Eleven ECE graduate students and one undergraduate student have won nine Best Paper awards between them this past year. This is an amazing accomplishment, says departmental chairman Tony Ambler. These awards come from major conferences. The competition is unbelievable. Some of these conferences only accept 20% of the papers submitted and to rise to the top of such a select group is a testament to the quality of our students' hard work.

Professors Ali Yilmaz and Hao Ling received a $270K grant from the National Science Foundation to advance the understanding of radiowave propagation and antenna operation in forests by utilizing the latest advances in fast and scalable computational electromagnetics (CEM) algorithms. Dr. Yilmaz’s and Ling’s students will use the grant to develop novel CEM simulators on supercomputing clusters specially tailored for efficient and accurate simulation of wave propagation in forests.

Professor J.K. Aggarwal recently received the 2007 Okawa Prize, awarded each year by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunication of Japan. The Okawa Prize honors those who have made outstanding contributions to the research, technological development, and business in the information and telecommunication fields. Dr. Aggarwal was cited for Outstanding Contribution to Conception and Pioneering Research of Dynamic Scene Analysis and Multisensor Fusion in Computer Vision Systems. He received a gold medal and 10 million yen (~$92K).

Grad student, Elias Mizan, and ECE undergrad, Tileli Amimeur, received the 2007 Best Paper Award at the 19th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing. Their paper, Self-Imposed Temporal Redundancy: An Efficient Technique to Enhance the Reliability of Pipelined Functional Units, discussed a new technique that allows computational circuits in microprocessors to produce more reliable results, effectively reducing the rate of errors. The paper was chosen from among 107 submissions and 32 accepted papers.

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.