Until now, the invisibility cloaks put forward by scientists have been bulky devices - an obvious flaw for those interested in Harry Potter-style applications. However, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a cloak that is just micrometers thick and can hide three-dimensional objects from microwaves in their natural environment, in all directions and from all of the observers’ positions.

UT ECE professor http://www.ece.utexas.edu/directory/directory_details.cfm?id=79>Al Bovik has been awarded the 2013 SPIE Technology Achievement Award for Broad and Lasting Contributions to the Field of Perception-Based Image Processing.” According to SPIE, the SPIE Technology Achievement Award is given annually to recognize outstanding technical accomplishment in optics, electro-optics, photonic engineering, or imaging.

Two researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are making it possible for smart phone users on the Forty Acres to take a “Gander” at the digital space around them.

Thanks to a new mobile application and search engine called Gander, students, faculty and staff will be able to access instant, useful information about coffee shop traffic or school assignments that they wouldn’t otherwise get from a website.

“The Invisible Man,” H.G. Wells’ 1881 novella, describes invisibility and invisibility cloaking concepts that are currently being explored and discovered at the Cockrell School of Engineering. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering assistant professor Andrea Alú uses Wells’ story as a base for explaining his unique and innovative cloaking technique to make three-dimensional objects invisible. Alú takes “The Invisible Man” approach in his February TedxAustin talk.

UT ECE professor Zheng Wang has received a 2013 Sloan research Fellowship. Sloan Fellowships are highly competitive and prestigious.“The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 126 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

UT ECE professor Yale Patt has been awarded the IEEE Computer Society 2013 Harry H. Goode Memorial Award “for nearly half a century of significant contributions to information processing, including microarchitecture insights, a breakaway textbook, and mentoring future leaders.”

UT ECE professor Vijay Janapa Reddi has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant entitled Feedback-Driven Resiliency for Near-Threshold Systems.

The University of Texas at Austin’s Solar Vehicles Team, a volunteer student-run organization that represents the university at international solar car competitions, will be the local university host for the Formula Sun Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas from June 24-29th.

Recent UT ECE PhD graduate Karthik Ganesan was awarded an Honorable Mention by The Research Group of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) for work on the topic “Automatic Generation of Synthetic Workloads for Multicore Systems”. Karthik recently received a PhD from Prof. Lizy John.

UT ECE professor Deji Akinwande and his research group have made a breakthrough with state-of-the-art flexible graphene field-effect transistors with record current densities and the highest power and conversion gain ever. The transistors also show near symmetric electron and hole transport, are the most mechanically robust flexible graphene devices fabricated to date and can be immersed in a liquid without coming to any harm.