several students have participated in the research. This includes one Brown undergraduate, who was a co-author on the Nature Communications paper and has now begun graduate school, as well as two Brown PhD students. It also includes two of Knightly’s PhD students who have made several extended visits to Mittleman’s laboratories at Brown in order to be trained on the THz measurement equipment and to acquire much of the data that is contained in the uploaded publications.
  • Samuel Zhou, an undergraduate at Rice University completed a summer internship in 2020. He studied security opportunities in THz wireless communication. He was advised by PI Knightly and Rice graduate student, Chia-Yi Yeh.
  • During the summer of 2020, Miftah Chowdhury completed a research internship at Rice University. Miftah is a graduate student at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, (KIT) Germany. Miftah worked on the project, 3D Path Discovery in Mobile THz Networks. He worked closely with the PI Knightly and project participants on the design, challenges and implementation of this project. So far, we have designed and implemented a 2D path discovery approach for efficient mobility adaptation in wireless THz networks. The reason is that the frequency-dependent emissions from a leaky-wave antenna have a fan beam shape, i.e., small half-power beamwidth in one plane while having a broad beamwidth on the vertical plane.  Hence, the spectral signature of the THz Rainbow is limited to one plane, hindering the 3D path discovery. To overcome this challenge, we have recently designed a new leaky antenna that incorporates two slits (one horizontal and one vertical) on the same waveguide plate. In principle, the horizontal and vertical slots enable frequency-dependent spatial steering in azimuth and elevation planes, respectively. We will analytically and experimentally explore the spectral properties of the superposed far-field emissions (from both slots) to extend our path discovery platform to 3D space.

Honors and Awards:

  • The paper “Efficient leaky-wave antennas at terahertz frequencies generating highly directional beams” was selected as the cover feature of the Applied Physics Letters journal. (Volume 117, Issue 26, 28 Dec. 2020)
  • Yasaman GhasemPour, advised by PI Knightly received her PhD., Rice University. She will join Princeton University as an assistant professor in January 2021.
  • Yasaman GhasemPour received the Marconi Society Paul Baran Young Scholar Award, 2020.
  • Yasaman GhasemPour received an ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2020.

  • Keerthi Dasala, advised by E. Knightly defended a Ph.D. thesis 2022, Rice University.

  • Rabi Shrestha, advised by D. Mittleman defended a Ph.D. thesis 2022, Brown University.

Invited Presentations:

  • Keerthi Dasala, advised by PI Knightly, will present a talk on “Multi-User Terahertz WLANs with Angularly Dispersive Links” at ACM MobiHoc 2022.
  • E. Knightly, Wireless Networking, Security, and Sensing above 100 GHz,ACM MobiCom 2021, New Orleans, LA, March 2022.
  • E. Knightly, Wireless Networking, Security, and Sensing above 100 GHz, Technical University of Braunschweig, June 2022.
  • E. Knightly, THz Physical Layer Security,1st International Workshop on Metrology for THz Communications, June 2022.
  • D. Mittleman, Physical Layer Security in Terahertz Wireless Links, CSIR National Physical Laboratory of India (presented online), April 2022
  • D. Mittleman, Conformal Leaky-Wave Antennas for Terahertz Wireless Communications, 8th International Conference on Antennas and Electromagnetic Systems, Marrakesh Morocco, May 2022.
  • D. Mittleman, Physical Layer Security in Terahertz Wireless Links, Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Terahertz Communications at IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) (presented online), May 2022.
  • D. Mittleman, Security in Terahertz Wireless Links, AFRL Tech Showcase on Terahertz Communications, Rome NY, August 2022.
  • In the past year, we have published and presented our work in the SenSys’20 conference.
  • PI Knightly presented the work in keynote talks at several other international conferences including International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology (IIT’20) November 2020 and IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC 2021) January 2021. PI Knightly also presented the work in 6G Symposium as a panelist October 2020.
  • PI Mittleman presented the work as one of the three invited keynote speakers at the 8th ACM International Conference on Nanoscale Computing and Communication (online via Catania Italy, September 2021), and as one of the ten plenary speakers at the 46th International Conference on Infrared Millimeter and Terahertz Waves (online via Chengdu China, August 2021).
  • In 2020, we have published one journal article in Nature Communications and another in Optics Express, as well as two accepted conference proceedings (in MobiCom 2020 and WiSec 2020).
  • PI Mittleman presented the work in invited or keynote talks at several other international conferences including the International Workshop on Mobile Terahertz Systems (IWMTS, July 2020), the OSA Advanced Photonics Congress, Topical Meeting on Photonic Networks and Devices (NETWORKS, July 2020), and CLEO Pacific Rim (August 2020).