Professor David Pan of UT ECE received the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) 2013 Technical Excellence Award at the SRC Annual TECHCON conference, held in Austin, Texas on Sept. 9-10. SRC is the world’s leading technology research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies.

Professor Yale Patt, Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering, was the inaugural lecturer at the new Henry Taub Memorial Distinguished Lecture Series at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. The Board of Governors of Technion established the lecture series in memory of Henry Taub, a major benefactor of the university who died in 2011 at the age of 83. Dr. Patt's lecture coincided with the Technion Board of Governors meeting in Haifa on June 11, 2013. 

Dr. Hyesoon Kim, PhD, ECE, 2007, has just been promoted to Associate Professor of Computer Science with tenure at Georgia Tech. Her PhD advisor was Yale Patt. She was a member of Yale's HPS Research Group. Hyesoon's research is in heterogeneous computer architectures, especialy CPUs+GPUs, tools to help programming and improve perfromance and energy efficiency. Hyesoon is a member of the Micro Hall of Fame, having published eight or more papers in the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture.

The University of Texas at Austin has cleared a major hurdle in its effort to build the new Engineering Education and Research Center, with the UT System Board of Regents today approving a $310 million funding plan for the building.

Prof. Suzanne Barber of UT ECE, along with co-PIs Prof. Lauren Meyers of the Division of Statistics and Scientific Computation and Andy Ellington of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, have been awarded a grant by the Department of Defense Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for their work titled "Surety BioEvent App." The grant is worth nearly $3 Million over three years.

Prof. Sujay Sanghavi and Prof. Sanjay Shakkottai of UT ECE have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award for their work on "NeTS: Small: Inverse Problems from Cascades: Structure, Causation and Opinions." Professors Sanghavi and Shakkottai aim to develop a new theoretical and algorithmic understanding of these classic processes.

Prof. Joydeep Ghosh of UT ECE was the keynote speaker at the inaugural Workshop on Divergences and Divergence Learning (WDDl), held in Atlanta, June 2013. In his talk, entitled "Learning Bregman Divergences for Prediction with Generalized Linear Models," which reflects joint work with ECE and WNCG student Sreangsu Acharrya,  an efficient approach to learning a broad class of predictive models was introduced. What is most remarkable about this approach is that model parameters can be estimated even when the loss function is unknown.

Prof. Alex Dimakis of UT ECE gave the keynote Address at the First International Workshop on Big Dynamic Distributed Data (BD3), in conjunction with the 39th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), in Trento, Italy on August 30, 2013. Prof. Dimakis's address was titled "Coding Theory for Large-Scale Storage."

Prof. Jeff Andrews has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications  (TWC) for the period January 1,  2014 to December 31, 2015. The IEEE TWC is one of the premier venues for publishing theoretical and practical innovations in wireless communications. The journal is a collaboration between the IEEE Communications Society and the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Prof. Andrews is the latest addition to a group of distinguished ECE faculty members who have served as EICs of major IEEE journals.

ECE graduate students Bei Yu and Jhih-Rong Gao, bothsupervised by Prof. David Pan, were awarded the BACUS Photomask Scholarship. This scholarship is awarded to an undergraduate or a graduate student in the field of microlithography with an emphasis on optical tooling and/or semiconductor manufacturing technologies. This scholarship is sponsored by BACUS, SPIE's Photomask International Technical Group.