ECE News for Summer 2007

ECE Graduate Student wins Best Paper Award

PhD candidate, Ramakrishna Kotla, along with CS professors—Drs. Lorenzo Alvisi and Mike Dahlin—won the Best Paper Award at USENIX annual technical conference. Their paper, SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System, proposes a solution for long-term data storage which protects it from hackers, human error, hardware and software failures, and environmental catastrophes. Their system, called SafeStore, is a new storage system architecture that ensures that duplicate data being stored at different locations is durable, cost effective, readily available, and audited for data loss. "It's the store, forget, and recover based storage system that everyone can use," says Mr. Kotla.

The USENIX conference is ranked as the seventh most influencial publication venue in Computer Science according to CiteSeer. Mr. Kotla's paper beat out 112 other papers for the Best Paper Award.

EE 464 Senior Lab Winners

First Place Multi-effect, Dual Output Guitar Control Board Joseph Crew and Ryan Moench TA: Pierre Collinet	Second Place Ad-Hoc Network Platform using Autonomous Vehicles Burt Snover and Daniel Mott TA: Sanghyun Chi	Third Place Constantly Variable Phase Shift Audio System Matthew Stone TA: Etienne Darphin
Fourth Place Voice-controlled Multiplication Table Device Karen Phan and Huan Lee TA: Sanghyun Chi	Fifth Place Automatic Control Outdoor Cooking Grill Asa Kirby and Suraya Fakhreddine TA: Yeo-Joon Kim	Sixth Place Digital Game System Gavin Rade and Adam Larue TA: Etienne Darphin

ECE Alumni win Best Paper Award

ECE alumni, Drs. Kagan Tumer and Adrian Agogino, received the Best Paper Award at the 2007 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). Drs. Tumer and Agogino, both supervised by Professor Joydeep Ghosh while at UT, are researching ways to accommodate the anticipated tripling of air traffic over the next decade. The current system routes flights on the basis of projections that do not take into account rapidly changing conditions in weather or airport congestion. Drs. Tumer and Agogino's approach is to create agents to govern specific air locations and use reinforcement learning to keep them informed of changing conditions. This approach shows a 67% reduction in congestion over current air traffic flow management.

Dr. Agogino is now with NASA Ames and Professor Tumer works at Oregon State. The AAMAS is the preeminent agent conference with more than 500 participants from 34 different countries and an acceptance rate of 23%. More...

Dr. Bovik wins $300K for Video Research

Professor Al Bovik recently received a $300K grant from the National Science Foundation entitled "Quality Assessment of Natural Videos." The research proposed by Dr. Bovik will create powerful Video Quality Assessment (VQA) algorithms that correlate highly with human visual perception of video quality.

Digital video acquisition, networking, storage and display devices have advanced to an extraordinary degree of sophistication, leading to the rapid rise of many popular and globally deployed networked applications as Internet Video, Interactive Video on Demand (VoD), Video Telepresence, Video Phones, PDAs and other Wireless Video devices, Video Surveillance, HDTV, Digital Cinema etc.

Monitoring and controlling the quality of broadcast video streams is essential towards improving quality of service (QoS). Yet, progress in methods for performing reliable video quality analysis has remained quite limited. In this work, Dr. Bovik and his students will extend their world-leading work on (still) image quality assessment to the video domain. The expected benefits of the research are far-reaching, since successful VQA algorithms are likely to be deployed throughout the global wireline and wireless communication networks as well as in video acquisition and display devices.

ECE Grad Student accepts Faculty Position

PhD candidate, Shobha Vasudevan, has accepted an offer from the University of Illinois for an assistant professor position. "UIUC is included among the nation's top few research institutions and the ECE department has maintained a reputation of excellence and world class research for the past many decades," says Ms. Vasudevan. "I am very excited and will be starting sometime in Fall 2007."

Ms. Vasudevan was advised by Dr. Jacob Abraham and was selected from over 250 candidates. Her research is concentrated on formal verification of hardware.

She has some advice for graduate students interested in faculty positions:
"The journey through grad school, from a diffident incoming grad student in 2001 to a professor in a top flight institution, has been a tough but rewarding one. More...

Prof. Lizy John receives NSF Grant

Dr. Lizy John was awarded a $300K grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research on using workload characterization to predict computer system performance.

Dr. John's team will produce a workload distiller to capture essential properties of workloads and create miniature program spines to help evaluate performance and power during presilicon design exploration. They will also formulate a methodology to create scalable benchmarks for performance estimation of futuristic systems and workloads. Benchmarking methodology for multi-core systems will also be developed.

Dr. John is an expert in this field. She has edited a book on computer performance evaluation and three books on workload characterization. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, IBM, Intel, Motorola, AMD, Texas Instruments, Tivoli and Microsoft Corporations.

AMD pledges $1 Million to UT-ECE

AMD announced a $1 million endowment to UT-ECE last week. This unique endowment, the first of its kind at the university, will be used for course redesign, student and faculty support and laboratory improvement, and will be administered by Chairman Tony Ambler. The funds will be given over a four-year period.

For more than a decade, AMD has worked with ECE to support higher education and recruit top engineering talent. AMD Day is a yearly event. AMD also contributes generously to various projects, scholarships, and faculty endowments; collaborates on research; and sponsors student design contests. In 2006, AMD trained 100 co-ops and interns from ECE and hired 16 new college graduates. Since 2000, AMD has hired approximately 200 new graduates from UT-ECE, more than from any other single university.

"AMD and UT Austin’s collaboration enables the university to continue the important work of educating and inspiring tomorrow’s innovators and helps us recruit top talent. It is my hope that the AMD Chair of Computing Engineering continues to push the limits of what is possible for the university, its students and AMD," said Dirk Meyer, president and chief operating officer, AMD.

Rappaport Elected to IEEE Communications Society Board of Governors

Professor Ted Rappaport has been elected to the IEEE Communications Society (Com Soc) Board of Governors. Com Soc is one of the largest of IEEE’s 39 industry-leading technical Societies with 145 chapters and members in 71 countries worldwide. Dr. Rappaport will serve as a Member-at-Large and as a member of the Operations Committee (Op Com). Only one member of the newly elected class is selected from the group to serve on this additional committee. In the past Prof. Rappaport has served Com Soc as the Technical Program Chairman for the IEEE Global Communications Conference in 2004, member of the IEEE Communications Society Awards Committee, liaison between Com Soc and the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society, and special assistant to the editorial board of the IEEE Communications Magazine.

ECE Mourns the Loss of a Scholar and Friend

Margarida Jacome passed away on the morning of Friday, May 25th, having battled against cancer for several months. We are all deeply shocked at her passing on but we are left with fond memories of her presence, character, hard work, and technical prowess - she was loved by everyone who came across her.

The Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering at both The University of Texas at Austin and at Carnegie Mellon are creating a joint Graduate Student Fellowship in her name – Margarida’s passion was for her research and for her students and it would seem very appropriate that we should do this.

If you would like to make a donation to this Fellowship, please send your contribution made out to ‘The University of Texas’ and marked ‘For Margarida’ to:

• Anthony P Ambler
• Chairman, Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering
• BN Gafford Endowed Professor in Electrical Engineering
• The University of Texas at Austin
• 1 University station C0803
• ENS Room 236
  
• Austin, TX 78712-0240

• Tel: (512) 471-6179
• Fax: (512) 471-3652
• ambler@mail.utexas.edu