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.

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."