ECE News for Summer 2005
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ECE professor, Vijay Garg, recently won $315,000 from the National Science Foundation to study multithreaded distributed software. Dr. Garg's research will hopefully result in improved monitoring and testing of concurrent programs—and increase the quality and fault-tolerance of distributed software. He is particularly interested in four areas: slicing, dependency tracking, global predicate detection and controlling a computation. More...
Dr. Sajeev John, winner of the 2001 King Faisal International Prize in Science, presented a seminar as part of the ECE Distinguished Lecture Series at 10:30 AM on Thursday, August 18th, in ENS 637. The topic was "Photonic Band Gap Materials: Semiconductors of Light" and was a description of his ground-breaking research on a new class of dielectrics that enable engineering of the most fundamental properties of electromagnetic waves. Dr. John has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. More...
Three ECE undergrads left on June 4th on a 4,500 miles bike ride from Austin, Texas to Anchorage, Alaska. Nicholas Bangia, Robert Grant, and Jason Soric helped raise over $150K for cancer research. The daily focus of their trek was threefold: first, to use their personal experiences to bring hope to cancer patients they met along the way; second, to educate others about cancer; last, to urge everyone to join in the fight against cancer by donating. EE 464 Senior Lab Winners
Dr. J. K. Aggarwal received the 2005 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award for "inspiring graduate students to achieve excellence through mentoring, teaching, and guidance of research in computer vision and signal processing." Professor Aggarwal was selected for his contributions in curriculum development, authorship of course materials, involvement with students and faculty in advisory capacities, as well as "attracting students to engineering and scientific professions, and preparing them for effective careers in engineering and the sciences." IEEE President W.
Dr. Sriram Vishwanath with co-authors Drs. Nihar Jindal and Andrea Goldsmith, are the recipients of the 2005 IEEE Joint IT/Comsoc Best Paper Award for their paper "On the Duality of Gaussian Multiple-Access and Broadcast Channels." The award recognizes one or two outstanding papers that address both communications and information theory. Any paper appearing in a ComSoc or IT Society publication during the year 2004 was eligible for the 2005 award. This year Dr. Vishwanath's paper is the only one receiving the award. Congratulations, Professor Vishwanath.
Professor Michael Orshansky, head of the Robust IC Design Lab, won the Best Paper Award at the most prestigous electronic design automation conference in the world—the 2005 Design Automation Conference. Dr. Orshansky's paper, An Efficient Algorithm for Statistical Minimization of Total Power Under Timing Yield Constraints, describes a new algorithmic solution for the design of low power chips in presence of process variations. The algorithm is more than 30x faster than other known solutions—which is essential for the process of industrial design of chips.
Professor Sandberg is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His contributions to the theory of stability of nonlinear systems are widely known. His research is applied in the design of control systems, neural networks and frequency-conversion circuits for communication systems. His contributions in nonlinear networks have provided a better understanding of the properties of the circuit equations and how best to use a computer to solve them.
Professor Gary Hallock was one of the two UT professors awarded a DADS' Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship for Spring 2005. This fellowship goes to professors who instruct freshmen undergraduates. Winners must be nominated by their deans and approved by the Vice Provost and Provost. The reasons Professor Hallock won are best expressed by his students:
Congratulations, Dr. Hallock, and good luck with the Solar Car Race beginning in 5 weeks. Dr. Inderjit Dhillon, UT Computer Sciences, and Dr. Joydeep Ghosh, ECE, were awarded the $5,000 Best Research Paper Award (from UT Co-op Society) for their collaborative work titled "Clustering with Bregman Divergences." This work was done jointly with Dr. Ghosh's two grad students: Arindam Banerjee and Srujana Merugu (both from ECE). |
Professor Vishwanath Wins Best Paper Award
Jack Kilby, Nobel-Prize Winner and 
