ECE News for Spring 2004
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Sharon Bressette, Advising Center Coordinator, won for her managerial skills, calm under pressure, and friendly professionalism. Some of the comments (and these are just from faculty and staff!): Since her arrival she has been nothing but wonderful! Watching her train a new staff member, taking care of all her tasks, and keeping her "cool" the whole time is so refreshing. Never has she lost it even though I know she is very tired and is very stressed out at times. Even though she is just doing her job, she has totally made an outstanding contribution to this office and to the department. Team player does not say it all. We are truly blessed to have her as our "leader of the pack".
ECE Staff Honored for Longevity Six ECE staff members were honored recently for long-time service:
ECE senior, Chris Condit, is a cancer survivor. He was diagnosed a month after his eleventh birthday. Eleven years later he began organizing a 4,500 mile bike ride from Austin, Texas to raise $180,000 for the American Cancer Society. The fundraising effort is called the Texas 4000 for Cancer. Four other ECE students are participating: Dan Haberberger, Don Ho, Suchin Wadhwani, and Brett Anderson. They are $62,000 short of their goal. More..
Third Graders Look at Solar Car
In July of 2005, teams will begin racing their solar-powered cars north from Houston. With students behind the wheels, the high-tech and high-efficiency solar cars will travel through the United States and Canada to the finish line in Calgary. More...
It's been a good year for Brian Hardin. OK, he didn't win a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, just an honorable mention, but the sting was soothed by the $20,000 he won as the Co-op's grand prize winner of the Undergraduate Student Awards for Academic Excellence and the $14,000 Seydel Fellowship. He is waiting to see if he will also be a Fulbright Scholar. The research that merited this recognition is a sophisticated computer program, which generates unusual shapes for solar cells and maximizes their ability to collect light on a smaller space. Hardin ’s project, “Non-tracking Solar Concentrator Model,” has long-range implications for the viability of solar power. Hardin will pursue an advanced degree in Switzerland in the fall. Graduate Students Honored at Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium Anil Kottam won Best Presentation in the Doctoral Category for his paper entitled, "Electric Field Penetration Depth of Myocardial Surface Catheters and the Measurement of Myocardial Resistivity". Dr John Pearce was a second author. Karthik Raghavan and David Altman won Best Poster in the BS/MS Category for their poster entitled, "Design of an Instrumentation and Data Acquisition System for Complex Admittance Measurement". Other authors included Chia Ling Wei, Anil Kottam, Daniel Fernandez, Maricela Reyes, Yi Mao, Dr. Jonathan Valvano, Dr. Marc Feldman, and Dr. John Pearce.
Prof. Jack Lee was recently presented the ECE department's most prestigous teaching award. Dr. Lee teaches two undergraduate circuit analysis and design courses and the graduate level course, "Submicron Device Physics and Technologies" which focuses on current research on ultra-small high-speed semiconductor devices used in integrated circuits. Typical student reaction to these courses: EE 411: I like the lectures. They're very organized and easy to follow. Dr. Lee is a really good professor—very knowledgeable and conveys the information very well. EE 411: Challenging class. Felt like I learned a lot though. EE 396K: Very well-organized, well communicated. I always felt like I understood what instructor was saying. All material was relevant and useful. Tests were fair. GOOD JOB!! The Lepley Award was established in 1999 to commenerate Gordon Lepley, an Electrical Engineering student whose life was tragically taken from us in an automobile accident. Congratulations, Profs Bard, Roth, and Brown!
Bill Bard won the 2004 Student Body Teaching Award. Dr. Charles Roth and Dr. David Brown won the Most Useful Class Award for EE 316, Digital Logic Design. And Lee Hill, Senior LAN Administrator, won the Student Body Staff Award.
Ray Russell, 13-year veteran undergraduate advisor, officially retired at the end of the fall semester. Just how much he will be missed by students and their parents is apparent from student feedback: "The last time that I visited the advising office, I spoke with Ray Russell, and he did an excellent job as an advisor. He was knowledgeable and able to give sound advice on course selection and government transfer credit options. Ray Russell was also very warm, friendly, and welcoming." "Ray Russell is an excellent advisor." "Both times I visited the ECE advising office, I talked to Ray Russell. He was incredibly friendly and very helpful with all of my questions. I really appreciated his assistance!" "Ray's awesome..Don't let him retire!" Sorry, guys, we couldn't stop him. Congratulations, Profs Jacome and DeVeciana!
EE 464 Senior Lab Winners
Larbi Boughaleb, TA for EE 360M, has won the first annual Outstanding ECE TA Award. He had excellent ratings from the students and according to a former supervising professor, Dr. Charles Roth, "Larbi is one of the very best TAs that I have had in my forty years of teaching....'' Mr. Boughaleb will receive his award at the Spring Graduating Seniors and External Advisory Committee Banquet.
Dr. Shakkottai, member of WNCG, recently won the NSF’s most prestigious award for 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. Prof. Shakkottai won $408,000 for his proposal, "Spatial Models and Algorithms for Sensor Networks." More...
Daniel Artusi, President and Chief Executive Officer of Silicon Laboratories, recently presented Professor Shouli Yan, member of WNCG, with a check large enough to support two research assistants for a year. Mr. Artusi said that his company recognizes that talent must be nurtured. "It is very difficult for us to find qualified applicants. Luckily, we have one of the best mixed signal device design programs in the country in our backyard and we want to invest in it." Team M.A.R.I.O. flies in July Two electrical engineering undergrads, Madhurita Sengupta and James Rexroth, are preparing to study the changes in heart rate of healthy individuals in zero gravity. Studies have been done using 3-lead electrocardiography, but to their knowledge no one to date has used an advanced 12-lead, PC-based electrocardiograph. More... Departmental Snapshots
National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships are awarded to individuals who have demonstrated ability and special aptitude in science, mathematics, or engineering. Congratulations to these students! AMD Day, March 24, 2004
ExploreUT - Saturday, March 6, 2004
Congratulations to: Dr. Joydeep Ghosh, ECE graduate students Arindam Banerjee and Srujana Merugu, and CS professor, Inderjit Dhillon for winning Best Algorithms Paper at the 2004 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining. Professor Lizzy John for her appointment as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems. Alumnus Oscar Alvarado for his election as president of the Texas Bay Chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.
For the fourth year in a row, IEEE beat out all the competition in its class and won E-Week. HKN won the smaller organization class. Overall, IEEE came in first and HKN came in second in total points (meaning HKN beat larger organizations such as ASME and SWE). National Engineers Week
MIT Researcher to Lecture About Humanizing Machine Responses
Adam Pridgen, Corporate Liaison for IEEE, was one of two undergraduates to win the Cisco Systems Information Assurance Scholarship this spring. The $2500 scholarship was awarded for research projects related to information assurance/information security. As a member of COMSOC, Pridgen has worked on The Honeynet Project. The project's purpose is "...to learn the tools, tactics, and motives of the blackhat community and share these lessons learned." More... ECE Professor Racks Up 3 Awards in One Month
Professor Ghosh then received the Outstanding Faculty Award by Class of 2003 Option III Masters Program for providing a stimulating, respectful, and responsive classroom. Congratulations, Dr. Ghosh!
Local technology groups, the University and the city of Austin are working up a plan to draw wireless technology companies to Austin and create a "wireless hub." Some aspects of the plan were recommended by a report, created with the assistance of UT graduate students in UT's Innovations, Creativity and Capital Institute, which details Austin's existing wireless sector and identifies ways to help the industry grow. More... ECE Alumnus Wins Prestigious Fellowship to Research Computer Vision
Brostow's research specialty, computer vision, initially started as a sub-domain of artificial intelligence but has grown to include numerous researchers focusing on medical imaging, machine learning, forensics, robotics, and graphics to name a few. At UT-ECE, Dr. J. K. Aggarwal's Computer and Vision Research Center spearheads the analysis and understanding of images, signals, and data, and the development of the computer resources required to accomplish these tasks. More...
Dr. Bruce A. Wooley, eminent scholar and Dr. Ambler's counterpart at Stanford University, spoke on Tuesday, February 3, on "Cascaded Noise-Shaping Modulators for Oversampled Data Conversion". Chairman Wooley's speech was part of the Silicon Laboratories Distinguished Speaker Series on Mixed Signal Design. Wooley's research is in the field of integrated circuit design, where his interests include oversampling A/D and D/A conversion, low-power mixed-signal circuit design, circuit design techniques for video and image data acquisition, high-speed embedded memory, high-performance packaging and testing, noise in mixed-signal integrated circuits, and circuits for high-speed communications. More... IEEE Spring Kick-Off Big Success!
We want to thank participating companies:
For the third year in a row, an ECE professor has won the Texas Exes Teaching Award. This very selective award is based on student nominations and only one professor from each college receives it. The 2004 recipient, Dr. John, an eight year veteran at UT-ECE, will receive her award at a presentation and reception on February 10 at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center. More...
Dr. Steve E. Watkins, associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, received one of two highly competitive IEEE-USA Congressional Fellowships for 2004. The Fellowships are awarded to U.S. members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to involve engineers in the public policy process by having them serve on personal or committee staff in the US Congress. Dr. Watkins studied under Dr. Michael Becker and received his PhD from ECE in 1989. The Tiles are Gone! While students were away on Winter Break, the Engineering-Science building (ENS) got a face-lift. The exterior of both the ENS and the annex were cleaned, caulked, and painted. And the western hallways of all six floors were sheetrocked and painted. Miss the tile? Wallpaper...
Distinguished Researcher Lectures on Extending
the Alamouti Space-Time Block Code to 4 Transmit Antennas |
ECE Undergraduate Wins Again!
Larbi
H. Boughaleb Wins Outstanding ECE TA Award 
Undergraduate
Wins National Scholarship
Dr.
Joydeep Ghosh
ECE
alumn and Georgia Tech computer science Ph.D. candidate, Gabriel
J. Brostow, won one of only two 
