ECE News for Spring 2006
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UT-Austin ECE Rocks! The US News and World Report again places the department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin in the forefront of the nation's engineering programs. Computer Engineering is ranked 8th and Electrical Engineering is ranked 10th!
Sabrina Smith graduated this spring. "I plan to attend graduate school here at UT Austin. I hope to get my Masters in Electrical Engineering, with a focus on Computer Architecture. "The courses that I believe will have the most significant contribution to my professional life are EE 360R, EE 360M, and EE 360N because these are the courses that cover the material that I am interested in and these courses all had significant lab components that I believe strongly facilitated my learning of the material. "The professor that I have found most influential/helpful is Dr. Archie Holmes. Although he didn't teach any of the courses I just mentioned, he was my favorite professor, and he has guided me throughout my college career. Without his advice and support, I would not be where I am today. "The memory that stands out the most from my undergraduate career actually did not take place at UT. I studied abroad for a semester in Denmark, and that was the most amazing experience of my life. Not only did I have a blast, but it was also a huge learning experience. I feel that living in another country and experiencing a culture different from my own has equipped me with better cross-cultural communication skills, which will give me an advantage in the worldwide job market." ECE Students Win NSF Fellowships Sharon E. Byers, Renee St. Amant, and Vishal Parikh, who are seniors in electrical and computer engineering at UT Austin, have won National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships. The NSF Fellowship provides $40,500 per year for three years to support a student pursuing a research-based Master's or doctoral degree. The NSF Fellowship is recognized as the most prestigious fellowship in the US for graduate studies in math, science, technology, and engineering.
Ben Woosley is getting ready to start a job at Microsoft, which he says, "will be an interesting jump into the real world of software development." In the meantime, he has set out to develop useful web applications, along with friend John Pratt. One is WhereAustin.com, which is a combination of the Austin Chronicle's event section and Google Maps. Ben said, "WhereAustin was a chance for us to get together and learn more about web programming. If it's useful to someone, all the better." He says they were able to develop it in a few months of spare time this spring because, "internet programming is maturing in a way that makes much more possible than in the past. APIs such as Google Maps', frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and various Javascript libraries help solve the common problems so that developers can get things done." They have more plans in the works.
Professors David Pan and Michael Orshansky received a three-year grant from the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, to study root causes of process variations and ways to mitigate them in nanometer circuit designs. As CMOS technology scales into deep sub-wavelength lithography regimes, variation related yield loss is becoming one of the most profound challenges for the semiconductor industry. This project will develop techniques for minimizing the impact of variability via variational lithography modeling, shape-based electrical characterization, and variation-tolerant design and optimization. Karen Fullam, supervised by Dr. Suzanne Barber, was recently awarded a $10,000 Anita Borg Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded to outstanding female undergraduate and graduate students completing their degrees in computer science or related fields. Only 19 are given each year. EE 464 Senior Lab Winners
More 464 Pictures
Professors Christine Julien, Suzanne Barber, and Dean Ben Streetman recently opened the Mobile & Pervasive Computing Group's (MPC) lab facilities. The MPC is dedicated to improving software engineering in mobile and pervasive computing environments. These environments are extremes among networks due to a lack of infrastructure, constantly changing configurations, and a great deal of resource variability. MPC's research is focused on middleware design and development, context-awareness, and adaptive communication. Director Julien explains that "The MPC's research aims to radically simplify software development for ubiquitous computing applications by making dynamic communication and coordination accessible to domain experts who have limited programming expertise." Good news for the marketplace!
Gaurav Thareja, a graduate student specializing in solid-state electronics, won the 2006 Outstanding ECE TA Award. Mr. Thareja has been the teaching assistant for Dr. Jack Lee's freshman and sophomore level circuit theory course for the last 3 semesters. According to students, he is not only "very organized, knowledgeable, and polite" he also "changed his office hours multiple times in order to accommodate more students." Professor Lee praised Mr. Thareja for being an innovative instructor: "He creates workshops in which students/TA have an interactive session in solving challenging problems and he is so good at answering student questions that the traffic during my office hours is noticeably lighter." Spring 2006 External Advisory Committee and Graduating Senior Banquet
Former Schlumberger executive and current ECE professor, Howard Neal, was awarded the Department's highest honor: ECE Fellow. Mr. Neal has a long history of service to UT-ECE, beginning with his work on the External Advisory Committee. At the annual Spring Banquet Chairman Tony Ambler praised Mr. Neal. "Howard has been a rock for our Department. He has fundraised, served on committee after committee, and is one of our most popular, and effective, teachers. Schlumberger's loss has certainly been our gain." Faculty Notes Professor Yale Patt gave the Saul Gorn Memorial Lecture at Penn on Monday, April 10. Past lecturers have included Barbara Liskov (MIT), Dave Clark (MIT), Moshe Vardi (Rice), Roger Needham (Cambridge), and Robin Milner (Cambridge). Dr. Patt's topic was "Computer Architecture Research: Is it Dead, Does it Need Revitalization, Where do we go from here?"
Divyanshu Vats, who has been conducting undergraduate ECE research under the supervision of Prof. Brian L. Evans for two years, has been awarded one of nine 2006 University Co-op/George H. Mitchell Awards for Academic Excellence. This university-wide award recognizes outstanding undergraduate research and academic performance. His undergraduate research resulted in a full-length paper at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo entitled "Image Authentication Under Geometric Attacks Via Structure Matching".
Gene Frantz, Principal Fellow and Business Development Manager at Texas Instruments, discussed his take on the acronym, SoC, on Thursday, April 6 at 3:30 PM in ACES 2.402. Mr. Frantz, developer of the Speak and Spell, explained why he thinks that the "S" in SoC is beginning to represent Software instead of System. More...
Raghavendra Hareesh Pottamsetty, Gaurav Singhal, and Omer Shakil each won a AMD Livestrong Notebook PCs for writing a software program that solved a sudoku. The contest—created and judged by Dr. Archie Holmes and HKN officers and sponsored by AMD—began at 5 PM on Friday with an announcement of the design objective and ended Saturday afternoon with submission of the finished program and documentation. "Of the 13 entries, 5 were able to solve the sudoku which is pretty amazing for one day." said Professor Holmes. "I was also very impressed with AMD for providing the prizes without knowing anything about the contest. We appreciate their bravery as well as generosity."
ECE Profs Win $275K Grant from NSF
While you were on Spring Break
Two ECE Papers Chosen as Top Picks IEEE Micro has included two papers by Professor Yale Patt and his graduate students in their annual "Top Picks" issue, which reproduces the best papers in the microarchitecture field. Of the 13 papers were selected for inclusion, UT had the most papers (3), ExploreUT - March 4, 2006
Doctorial Student Wins Best Paper Award Ph.D student, Edmund Spencer, received an Outstanding Student Paper Award from the American Geophysical Union. Spencer, co-supervised by Professors Gary Hallock and Wendell Horton in the physics department, presented his paper "Analysis of the October 3-7, 2000 and April 15-24, 2002 Geomagnetic Storms with the WINDMI Model". More...
The Lecture is sponsored by AMD, AT&T, IBM, IEEE Foundation, Freescale, Intel, National Instruments, SigmaTel, Texas Instruments, and En Pointe Technologies. The lecture's website is www.edisonlectureseries.org. Scenes from this year's Edison Lecture
For the second time in 3 years, Melanie Gulick, ECE graduate program coordinator, received the Graduate Engineering Council’s annual staff service award. Ms. Gulick says "I think the main reason I won is that ECE is the biggest department and that gives us an unfair advantage. But I am flattered. I love ECE. I love the graduate students. I came here in 1989 and liked it so much I just stayed. I don't have to travel. The world comes to me and I've gotten really good at pronouncing Indian names."
Dr. Chris Palmstrom, a professor at The University of Minnesota, gave a lecture Friday, Feb. 3 at 2 PM in ENS 637 as part of the ECE Distinguished Lecture Series. His topic was "Ferromagnetic Metal/Compound Semiconductor Heterostructures: Growth, Interfacial Reactions and Spin Injection." Professor Palmstrom pioneered the use of epitaxial thermodynamically stable contacts to compound semiconductors and chemical beam epitaxy to grow InP based ultra-high speed heterojunction bipolar transistors, resulting in a world speed record. His group was the first to grow epitaxial Heusler alloys on compound semiconductors. Recent emphasis has been made on the development and in-situ atomic level characterization of epitaxial Spintronic materials and devices and ferromagnetic shape memory alloys.
Professor Al Bovik has been selected to receive the 2005 Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. This is the major award given by the SPS. Previous winners include such prominent engineers such as J.W. Cooley, A.V. Oppenheim, L.R. Rabiner, and J.L. Flanagan. Dr. Bovik is the first person in the UT system to win this award. The Technical Achievement Award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to the theory and/or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on the field. Prof. Bovik's research interests span digital video, image processing, and computational aspects of biological visual perception. ECE Graduate Student Ajay Joshi wins Best Paper Award
The paper, Analyzing the Processor Bottlenecks in SPEC CPU2000, was co-written by four other researchers. It reports on the effectiveness of using the Plackett and Burman design to quantify the magnitude of the bottlenecks in the SPEC CPU 2000 benchmark suite. From Departmental Chair Anthony Ambler
The ECE Distinguished Lecture Series presented Dr. John Bowers: a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the CTO and founder of Calient Networks, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Professor Bowers spoke about the viability of Terabit networks. The lecture covered the likely form of Terabit networks, the components required, current research, and the limits to advancement in this area.
ECE Professor Joydeep Ghosh was recently elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for “contributions to the theory and practice of multi-learner systems.” Ghosh investigates the theory and practice of adaptive multi-learner systems, intelligent data analysis, data mining and web mining. He is the founding director of the Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis (IDEAL) Lab. He has authored or co-authored over 200 refereed publications and has won 12 best paper awards over the years, including the UT-Coop Society’s award for best research paper of 2005.
Electrical engineers at the University of Texas (Austin) have demonstrated what they claim is the world's smallest silicon modulator. The device features a photonic-crystal waveguide with an electrode configuration that they hope will make it easily manufacturable. Such a compact modulator might be the key to building practical all-silicon lasers, they said. More... |
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Graduating Senior Profile 
TI Fellow asks Does SoC Mean Software on Chip? 
Leading Researcher Discusses Future of Semiconductors
Ajay Joshi, a Ph.D. student of 
