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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.