October 2, 2000
The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Assocation (IDEMA), the magnetic storage industry trade association, has awarded three university graduate fellowships totaling $40,000 in an effort to promote research in the nation's universities. Hongwei Song, a student in the Data Storage Systems Center whose advisor is ECE Prof. Vijayakumar Bhagavatula, has won the second place award of $10,000 for his work aimed at developing advanced channels employing iterative soft decoding for high-density data storage systems suffering from low signal-to-noise ratio. Song presented his work on September 20 at DISKCON USA, the largest technical conference in the world dedicated to the data storage industry.
