I attended a conference on dynamic spectrum access in 2017 and participated in a session on automatic modulation recognition. The session was connected to a live competition within the conference where participants would attempt to apply their modulation-recognition system to signals transmitted in the conference center by the conference organizers. Like a grand modulation-recognition challenge but confined to the temporal, spectral, and spatial constraints imposed by the short-duration conference.
What I didn’t know going in was the level of frustration on the part of the machine-learner organizers regarding the seemingly inability of signal-processing and machine-learning researchers to solve the radio-frequency scene analysis problem once and for all. The basic attitude was ‘if the image-processors can have the AlexNet image-recognition solution, and thereby abandon their decades-long attempt at developing serious mathematics-based image-processing theory and practice, why haven’t we solved the RFSA problem yet?’
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