Assistant professor, Sarfraz Khurshid, has become the fifth ECE faculty member to win the most prestigious prize the National Science Foundation offers this year. The CAREER award supports the early career-development activities of the country's most promising researchers.

An anonymous donor has established a $50,000 J.K. Aggarwal Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Electrical & Computer Engineering. The annual scholarship was awarded to ECE senior, David Lu.

Dr. Sujay Sanghavi will join ECE as an Assistant Professor in the Fall. His research lies at the intersection of two fields: networking, and statistical machine learning. He is particularly interested in the use of probability and optimization for developing new algorithms in both of these fields.

Sujay has a B. Tech from IIT Bombay, and two MS degrees (in Math and ECE) and a PhD in ECE from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He just completed two years as a postdoc at MIT, and one year as an assistant professor in ECE at Purdue University.

Assistant professor Seth Bank just received a 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on young researchers. Bank will use the $1M grant attached to the award to study metal/semiconductor nanocomposites (metallic nanoparticles embedded in a semiconductor). The goal is to use these new materials to produce efficient sources of terahertz radiation for a number of applications in chemical/gas sensing and security.

Deji Akinwande to Join ECE Faculty

Edward Yu Accepts Chaired Position

The 4th Annual Austin Conference on Integrated Systems & Circuits (ACISC) has issued a call for papers. Previous conferences have included keynote addresses from the CEO's of Silicon Laboratories and Cirrus Logic, tutorials on bleeding edge technologies, and wide participation from industry.

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.