PhD Alum Pengyu Zhang Wins ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award

Pengyu Zhang, a 2016 graduate of the UMass CICS PhD program advised by Professor Deepak Ganesan, now a postdoctoral researcher in Stanford University's Computer Science Department, has been named a winner of the 2017 ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award.

The ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award recognizes exemplary thesis research by doctoral candidates, specifically within mobile computing and wireless networks. The Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group on mobility of systems users, data, and computing (SIGMOBILE) sponsors this award.

Zhang's submission, "Leveraging Backscatter for Ultra-Low Power Wireless Sensing Systems," presents the "fundamental principles underlying the physical layer, hardware architecture, and operating system design of backscatter based sensors to enable widespread deployment of such systems."

This year, two winners and one runner-up will receive ACM SIGMOBILE dissertation awards; the recipients will be recognized at a SIGMOBILE Conference later this year.

Zhang's dissertation also received a 2016 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences.