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.

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.