Congratulations Lissy Pellaco!
Lissy Pellaco, doctoral student at ISE has been awarded “Outstanding Student Paper Award” at the International Conference of Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2021) for her paper “Deep Weighted MMSE Downlink Beamforming”. We spoke to her about the award and her work at KTH.
What does this award mean to you?
“This award is a big achievement for me. I am very happy and honored to receive it and to share it with my coauthors Mats Bengtsson and Joakim Jaldén, who is also my supervisor. It is a recognition of the hard work that we carried out in the past year and, considering that PhD life can be stressful at times, it definitely helps stay motivated.”
Could you tell us a bit about the paper?
“In our paper we aim to maximize the transmission data rate of a mobile network, in presence of computational complexity constraints. To this end, we apply a machine learning technique called deep unfolding to a popular iterative algorithm in the field of wireless communications, which is well-performing but computationally heavy.
From a theoretical standpoint, we prove that machine learning does not invalidate the convergence guarantees of the original algorithm. From a practical standpoint, we show that our machine-learning-based approach achieves a performance compared to the original algorithm at a significantly lower computational complexity.”
As a doctoral student, you are also part of the coordination group of the Female PhD Student Network at EECS, what does this network do? Why have you chosen to work with this group?
“The aim of this network is to bring together the female PhD students at EECS School, who unfortunately are still a minority. By organizing seminars and social events, we promote networking and we hope to motivate and inspire female researchers. Personally, I think that we, as female PhD students, can really benefit from these events, so when the opportunity to join the coordination group presented itself, I did not hesitate!”
How will you celebrate this award?
“I will have a nice dinner with my boyfriend and when I go back to my hometown for vacation I will also celebrate with my family.”
Joakim Jaldén, you are Lissy’s supervisor, and you also co-wrote the paper, how would you describe the significance of this award?
"The international conference on acoustics, speech, and signal processing (ICASSP) is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. To be selected as one of 4 papers to be awarded with an outstanding student paper award among the 3652 submitted and 1793 presented papers is a clear recognition of the quality and importance of Lissy’s contribution.”
