Dr Wei Liu (BSc, LLB, MPhil, PhD, CiLT, SMIEEE)

He received his BSc in Space Physics (minor in Electronics) in 1996 and LLB in Intellectual Property Law in1997 from Peking University, China, MPhil from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Hong Kong, in 2001, PhD in 2003 from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, U.K. He then worked as a postdoc first in Southampton and later in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London. From September 2005 to August 2023, he worked at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Sheffield first as a Lecturer, and then a Senior Lecturer. Since September 2023, he has been a Reader at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London.  

His research interests cover a wide range of topics in signal processing, with a focus on sensor (antenna, hydrophone, microphone, seismometer, etc.) array signal processing (beamforming and source separation/extraction, direction of arrival estimation, target tracking and localisation, etc.), and its various applications, such as robotics and autonomous vehicles, remote sensing, human computer interface, radar, sonar, and wireless communications.

He received one journal “Best Paper Award” (“Approximate Gaussian Conjugacy: Parametric Recursive Filtering Under Nonlinearity, Multimodal, Uncertainty, and Constraint, and Beyond”, Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering, vol. 18, issue 12, December 2017), three conference “Best Paper" awards ("Sparse Planar Antenna Array Design for Directional Modulation", Proc. the 2019 8th International Conference on Communications, Signal Processing, and Systems (CSPS), “Improving SSVEP-BCI Performance Using Pre-Trial Normalization Methods” from the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, and “Reduced Complexity MIMO Receiver with Real-Valued Beamforming” from the 2015 15th IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology), and one conference “Excellent Paper" award (“Robust DOA Estimation for a MIMO Array Using Two Calibrated Transmit Sensors” from the 2013 IET International Radar Conference).

He is an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer (2023-2024, Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society).

A brief summary of his academic activities:

1. Publications and indexes

   • First book dedicated to wideband beamforming: “Wideband Beamforming Concepts and Techniques”, Wiley, 302 pages, March 2010.

   • A second book titled “Low-Cost Smart Antennas” (by Wiley) was published in March 2019.

   • Number of publications: two books, five book chapters, 220+ journal papers, 170+ conference papers (h-index: Google Scholar,  Scopus,  Researcher ID). 

   • ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2968-2888

2. Representative funded projects as principal investigator (PI):

   • Beamforming optimisation for massive MIMO in wireless communications, £221K, PI, Innovate UK, 2021-2023

   • Cooperative underwater surveillance networks, £222K, PI, UK EPSRC, 2021-2024.

   • Intelligent design of antenna arrays, US$70K, PI, Huawei Technologies Sweden AB, 2020-2021.

   • Virtual sensing for autonomous systems via V2X communications, £50K, PI, UK EPSRC, 2019-2021.

   • Sparse sensor array signal processing for detection and estimation, £103K, PI, funded by industry from China, 2017-2019.

   • High resolution wide swath spaceborne SAR based on co-prime arrays, about £23K, PI, funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, 2017-2018.

   • Sparsity based wideband direction of arrival estimation, £95K, PI, funded by the UK DSTL, 2014-2015.

   • Wind profile prediction, £90K, PI, joint by National Grid (UK) and UK EPSRC, 2011-2014.

3. Professional memberships

   • Senior Member of IEEE (from 05/2010).

   • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy of the UK (from 04/2009).

   • Member of the UK EPSRC College of Peer Reviewers (from 10/2020).

   • Elected member (05/2015-present) of the Digital Signal Processing Technical Committee (DSPTC) of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.

   • Elected member (01/2017-12/2023) of the Sensor Array and Multichannel Technical Committee (SAMTC)  of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

   • Vice-Chair (2019-2020) and Chair (2021-2022) of the IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Technical Committee.

   • Secretary (2020-2022) and Chair (2022-2024) of the IEEE Digital Signal Processing for Circuits and Systems Technical Committee.

   • Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Directions Board (2021-2022) and Conferences Board (2022-2023).

   • Member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Education Board (2024-2026) and Chair of its Educational Conference Programs (ECP) Committee.

4. Editorships

   • Associate editor for IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (11/2023 to 10/2026).

   • Associate editor for IEEE Trans. Signal Processing (03/2015 to 03/2019) and IEEE Access (04/2016 to 03/2021).

   • Associate editor for the Journal of The Franklin Institute (02/2021-01/2023).

   • Executive Associate Editor-in-Chief (2023-2026) and Editorial Board Member (2016-2022) of Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering (FITEE) and received the 2019 Distinguished Editorial Board Member Award.

5. Invited talks

   • “Sensor Location Optimization for Effective and Robust Beamforming”, IEEE Distinguished Lecture (Webinar), IEEE Aerospace & Electronic Systems Society, December 2023.

   • “Twenty-Five Years of Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing”, IEEE Signal Processing Society 75th Anniversary Webinar, July 2023.

   • “Direction of Arrival Estimation with Magnitude-only Array Measurements”, half-hour talk at the International Workshop on Signal and Information Intelligent Learning and Processing, China, July 2022.

   • Two-hour tutorial entitled “Basic Concepts and Techniques for Wideband Beamforming” at the International Workshop on Intelligent Signal Processing, China, September 2021. 

   • Half-day  tutorial entitled "Underdetermined Wideband Direction of Arrival Estimation and Target Localization" at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing (ICASSP), Toronto, Canada, 6-11 June 2021.

   • Half-day  tutorial entitled "Wideband Beamforming for Next-Generation Wireless Communication Systems" at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Florence, Italy, 27-30 May 2018.

6. Conference activities

   • Technical Committee Co-Chair for the track of Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing of the 2019-2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

   • Track Co-Chair for Digital Signal Processing of the 2021-2024 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS).

   • Finance Co-Chair of the 2024 IEEE Conference on Computational Imaging Using Synthetic Apertures, Boulder, USA.

   • Publicity Co-Chair of the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), Singapore.

   • Finance Co-Chair of the 2023 IEEE International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing (CAMSAP), Costa Rica.

   • Proceedings Chair of the2023 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IEEE CAI), Santa Clara, California, USA.

   • Chair of the IEEE Five-Minute Video Clip Contest (5-MICC) "Let There Be a Beam" at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP2020), Barcelona, Spain, 4-8 May, 2020.

   • General Co-Chair of the 2018 IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop, Sheffield, UK. 

   • Registration Chair for the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC2015), London, UK.

   • Publications Chair of the 2009 European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO2009), Glasgow, UK.

   • Technical programme committee (TPC) member (or similar role, or regular/special session chair) for about 100 international conferences, such as IEEE ICASSP, IEEE ISCAS, EUSIPCO, DSP, IEEE VTC, IEEE GLOBECOME, IEEE ICC, IEEE WCNC.

7. Other activities

   • Regular reviewer for all major journals in areas related to signal processing, such as IEEE TSP, IEEE SPL, IEEE TALSP, IEEE TAP, IEEE TAES, Elsevier SP, Elsevier DSP, and IET SP, etc. 

   • External examiner for universities in the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Germany, Canada, India and Pakistan.

You can click the following links for his profiles at ORCID, Google Scholar, Researcher ID, Scopus, and Research Gate.