UT ECE students Bei Yu, Xiaoqing Xu, Jhih-Rong Gao and their advisor Prof.  David Z. Pan received the William J. McCalla Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). The title of the paper that received the award is “Methodology for Standard Cell Compliance and Detailed Placement for Triple Patterning Lithography.” The award will be presented at the opening session for ICCAD 2013, on Monday, Nov. 18, 2013. ICCAD is the premier conference devoted to technical innovations in electronic design automation.

Karun Vijayraghavan, a UT ECE graduate student in Prof. Mikhail Belkin’s group, was recently awarded the outstanding student paper award at the International Conference on Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz Waves (IRMMW) held in Mainz, Germany. IRMMW is the premier conference for terahertz (THz) science and technology and Karun’s work on THz quantum cascade laser sources was selected as the top paper/presentation amongst 133 doctoral student entries.

UT ECE graduate student Zhuoran Zhao has won a Best in Session Award at the 2013 SRC TECHCON Conference held in Austin, Texas on September 9-10, 2013. Zhao won for his submission "Automated, Retargetable Back-Annotation for Host Compiled Performance and Power Modeling." TECHCON 2013 highlights the best of SRC-sponsored research, while showcasing the students performing the research. 

Zhuoran is a graduate student in UT ECE studying under Dr. Andreas Gerstlauer in the Integrated Circuits and Systems area.

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.