Latest ECE News

Professor Edward Yu has accepted the Swearingen Regents Chair in Microelectronics and will begin teaching at UT-Austin in September. Dr. Yu's research is in electronic and optical properties of solid-state materials and devices at the nanoscale--including III-V nitride materials and device physics; scanning probe characterization of advanced electronic materials and devices; novel structures for photovoltaic devices; and solid-state nanostructure physics and devices.

Prof. Yu received his A.B. (summa cum laude) and A.M. degrees in Physics from Harvard University in 1986, and his Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1991. He comes to us from the University of California, San Diego.

The 4th Annual Austin Conference on Integrated Systems & Circuits (ACISC) has issued a call for papers. Previous conferences have included keynote addresses from the CEO's of Silicon Laboratories and Cirrus Logic, tutorials on bleeding edge technologies, and wide participation from industry.

Extended abstracts, full papers, and/or presentations are acceptable for submission. Proposals that describe open issues, industry/technology needs, or opinions are welcome. The final version of each presentation will be published via a password-protected site, but authors retain full ownership and may present at other conferences. More...

UT-ECE PhD graduate, Vishal Monga, has accepted a tenure-track position at Pennsylvania State University for fall 2009. Monga's PhD research, supervised by Professor Brian L. Evans, was in a problem in multimedia security and mining known as perceptual image hashing. Perceptual image hashing helps index large image databases for efficient search and retrieval, makes watermarking images easier, and strengthens image/document authentication against attacks.

Monga received his BSEE degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2001, and his MS and PhD degrees from The University of Texas at Austin in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He has been working at Xerox Research since graduation. Prof. Evans notes that "Dr. Monga is already a seasoned researcher and accomplished teacher, and is well prepared to be a successful professor at Penn State." More...

Dr. Al Bovik was recently awarded two separate grants from the National Science Foundation totaling $703,000. The first is an equipment grant to conduct high definition (HD) video processing research, with particular emphasis on video quality assessment. The equipment includes the “Red One”—a revolutionary high-definition cinematic movie camera famously used by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson—as well as high-definition displays and a visual eyetracker and headtracker. Bovik’s research group plans to build a standardized public database of HD videos for video quality assessment and other applications.

The second grant is a joint project with UT-Psychology Professor Larry Cormack. Bovik and Cormack’s grant, entitled “Statistical Measurement, Modeling, and Inference on Natural 3D Scenes.” They are using a precision terrestrial scanner to measure luminance, chrominance, range, and disparity and ultimately develop sophisticated statistical models of natural scenes. Their work will make possible many important engineering applications, including creating better stereoscopic (3-D) image sensors and displays, and higher-quality 3-D movies.

Graduate Students Excel - 4 Best Papers and Fellowships from IBM and Intel

	Rajeshwary Tayade - Best Paper Award at the 13th IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS'09): "Critical Path Selection For Delay Test Considering Coupling Noise" (co-authored by Professor Jacob Abraham)
	Muhammad Aater Suleman received the very prestigious Intel PhD Fellowship. Fewer than 30 fellowships were awarded nationwide across all engineering and science disciplines. Suleman was the only UT recipient (and the first UT student to win since 2004). Suleman is supervised by Professor Yale Patt.
	Xiaokang Shi received a highly competitive IBM Ph.D. Scholarship. Shi is a member of the Design Automation Group and is supervised by Professor David Pan. His research is in lithography simulation and optimization.
	Shobha Sundar Ram - Best Student Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE Radar Conference: "Simulation of High Range-Resolution Profiles of Humans Behind Walls" (co-authored by Professor Hao Ling and former ECE graduate student Craig Christianson). This is the second year Ms. Ram has won this competition.  She was the first-place winner in the 2008 IEEE Radar Conference held in Rome, Italy.
	Duo Ding - Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on IC Design and Technology 2009: “Machine Learning Based Lithographic Hotspot Detection with Critical Feature Extraction and Classification” (co-authored by Xiang Wu, Prof. Joydeep Ghosh and Prof. David Z. Pan)
	Ciji Isen - received the highly competitive IBM PhD Fellowship. Ciji is a member of the Laboratory for Computer Architecture (LCA) and is supervised by Professor Lizy John. His research is on memory system design and optimization.
	Sanghyun Chi - Best Paper Award at the IEEE Communications Quality and Reliability Workshop 2009: "Predicting the Quality of Voice over IP Networks" (co-authored by Professor Baxter Womack)

Congratulations to our New Alumni

Dr. Suzanne Barber is a national leader in identity management and the primary organizer of the recent summit: “The Digital Identity: A Double-Edged Sword”. At the summit, experts from industry, government, and academia discussed how shortfalls in even the most fundamental identity management needs, such as basic standards and definitions, are undermining efforts to make our digital identities as secure as our physical ones.

“In the meantime,” says Dr. Barber “we are developing software agents that can assess the trustworthiness of information from different sources. These ‘intelligent agents’ operate in complex environments with massive amounts of conflicting information. They evaluate the reliability of the source, coordinate information exchange, and can take into account cost considerations and timeliness as well. We are very excited by the rapid progress we are making in this area.” More...

Loyal Staff Honored

Long-time ECE staff were honored at a staff breakfast for years of service:

• Wanda Franklin (30 years): "I can’t believe how the time has flown. It was 1981 when Ed Powers hired me… and we’re both still here!"
• Daryl Goodnight (25 years): "It has been both fun and challenging to work with all the talented ECE students and ensure that our labs kept up with changing technology."
• Melanie Gulick (20 years): “I’ve seen a lot of changes in ECE in 20 years, but what hasn’t changed is how much I’ve enjoyed working with such great coworkers and with the best graduate students ever.”
  
• Carol Assadourian - 20 years
  
• Melody Singleton (15 years): "I've actually been here 18 years. I started part-time in high school. I worked in Accounting, Biology, at the Performing Arts Center and now in ECE. I love the faculty I support. They are great bosses."
• Jason Pannell (10 years): "I feel at home at UT. It’s a nice work atmosphere and I enjoy interacting with the students."
• Kendrick Weld - 10 years

UT-ECE research to be published in the journal Science demonstrates, for the first time, that centimeter-square areas of copper foils can be covered almost entirely with mono-layer graphene bringing this intriguing material one step closer to commercial viability. Graphene, formed with carbon atoms linked together like nanoscopic chicken wire, holds great potential for nanoelectronics. It also shows promise for electrical energy storage, for use in composites, for thermal management, in chemical-biological sensing, and as a new sensing material for ultra-sensitive pressure sensors.

ECE Professors Sanjay Banerjee and Emanuel Tutuc and graduate students Seyoung Kim and Junghyo Nah are co-authors of “Large-Area Synthesis of High-Quality and Uniform Graphene Films on Copper Foils.” More...

UT-ECE, IEEE Central Texas Section, door64, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, and 1,000 engineers celebrated the 125th anniversary of the IEEE at Austin's Goodwill Center. It was a full day, beginning with a Tech Fair at 11 a.m. Thirty seven local tech companies exhibited between sessions about entrepreneurship, consulting, and career development. ECE Chairman, Tony Ambler, and adjunct professor/Cirrus Logic Fellow, Eric Swanson, participated in a Panel Discussion about The Engineer of 2020.

The 3rd Annual BrainParty/125th Anniversary celebration featured UT-ECE graduate research and IEEE student groups. Free food, drinks, and live music preceeded a presentation of a proclamation by Governor Rick Perry. Only 8 celebrations are being held world-wide, with only 3 in the United States. More...

from ScienceNews:
Cell phone antennas, radio receivers and GPS devices may one day go incognito. In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta propose a new cloaking method that cancels out the electromagnetic waves bouncing off an object. The concept may ultimately lead to surreptitious sensors that can collect and send messages without detection.

The new cloak manipulates electromagnetic waves — including light — not by blocking out the waves, but by working with them. Previous cloaks worked by diverting waves around an object. "We have shown how plasmonic materials and metamaterials may overcome a general and fundamental limit of currently available sensors, in that they are necessarily required to scatter around, affecting their own measurement," says Alù. "In our paper, we have set the ground for a new general class of sensing devices that may see without being seen. This may have fundamental implications in conceiving novel non-invasive probing devices for a wide range of biological, optics, physics, and engineering applications." More...

Spring 2009 Senior Lab

Long-time External Advisory Committee member and UT-ECE alumnus, Mark Papermaster, was named an ECE Fellow last week. "Mark has been instrumental in raising our profile and forging relationships with industry," says Chairman Tony Ambler. "We have been very lucky to have his help and guidance on EAC."

Papermaster has over 25 years of experience of product and technology experience. He has an international reputation in the chip design field. Papermaster worked at IBM from 1982-2008. His last position was VP of IBM's blade server division. He begins a new job at Apple as senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, on Friday, April 24. Papermaster will lead Apple’s iPod and iPhone hardware engineering teams.

Professor Christine Julien is using a grant from the National Science Foundation to solve persistent problems posed by delay-tolerant networks (DTNs)—heteterogeneous networks with spotty connectivity. DTNs are the norm in remote areas with inadequate energy resources and mobile nodes, complicating search and rescue operations and third world communications.

Previous solutions have been tailored for specific applications. Julien is stepping back and looking for common characteristics. The optimal solution to the frequent and long-lasting disconnects on DTNs would be communication protocols that adapt to changing conditions on-the-fly. The ability to collect and interpret information about the application's environment would be key to success.

Julien's solution is an adaptive middleware that coordinates communication among mobile applications running on devices that are only intermittently connected. The middleware helps software react to frequent configuration changes that occur as devices move and communication capabilities change.More...