Research

Jaakko Marin wins 2021 Master’s Thesis Award

Published on 18.11.2021

Tampere University

Jaakko Marin's Master's Thesis was named as the best of year 2021 by TEK. TEK is a professional community of academic engineers and architects in Finland. Photo: Noora Eilola / TEK

Jaakko Marin (29) from Tampere University has received an award for the best master’s thesis written in the field of engineering in 2021 from Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland TEK and the Tekniska Föreningen i Finland TFiF. In his thesis, Marin developed a system which, for example, enables public authorities to prevent the use of drones that are a threat to safety. TEK and TFiF also granted a Doctoral Dissertation Award and Master’s Thesis Awards in non-engineering fields.

The 2021 Master’s Thesis Award was presented to Jaakko Marin for his thesis titled Full-Duplex Transceiver Inspired by Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave Radar. Marin wrote his thesis in the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences (ITC) at Tampere University under the supervision of Associate Professor Taneli Riihonen and D.Sc. Michael Bernhardt.

The Award Committee considered Jaakko Marin’s thesis to be a high-quality work for an academic engineer. According to the Award Committee, Marin demonstrated an excellent command of the topic and made an important original contribution to the body of knowledge in his field. In addition, the Award Committee described his thesis as a clear piece of writing with a coherent structure.

Fourteen master’s theses were nominated for the award.

Jaakko Marin, who graduated from Tampere University with a master’s degree in communications engineering in 2019, was honoured to receive the award.

“I never expected to win. I am now working as a PhD student in the Electrical Engineering unit at Tampere University. My current research focuses on full-duplex communications, radar and jamming. I still use the radio transceiver I developed while working on my master’s thesis in some of my projects,” Marin says.

A full-duplex system could improve the safety of communications between public authorities

During his M.Sc. thesis project, Jaakko Marin developed a full-duplex transceiver based on a frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar. His research demonstrated that the system is capable of simultaneously interfering with and receiving WLAN signals.

“The method slightly distorts the incoming signal. For example, the police could use the system to stop drones without interfering with devices that are operated by the police on the same frequencies,” Jaakko Marin says.

This year, the award-winning theses in the fields of engineering explored IoT connectivity, the Earth’s magnetosphere, drone interference and quasiregularly elliptic manifolds. The winner of the 2021 Doctoral Dissertation Award is D.Sc. Onel Luis Alcaraz López (University of Oulu). Two MA graduates, Susanna Heikkilä (University of Helsinki) and Laura Vuorinen (University of Turku), were presented with Master’s Thesis Awards in non-engineering fields.

Read more about the awards granted by TEK, TFiF and MAL.