UT-ECE PhD graduate, Vishal Monga, has accepted a tenure-track position at Pennsylvania State University for fall 2009. Monga's PhD research, supervised by Professor Brian L. Evans, was in a problem in multimedia security and mining known as perceptual image hashing. Perceptual image hashing helps index large image databases for efficient search and retrieval, makes watermarking images easier, and strengthens image/document authentication against attacks.

Professor David Z. Pan has been elected chair of the IEEE Computer-Aided Network Design (CANDE) Committee, a position that he will hold for one year. CANDE is a technical activity of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA) and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society.

Dr. Al Bovik was recently awarded two separate grants from the National Science Foundation totaling $703,000. The first is an equipment grant to conduct high definition (HD) video processing research, with particular emphasis on video quality assessment. The equipment includes the “Red One”—a revolutionary high-definition cinematic movie camera famously used by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson—as well as high-definition displays and a visual eyetracker and headtracker.

Rajeshwary Tayade earned Best Paper Award at the 13th IEEE European Test Symposium (ETS'09): Critical Path Selection For Delay Test Considering Coupling Noise (co-authored by Professor Jacob Abraham)

Dr. Suzanne Barber is a national leader in identity management and the primary organizer of the recent summit: “The Digital Identity: A Double-Edged Sword”. At the summit, experts from industry, government, and academia discussed how shortfalls in even the most fundamental identity management needs, such as basic standards and definitions, are undermining efforts to make our digital identities as secure as our physical ones.

Cell phone antennas, radio receivers and GPS devices may one day go incognito. In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta propose a new cloaking method that cancels out the electromagnetic waves bouncing off an object. The concept may ultimately lead to surreptitious sensors that can collect and send messages without detection.

Professors Sanjay Banerjee and Emanuel Tutuc have demonstrated, for the first time, that centimeter-square areas of copper foils can be covered almost entirely with mono-layer graphene bringing this intriguing material one step closer to commercial viability. Graphene, formed with carbon atoms linked together like nanoscopic chicken wire, holds great potential for nanoelectronics. It also shows promise for electrical energy storage, for use in composites, for thermal management, in chemical-biological sensing, and as a new sensing material for ultra-sensitive pressure sensors.

UT-ECE research to be published in the journal Science demonstrates, for the first time, that centimeter-square areas of copper foils can be covered almost entirely with mono-layer graphene bringing this intriguing material one step closer to commercial viability. Graphene, formed with carbon atoms linked together like nanoscopic chicken wire, holds great potential for nanoelectronics.

UT-ECE, IEEE Central Texas Section, door64, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, and 1,000 engineers celebrated the 125th anniversary of the IEEE at Austin's Goodwill Center.

from ScienceNews:

Cell phone antennas, radio receivers and GPS devices may one day go incognito. In a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters, Andrea Alù and Nader Engheta propose a new cloaking method that cancels out the electromagnetic waves bouncing off an object. The concept may ultimately lead to surreptitious sensors that can collect and send messages without detection.