Ramakrishna Kotla has won two Best Paper Awards in the past five months. His most recent award was presented at the top conference in operating systems, the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-2007). The paper—Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance co-authored with Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, Allen Clement, and Edmund Wong—introduces a protocol that uses speculation to reduce the cost and simplify the design of BFT state machine replication.

Dr. Alexis Kwasinski received the best technical paper award at the 29th International Telecommunications Energy Conference (INTELEC) for the paper entitled Telecom Power Planning for Natural and Man-Made Disasters. The paper, co-authored by Dr. Philip Krein from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses a planning framework to reduce telecommunication network power supply vulnerability during natural and man-made disasters.

Vijay Garg, Cullen Trust Endowed Professor, was awarded $242K from the National Science Foundation. The project introduces the idea of fusible data structures and fusible state machines. Given a fusible data structure, it is possible to combine a set of such structures into a single 'fused' structure. This approach greatly reduces the space required for backups compared to currently used methods without significantly affecting normal operations on the original data structures.

Professor Constantine Caramanis and colleagues at MIT received a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study the National Air Transportation System (NATS) as an autonomously reconfigurable engineered system, enabled by cyber-infrastructure. The NATS is a core part of the national economy. Recent studies project that disturbance-induced congestion and delays will soon make the current system unstable, thus threatening to arrest growth and expansion. In short, the current system is unsustainable.

ECE graduate student, Yonghyun Kim, recently received the prestigious Applied Materials Graduate Fellowship. The fellowship includes $17,000 cost of educational allowance and $18,000 annual stipend, which can be renewable up to 3 years. The fellowship is awarded to excellent engineering and science graduate students.

Kim studies semiconductor defects as well as process simulations for ultrashallow junction formation of CMOS under Professor Sanjay Banerjee.

Dr. Joydeep Ghosh recently won two new grants worth over $1M to study land use and improve analysis of large and complex data sets. The National Science Foundation awarded the money to Dr. Ghosh and his co-PI's, M. Crawford and B. Pijanowski of Purdue University, for a project called Advanced learning and integrative knowledge transfer approaches to remote sensing and forecast modeling for understanding land use change. This research applies data mining techniques for long-term forecasting of land use change over large geographical areas using both remotely sensed and GIS data sources.

The National Science Foundation awarded $272,764 for a project entitled Quality Assessment of Natural Videos, under the direction of Dr. Alan Bovik, the Keys and Joan Curry/Cullen Trust Endowed Chair of ECE.

Dr. Yilmaz Awarded NSF Grant for Computational Electromagnetic Research

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.