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.

Flexible electronic circuits would make possible radical new kinds of devices, like water-resistant tablet computers that can be rolled or folded. A group of academic and industry researchers has now demonstrated one of the most important components for this fully flexible future: graphene radio-frequency electronics that are speedy enough to produce, receive, and process telecommunication signals.

UT ECE graduate Dr. Oluwasanmi Koyejo has won the Amazon Best Student Paper Award for "Constrained Bayesian Inference for Low Rank Multitask Learning" with Prof. Joydeep Ghosh at The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). UAI is is the premier international conference on research related to representation, inference, learning and decision making in the presence of uncertainty, and typically has a 12-14% acceptance rate for oral papers. 

ECE professors Dr. Christine Julien, Dr. Sarfraz Khurshid, and Dr. Miryung Kim, along with Mechanical Engineering professor Dr. Raul Longoria, have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for their work titled "CPS: Synergy: Physically-Informed Assertions for CPS Development and Debugging."

UT ECE Alum Rajeev Gulati has been named Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Data I/O Corporation, the leading global provider of advanced programming and IP management solutions for flash, flash-memory based intelligent devices and microcontrollers.

Engineers from Prof. Mikhail Belkin’s group at The University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with Prof. Markus Amann’s group at the Technical University of Munich have demonstrated the first broadly-tunable electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent terahertz radiation (or T-rays) that operates at room-temperature.

Prof. Brian Evans gave a keynote talk at the International Conference on Communications and Information Technology on June 20, 2013, in Beirut, Lebanon, entitled "Smart Grid Communications".

Smart Grid systems intelligently monitor and control energy flows in order to improve efficiency and reliability of power delivery. A local utility would receive customer load profiles from smart meters, and adjust power generation and energy distribution accordingly. Smart meters could transmit usage data over powerline or wireless links once per minute.

UT ECE PhD student Hari Nair received a Best Student Paper Award at the 55th annual Electronic Materials Conference (EMC). Hari finished his PhD in Spring 2013 and studied under Prof. Seth Bank. Hari is currently a postdoc at Cornell University.

The 55th Electronic Materials Conference (EMC) is the premier annual forum on the preparation and characterization of electronic materials.