On June 4, the scientific innovation project of an undergraduate team from the School of Electronic Information and Communications (EIC), “The Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-based Amplification System for 5G Network Coverage”, won the special award in the 13th Challenge Cup of Hubei Province, and was also demonstrated in the award ceremony as the representative of excellent projects.

The leader of the team is Wang Kai, an undergraduate student of class 2017, and the supervisors are Yin Haifan and Tan Li. On behalf of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the team will participate in the 17th National Challenge Cup. The wireless communication prototype system with reconfigurable intelligent surface developed by the research team successfully broke the record of this field after the experiments during the past two years, which was widely reported by the media, such as People’s Daily and Xinhua Net. The team accomplished the world’s first outdoor long-distance signal transmission experiment of the reconfigurable intelligent surface. The loss of signal strength after long-distance transmission was compensated by this technology, and the real-time playing of a High Definition video 500 meters away was achieved in the experiment. The received signals were amplified by 500 times without any change of the transmit power.

EIC attaches great importance to the innovation and entrepreneurship of undergraduate students.  Staying committed to the principle of driving development by innovation and with the purpose of training students to solve bottlenecks, EIC provides support and guidance for its students and encourages them to participate in various innovation practice, such as undergraduate innovation and entrepreneurship projects, professional competitions, and join supervisors’ research teams in advance. In this way, students can continuously enhance their command of knowledge in practice.