Cardan Samples has two favorite prime-time T.V. shows: "The Office" and the science fiction series "Fringe."

But between classes and homework at McCombs School of Business, the Management Information Systems junior doesn't have time to watch them when they air.

Instead, once or twice a week he uses the 15-20 minute bus ride from The University of Texas at Austin campus to his apartment on Riverside Drive to catch up on episodes by streaming them on his 4x2-inch cell phone.

At the 2011 ECE Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. Dept. Chair Ahmed Tewfik was asked to be on panel discussing the "Challenges and Opportunities for ECE in the Coming Decades." The panel included department chairs from five schools, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech and UT Austin. This is a clear testament to the impact and reputation of the UT ECE Department.

Professor David Z. Pan and Kun Yuan Receive Best Paper Award at 2011 ACM International Symposium on Physical Design UT ECE Professor David Z. Pan and former graduate student Kun Yuan received the Best Paper Award from the 2011 ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), for their paper "E-Beam Lithography Stencil Planning and Optimization with Overlapped Characters".

Professor Andrea Alù Awarded URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal

Professor Robert Heath and Former UT ECE Student Dr. Rahul Vaze Receive EURASIP 2011 Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking Best Paper Award

UT ECE Student Seunghyun Chun Wins Best Presentation Award at APEC 2011

U.S. News and World Report has just published their annual rankings of the Best Engineering Graduate Programs in the country for 2012, and the UT ECE Department is ranked #9 in Electrical Engineering and #10 in Computer Engineering. This continues a long streak of UT ECE being ranked among the Top 10 programs in the country. U.S. News surveyed 198 programs to get the information used in the ranking of top engineering schools. The UT Cockrell School of Engineering was ranked #8 for its overall excellence in Graduate Engineering programs.

Texas Instruments hosted an awards ceremony for the inaugural 2010 Beagle Board Open Source Design Challenge. The challenge was to create the best design around TI’s Beagle Board using open source embedded Linux. Teams of up to four students competed, posting their design on the TI wiki and submitting a team video introducing their project. UT Engineering undergraduates Jackie Leverett (BME) and Zach Wasson (ECE) won first place.

Several UT ECE and CS undergrads from The University of Texas at Austin chapter of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE RAS) broke into show business recently. They were brought on to build controllable bases and lights for four robots in the local production of Heddatron, the 2006 comedy by Elizabeth Meriwether currently running at the Salvage Vanguard Theater in Austin. IEEE RAS started working on the project with director Dustin Wills in early November 2010 to create a remote controlled drivable and lighted system. Wills designed the top part of the robot.

UT ECE professor Ross Baldick recently addressed the historic failure of electric generators and recent rolling blackouts associated with ERCOT.

As posted on Statesman.com.