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.

Kaibin Huang, jointly supervised by Professors Jeff Andrews and Robert Heath, won a University Continuing Fellowship. The Fellowship includes tuition and an $18K stipend. Huang is researching precoding for multiple antenna systems, spatial division multiple access, code division multiple access, adaptive modulation coding and power control.

Dr. Hao Ling's graduate student, Youngwook Kim, won the A.D. Hutchinson Fellowship which pays tutition plus a $19K stipend to support Kim's research in broadband antenna design, antenna optimization, and human target tracking.

The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) recently recognized Professor Yale Patt and Dr. Tse-Yu Yeh for work they did 15 years ago. Every year the symposium selects one paper that has had the most impact on the field (in terms of research, development, products or ideas) during the intervening years. This year the paper was Alternative Implementations of Two-Level Adaptive Branch Prediction.

ECE's External Advisory Committee gave Professor Jeff Andrews their first High Gain Award for his work in ad hoc wireless networks. The High Gain Award was established to recognize exceptional contributions to the mission of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Dr. Andrews recently received a $400K National Science Foundation CAREER award and a $6.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Jeff's research is at the forefront of his field. says Chairman Tony Ambler.

One of the most impressive and important people in the history of wireless communications, Dr. Irwin Jacobs, lectured on the future of wireless devices and applications. Dr. Jacobs co-wrote a seminal textbook on wireless communication back in the late 1960's (Wozencraft & Jacobs, still in use today) when an MIT professor, before founding Link-a-bit (the grandfather company of the San Diego telecommunications industry) and then co-founding Qualcomm with Andrew Viterbi. He was their CEO for the first two decades of their existence (until 2 years ago).

In a very heated IC global routing contest at the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), the BoxRouter team from UT led by Dr. David Pan won 2nd place in the industry-strength 3D category. BoxRouter was based on a DAC 2006 paper by Minsik Cho and David Pan which helped to generate the recent renaissance of global routing research.

ECE graduate student Gunjan Gupta and Professor Joydeep Ghosh just missed the best research paper award at the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. Their paper, Bregman Bubble Clustering: A Robust, Scalable Framework for Locating Multiple, Dense Regions in Data, came in second out of 776 submissions. Their research addresses the problem of grouping data in meaningful ways.

Prof. Jeff Andrews was recently chosen as a recipient of a $400K National Science Foundation CAREER award.  The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) recognizes promising young faculty members using a highly competitive peer-review process.