UT ECE Professor Emeritus Dr. Elmer Hixson Passes Away

On Wednesday, February 2, 2011, ERCOT found it necessary to initiate rolling blackouts to cope with increased demand due to extremely cold temperatures and numerous unexpected power plant trips. Here on the UT campus the blackouts went unnoticed, as the UT Austin campus is powered by its own power station, but UT ECE Professor Mack Grady was hard at work analyzing real time grid data. On February 7th, Prof.

UT ECE Professor Deji Akinwande and Stanford Professor Wong have co-authored a new book called Carbon Nanotube and Graphene Device Physics. This is the first introductory textbook covering the properties and performance of practical nanotube devices and related applications. All the fundamental concepts are introduced, so that readers without an advanced scientific background can follow all the major ideas and results. Additional topics covered include nanotube transistors and interconnects, and the basic physics of graphene.

UT ECE undergraduates Jackie Leverett and Zach Wasson recently received attention from Popular Science Online for their entry in the Texas Instruments Beagle Board Open Source Design Challenge. Their project, called Project Smart Pill Box, is a visual verification system that utilizes face detection and primitive hand tracking to ensure that patients with memory pathologies, such as Alzheimer’s, successfully take their medications.

The Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG), a research center within the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/University Collaborative Research Center.

UT ECE Prof. Al Bovik has been named the IS&T/SPIE Imaging Scientist of the Year. Prof. Bovik was given the award for "his seminal contributions to the computational aspects of biological visual perception, specifically in the areas of image and video quality."

A message from Dean Gregory L. Fenves:

With the new year underway I want to reflect on what the Cockrell School of Engineering accomplished in 2010 and some of the challenges ahead. The accompanying video presents a sample of the amazing work by our students and faculty over the past year. I am proud of their achievements and am grateful to our alumni and friends for your support of the Cockrell School.

Software is the soul of our computing devices. Without it, these devices are like dead bodies, said Herb Krasner, senior lecturer in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering. Krasner, along with Christine Julien, associate professor in ECE, is addressing this topic at the seventh annual Edison Lecture Series titled Software is Engineering.

Prof. Ted Rappaport, the William and Bettye Nowlin Chaired Professor at UT ECE and founder of UT's Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG), presented an invited plenary address on December 8 at the 2010 IEEE Globecom conference in Miami Florida. Rappaport's presentation described the future of wireless communications, and described the massive increases in bandwidth and carrier frequency that are being made possible by semiconductor technologies.

UT ECE student Fei Xue and Prof. Jack Lee received the Nicollian Award for best paper in IEEE Semiconductor Interface Specialists Conference SISC 2010. The award was for work on "InAs and In0.7Ga0.3As buried channel MOSFETs with ALD gate dielectrics" with H. Zhao, Y. Chen, Y. Wang, F. Zhou, and J. Lee.