Texas ECE alumnus Dr. Xiaoqing Xu was selected for the ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation for his dissertation “Standard Cell Optimization and Physical Design in Advanced Technology Nodes."

Prof. Jeff Andrews, along with Texas ECE alumnus Sarabjot Singh, and recent PhD recipient Mandar Kulkarni, along with their Nokia Bell Labs co-author Amitava Ghosh were awarded the 2018 Leonard G. Abraham Prize from the IEEE Communications Society. This award recognizes the best paper over the previous 3 years in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication. Jeff and his co-authors were recognized for their paper: "Tractable Model for Rate in Self-Backhauled Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks”, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, October 2015.

Texas ECE held the Spring Awards Banquet Monday. May 7, 2018 at the Connally Ballroom in the Alumni Center to recognize graduating students, exceptional students and faculty, and present awards. The keynote address was delivered by Texas ECE alumna Aruna Viswanathan, COO of AlphaX Decision Sciences, LLC.

Students groups at The University of Texas at Austin hosted the first annual Hack for Good competition on Saturday, April 21 in the Engineering Education and Research Center on campus.

Matthew Johnson, a senior in Texas ECE, along with his teammates Suyi Tu, a Master’s student in Business Analytics at UT, and Hang Zhu and Ye Zhang of Rice University, took first place in The Data Open hosted by Citadel Securities and CorrelationOne.

Prof. Edison Thomaz of Texas ECE has received a Google Faculty Research Award for his proposed research work on "Identifying Acoustic Biomarkers of Mental Health and Well-Being in Voice-Based Interactions with Conversational Assistants in the Home".

Prof. Robert Heath of Texas ECE along with his former students Jeonghun Park, Chan-Byoung Chae and their co-author Min Soo Sim have received the 2018 Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award.

Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE along with former students Ming-Jun Chen and Che-Chun (Tony) Su and his collaborators Do-Kyoung Kwon (Texas Instruments) and Lawrence K. Cormack (UT-Austin’s Department of Psychology) have received he 2018 European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) Best Paper Award.

Prof. Alex Dimakis of Texas ECE was one of three distinguished speakers o give a plenary talk at the 52nd annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) at Princeton University on March 23, 2018. Prof. Dimakis delivered a talk entitled "Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Compressed Sensing."

Prof. Mikhail Belkin of Texas ECE has been promoted to Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Fellows are Members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement, for their service to the general optics community, and to SPIE in particular. More than 1,300 SPIE members have become Fellows since the Society's inception in 1955.