Dr. Joseph Mitola, distinguished professor and VP of the Research Enterprise at Stevens Institute of Technology, was awarded the IEEE TCCN Recognition Award at the IEEE International Dynamic Spectrum Access Networks Symposium (IEEE DySPAN) held in Aachen, Germany, May 3-6.

The award recognizes Dr. Mitola's fundamental contributions to wireless communications as the founder of cognitive radio and his continued contributions in the field.

In his remarks at DySPAN, Dr. Mitola observed that it is no longer effective to think in terms of "strictly licensed or unlicensed bands," and promoted the use of dynamic spectrum databases at the FCC to holistically integrate out-of-band, low-power, high-speed wireless devices into a new "interference control" era. He also stressed the need to address security concerns to assure information and user privacy.

Dr. Mitola published the first technical paper on software radio architecture in 1991 and coined the term "cognitive radio" for the integration of machine perception of RF, visual and speech domains, along with machine learning, into software-defined radios (SDRs) to make dynamic spectrum access technically viable. His doctoral dissertation, Cognitive Radio (June 2000), created the first architecture for such autonomous radios.