The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (UT ECE) has joined a strategic partnership with BP to support several leading-edge oil and gas industry research projects. BP has committed $4 million to the partnership with the potential for increased contributions as new studies are identified in the future.

James Truchard, who earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1974, was recognized by Texas Exes on Nov. 1 with the organization’s annual Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Prof. Andrea Alu of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has been elected to Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA) “for outstanding contributions to the fields of photonic metamaterials, plasmonic phenomena and devices, cloaking and scattering suppression."

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has selected UT ECE assistant professor Zheng Wang as a 2013 Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering. Wang is one of 16 of the nation’s most innovative young scientists and engineers receiving the Packard Fellowship this year. Each Packard fellow will receive a grant of $875,000 over five years to pursue research.

The Wireless Networking and Communications Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin is part of a team that has been awarded a $1.4 million grant for the development of a Tier 1 University Transportation Center (UTC) by the USDOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA).

UT ECE student Duehee Lee placed fourth in the IEEE Power and Energy Society Global Energy Forecasting Competition (GEFCom) in the Wind Power Forecasting Track. GEFCom2012 is the largest known energy forecasting competition to date. Not only does it bring together many new ideas to the energy-forecasting field from data scientists in many different industries but the competition data has already been used by scholars for benchmarking purposes. More than 200 teams submitted more than 2,000 entries focusing on hierarchical load forecasting and wind power forecasting.

In an interdisciplinary collaboration, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES) teamed up with material scientists to understand, explain, and exploit a specific microwave effect. The team’s results were recently published in Scientific Reports.

UT ECE students Bei Yu, Xiaoqing Xu, Jhih-Rong Gao and their advisor Prof.  David Z. Pan received the William J. McCalla Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). The title of the paper that received the award is “Methodology for Standard Cell Compliance and Detailed Placement for Triple Patterning Lithography.” The award will be presented at the opening session for ICCAD 2013, on Monday, Nov. 18, 2013. ICCAD is the premier conference devoted to technical innovations in electronic design automation.

UT ECE graduate student Francesco Monticone and his advisor Prof. Andrea Alu received the Best Student Paper Award at Metamaterials 2013 in Bordeaux, France. The title of Francesco’s paper with Andrea is 'On the Physical Bounds of Cloaking and Invisibility'. Metamaterials 2013 is the most visible international conference in the field of artificial materials and metamaterials, and this year it celebrated its 20th anniversary.

A group of UT Austin and Stanford faculty members led by Prof. Gustavo de Veciana in collaboration with Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai, Lili Qiu, and Ramesh Johari have recently been awarded an NSF grant totaling $978,000. This project supports research in 5G wireless networks.