SMART Hub holds first center meeting at Baylor University

WACO, TX (July 31, 2024) – The Hub for Spectrum Management with Adaptive and Reconfigurable Technology (SMART Hub) completed its first center meeting in July. The meeting was held on the campus of Baylor University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, and faculty researchers from SMART Hub institutions were in attendance. In this meeting, initial research steps for this Center were established to be culminated in a demonstration at the six-month point in the research project.  

“We’ve had a great interaction with our researchers, and their creativity and innovation are truly inspiring,” said SMART Hub Director Dr. Charlie Baylis. “We have coordinated our efforts, and are prepared to go and make an immediate impact with our work. We have developed plans for innovation that will make a difference at the 6-month and 1-year marks of this project, and that is good news for our U.S. defense partners.”  

The SMART Hub center meeting began with a state-of-the-center update from Dr. Baylis, followed by discussions of basic research techniques and spectrum management approaches that will be common to the entire team. Researchers then split into breakout sessions to discuss interdisciplinary tasks, and reconvened to share demonstration plans. The one-and-a-half day meeting was used to kick off the research that will span the next 12 months.

“I am very excited to see what comes out of these interdisciplinary project teams,” said Baylis. “The expertise of our researchers, combined with our unified plan, is something that will generate technology that can actually be used by real people in dense spectral environments.”  

Dr. Austin Egbert, Director of Strategic Initiatives for SMART Hub, is leading the coordination of the multidisciplinary research projects.  “We have identified several near- and long-term research goals that will greatly improve our ability to operate in congested spectral environments. These types of developments would not be possible without the cross-pollination and collaboration of our fantastic researchers, and I’m looking forward to seeing the great improvements and breakthroughs they will achieve,” said Egbert.

In addition to research project planning, a coordinated effort to host four undergraduate spectrum workshops across the country was planned for Summer 2025. Tom Brooks, Director of Strategic Initiatives for SMART Hub, will be coordinating this project, designed to develop interest in wireless spectrum issues among undergraduates around the country. Workshops will be held at Baylor, Colorado State University, New York Institute of Technology, and Virginia Tech, all SMART Hub institutions.    

“We tripled our attendance from Summer 2023 to Summer 2024 with our Spectrum Sizzle Workshop on Baylor’s campus,” said Brooks. “By strategically placing next summer’s workshops in four regions of the country (North, Southeast, West and South) we look to triple our attendance year over year once again. These one week on-campus workshops are more than just great resume builders for technological understanding and professional development. We give students valuable hands-on experience that they may not have at their home institutions.”  

With the planning from this meeting, SMART Hub members are excited about next steps in these endeavors. “With God’s enablement and provision, we hope to provide and grow the intellectual resources to solve some of our nation’s biggest wireless spectrum problems,” said Baylis.  

The Hub for Spectrum Management with Adaptive and Reconfigurable Technology (SMART Hub) is a collection of researchers, engineers, and economic and policy experts looking to enact a paradigm shift in the use and management of the wireless spectrum. We believe that spectrum management needs to be adaptive and reconfigurable end-to-end, from policy down through circuits and out through propagation.