Professor Hagit Messer-Yaron from Tel Aviv University (TAU) recently won the prestigious 2024 IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies, considered to be the “Nobel Prize” of the engineering world.

The award is handed out by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest international professional association with about 450,000 members worldwide. The IEEE strives to advance technological innovation and entrepreneurship for the benefit of humanity.

Messer-Yaron, from TAU’s Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, won the award for her outstanding contributions to “sensing of the environment using wireless communication networks.”

Her research enables the use of existing cellular network infrastructure to monitor weather and precipitation, thereby eliminating the need to install bespoke weather radars and local stations to provide reliable measures.

“The technology we developed enables processing and analyzing the big data collected by these existing communication networks for other purposes. Specifically, it uses changes in signal intensity to monitor meteorological phenomena in general and precipitation in particular,” explains Messer-Yaron.

She added that the study addresses two of today’s greatest scientific and technological challenges: climate change and processing big data in AI systems, and that the IEEE award further validates her work.

“Current challenges have generated considerable interest worldwide in this technology, including the establishment of a cohort of over 100 researchers working to implement it with EU funding, an initiative for promoting it in Africa, and more.”

In 2009 Messer-Yaron and her team won the Best Inventor Award from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for proving the use of cellular networks to predict floods.

Originally posted on israel21c.org