Introduction to School of Electronic Information and Communications

The School of Electronic Information and Communications was founded in 1960. At the beginning, she was initially named as the Department of Radio Engineering in the Huazhong Institute of Technology. Later, it was renamed as the Department of Electronic Information and Communications in the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. In May 2000 after the university merge, she is now the the School of Electronic Information and Communications in the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The Department has a strong foundation of teaching and research, covering two first-level disciplines including Information and Communication Engineering, and Electronic Science and Technology. In these two disciplines, the Department is also qualified to recruit postdoctoral researchers. The School is one of first batch of departments to set up Ph.D. programs. She is qualified to confer Ph.D. and master degrees in communication and information systems, signal and information processing, circuits and systems, and electromagnetic field and microwave. The second-level discipline "communication and information system" of the School is now a national key fostering discipline; the second-level disciplines "information and communication engineering" and "electronic science and technology" are both key disciplines in the Hubei Province.

Excellent Faculty: We now have a total number of 158 faculty and staff members including 122 faculties (23 professors and 64 associate professors). We have 1 professor enrolled in the Recruitment Program of Global Youth Experts, 2 Changjiang scholars, 1 professor awarded with the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, 1 professor awarded with the National Science Fund for the Excellent Youth Scholars, 6 professors enrolled in New Century Excellent Talents Supporting Plan of Education Ministry, 1 National Outstanding Teacher, 1 National Outstanding Moral Teacher, 1 professor enrolled in the Disciplines Review Committee of the State Council, 1 Grand Prize winner of the outstanding teacher by the Baosteel Education Fundation. We have also recruited a number of internationally and nationally well-known scholars as adjunct professors or advisory professors including Zhongliang Zhu who is the fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shan Zhong, Zishen Zhao, who are the fellows of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Carl Chang who is the fellow of IEEE and AAAS from the Iowa State University, USA, and Zhiquan Luo who is the fellow of SIAM and IEEE, the past chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committee on the Signal Processing for Communications (SPCOM) .

Outstanding Teaching: We provide 2 undergraduate programs: i) telecommunications engineering; ii) electronic and information engineering. In particular, the telecommunications engineering program has been awarded as one of the national distinguished majors, and it has also been awarded as one of the representative undergraduate programs in the Hubei Province. Three courses including “the foundation of the electronics ", "electronic circuit design and testing" and "communications circuits"  was awarded as the national outstanding courses and the national open-sharing courses. In recent years, we have won three second-prizes of the National Teaching Achievement consecutively. We have the National Electrical and Electronic Laboratory Teaching Demonstration Center (electronic). Our electrical and electronic teaching team was awarded as one of the national outstanding teaching teams. The “Basic of Information Theory” course was awarded as the national-level international English teaching brand course.

Top-tier innovative education is one of the distinctive features of the Department. We have been opening an experimental undergraduate program called “advanced class” for many years, which encourages innovation for students and emphasizes solid theoretical courses in its curriculum. In 2001, the Electrical and Electronic Technology Innovation Center was founded. In 2002, the mentor-tutoring undergraduate talent incubator station was also established, also called the Dian Group; in 2006, the project-based innovative experimental class for the information majors, also called the seed class, was founded. In 2010, our electronic and information engineering program has been selected among the first batch of the national excellence engineer pilot programs. This program is the demonstrative professional education program in our university for fostering top-tier innovative talented students, and it has been selected among the first batch of the national quality-certified model programs for training innovative outstanding engineers.The students in our programs have many opportunities to participate in scientific and technical innovation activities and various international/national competitions. In recent years, our undergraduate students have won more than 30 international/national scientific awards and more than 20 students’ innovation and entrepreneurship projects have been granted annually on average at the department, university and national levels. Our students have been awarded with the grand prizes and first prizes for multiple times in various major international/national competitions.

Alumni with accomplishment: Over the years our department has graduated more than 15000 undergraduate, master and Ph.D. students, including Zhongliang Zhu, the fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences , Xiwen Luo, the fellow of the Chinese Academy of Engineering , Bill Huang, the member enrolled in the Recruitment Program of Global Experts / the dean of the Mobile Research Institute , Li Huang, the members on the competing list of China’s richest person released on 2010 and 2014 by the journalist Rupert Hoogewerf such as the Chairman of the board of the Wuhan Guide Infrared Co. and Ke Ling the Chairman of the board of the Gemdale Corporation , Ying Wu the Chairman of the board of the UT Starcom , Xiaolong Zhang "the father of wechat"/the Foxmail founder/the senior vice president of Tencent Ltd. Co. , Lianglun Zhang and Zunyao Ke the founders of the Mizhe e-commerce website (Lianglun Zhang was also selected among the 2013 Forbes "30 under 30 entrepreneurs" list) and many other outstanding alumni in various areas.

International joint programs and undergraduate/graduate programs for international students are unique in our university. We have offered various international joint undergraduate programs with the University of Birmingham United Kingdom, the Arizona State University USA and the University of Wollongong Australia. The curriculums of these programs have been carefully designed to be flexible such as 2+2 and 3+1. The courses are well organized and the course credits are mutually recognized by the cooperative universities on both sides. In 2012, in the national tier-1 disciplinary assessment, the metric of the "student international exchange" of our department ranked no. 1 in the nation. In addition, our department is the first in our university to recruit international students at scale including undergraduate programs, master programs and Ph.D. programs. Currently, more than 160 international students in our undergraduate programs and beyond are studying on campus.

Cutting-edge research: In research, we have been striving for excellence in the broadband wireless communications and networking, information security and anti-counterfeiting, image graphics and multimedia processing, space navigation and detection, electromagnetic radiation characteristics and target detection, and Internet technology and engineering. In 1996, as a joint work by our department and the national Electronics Division 54, a large-capacity digital program-controlled switch for local branch “EIM-601” won the grand prize of the scientific and technological progress by the Ministry of Electronics Industry. Since 2008, we have won more than 10 provincial and ministerial awards, including a total of 5 first-prizes of the provincial natural science, first-prizes of technology inventions and technological advancement. We have published a large number of top-tier research papers in international journals and conferences, including more than 200 SCI papers and more than 400 EI papers. In the first national tier-1 disciplinary assessment in 2012, the metric of "the representative publication" ranked no.1 in the nation. We have also been granted with 208 patents, and participated in the planning and development of multiple national standards. We have been granted with the research fund for 229 million RMB, among which the ratio of the research funds from the national research grant agency is more than 70%.

Influential research and teaching platforms: We now have the National Anti-counterfeiting Engineering Laboratory, the National Electrical and Electronic Laboratory Teaching Demonstration Center (electronic), the Data Center of the Social Science for Chinese Universities, the provincial Key Laboratory of the Smart Internet Technology in Hubei, the provincial International Cooperation Base for the Green Broadband Wireless Communications in Hubei. In addition, we have been participating in the construction of the National Engineering Laboratory for the next generation for network access systems, the National Security Laboratory for multi-spectral information processing and some other national and provincial research laboratories and teaching centers. We have established some joint laboratories with well-known domestic and international enterprises such as the TI laboratory and the Xilinx laboratory. We have maintained stable research and teaching cooperation with many universities in United States, Singapore, Australia, Germany, Hong Kong and other countries and regions over the years.