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14 IEEE AntEnnAs & ProPAgAtIon MAgAzInE A u g u s t 2 0 1 6

organizers who managed to prepare and maintain the conference at the high level that we have observed at all pre-vious meetings. One highlight of the conference this year was acknowledging the 95th birthday of Prof. Yakov S. Shi-frin, the chair of all previous ICATTs.

I very much thank the organiz-ers for inviting me, including my

paper in the technical program, and assisting me in overcoming some formalities associated with my trip. It was a great privilege to be at the jubilee meeting honoring Yakov S. Shifrin and to personally congrat-ulate such a prominent scientist and remarkable person. I was also pleased to convey greetings to Yakov

Solomonovich from a number of his colleagues and from several organi-zations in Moscow. We all sincere-ly wish Yakov Solomonovich many happy returns and new great success and achievements in his many activ-ities. We also wish every success in the organization of the future ICATTs and hope to participate!

a 2016 National Radio Science conference of Firsts in Upper Egypt

Said El-Khamy and Mahmoud El-Hadidi

T he 33rd National Radio Science Conference (NRSC 2016) was jointly organized by the Nation-

al Radio Science Committee (URSI-NRSC) of the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology and the Arab Academy for Science, Tech-nology and Maritime Transport (South Valley Branch, Egypt). For the first time in the history of the NRSC series, the venue for the event was located in upper Egypt. The intention had been to attract researchers, students, and academic staff from this remote part of the coun-try and encourage them to participate and attend this highly prestigious scien-tific gathering.

To the pleasant surprise of the con-ference organizers, a sizable draw of submissions brought in a total of 105 technical papers and 16 graduation proj-ects. Following a rigorous refereeing pro-cess, whereby all papers were blindly evaluated by three independent review-ers, only 53 papers were selected for

inclusion in the conference proceedings. All of the graduations were presented in the form of posters. The following are some NRSC 2016 conference highlights.

The opening session was inau-gurated by the minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research; the governor of Aswan Province; the president of the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technol-ogy; the president of the Arab Acad-emy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport; as well as the presidents of Aswan and Alexandria

Universities and Prof. Yahia Antar, vice president of International URSI. Figure 1 shows a shot of the formal opening ceremony. Following the tra-dition of the NRSC conference series, three pioneers of radio science in Egypt had been honored and their contributions to the radio theory and practice acknowledged. They were Prof. Dr. Said El-Khamy (Alexandria University), Prof. Dr. Osman LOTFY (Cairo University), and Eng. Lotfy SAKR (NileSat). Figure 2 shows Prof. El-Khamy being honored.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2016.2571720Date of publication: 4 August 2016 FIGURE 1. The formal opening ceremony.

15IEEE AntEnnAs & ProPAgAtIon MAgAzInE A u g u s t 2 0 1 6

Following the tradition of the NRSC conference series, three invited talks by distinguished speakers were also present-ed. The first invited speaker was Prof. Dr. Yahia Antar (Royal Military College of Canada and International URSI vice-president), who gave the talk “Reactive Energy and the Near-Field in General Antenna Systems.” The second invit-ed speaker was Prof. Dr. Abdel-Razik Sebak (Concordia University, Canada), who delivered the talk “High Gain Mil-limeter Wave Antennas for 5G Wireless and Security Imaging System.” The third invited speaker was Prof. Dr. Diaa Khalil (Ain Shams University, Egypt), who delivered the talk “The MEMS FTIR Spectrometer: An Optical IC to Analyze Everywhere.” Figure 3 shows Prof. Yahia Antar during his keynote speech. Fol-lowing the NRSC tradition, five papers received awards: two Best Paper Awards and three Best Student Paper Awards. The International URSI, as usual, con-tributed €500 toward the Best Student Paper Awards.

BEST PAPER AWARDS

FIRST PLACE ■ Mai B.S.A. Kafafy and Khaled M.F.

Elsayed, Department of Electron-ics and Communications Engineer-ing, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, “Stochastic Geometry-Based Anal-ysis of Autonomous Uplink Inter-cell Interference Coordination in OFDMA/LTE Wireless Systems.”

SECOND PLACE ■ George A. Adib, Ahmed Shebl,

Yasser M. Sabry, and Diaa Khalil, Faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, “Beating Signal Power Level Improvement in Ring Lasers Based on Coupled Ring Resonators.”

BEST STUDENT PAPER AWARDS

FIRST PLACE ■ Ahmad S. Mahmoud and Hesham

N. Ahmed, Military Technical Col-lege, Cairo, Egypt, “A Novel Nonlin-earity Measure for RF Amplifiers in Jamming Applications.”

SECOND PLACE ■ Mohamed Samir A. Abouelfadl,

Fathy M. Ahmed, Military Technical College, Cairo, Egypt, and Alaud-deen H. Asseesy, Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Mari-time Transport, Aswan, Egypt, “Per-formance Analysis of LFM Pulse Compression Radar Under Effect of Convolution Noise Jamming.”

THIRD PLACE ■ Wafaa A. Shalaby, Waleed Saad, Mona

Shokair, and Moawad I. Dessouky, Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Menoufia University, Menouf, Egypt, “An Efficient Recovery Algorithms

FIGURE 2. Dr. Ashraf El-Sheihy (left), minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, honoring Prof. El-Khamy (right) with an AASTMT administrator present.

FIGURE 3. Prof. Yahia giving his keynote speech.

FIGURE 4. Some of the student teams whose graduation projects received recognition awards.

16 IEEE AntEnnAs & ProPAgAtIon MAgAzInE A u g u s t 2 0 1 6

Using Complex to Real Transforma-tion of Compressed Sensing.”

In addition, and for the first time in the NRSC series, student graduation projects were evaluated, and ten of them received recognition awards. Figure 4 shows some of the winning student teams. Another first: all of the papers that received awards were coauthored and presented by students.

All submitted papers were subjected to the IEEE plagiarism-detection tool, CrossCheck. All accepted papers passed the test successfully. The conference

papers are now in the process of being published in IEEE Xplore. All papers presented were accepted and no abstention was recorded.

Finally, NRSC 2016 has embraced the following new activities that were not typical in previous years:

■ a special session on new trends titled “Cognitive Radio Cloud (CRC): En-abling a Collaborative Environment for Wireless Communication and Networking Research,” by Dr. Mus-tafa El-Nainay and a research team from Alexandria University

■ a special session, “How to Write a Successful Proposal for a Research Project,” by Dr. Yasser Dessouky from Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Trans-port, Alexandria Branch

■ a special session, “Scientific Pub-lications and Citation Secrets,” by Dr. Mahmoud Abdel-Aty from Sohag University

■ a special session, “Patent and Prior Arts,” by Eng. Ahmad Gou-dah from AASTMT, Alexandria Branch.

the 2016 IEEE International Workshop on antenna technology

Xun Gong and Parveen Wahid

T he 12th annual IEEE International Workshop on Antenna Technology (iWAT) was held in beautiful Cocoa

Beach, Florida, 29 February–2 March 2016. A total of 144 people attended this event, coming from 22 countries including Australia, China, France, Ger-many, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The single-track technical program for each day of this three-day conference consist-ed of three oral sessions and one inter-active forum session. The iWAT2016 organizers gratefully acknowledge the generous support from exhibitors and sponsors. iWAT2016 had two sponsors (gold level: Harris Corp.; silver level: Altair) and six exhibitors. In addition, the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida pro-vided financial support. The technical sponsor was the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society.

The technical sessions started with a keynote session of three speakers: Zhi Ning Chen (National University of Singapore), Félix Miranda (NASA), and Stephen Brown (Harris Corp.). There were eight oral session in which all 40 presentations were invited. The topics covered small antennas for por-table devices, antennas for fifth gen-eration (5G) and mmW, reconfigurable

antennas, materials and three-dimen-sional (3-D) printing for antennas, wearable and implanted antennas, metamaterials and metamaterial-based antennas, wireless power transmission, charging and harvesting, and beam-steering and multibeam antennas and arrays (Figure 1).

iWAT has a particular focus on exhib-iting notable papers as posters, which

FIGURE 1. The exhibitions and posters session.Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2016.2572663Date of publication: 4 August 2016