UT ECE students Kyle Fernald, Chao Chen, Maher Dakkak, and Bryant Tran won second place at the IET Present Around the World Americas Finals, in Ottawa, Ontario on Sept. 11th. The Present Around the World Competition is an annual event held by the Young Members and Professionals of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. The multi-stage event includes members and students from all around the world, participating from different fields of engineering.

Professor Miryung Kim of UT ECE along with two of her former students, Adam Duley and Chris Spandikow, have received the Best Paper Award at the 25th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering for their paper A Program Differencing Algorithm for Verilog HDL.

Professor Vijay Garg of UT ECE, along with former UT ECE students Anurag Agarwal and Vinit Ogale, received the best paper award at the 12th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2010), New York City, USA September 20-22, 2010. The award is for the paper titled Modeling and Analyzing Periodic Distributed Computations.

Professor David Pan of UT ECE had received a 2010 IBM Faculty Award. The IBM Faculty Awards is a competitive worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organizations, and promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM.The IBM Faculty Awards is a worldwide competitive program. Nominations for these awards must be initiated by someone within IBM.

Professor David Pan of UT ECE has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his research on Design for Manufacturability for 3D ICs with Through Silicon Vias. This is a collaboration research project with Prof. Sung Kyu Lim at Georgia Tech. 3D IC is gaining a lot of momentum in industry, and this project will study key DFM issues which are not yet addressed.

Research Abstract

Graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin will play an integral part in the development of the power grid of the future for the Pecan Street Project, a leading sustainable energy research partnership between the University, Austin Energy, the City of Austin and high-tech companies, among others, that's aimed at reinventing how we get and use energy.

Improving energy efficiency is one of the major design challenges in computing, especially in battery-operated and autonomous embedded and mobile systems. In many systems, a large amount of computation is devoted to algorithms for audiovisual processing, recognition, and communication that heavily utilize digital signal processing (DSP) architectures. In a recently awarded NSF grant on the Formal Synthesis of Low-Energy Signal Processing Systems Relying on Controlled Timing-Error Acceptance, Profs.

NSF Grant on Whitespace Spectrum Sharing Awarded to Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai and Lili Qiu

Fundamentals of LTE, the most accessible and complete tutorial on the LTE standard for 4G cellular, hits bookstores on September 13. This book is the result of a long-standing collaboration between Dr. Arunabha Ghosh and Rias Muhamed of AT&T Labs and Prof. Jeffrey Andrews and his former student Dr. Jun Zhang, whose dissertation research was on multiuser and networked MIMO techniques and their application LTE, and was supported by AT&T Labs.

On August 17th, 2010, Life Technologies Corporation (NASDAQ: LIFE), a provider of innovative life science solutions, announced a definitive agreement to acquire Ion Torrent for $375 million in cash and stock and an additional $350 million upon the meeting time-based milestones through 2012. Ion Torrent has been building the next generation of fully-electronic and CMOS-based DNA sequencing platforms, a technology which was co-invented by Professor Arjang Hassibi while at Stanford University (US Patent 7,223,540), now an Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Austin.