ECE News for Fall 2003

ENS Gets a Face-Lift

Happy Winter Holidays!

ECE Undergrad Wins Homeland Security Scholarship

George Chamales, ECE senior and cofounder of ComSoc, received a $24,000 scholarship from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for his research on honeynet technology. "Honeynets are sets of decoy machines placed on the Internet with the sole purpose of being probed, attacked, and exploited by malicious hackers." explains Chamales. "Honenyets have been used to gather an unprecedented amount of information about hacker activity including the detection of novel attacks in the wild, uncovering credit-card fraud rings, and preventing insider attacks." More...

Congratulations to the Winners of
Dr. Valvano’s EE 345M MonsterBot Battle Royale

We had co-champions! Group 1 TA: Dhirajkumar Acharya Linda Bigerlow Elmustafa Erwa Jeng Yun Chen Hayden Nelson

Group 2 TA: Anil Kottam L. S. Barbosa Mendes D. A. Santos E Santos Tiago Falqueto Samuel Crowder

More...

EE 464 Senior Lab Winners

Congratulations, New IEEE Fellows, Dr. Chen and Dr. Garg!

ECE is pleased to announce the election of two faculty as IEEE Fellows. Dr. Ray Chen was honored "for contributions to polymer-based guided devices for optical interconnects." Dr. Chen supervises 14 Ph.D. students and four postdoctoral students in the Microelectronics Research Center's Optical Interconnect Group. This research group has published over three hundred fifty research papers and worked on over fifty awarded research programs. Dr. Chen is currently teaching EE325, Electromagnetic Engineering, and will teach EE383P, Optoelectronic Interconnects, in the spring.

Dr. Vijay K. Garg was honored "for contributions to distributed computing systems and discrete event systems." Dr. Garg, director of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Laboratory, is a pioneer in the area of distributed computing. His research group was the first to develop efficient algorithms for detecting global predicates. These algorithms have wide applications in distributed debugging and software fault-tolerance. Dr. Garg is teaching EE 382V, Lattice Theory, this semester and will teach EE 382N-11, Distributed Systems, and EE 360P, Concurrent and Distributed Systems, in the spring.

ECAC Programs Help Students Get Jobs

The Engineering Career Assistance Center (ECAC), located in ECJ 2.400, is a full-service employment center offering support to employers, students, alumni, and parents.

Diana Perez Named Executive Assistant
In the corporate world, business groups have HR, COOs, and CFOs. At UT, a single person performs all these functions: the executive assistant.

Diana Perez, a 20+ year veteran with ECE, was recently promoted to this position. Fortunately, Wanda Franklin, ECE's executive assistant since 1981, will continue to oversee the departmental budget on a part-time basis. According to Chairman Tony Ambler, "Our EAs are the real bosses of ECE. The department is unbelievably lucky to have such talented and hard-working people at the helm. And Diana is perfect for this job. I couldn't get through the day without her."

ECE Lights the Tower!
The UT-Austin Tower lights honored the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering’s centennial on Oct. 30, 2003. The celebration was webcast from the University Co-op’s Tower Cam.

ECE is also celebrating the graduation of its 10,000th BSEE in December. Senior, Justin McKinnerney, won a blind drawing for the honor of being named the 10,000th BSEE.Mr. McKinnerney grew up in Waco and was the 1999 salutatorian of Bosqueville High. His favorite ECE professor was his first. R. Gary Daniels started his EE 302 class with a slide show showing his yacht. "Engineering isn't easy," he told the new students, "but it's definitely worth it."

McKinnerney is interviewing with several companies and is optimistic about his prospects. "I want to get my MBA from UT eventually, but first I want to take a break from school." About his selection as the 10,000th BSEE, he said "That's awesome! My parents are pretty excited, too!"

2003 Wireless Networking Symposium

Last week, ECE's Wireless Networking & Communications Group (WNCG) hosted the Wireless Networking Symposium. Business leaders and cutting-edge technical innovators from over 20 companies, 25 universities, and 6 countries exchanged ideas and predictions in formal presentations and informal social events. Topics included "Titans of the Wireless Industry: What Happens Next?", "Network Modeling and Analysis", and "OFDM and Ultra-Wideband".

IEEE recognizes Deppe for contributions to laser technology

Dr. Dennis Deppe has been awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers/Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (IEEE/LEOS) 2003 Engineering Achievement Award.

The award, which will be presented to Deppe on Oct. 27 at the LEOS annual meeting, is recognizes exceptional engineering contributions to laser or electro-optic technology.

Deppe’s research centers on new kinds of lasers and light sources that have applications in fiber optic data links, displays, biomedical applications, and quantum information technology.

ECE Graduate Students Prepare to Meet the World

The recent up-tic in the world economy has some December graduates of UT-ECE's world-class graduate program (ranked in the top 10 for all American colleges and in the top 5 for public schools) looking towards a promising future.

Xuliang Han, Ph.D - Plasma and Quantum Electronics and Optics
Soon-to-be Dr. Han has spent the last 4 years studying optical interconnects with Dr. Ray Chen at the Microelectronics Research Center.

Alper Sen, Ph.D - Computer Engineering
Ph.D. Candidate Sen studied formal verification of hardware and software, runtime verification, and distributed computing under Dr. Vijay Garg. at the Parallel and Distributed Systems Laboratory."The ECE department has provided me with the ideal environment for developing state-of-the-art methodologies for verifying the correctness of hardware and software systems—a subject of great interest to me."

Raghuveer Simha, MS - Communications, Networks and Systems
Mr. Simha, working on distributed systems applications in adhoc networks under Dr. Vijay Garg. "The best thing about ECE is doing the stuff I like and taking the courses I like. I worked under Dr. Chase, as well, and found that to be a really valuable learning experience."

Harish K Subramanian, MS - Manufacturing Systems Engineering
Rugby buff and summa cum laude graduate, Harish Subramanian, is looking forward to developing algorithms and applications in industry. He has worked with Dr Flake, Dr Kuipers, and Dr Stone in modeling a variety of systems.

More information about ECE graduate students is available in the Fall 2003 Graduate Student Directory.

Workshop on
Electric Power Quality and Reliability

October 23, 2003
UT-Austin
Thompson Conference Center

Dr. Grady's research interests are mainly in the area of electric power
systems, with special focus on harmonics and power quality. He regularly
teaches courses in power system engineering, power electronics, and
circuits, and he recently started an undergraduate power electronics
laboratory course. His research is presently funded by EPRI-PEAC and the
Office of Naval Research. He also consults and teaches short courses for
various utilities and industries on power quality-related issues. One of
his most interesting consulting projects was the design and analysis of the
extensive harmonic filter plan for the 2002 Winter Olympics ski area.

Dr. Grady is the author of the PCFLO computer program for harmonics
analysis, plus several other widely-used power system programs found on
this web page. He is Vice Chairman, Programs, of the IEEE-PES Transmission
& Distribution Committee, and Technical Program Chairman for the IEEE-PES
Transmission & Exposition, Dallas, September 2003. More...

Director of IBM Research Lab Predicts the Future of VLSI

Dr. Michael Rosenfield, Director of IBM Austin Research Lab, was the first speaker in a new seminar series devoted to exploring the issues and solutions for IC designers and manufacturers. VLSI or Very Large Scale Integration is a way to manage semiconductor integrated circuits composed of hundreds of thousands of logic elements or memory cells. Dr. Rosenfield has a front-line perspective on his subject, "Technology Outlook and VLSI Trends". More...

ECEntury Lectures Now Available Online

Dr. Dennis Buss	Gene Frantz	Dr. Kevin Kahn	Dr. Joy Laskar	Dr. Jim Plummer	T. J. Rodgers

ECE News - Fall 2003

the semester so far

Dr. Beer Publishes Second Edition of Best-Selling Text

Dr. David Beer, ECE senior lecturer, has published the second edition of his Writing and Speaking in the Technology Professions. The new edition is revised and expanded, with two new sections on global communications and the Internet. More...

ECEntury Distinguished Lecture Series Presents:
Gene Frantz, TI Principal Fellow and Author of Gene's Law
"Digital Signal Processing: To Speak & Spell™ and Beyond"
Sept. 11, 3:00 - 4:00 PM, ACES Auditorium 2.302

Gene Frantz, one of the world's foremost authorities in digital signal processing (DSP) applications and co-inventor of TI's Speak & Spell™ will be the second speaker in 2003 ECEntury Distinguished Lecture Series. Mr. Frantz is also known for Gene's Law, which postulates that power usage of integrated circuits decreases exponentially every 18 months, leading to reductions in the size of devices built around these chips and to longer battery life. The proof is in. Since Gene's Law was introduced in 1994, the power required to run an integrated circuit has declined ten-fold every two years. In tandem with Moore's Law, Gene's Law predicted—and is the basis for—the continuous miniaturization of mobile computing products. More...

Like the new website design?

ECE senior, Michael Cheng, is the designer. Cheng plans on going to design school after graduation. "Right now I'm interested in making cell phones easier to browse, but really the whole field of interface artchitecture is getting ready to explode as mobile computing devices get smaller and more common."

ECEntury Distinguished Lecture Series Presents:
Dr. Joy Laskar, Georgia Tech
"Circuits and their Integration: Future Challenges"
Sept. 5, 2:00 - 3:00, ACES Auditorium 2.302

There is no question that the networks of the future require functional improvement along each of the important transmission media: wireless and wired (optical and copper).  However, an even more daunting challenge is the integration and coexistence of these technologies in both function and form.  The System-on-Package (SOP) paradigm provides a highly integrated, microminiaturized, multifunctional technology that optimizes the IC and the package to enable these types of systems.

In this speech, Dr. Laskar will review the evolutionary trends in IC and module integration and how these trends are bounded by advanced communication applications. More...