ECE News for Fall 2006
New Coffeeshop
The UT Co-op distributed some of the extra money earned from from last year's record sales of UT souvenirs to ECE for two new student lounges—one on the first floor and the other on the 7th floor. The glassed-in room next to the main entrance to the ENS has been converted from storage to The Co-op also is providing new seating for the ENS entrance and porch. The 7th floor "penthouse" will be refurbished this spring. |
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Sanjay Banerjee has been elected Fellow of the American Physical Society
"None of us has any delusions that it is going to be an easy thing," Banerjee says. "But the most fun research programs are not just the ones where you don't know the answer, but you don't even know if there is an answer." More... EE 345M Battle Robots Final Match
Al Bovik named Fellow of the Optical Society
EE 464 Senior Lab Winners
At the National Academy of Engineering's Offshoring of Engineering conference in October, Professor Ted Rappaport created a sensation with his paper "Telecommunication R&D in the U.S.: A Chasm between U.S. Industry & U.S. Students". Dr. Rappaport's study of the telecom industry shows that 52 out of 57 recent research initiatives were located overseas. If telecom operations and cutting edge research continue to move offshore, Dr. Rappaport warns, American universities are in danger of losing U.S. citizens as graduate school applicants—and without these nascent researchers, the next technological wonder and military superiority may be invented overseas. More from BusinessWeek...
"Smart surveillance systems capable of automatically detecting violent crimes could soon be available. A computer vision system developed in the University of Texas in Austin, US, can already tell the difference between friendly behaviour, such as shaking hands, and aggressive actions like punching or pushing. The hope is that such systems will simplify the task of monitoring huge quantities of CCTV security footage, says Sangho Park, who worked on the project with colleague Jake Aggarwal." More... Fall 2006 Banquet
ECE professor Michael Orshansky and two of his graduate students, Murari Mani and Ashish K. Singh, will be presented the IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award at International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) 2006 conference this week. The paper entitled "Joint Design-Time and Post-Silicon Minimization of Parametric Yield Loss using Adjustable Robust Optimization" describes a novel technique for improvement of integrated circuit yield. ICCAD is the premier event for researchers in the area of computer-aided design (CAD). Dr. Orshansky is teaching a course about digital integrated circuit design in the spring. Distinguished Lectures cover Wireless and Digital Signal Processing Trends
Dr. Bill Krenik, Wireless Advanced Architectures Manager, provided an update on the major trends in the wireless industry and some of the underlying technologies. Key research challenges and their potential impact on the industry were also discussed. Later in the day, Gene Frantz, a TI Principal Fellow, explored the topic, "What has Digital Signal Processing Done for Us Lately?" This talk focused on the world of entertainment and discuss innovations to come. Parents' Day - Saturday, Oct 28
Dr. Dodabalapur sells RFID Company Recent ECE Student AccomplishmentsECE grad student, Katrina Lu won an SRC Master’s Scholarship to pursue her graduate study at UT, under the supervision of Prof. David Pan. Lu will receive full tuition and a living stipend of $1,950/month, for up to two years of master's level study. Three ECE students received scholarships from the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Corporation: seniors Lisa de La Fuente and Carlos Silva and graduate student Teri Houle. Taiwen Tang—along with Sunghyun Cho and Sangboh Yun—won the best student paper award at the 9th Wireless Personal Multimedia Communications Conference for "Opportunistic Feedback in Clustered OFDM System." He was supervised by Dr. Robert Heath who also co-authored the paper. UT-ECE grad student, Cynthia Burham, is the new district grand prize winner for the IEEE GOLD 10th Anniversary Online Challenge. Congratulations, Cynthia!
Dr. Kent D. Choquette of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign discussED the application of nanotechnology to achieve unprecedented confinement of both photons and electrons to develop the next generation of lasers, photonic integrated circuits, and sensors. This technology may be used in applications such as imaging, free space interconnects, and beam steering. Dr. Choquette's lecture is entitled Next Generation Nanocavity Lasers. More...
ECE professors—Jeffrey Andrews, Sanjay Shakkottai, and Robert Heath—and CS professor, Peter Stone, received $6.5 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a new non-equilibrium information theory that describes the performance limits of temporary, or ad-hoc, mobile wireless networks. Ad-hoc networks can be used in emergency and military situations, and by countries with immature telecommunications infrastructure. These networks allow for the quick addition of mobile devices and for widespread cooperation in relaying traffic over the network. The problem is that current theories do not accurately describe them. "It's rare that DARPA allocates such a large amount of funding for basic theoretical research, so our team feels very fortunate to have won this highly competitive grant", said Dr. Andrews, who will lead twelve faculty from eight universities in this five-year inter-disciplinary effort. "We hope to develop an entirely new way of thinking about wireless networking by looking at the network as a whole, rather than individual communication links. Shannon's information theory in 1948 provided the bedrock for the information age, but has not proven successful at describing distributed networks with mobility and unpredictable delay. We hope to develop a general information theory that does." More... Drs. Andrews, Heath, and Shakkottai are members of the Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG).
Yonghyun Kim and Ajay Joshi both won sizable fellowships this fall for their research. Kim won the Applied Materials Graduate Fellowship which includes a $10,500 cost of education allowance and $18,000 annual stipend, renewable for up to 3 years. His graduate advisors are Dr. Sanjay Banerjee and Dr. Gyeong Hwang (CHE). Joshi has been named an IBM Ph.D. Fellow. His fellowship pays for one year of tuition and fees, includes a free laptop, a $17,500 stipend, and is renewable up to 3 years. Joshi is supervised by Professor Lizy John.   ECE Professors receive $750K Air Force GrantUT-ECE professors Al Bovik and Jake Aggarwal, and industry partner 21st Century Technology of Austin, Texas, have been awarded a $750,000 grant from the United States Air Force. The grant entitled “Passive Optical Sensing,” will cover 2 years and provides for equipment and graduate researchers that are key in the development of new algorithms for 3-D Scene Modeling. Professor Bovik said, “We are gratified to receive this grant and are excited to continue our work with 21st Century Technology in the area of 3-D Scene Modeling." Professor Aggarwal added "I am delighted that my graduate students and I will be again helping the Air Force in its mission through tracking and recognition of objects and people."
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $700,000 in grant funding to two of ECE's professors, Drs. Robert Heath and Scott Nettles, for research into mobile ad hoc wireless networks. The project is entitled "NeTS-ProWiN: Practical Use of Channel Information in Multihop Wireless Networks" focuses on the development of anytime, anywhere communication from mobile nodes that communicate despite changing locations and signal strength—and without fixed wireless infrastructure. |
(pronounced ohms), a lounge/coffee bar offering coffee, juice, sandwiches, and pastry from 7:30 AM - 4 PM weekdays. 
Dr. Orshansky wins ICCAD Best Paper Award 
Distinguished Lecture features Nanotechnology Researcher
