UT ECE graduate students Bei Yu, Jhih-Rong Gao, and their advisor Prof. David Z. Pan won the 2nd Place Award at the ICCAD'12 CAD Contest in Fuzzy Pattern Matching for Physical Verification. There are over 60 teams around the world participated in the ICCAD'12 CAD Contest, which has three distinct contest problems. This fuzzy patterning matching problem and benchmarks are provided by Mentor Graphics, a leading EDA company, to advance the state-of-the-art of IC design for manufacturing (DFM).

UT ECE professor J.K. Aggarwal recently gave a distinguished lecture at the University of Notre Dame as part of their King-Sun Fu Prize Winner Lecture Series. The King-Sn Fu Prize is given every other year by the International Association for Pattern Recognition in recognition of outstanding technical contributions to the field of pattern recognition. The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame recently hosted a series of lectures by winners of the King-Sun Fu Prize. Dr. Aggarwal was awarded the K.S.

UT ECE professor Robert Heath has been selected as distinguished lecturer of the IEEE signal processing society for 2013-2014. The distinguished lecturer title is viewed as an award within the IEEE signal processing society. It is conferred by its awards board. Each year, the board selects five individuals as distinguished lecturers.

Article by Rick Docksai, reprinted with permission from Software Engineer Insider

UT ECE graduate student Michelle Saad has been named a winner of a 2012 Intel PhD Fellowship for her work on Natural Scene and Motion Statistics Model-Based Video Quality Assessment. Michelle's work is supervised by Dr. Alan Bovik in the Laboratory for Image & Video Engineering (LIVE) and Wireless and Networking Communications Group (WNCG).

UT ECE professor Christine Julien has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant entitled “Grapevine: Efficient Shared Situational Awareness for Dynamic Networks.”

UT ECE professor Christine Julien has been awarded a Google Research Award entitled “Gander: Mobile, Pervasive Search of the Here and Now in the Here and Now.”

Prof. Bill Bard and his senior design team have been named a Top Finalist in the Texas Instruments Analog Design Contest 2012. The senior design team consisting of Lauren Guckert, Ali Nabi, Sujith Pottem, Jeff Wang, Bryan Huffaker won the award for their work developing an autopilot for an autonomous airborne vehicle.

The Analog Design Contest is designed to encourage engineering students to submit senior design projects that utilize TI technology.

UT ECE graduate student Chao Jia and his advisor, Prof. Brian Evans, have received a Top 10% Paper Award at the the 14th IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Workshop held in September 2012. Their paper was entitled “Probabilistic 3D Motion Estimation for Rolling Shutter Video Rectification from Visual and Inertial Measurements.”

UT ECE graduate student Pai-Yen Chen was awarded a 2012 Donald D. Harrington Dissertation Fellowship, the highest award that can be made to a continuing student at The University of Texas at Austin. Pai-Yen is currently studying under Dr. Andrea Alù in the Metamaterials and Plasmonics Research Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.