ECE News for Fall 2008
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Professor Gustavo DeVeciana has been named an IEEE Fellow, the highest grade of IEEE membership. He was promoted "for contributions to the design of communication networks." Dr. de Veciana researches wireline and wireless network protocols and architectures. His work involves the measurement, modeling and analysis of traffic, evolving applications, and service requirements towards supporting better network engineering. He also researches architectural principles of networks supporting sensing and pervasive computing applications, by embedding sensors, storage and computation in the environment. The objective of this work is to enable mobile devices and environments which share contextual information, allowing distributed applications which exhibit location, and more generally context-specific functionality. |
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Professor Arjang Hassibi wants to revolutionize medical testing. Dr. Hassibi's research is devoted to making test results quick, convenient, and cheap via biochips. Biosensors—aka biochips—are essentially miniaturized laboratories on a single disposable integrated chip, capable of performing simultaneous biochemical reactions. "Biochips are basically hybrid systems," Hassibi says. "The electronic part is solved. The challenge is how to make it into a chemical sensor." Dr. Hassibi is working on an open platform for a tester that can be tailored to detect specific diseases. If all goes as planned, Dr. Hassibi believes commercialization can occur in three years, with the biosensors entering the consumer market three years after that. |
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Professor Ted Rappaport has been selected as one of two winners of the WTC Recognition Award. Every year, the IEEE Technical Committee on Wireless Communications (WTC) recognizes colleagues with outstanding achievements and contributions in the area of "wireless and mobile communications theory, systems, and networks" through this award. It was presented at Globecom 2008 in New Orleans. |
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Fall 2008 Senior Lab
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Congratulations to Robert C. Daniels, Ketan Mandke, Steven W. Peters, Scott M. Nettles, and Robert W. Heath, Jr. for winning the Grand Prize for the WinCool demo contest at the WiNTECH 2008 Conference, The Third ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization. The team won for “Machine Learning for Physical Layer Link Adaptation in Multiple-Antenna Wireless Networks.” Work on the demo was funded in part by NSF and DARPA through the ITMANET program. |
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Dr. Bruce McCann was named an ECE Fellow at the Fall 2008 Fall Graduating Seniors and External Advisory Committee Banquet. Dr. McCann was recognized for his hard work and dedication to teaching at all levels. Dr. McCann has long taught freshman-level classes as well as masters courses to working professionals. He also made a large contribution to upgrading our senior design course, EE 364 and 464. HKN also recognized faculty and staff. Keynote speaker, Prof. Yale Patt won the I'm Feeling Lucky award for his high ranking on Google. Courtney Lockhart won the Awesome Advisor award and Stephanie Peco won the coveted Super Supportive Staff award.
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Recently, ECE presented the prestigious Gordon T. Lepley IV Endowed Memorial Teaching Award to Prof. Brian Evans. Dr. Evans was an obvious choice for both his classroom performance and curricular reforms. Almost 1,000 students have taken his real-time digital signal processing laboratory course where they translate theoretical ideas into working prototypes. He has also guided 100+ senior design students through their projects and supervised 16 Ph.D. and 8 M.S. students to degree completion. Prof. Evans facilitated the 2000-2001 undergraduate ECE curriculum reform discussions, with co-chair Prof. Craig Chase. The result was modernized course content, more electives, and reduced redundancy. Students had more choices and a faster finish. To implement the reform, Prof. Evans has been scheduling ECE classes since fall 2002 and—based on student feedback—he eliminated 8:00 am courses. Prof. Evans is currently an integral part of the current ECE curriculum reform discussions being chaired by Profs. Michael Orshansky and Sanjay Shakkottai. |
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Dr. Dean Neikirk won the External Advisory Committee's coveted High Gain Award for guiding the Department's graduate program for the last 9 years. Dr. Neikirk serves as the ECE Graduate Advisor. Until recently, he was the chairman of the Graduate Studies Committee as well. These jobs call for diplomacy, discretion, decisivness, and follow-through. "I really admire Dr. Neikirk," says graduate coordinator, Melanie Gulick. "He's served on committees all over the university, so he understands UT policy, but he's no bureaucrat. He tries to help every student succeed. He doesn't sweat the small stuff and he is very interesting to talk to." Dr. Neikirk's research concentrates on the fabrication and modeling of electromagnetic and micromachined sensors and actuators. His research project related to development of new chemical sensors (an “electronic taste” sensor) was selected for a commercialization venture between The University of Texas and LabNow, Inc. |
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ECE alumnus James Truchard (Ph.D. '74) worked at UT's Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) for only two years before he, and fellow ARL employees Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin, founded National Instruments (NI). Thirty two years later, the company has 4,000 employees, direct operations in 41 countries, and nearly $1 billion in sales. Dr. Truchard bleeds orange. Two of his sons, John (’94) and Michael (’89), got their BSEEs from this department. Truchard is a member of the University of Texas Chancellor's Council, the Engineering Foundation Advisory Council, and a former member of ECE's Visiting Committee. Truchard was inducted into the Electronic Design Engineering Hall of Fame, elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, and elected to the National Academy of Engineering. We are proud to call him one of our own. |
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Dr. Robert Flake has discovered the first non-sinusoid signal that doesn’t undergo dispersion on transmission lines that would normally distort a signal. The waveform, “Speedy Delivery” (SD), is a pulse with a positive exponential leading edge. One possible use of SD to develop a new generation of high-resolution TDR instruments. TDR stands for time-domain reflectometer. TDRs send an electrical pulse through a metal cable encased in the foundation of a structure. Any impedance, such as a crack, sends the signal back towards the source. Flake’s working prototype consists of a laptop, oscilloscope, and function generator. Early results promise much greater acuracy than conventional TDRs. This ultra-fidelity signal technology holds potential for advancing the interconnect performance and design of audio and high-speed computer communication systems. |
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Dr. Ted Rappaport has been recognized twice recently. He won an award at the Texas Wireless Summit—the 2008 AWA Wireless Industry Leadership Award. He has also been appointed to the IEEE Board of Governors for the Vehicular Technology Society for 2009-2011. He already serves on the IEEE Board of Governors for the Communication Society (COMSOC). Professor Rappaport develops new methods for analyzing and deploying wireless broadband networks and portable internet access. A recent Army Research Laboratory grant has enabled his team to begin research in millimeter wave circuits and embedded antennas that will enable far-reaching applications such as rugged, lightweight and massively broadband wireless multimedia terminals. More about research... Cirrus Logic Day 2008
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Dr. Robert W. Heath, Jr. just won a National Science Foundation Award to research signal processing on special manifolds with applications to wireless communication. To meet the demand for wireless communication, wireless systems may employ new concepts such as multiple antennas, multiple user processing, transmitter coordination, and interference alignment. Implementing these techniques requires development of algorithms that exploit structure in the underlying signals. Dr. Heath's research involves developing a suite of signal processing techniques for analyzing, filtering, predicting, and optimizing signals with curved manifold structure. The immediate impact of this research will be to improve the quality and capacity of wireless communication links. Dr. Heath's broader research interests include all aspects of MIMO (multiple input multiple output) wireless communication including precoding, limited feedback, equalization, prototyping, adaptation, as well as 60GHz communication and bio-signal processing. Sun Microsystems Day 2008
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Shayak Banerjee, a Ph.D. candidate being supervised by Professor Michael Orshansky, has won an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. The fellowships are awarded worldwide and are intensely competitive. Only 60 students were awarded this fellowship for 2007-08. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are awarded tuition fees, and a stipend for one nine-month academic year. The fellowship is usually followed by an internship at IBM. Banerjee will be presenting his paper "Electrically Driven Optical Proximity Correction Based on Linear Programming" at the 2008 International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in November. His research aims at reducing variability in circuit manufacturing by altering the lithography mask to directly compensate for any mismatch in design targets. Reducing variability improves the yield of circuits and is of great benefit for any foundry. |
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Sun Microsystems awarded ECE Research Fellow Mark McDermott a $20K award for Best University Level Computer Architecture and/or VLSI Course. McDermott received the prize for EE 382M-8, VLSI II. The graduate-level course brings the real world into the classroom. Experienced IC designers from local industry co-developed and co-teach the course. The class concentrates on how to do the early design planning of a microprocessor or SOC using a high level behavioral or RTL model and how to do the circuit feasibility analysis of the critical speed paths of the microprocessor or SOC based on the results of the early design planning. The 40+ students use open source SPARC-T1 for a complex class design project. UT is a Sun OpenSPARC Center of Excellence. National Instruments Day 2008
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Chan-Byoung Chae, a Ph. D. candidate supervised by Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr., has been awarded the 2008 IEEE VTS Dan E. Noble Fellowship Award. The fellowship recognizes an individual most likely to impact the areas of concentration of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society including "wireless", and mobile radio. This is the most prestigious award a graduate student in wireless communications can receive. The award will be presented at the IEEE VTS Conference (VTC) in Calgary, Canada on September 23rd. Mr. Chae was the recipient of the Gold Prize in the 2007 Humantech Paper Contest, the KSEA-KUSCO scholarship in 2007, and the Korea Government Fellowship (KOSEF) in 2005. Schlumberger Day 2008
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Professor Yale Patt was one of five speakers to address the Mexican Congress at a 50th Anniversary Celebration of the first computer installed in Mexico. The title of his talk was "Future Microprocessors and their Implications for Computer Science Education in Mexico." Professor Patt is a recipient of the highest honor in computer science education, the 2000 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In 1985, he (and his students Wen-mei Hwu, Steve Melvin, and Mike Shebanow) introduced HPS, a wide-issue, out-of-order processor that implemented precise exceptions. In 1991, he and student Tse-Yu Yeh introduced the two-level dynamic branch predictor. Elements of both are now used in some form by every high performance microprocessor. |
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Dr. Alan C. Bovik has been selected to receive the 2008-2009 Claude R. Hocott Distinguished Centennial Engineering Research Award. Dr. Bovik will receive the award at the Faculty Excellence Awards Dinner later this fall. The Hocott award, given by the Cockrell School of Engineering, recognizes faculty members whose documented research while associated with UT has significantly advanced the engineering profession. Dr. Bovik earned a worldwide reputation for his research in the fields of image and video processing, computational vision, digital microscopy, and modeling of biological visual perception. Dr. Bovik received the Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2005, the Distinguished Lecturer Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in 2000, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Meritorious Service Award in 1998, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in 2000, and is a two-time Honorable Mention winner of the international Pattern Recognition Society Award for Outstanding Contribution (1988 and 1993). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. |
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Dr. Charles Roth has received the 2008 McGuffey Longevity Award for his fifth edition of Fundamentals of Logic Design. The Text and Academic Authors Association created the McGuffey Longevity Awards in 1993 to recognize textbooks and learning materials demonstrating excellence over a significant period of time. Works must have been in print at least 15 years and currently remain in circulation and use. Judges described Fundamentals of Logic Design as, "exceptionally written" and "an excellent text because it can easily be used for a self-study or distance learning course." Dr. Roth has also won UT's Student IEEE's Most Useful Class Award two years in a row for EE 316, Digital Logic Design, a self-paced course that he developed. |
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Fall 2008 Newsletter
Welcome back! And to those of you joining us, Welcome! The quality of our program is based on the quality of our students. We are gratified to report that:
Engineering Science Building (ENS) Renovation
The rest of the building is undergoing massive renovations. ACA: We still have use of the ACA (giant shed in the parking lot just south of the ENS).
Basement: The Biomedical Engineering department has left the building, freeing up much needed lab space in the basement.
3rd floor: Third floor renovations are anticipated to be ready for the Fall 2009 academic year. When complete, the third floor will hold all general purpose computer labs (AKA, LRC labs), all teaching labs, IT workspace, adjunct faculty offices, and the existing classroom.
5th floor:
6th floor: The Biomedical Engineering department moved out of the sixth floor late this summer. Sixth floor renovations are slated to begin after the completion of the third floor. The renovations include moving the chairman and some administrative staff offices to the sixth floor, a display hallway of departmental awards, faculty offices, graduate research labs and offices, and a large multi-purpose room.
The Wireless Networking and Communications Group hired two new staff members: Lauren Allaire and Cassandra Clarke. Lauren is a graduate student from Texas State. She is administering the EUREKA program, an opportunity for undergraduates to do research over the summer. Cassandra, who has a masters in creative writing from UT, supports Dr. Ted Rappaport. Jason Pannell is the new supervisor of the second floor lab check-out. Our new procurement officer, Kendrick Weld, comes to us from Natural Sciences. They all agree that ECE provides a fast-paced, challenging workplace.
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Dr. Gregory Fenves
Dr. Andreas Gerstlauer
