The awardee, Dr. AZIZ，Muhammad Reza Kahar (graduated from the JAIST PhD course at June 2016, a member of Information Theory and Signal Processing Laboratory led by Prof. Matsumoto of Security and Network Area), currently serving as a lecturer at Electrical Engineering Department, Institut Teknologi Sumatera (ITERA), has continued joint work since his graduation. The joint work between his Lab in Indonesia and the JAIST Information Theory and Signal Processing Lab achieved a lot of results. A part of the results has been published in IEEE Access Journal (Impact Factor 3.745 in 2020), based on which he received a Certificate of Appreciation for successfully published 2 papers in IEEE Access Journal in the period of 1 Jan 2020 - Feb 2021. He is also a recipient of IEEE Journal Award IEEE Indonesia last year, as detailed here.

According to the IEEE by law, each section provides award(s) to the author(s) of the excellent paper(s). Dr. AZIZ，Muhammad Reza Kahar received this award with the recognition by the award committee for his high quality publications, in part, of the joint work with JAIST and, in part, of his own research group (in total, for his two publications).

■Date of the Award
February 20, 2021

■Authors
Cheng, Meng; Aziz, Muhammad Reza Kahar; Matsumoto, Tad

■Title
" Integrated Factor Graph Algorithm for DOA-based Geolocation and Tracking," in IEEE Access, 2020 Issue 8, pp. 49989 - 49998

※JAIST Repository

■Abstract
This paper proposes a new position tracking algorithm by integrating extended Kalman filter (EKF) and direction-of-arrival (DOA)-based geolocation into one factor graph (FG) framework. A distributed sensor network is assumed for detecting an anonymous target, where the process and observation equations in the state space model (SSM) are unknown. Importantly, the predicted state information can be utilized not only for filtering, but also for enhancing the observation process. To be specific, by taking the prediction into account as the a priori, a new FG scheme is proposed for GEolocation, denoted by FG-GE. The benefits are two-fold compared to the conventional geolocation schemes which do not use the a priori information. First of all, significant performance improvement can be observed, in terms of the root mean square error (RMSE), when severe sensing errors are suddenly encountered. Furthermore, the proposed FG-GE can achieve dramatic reduction of computational complexity. In addition, this paper also proposes the use of a predicted Cramer-Rao lower bound (P-CRLB) to dynamically estimate the observation error variance, which demonstrates more robust tracking performance than that with only fixed average variance approximation.

■Short Message from his Supervisor, Prof. Tad Matsumoto
We are highly honored with the excellent work results of the joint work between Dr. Muhammad Reza Kahar Aziz's Lab in Indonesia and our Lab in JAIST. This award is an evidence by the IEEE Indonesian Section's recognition for Dr. Muhammad Reza Kahar Aziz's high academic activities; even after his graduation, he continued his high activity, acquired an academic position, and worked actively together with us. In fact, the IEEE Indonesian Section Award reception for two consecutive years represents our strong policy and philosophy towards high quality research work of JAIST Information Theory and Signal Processing Lab to the public society. Our powerfulness has been represented also by another award reception that one of our lab's graduate received Niwa Yasujiro Memorial Award provided by Tokyo Denki University, one of the most prestigious award in telecommunications areas in Japan (two of our lab graduates received this award in two consecutive years).
＊Reference：Yasujiro Niwa Outstanding Paper Award (Japanese)

When conducting theoretical research, not only the skills of the researchers but also the accumulations of the results and the continuation of cooperation with the graduates are of significant importance. I hereby would like to express my sincere appreciation to our lab graduates, their parents, and excellent support and enormous efforts made by the administration stuff of JAIST.

March 8, 2021