Fall 2004 Newsletter
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We hope you had a relaxing summer and are ready for the hard work that awaits you in one of the toughest electrical and computer engineering programs in the country. In 2005, the ECE department is ranked 8th nationally for its Computer Engineering program and 11th for Electrical Engineering in the US News & World Report rankings. We hope the addition of new faculty (we hired 12 in the last 3 years!) and our continuous efforts to improve your educational experience will help boost these already impressive rankings. You are a member of a very elite student population. The average ECE freshmen has a SAT score almost 50 points higher than the UT average. This department receives nearly a fourth of UT-Austin's graduate school applications, but only accepts 15% of applicants. And it will only get harder to get in. Beginning this fall, all entering freshmen will have to be in the top 10% of their high school class and pass a rigorous math competency test as well. The reason for our stringent entrance policies is to ensure that our students can do the stellar work that we expect. But, don't worry, if you were accepted, you can do the work. Use the resources available to you: your TAs and professors; your Blackboard class website and email list; free HKN, CSoE, and SWE tutoring; the always open ENS labs; and interest groups. Work hard, but have some fun this semester, too.
The ECE-IT group has two new members: Gabriel Hernandez and Roland Rocha II. The undergraduate advising office, supervised by Sharon Bressette, has two new advisors: Courtney Lockhart and Janice Williams-Perkins. To our new staff and faculty, we say welcome aboard!
Some members of the ECE family will be retiring this fall as well. Charley Randall has been helping students and professors in the second floor labs for 15 years, but he seems like a dilettante next to our other two retirees. Lisa Walter, our procurement officer, has been with UT for 27 years. When she began, ECE was still the Department of Electrical Engineering. Enough said.
New Circuit Design Academic Track
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UT-ECE welcomes a new faculty member this
fall. Dr. Christine Julien comes to us from Washington University.
Her research interests lie in the realm of software engineering,
specifically for mobile computing. Much of her previous work has
focused on software engineering for ad hoc mobile networks and
includes the development of algorithms for mobile computing,
middleware for simplifying the software development process, and
the use of formal methods for reasoning about mobile
interactions.
Professor Mario Gonzalez is one of the people
responsible for making UT-EE into UT-ECE. He received all 3 degrees
here, worked in the private sector for a time, and came back in
1986 to have an exceptional and much-honored academic career. He
served as an Associate Dean, chair of ECE, and as an executive
officer of The University of Texas System where he assisted the
chancellor in a number of areas, especially in South Texas/Border
Area Development and Telecommunications and Information Technology.
His contributions are great and long-lasting and he will be
missed.
Professor Jacob Abraham was instrumental in creating a
new masters degree program in Circuit Design. This program was
initiated at the request of industry to provide a more focused
curriculum covering both analog and digital design. This massive
undertaking could only have been achieved with significant
assistance from industry. Cadence, AMD, National Instruments,
Intel, IBM, Motorola, and Austin Ventures provided equipment,
financing, and expertise.