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Prof. Wing-Kin Ma from the Department of Electronic Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2017 for his contributions to optimization in signal processing and communications.  IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honour and an important career achievement.  The total number of recipients each year does not exceed 0.1% of the total voting IEEE membership.  So far, a total of 28 professors in CUHK have been conferred such recognition including Professor Ma.

Research in signal processing, communications, optimization and remote sensing are important powerhouses behind many amazing technologies, like smartphones we use every day, and how we can discover something we cannot see with the human eye in biomedical images or in a Mars image.  Professor Ma is well recognized for his fundamental contributions to the above areas and he has tackled a number of key problems, such as developing high-performance multi-in multi-out (MIMO) detection solutions for wireless communications (a key technology for Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G and more); interference management and resource optimization in a complex mobile network (e.g., 4G and 5G networks); matrix factorization techniques that can be used to separate different parts of tissues in a biomedical image, or tell which materials a remote sensing picture contains under hyperspectral imaging technology, to name a few.  At the heart of these seemingly different developments is optimization—think of real-life problems such as finance and logistics management, which optimization can solve and give us the best answers to. 

Professor Ma’s work is highly influential.  He has about 7,000 citations in Google Scholar, about 3,200 citations in Web of Science, and 8 papers that have been listed as Highly-Cited Papers by Essential Science Indicators (the top 1% of the academic field of engineering, simply speaking).  He received the prestigious IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award in 2015 and IEEE Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award in 2016.  Concerning student mentoring, two of his students received best student paper awards in ICASSP, the top signal processing conference.  One received the Postgraduate Research Output Award by CUHK and one is now a faculty member in The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and is in the competitive programme of ‘1000 Talents Program for Young Professionals’ in China. 

About IEEE 

The IEEE is the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity, with more than 430,000 members in over 160 countries.  IEEE Fellowship is one of the most prestigious honours of the Institute, and conferred upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.