Two teams of Texas ECE students who participated in the Startup track of the Texas ECE Capstone Design Competition were recognized with awards at The Selig Entrepreneurship Prize Competition held by the Innovation Center in the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin.

The award "Honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to theory and/or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on the field."

Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE and his former students Anish Mittal and Rajiv Soundararajan have received the 2017 Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award for their paper " “Making a “Completely Blind” Image Quality Analyzer."

Texas ECE PhD student Meng Li won the First Place Gold Medal at the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) Student Research Competition held at the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). His research competition title is "Design-for-Security Techniques for Hardware IP Supply Chain Protection”. 

The BBC recently featured the work of Texas ECE professor Deji Akinwande on the graphene tattoo:

A graphene-based tattoo that could function as a wearable electronic device to monitor health has been developed at the University of Texas.

Gold is often used in electronic components, but graphene is more conductive, can be hundreds of times thinner and allows the tattoo to wrinkle naturally with skin.

It is hoped that as the cost of graphene falls, such tattoos will become affordable for medical use.

Deji Akinwande, associate professor at Texas ECE, has been elected a 2017 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Prof Akinwande is being recognized for “contributions to the physical study and development of scalable uniform monolayer graphene synthesis on wafer scale substrates, and the realization of gigahertz flexible and wearable two-dimensional devices, circuits and systems.”

Prof. Robert Heath, a Professor in Texas ECE, gave the 2017 Dean W. Lytle Lecture at the University of Washington Department of Electrical Engineering on Monday, October 2, 2017. The Dean W. Lytle Electrical Engineering Endowed Lecture Series is “a premiere annual event, featuring internationally-renowned researchers in the field of communications and signal processing.”

Texas ECE professor Jacob Abraham, has received the IEEE Test Technology Technical Council (TTTC) Lifetime Contribution Medal. The IEEE TTTC Lifetime Contribution Medal is presented to a prominent individual for outstanding technical contributions that have made a fundamental impact on test technology.

Texas ECE Professor Vijay Garg and his former PhD student Himanshu Chauhan received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Runtime Verification 2017 (RV’17), held September 13th–16th in Seattle, Washington. The Runtime Verification event originated as a workshop in 2001, and is now an international conference, held annually since 2010. The award recognizes their paper “Space Efficient Breadth-First and Level Traversals of Consistent Global States of Parallel Programs.”

In modern society, robots and humans are becoming increasingly integrated. Already, robots assist people in factories, hospitals and households, as well as share the roads. These collaborations raise demands for technological innovation and research to develop and enable friendly robots that can work effectively with, for and around people.