ECE News for Fall 2007

Happy Holidays from ECE

Drs. Yilmaz and Ling win Grant to Study Electromagnetic Waves and Antennas in Forests

This collaborative effort will demonstrate how the latest CEM solvers can be effectively tailored and deployed on high-performance computers to analyze complex systems in nature. The developed methodology can also benefit other applications involving wave interactions with synthetic media such as electromagnetic metamaterials.

Dr. Aggarwal Receives International Award

Professor J.K. Aggarwal recently received the 2007 Okawa Prize, awarded each year by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunication of Japan. The Okawa Prize honors those who have made outstanding contributions to the research, technological development, and business in the information and telecommunication fields. Dr. Aggarwal was cited for "Outstanding Contribution to Conception and Pioneering Research of Dynamic Scene Analysis and Multisensor Fusion in Computer Vision Systems." He received a gold medal and 10 million yen (~$92K).

Professor Aggarwal is also the recipient of the 2004 King-Sun Fu Prize of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and the 2005 Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE). He is a Fellow of IAPR, IEEE, and AAAS.

EE 464 Senior Lab Winners

First Place Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Test-bed Bart Gillan, John Fraziler, Nick Paine TA: Pierre Collinet	Second Place Remote Kitchen Control using Webservices Sonik Shah, Chen Ding, Adam Tyler, Abel Mathew TA: Bassem El Karablieh	Third Place Portable Sign Language to Speech Translator Cong Wang, Esther Kim, Michelle Garich, Lauren Jarvis TA: Mohit Singh
Fourth Place RFID Bus Tracking System Lisa De La Fuente, James Teherani, Nady Obeid, Carlos Silva TA: Kris Gleason	Fifth Place Data Acquisition System with Ad-Hoc Network Tim Craddock, Richard Broderick, William Forrest, Adilbek, Imanbaev, Ernst Leiss TA: Sanghyun Chi	Sixth Place Autopilot for UAV Ross Dickey, Franco Alamo, Jonathan Bowman, Kevin Baker, Muhammad Ali TA: Pierre Collinet

Students win Computer Architecture Best Paper Award

Grad student, Elias Mizan, and ECE undergrad, Tileli Amimeur, received the 2007 Best Paper Award at the 19th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing. Their paper, "Self-Imposed Temporal Redundancy: An Efficient Technique to Enhance the Reliability of Pipelined Functional Units", discussed a new technique that allows computational circuits in microprocessors to produce more reliable results, effectively reducing the rate of errors. The paper was chosen from among 107 submissions and 32 accepted papers.

The late Professor Margarida Jacome is a co-author. Mr. Mizan says, "Even though Margarida was sick during the time we worked on this paper, she played an active role in guiding us to investigate the issue in detail and produce a high-quality publication. Most importantly, she believed in the value of my idea and encouraged me to set high standards and develop a full-length paper, rather in a short workshop publication, as I initially intended to."

ECE Grad Student Wins 2 Best Paper Awards

Awards Distributed at the Fall Banquet

Faculty and staff were recognized at the annual graduating seniors' banquet. The Undergraduate Student Affairs Office received special recognition for a job well done. Undergraduate adviser, Professor John Pearce, won the Lepley Teaching Award for sustained classroom excellence. The undergraduate academic advisers received special commendation for substantial contributions to the departmental mission. They collectively won the Chairman's Excellence Award, which is the operational equivalent of the High Gain Award. Stephanie Peco won HKN's Staff Merit Award and Dr. Frances Bostick won HKN's Faculty Merit Award. Both were given in recognition of general splendidness. Dr. Archie Holmes gave new graduates advice about navigating work and graduate school and HKN president, Nady Obeid, supervised the HKN raffle.

Professor Kwasinski's Paper Proposes a New Telecom Design

Dr. Alexis Kwasinski received the best technical paper award at the 29th International Telecommunications Energy Conference (INTELEC) for the paper entitled "Telecom Power Planning for Natural and Man-Made Disasters". The paper, co-authored by Dr. Philip Krein from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses a planning framework to reduce telecommunication network power supply vulnerability during natural and man-made disasters. One of the alternatives suggested in the paper is to use of alternative distributed generation technologies, such as photovoltaic panels, small wind generators, microturbines, and fuel cells, to diversify energy supply. During the presentation of the award, Mr. Grossoni—INTELEC 2007 Chairman—highlighted both the technical value and the social implications of the framework suggested in the paper.

INTELEC is one of the three main annual conferences supported by the IEEE Power Electronics Society. The conference is the main forum dedicated to the analysis and discussion of issues related with telecommunications and data-networks energy systems technologies, and related devices and circuits.

Dr. Garg's Research Makes Computing More Efficient

Vijay Garg, Cullen Trust Endowed Professor, was awarded $242K from the National Science Foundation. The project introduces the idea of fusible data structures and fusible state machines. Given a fusible data structure, it is possible to combine a set of such structures into a single 'fused' structure. This approach greatly reduces the space required for backups compared to currently used methods without significantly affecting normal operations on the original data structures. The project involves implementing a library that uses fusion for standard data types, thus enabling users to transparently use these ideas in their programs without any programming overhead.

Professor Garg has authored four textbooks--Concurrent and Distributed Computing in Java, Elements of Distributed Computing, Principles of Distributed Systems, and Modeling and Control of Logical Discrete Event Systems--and is a recognized expert on distributed systems.

Dr. Caramanis wins $2M to Study Air Traffic

Professor Constantine Caramanis and colleagues at MIT received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study the National Air Transportation System (NATS) as an autonomously reconfigurable engineered system, enabled by cyber-infrastructure. The NATS is a core part of the national economy. Recent studies project that disturbance-induced congestion and delays will soon make the current system unstable, thus threatening to arrest growth and expansion. In short, the current system is unsustainable.

Dr. Caramanis’ research will develop new mathematical models and tools, cooperative and distributed algorithms and protocols to enable the NATS to be robust to unforeseen disturbance and uncertain events, through autonomous reconfigurability. This is accomplished through dynamic, distributed, iterative and optimization-based capacity allocation and scheduling mechanisms, complemented by dynamic pricing and collaborative arrangements between airlines.

ECE Graduate Student wins Fellowship

ECE graduate student, Yonghyun Kim, recently received the prestigious Applied Materials Graduate Fellowship. The fellowship includes $17,000 cost of educational allowance and $18,000 annual stipend, which can be renewable up to 3 years. The fellowship is awarded to excellent engineering and science graduate students.

Kim studies semiconductor defects as well as process simulations for ultrashallow junction formation of CMOS under Professor Sanjay Banerjee.

Professor Ghosh Wins Two New NSF Grants

Dr. Joydeep Ghosh recently won two new grants worth over $1M to study land use and improve analysis of large and complex data sets. The National Science Foundation awarded the money to Dr. Ghosh and his co-PI's, M. Crawford and B. Pijanowski of Purdue University, for a project called "Advanced learning and integrative knowledge transfer approaches to remote sensing and forecast modeling for understanding land use change." This research applies data mining techniques for long-term forecasting of land use change over large geographical areas using both remotely sensed and GIS data sources.

The second projects is called "Versatile Co-clustering Analysis for Bi-modal and Multi-modal Data." Professor Ghosh and co-PI, Dr. Inderjit S. Dhillon of UT-Computer Science, will analyze very large and complex data sets, including tensor data and relational data such as large social networks, to find natural grouping and similarities among objects. This research can enhance our understanding of underlying physical, economic or social phenomena.

Parents' Day 2007

Professor Bovik works on Next-Generation Video Quality

The National Science Foundation awarded $272,764 for a project entitled "Quality Assessment of Natural Videos," under the direction of Dr. Alan Bovik, the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair of ECE.

The goal of the project is to formulate an objective measurement of image quality and embed the quality measurement techniques into the very algorithms that process images and videos. A reliable quality metric could dynamically monitor and adjust image quality. It could also be used to optimize and benchmark algorithms and image processing systems—and ultimately, help design algorithms whose quality prediction is in good agreement with subjective scores from human observers.

ECE Welcomes Companies

Schlumberger Day - Sept 19

National Instruments Day - Sept 24

Dr. Yilmaz awarded NSF Grant for Computational Electromagnetic Research

Professor Ali Yilmaz recently received a $150K grant from the National Science Foundation to develop fast multiscale algorithms for computational electromagnetics (CEM). CEM algorithms in particular and numerical algorithms in general grind to a halt when confronted with problems involving real-world systems due to the “tyranny of scales”. Physical phenomena occurring across large ranges of length and time scales are often critical for the operation of complex systems; unfortunately, few conventional algorithms are efficient and robust enough for computations involving more than a single scale of interest. Innovative CEM algorithms are needed to overcome the difficulties inherent in multiscale modeling and analysis.

Dr. Yilmaz’s team will develop multiscale extensions for state-of-the-art fast algorithms and incorporate them to CEM simulators. The simulators resulting from this research effort will enable the first-principles analysis of a variety of challenging electromagnetic propagation, scattering, and radiation problems, which ultimately will advance the understanding, design, and optimization of complex engineering systems.

Thank you, CO-OP and Gonzalo Zapata, for our new Student Lounges!

Before:	After: Ohm's Coffee Shop	Before:	After: 7th floor Penthouse Study Area - Inside	After: 7th floor Penthouse Study Area - Outside

Sriram Vishwanath wins Army Research Office's Young Investigator Award

Dr. Sriram Vishwanath received a $300,000 U.S. Army Research Office Young Investigator Award to design transmission strategies of wireless networks that are both optimal in performance and simple in complexity and structure.  The award is intended to support the research, teaching and careers of university faculty members who have held their doctorate for five years or less.

Dr. Vishwanath also won a NSF CAREER Award and the 2005 IEEE Joint IT/Comsoc Best Paper Award.

Dr. Abraham wins Best Paper Award at Major Symposium

Dr. Jacob Abraham and two of his graduate students—Hongjoong Shin and Byoungho Kim—received the Best Paper Award at the 24th IEEE VLSI Test Symposium for a possible solution to loopback testing problems. The paper, "Spectral Prediction for Specification-Based Loopback Test of Embedded Mixed-Signal Circuits", outlines a new approach to testing mixed-signal circuits. Instead of using the traditional time-domain approach, Professor Abraham and his team were able to create a composite loopback response of all the devices being tested, extract characteristic parameters, and use spectral predictors to provide demonstrably more accurate test results.

The IEEE VLSI Test Symposium has been a premier test conference since it's inception in 1982 with international attendance and a rigorous selection process.

Dr. Pan wins NSF CAREER Award

Prof. David Z. Pan recently won a $410K National Science Foundation CAREER award. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) is its most prestigious award for junior faculty using a highly competitive peer-review process. Dr. Pan’s research focuses on nanometer VLSI CAD and design/manufacturing integration.  This project will develop a synergistic CAD framework that enables holistic design and process integration. It will resort to the root causes of yield losses by developing a set of design-oriented and variation-aware manufacturing/yield models. Meanwhile, novel multi-objective design/manufacturing optimizations will be studied at various abstraction levels. The project will further investigate design and process integration issues for emerging technologies such as nanolithography and hybrid CMOS/post-CMOS processes. If successful, Professor Pan's research will help fill the critical gaps between IC design and manufacturing to further extend the scaling and economic benefits of the Moore’s Law.

This is another major recognition that Dr. Pan received in the past couple of years. He won ACM/SIGDA Outstanding New Faculty Award in 2005, IBM Faculty Awards three times (2004-2006), ISPD 2007 Routing Contest Awards, etc. He has been serving as an Associate Editor for three IEEE transactions, TCAD (2006-), TVLSI (2007-), and TCAS-II (2006-), and will be the General Chair for the 2008 ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), the premier conference on IC physical design.

Professor Orshansky named Outstanding New Faculty by SIGDA

Dr. Michael Orshansky, NSF CAREER Award recipient, was named Outstanding New Faculty by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) interest group on design automation. The award recognizes a “junior faculty member early in her or his academic career who demonstrates outstanding potential as an educator and/or researcher in the field of electronic design automation.” The selection committee weighs research and teaching accomplishments, but especially considers “the impact that the candidate has had on her or his department and on the EDA field during the initial years of their academic appointment.”

In the past year, Dr. Orshansky was the program chair of the Austin Conference on Integrated Systems & Circuits and won the IEEE/ACM William J. McCalla ICCAD Best Paper Award at International Conference on Computer-Aided Design ( ICCAD). His paper, "Joint Design-Time and Post-Silicon Minimization of Parametric Yield Loss using Adjustable Robust Optimization" is co-authored with two of his graduate students, Murari Mani and Ashish K. Singh and describes a novel technique for improvement of integrated circuit yield.

Fall 2007 Newsletter

We are extremely pleased that our national recognition has improved in the past year. The latest US News & World Report ranks UT-Austin's

• Undergraduate Electrical/Electronic/Communications #9 (up from #11)
• Undergraduate Computer Engineering #8
• Graduate Electrical/Electronic/Communications program #10
• Graduate Computer Engineering program #6 (up from #8)

Each of our programs is in the top 10. We are the only department in the Cockrell School of Engineering to move upwards this year.

More...

ECE Research Review for Industry

Computer Architecture and
VLSI/CAD Research Areas

The research faculty and their PhD students in computer architecture and VSLI/CAD will present a snapshot of the research in these areas that is going on in the ECE Department on August 28, 2007. The opening session will be held in ACES 2.302.

Everyone is welcome to attend at no charge.

AGENDA

Drs. Julien and Vishwanath win Grant to Create Flexible Test-Bed

Professors Christine Julien and Sriram Vishwanath received a $380K grant from the Air Force to create a test-bed for mobile, distributed and pervasive computing research. The grant will be used to create a flexible environment that incorporates different technologies into a single integrated test bed. Both graduate and undergraduate researchers will use the environment to study cross-layer information exchange, context-sensitive communication, adaptive mobile middleware, multimedia in mobile networks, and delay tolerant networking. In addition, the team intends to make the test bed available to students to use for projects in courses on mobile and ubiquitous computing.

This new grant is in addition to Dr. Julien's recent $472K grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for developing middleware abstractions in support of network-centric communication in sensor networks.