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.

ECE professor Ross Baldick was recently elevated to IEEE Fellow. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellows Committee recommends a select group for one of IEEE's most prestitious honors. Dr. Baldick was recognized for contributions to analysis of power system economics.

Electrical & Computer Engineering professor Ari Arapostathis was elected fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Fellows are academic and industry professionals with extraordinary accomplishments in the field of electrical engineering. Arapostathis was elected for his contributions in nonlinear and stochastic control as well as applications in power systems. Currently, he is developing control techniques that would allow U.S. Navy ships' power systems to continue operating after sustaining damage.

Kaibin Huang, jointly supervised by Professors Jeff Andrews and Robert Heath, won Best Student Paper Award at the Global Telecommunications Conference. The paper, Multi-Antenna Limited Feedback for Temporally-Correlated Channels: Feedback Compression, was also authored by Bishwarup Mondal, R. W. Heath, Jr., and J. G. Andrews. The GLOBECOM conference is one of the two biggest communications conferences every year (the other is ICC).

The third annual Edison Lecture featured ECE professor and renewable energy authority, Dr. Mack Grady, and some of the country's leading lights in wind and solar power. The free interactive show included audience participation, give-aways, and demonstrations which brought the excitement of technology alive. Speakers discussed the ongoing transition from finite, expensive, and polluting energy sources to clean and cheap energy.

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