ECE Students win Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

Fin Amin, Tse-Han Pan, Joseph Carlson and Nitish Deshpande, all ECE Ph.D. students, were selected as winners in the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship North America 2023!

Four ECE Ph.D. students were selected as winners in the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship North America 2023!

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) is a research and development program headed by Qualcomm. The fellowship allows Qualcomm to partner with Ph.D. students from universities across the world “in order to cultivate new and forward-thinking ideas.” The QIF program establishes a routine procedure for students to engage with Qualcomm and share information and ideas.

Fin Amin and Tse-Han Pan, advised by ECE Cirrus Logic Distinguished Professor Paul Franzon, won as a team on their presentation titled “Custom Reinforcement Learning Agents and Policy Optimizers for 2.5D and 3D Floorplanning in Electronic Design Automation.”

Additionally, Joseph Carlson and Nitish Deshpande, advised by ECE Lampe Distinguished Professor Robert Heath, won as a team for their presentation titled “Hybrid beamforming using dynamic metasurface antennas for wideband massive MIMO systems.”

Students in the QIF program are afforded mentorship from Qualcomm engineers who provide support with research goals. Students apply and submit proposals on any innovative idea they choose. From there, Qualcomm Research’s top engineers review the proposal and select finalists.

After finalists are selected, the students are required to prepare a 12-minute presentation including their innovative idea, how their idea is different from other state-of-the-art methods, and the team’s execution plan.

Some other universities that had students win include UCLA, Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.

Congratulations to Fin, Tse-Han, Joseph and Nitish for their accomplishment and recognition from Qualcomm!