PhD candidate, Ramakrishna Kotla, along with CS professors—Drs. Lorenzo Alvisi and Mike Dahlin—won the Best Paper Award at USENIX annual technical conference. Their paper, SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System, proposes a solution for long-term data storage which protects it from hackers, human error, hardware and software failures, and environmental catastrophes.

ECE alumni, Drs. Kagan Tumer and Adrian Agogino, received the Best Paper Award at the 2007 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS).

Professor Al Bovik recently received a $300K grant from the National Science Foundation entitled Quality Assessment of Natural Videos. The research proposed by Dr. Bovik will create powerful Video Quality Assessment (VQA) algorithms that correlate highly with human visual perception of video quality.

PhD candidate Shobha Vasudevan has accepted an offer from the University of Illinois for an assistant professor position. UIUC is included among the nation's top few research institutions and the ECE department has maintained a reputation of excellence and world class research for the past many decades, says Ms. Vasudevan. I am very excited and will be starting sometime in Fall 2007.

Ms. Vasudevan was advised by Dr. Jacob Abraham and was selected from over 250 candidates. Her research is concentrated on formal verification of hardware.

Dr. Lizy John was awarded a $300K grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research on using workload characterization to predict computer system performance.

Dr. John's team will produce a workload distiller to capture essential properties of workloads and create miniature program spines to help evaluate performance and power during presilicon design exploration. They will also formulate a methodology to create scalable benchmarks for performance estimation of futuristic systems and workloads. Benchmarking methodology for multi-core systems will also be developed.

AMD Pledges $1 Million to UT-ECE

Professor Ted Rappaport has been elected to the IEEE Communications Society (Com Soc) Board of Governors. Com Soc is one of the largest of IEEE’s 39 industry-leading technical Societies with 145 chapters and members in 71 countries worldwide. Dr. Rappaport will serve as a Member-at-Large and as a member of the Operations Committee (Op Com). Only one member of the newly elected class is selected from the group to serve on this additional committee. In the past Prof.

Margarida Jacome passed away on the morning of Friday, May 25th, having battled against cancer for several months. We are all deeply shocked at her passing on but we are left with fond memories of her presence, character, hard work, and technical prowess - she was loved by everyone who came across her.

In the past 3 years, the Edison Lecture Series has inspired and informed almost 14,000 middle and high school students. Almost 8,000 have attended a live free hour-long show on The University of Texas at Austin campus. Another 6,000 students participated in Texas Connects: EDISON DAY, a day-long video conference presented by the Texas Education Telecommunications Network. Dr. Mack Grady also took the series on the road to the fifth grade science classes of Cypress Elementary in the Leander school district.

Graduate student Ramya Bhagavatula received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2007 Vehicular Technology Conference held in Dublin, Ireland, April 23 - 25, 2007 for her paper entitled MIMO Antenna Placement for Multimedia Delivery in Aircraft.