ECE News for Fall 2004
Fall 2004 news
February 15, 2005 marks the inauguration of the Edison Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by UT-ECE and the IEEE Communications Society, the series is designed to motivate middle and high school students to stay in school and pursue careers in technology. With major support from SBC and NASA, this year's one-hour long, FREE, interactive, presentation will be held at the LBJ Auditorium on the UT campus and will explore Communications: its history, current technology, and the future of this exciting field. Students
What it's like during the Break
ENS PorchCam | ENS LabCam | TowerCam From Legacy Twisted Pair to IP: The department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Central Texas chapter of IEEE Communications and Signal Processing Society (CTS-ComSoc/SP) co-sponsored a seminar on Wednesday, Dec. 15, and Thursday, Dec. 16, in the AVAYA Auditorium, University of Texas at Austin campus. Participants found out about technologies, markets, and business opportunities in VoIP, IPTV, and IP security. More...
Happy Holidays from ECE
Dr. Bovik and UT Psychology Profs Get $1.2 Million Professor Alan C. Bovik and the project’s other principal investigators, Drs. Larry Cormack, Bill Geisler and Eyal Seidemann, all psychology professors at The University of Texas at Austin, have received $1.2 million from the National Science Foundation to develop a visual search system capable of finding objects in cluttered environments. The team will research the methods used by humans to search for objects in order to understand the process used by the human eye. The group, all of whom are members of UT-Austin’s internationally-recognized Center for Perceptual Systems, will then create mathematical algorithms for use in software and companion hardware capable of visually searching like humans. More... Annual EE 345M Robot Competition
Professor Emeritus Al Tasch joined the ECE faculty in 1986 after a distinguished career at Texas Instruments and Motorola. He received 38 U.S. Patents and was a Texas Instruments fellow, an IEEE fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor an engineer can receive. His research at ECE focused on fabrication and devices for VLSI circuits, including the development of improved process and device models and simulation codes. In 2001, he received the Andrew S. Grove Award for outstanding contributions in the field of solid-state devices and technology. EE 464 Senior Lab Winners
The ECE Distinguished Lecture Series hosted Dr. Kevin Lepak, AMD expert on high-performance computer architecture and performance modeling. Dr. Lepak's lecture explored:
At the annual ECE Fall Banquet, Professor John B. Goodenough, member of the National Academy of Engineering and 2001 Japan Prize Laureate, warned that the greenhouse effect is already having significant impact on the environment and we must act now to limit global warming. Dr. Goodenough has been a pioneer in the development of lithium batteries which power cell phones, computers and other staples of the tech age and have enormous potential in electric vehicles and energy storage. Graduating seniors were honored at the banquet, as well, as retiring staff. HKN, co-sponsors of the event, hosted a very popular raffle.
Dr. W. Mack Grady was presented the Gordon Lepley IV Memorial Teaching Award at the ECE Fall Banquet. The reasons he won are best expressed by his students.
Professor Grady is teaching Power Electronics and EE 394-7 Power Electronic Devices and Systems in the Spring. As one student put it, "Good job, my man! Keep up all the crazy good work..."
For over 70 years, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has been the recognized accreditor for university programs in applied science, computing, engineering, and technology. Accreditation occurs every 6 years and ECE's next visit is from Sun, Oct 31, through Tues, Nov 2. At that time, volunteer evaluators from the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) will look at ECE facilities, review student feedback about how successfully classes are meeting educational objectives in the electrical and computer engineering curriculum, and judge the department's plans for improvement. UT-ECE Mission | Objectives | Outcomes | Results | More about ABET
Schlumberger Day - October 27, 2004 Schlumberger executives and staff visited ECE on Wednesday in the latest collaborative effort between ECE and Schlumberger Limited. The signature event was a ECE Distinguished Lecture Series presentation from Schlumberger's Chief Scientist. Philippe Lacour-Gayet, discussing a possible solution to the Greenhouse Effect. He proposed removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in underground formations that formerly contained oil. Engineering students and faculty also participated in demonstrations and learned more about the latest technology from Schlumberger, the leading oilfield services company supplying technology, project management, information solutions to the oil and gas industry.
One-day workshop, sponsored by IEEE and the Technical Committee on Computer Architecture, focused on characterizing and understanding modern computer applications from both commercial and scientific computing. The keynote address by Dr. Pradeep K. Dubey, manager of INTEL's innovative platform architecture group, addressed the common misconception that design complexity and power limitations of modern-day processors don't allow them to scale well to next levels of performance. Consumers are told "We cannot offer significant speedup of your apps, and why do you need it anyway?" This talk explored the requirments of next generation general-purpose mass applications. More... 2004 Wireless Networking Symposium Over 400 research and business leaders from around the world gathered at the Omni Hotel Downtown to learn the latest in wireless networking and communications at the second annual Wireless Networking Symposium. Workshop on Renewable Energy was Busy and Well Attended
Cadence Day Strengthens UT-ECE/Cadence Relationship October 20th was Cadence Technology Day at UT-ECE. It was a full day devoted to strengthening the alliance between Cadence and ECE. Cadence staff demonstrated the latest design and verification platforms in the ENS lobby and provided a FREE lunch to ECE majors on the ENS lawn. HKN cooked and served around 500 people. As part of the ECE Distinguished Lecture Series, Bill McCaffrey, Chief Architect for System-in-Package (SiP) at Cadence Design Systems, discussed the latest SiP technologies and design challenges. Faculty and Cadence executives also exchanged ideas for collaboration and new technological trends.
IEEE's semesterly all you can eat/drink extravaganza was, once again, a smashing success. Dr. Bovik Shares Image Perception Research
The second edition of Professor Bovik's best-selling book, The Handbook on Image and Video Processing, will be released in 2005. He will teach EE 371R Digital Image and Video Processing in the spring.
Dr. Michael Orshansky was notified recently that he won the most prestigious award the National Science Foundation grants to new faculty members. The CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. Dr. Orshansky will use the award to support his teaching and research in developing models, algorithms, and conceptual frameworks that enable robust circuit design in nanometer scale CMOS technology. Professor Orshansky also won a SRC grant as a principal investigator (the co-PI is ECE prof, Dr. Margarida Jacome). The research under this award will focus on developing formal probabilistic principles and the methodology of hierarchical system design. The focus is on error tolerant system behavior with the goal of investigating the abstraction and composition of uncertainty at multiple levels of hierarchy. The new formal approaches will be central to the successful implementation of the future nanometer scale digital systems.
Every two years the International Association for Pattern Recognition or IAPR identifies someone who's contributions to the field of pattern recognition warrant special distinction. This year the biennial King-Sun Fu Prize was awarded to Dr. J. K. Aggarwal in late August at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Cambridge, UK. In a research career spanning 40 years, Dr. Aggarwal has made seminal contributions in diverse research areas including digital signal processing, image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision. He has contributed to the development of products including software for seismic data processing and modeling of real objects in order to estimate structure from multiple views, and the evolution of new research areas - dynamic scene analysis and multi sensor fusion. His current research focuses on understanding human motion and interactions using computer vision and content-based image/video retrieval.
Drs. W. Mack Grady and Ari Arapostathis received a research grant for $120K from the National Science Foundation to study the role of power electronic loads in interconnected power systems. Due to their nonlinear (switching) character and increasing penetration, there is a critical need to understand precisely how such loads will impact both stability and transient behavior of large and medium-scale power systems. Drs Grady and Arapostathis are also CoPIs (together with Dr. Edward Powers) on the Electric Ship Engineering and Research Consortium, a five year research effort funded by ONR. Texas Symposium
on Software Engineering is
Huge Success
A new faculty member joins ECE this fall. Dr. Christine Julien received her doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests lie in the realm of software engineering, specifically for mobile computing. Much of her previous work has focused on software engineering for ad hoc mobile networks and includes the development of algorithms for mobile computing, middleware for simplifying the software development process, and the use of formal methods for reasoning about mobile interactions. She is teaching a graduate course in mobile computing this fall. |
IEEE Fellow and ECE Professor Dr. Al F. Tasch, Jr. 
AMD Scientist and ECE Adjunct Professor explores 
ECE Professors Study the Effect of
