A new paper by Prof. Alex Dimakis and others is currently featured on Facebook Publications, which collects scientific papers written by Facebook employees and researchers. The paper on XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data developed a new coding scheme for Facebook storage servers. The paper was co-written by Maheshwaran Sathiamoorthy, Megasthenis Asteris, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Ramkumar Vadali, Scott Chen and Dhruba Borthakur.

Nvidia announced Tuesday April 30, 2013 that its Tegra team has been bolstered by Deepu Talla, a former Texas Instruments executive who used to head TI’s SoC business. Talla is now an Nvidia VP and he will head the company’s Tegra business unit. Talla has extensive experience in mobile computing, with ten years of service at Texas Instruments. He received his Ph.D from The University of Texas at Austin in 2001.

Professor Ali Yilmaz has received the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief Grand Challenge Faculty Award from The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES). The award will provide Dr. Yilmaz with resources to conduct research related to computational challenges in brain mapping.

UT’s Solar Car Team has been trying to a win a solar car race for more than a decade. This year the team has a $50,000 donation in their arsenal, an advantage team members hope will help them win the Formula Sun Grand Prix this summer.

Bobby Epstein, chairman of Austin’s Circuit of the Americas racetrack, announced the donation of $50,000 to the team, which will help purchase critical parts for the roughly $100,000 solar car, called TexSun. Epstein said COTA made the donation because it wants to be involved in supporting a local effort to develop the cars of the future.

The University of Texas at Austin Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (UT ECE) hosted the Spring 2013 Senior Design Open House on Wednesday, April 24, 2013. UT ECE undergraduate seniors presented demonstrations of their projects spanning two semesters of work.

UT ECE professor Brian Evans and his students Karl F. Nieman, Jing Lin and Marcel Nassar have received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Powerline Communications and Its Applications.

The paper is entitled Cyclic Spectral Analysis of Power Line Noise in the 3-200 kHz Band and was co-authored with Freescale engineer Dr. Khurram Waheed. The IEEE ISPLC was held on March 25-27, 2013, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

UT ECE alumnus Duo Ding has received the 2013 ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation! Dr. Ding is Prof. David Z. Pan’s student and received his PhD in August 2011. He is currently with Oracle Microelectronics in Austin. His PhD dissertation is entitled “CAD for Nanolithography and Nanophotonics”.

UT ECE alumnus Onur Mutlu has been appointed the Dr. William D. and Nancy W.Strecker Early Career Professor in the Department of Electrical and ComputerEngineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

UT ECE professor Al Bovik has been selected as the 2013 recipient of the Honorary Member Award of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology.

Prof. Bovik was selected for the impact that his work has had on shaping the direction and advancement of the field of perceptual image processing. Al’s models of perceptual image quality are used throughout the television and cable industries to monitor and control image quality.