Microsoft's chairman gave a lecture entitled Bill Gates Unplugged: on Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back to computer science and ECE majors on Wednesday, Feb 20th at 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM in the Texas Union Ballroom.

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Professor Derek Chiou has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER award for his proposal entitled Transforming Computer System Design. 

UT-ECE alumnus (M.S. 1999, Ph.D. 2001) Dr. Clint Slatton, now a professor at the University of Florida, was named a 2006 winner of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the US Government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers. The title of his proposal was Prediction of Diffractive and Non-Diffractive Propagation in Forested Terrain by Combining Probabilistic and Physical Modeling. His PhD advisors at UT Austin were Prof. Brian Evans (ECE) and Prof. Melba Crawford (Mech.

Professor Bovik Wins Third of Four Major Signal Processing Awards Dr. Alan Bovik has received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Education Award, which is the society's highest honor for accomplishment in signal processing education. This award honors educators who have made pioneering and significant contributions to signal processing education. Dr.

Eleven ECE graduate students and one undergraduate student have won nine Best Paper awards between them this past year. This is an amazing accomplishment, says departmental chairman Tony Ambler. These awards come from major conferences. The competition is unbelievable. Some of these conferences only accept 20% of the papers submitted and to rise to the top of such a select group is a testament to the quality of our students' hard work.

Professors Ali Yilmaz and Hao Ling received a $270K grant from the National Science Foundation to advance the understanding of radiowave propagation and antenna operation in forests by utilizing the latest advances in fast and scalable computational electromagnetics (CEM) algorithms. Dr. Yilmaz’s and Ling’s students will use the grant to develop novel CEM simulators on supercomputing clusters specially tailored for efficient and accurate simulation of wave propagation in forests.

Professor J.K. Aggarwal recently received the 2007 Okawa Prize, awarded each year by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunication of Japan. The Okawa Prize honors those who have made outstanding contributions to the research, technological development, and business in the information and telecommunication fields. Dr. Aggarwal was cited for Outstanding Contribution to Conception and Pioneering Research of Dynamic Scene Analysis and Multisensor Fusion in Computer Vision Systems. He received a gold medal and 10 million yen (~$92K).

Grad student, Elias Mizan, and ECE undergrad, Tileli Amimeur, received the 2007 Best Paper Award at the 19th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing. Their paper, Self-Imposed Temporal Redundancy: An Efficient Technique to Enhance the Reliability of Pipelined Functional Units, discussed a new technique that allows computational circuits in microprocessors to produce more reliable results, effectively reducing the rate of errors. The paper was chosen from among 107 submissions and 32 accepted papers.

Ramakrishna Kotla has won two Best Paper Awards in the past five months. His most recent award was presented at the top conference in operating systems, the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-2007). The paper—Zyzzyva: Speculative Byzantine Fault Tolerance co-authored with Lorenzo Alvisi, Mike Dahlin, Allen Clement, and Edmund Wong—introduces a protocol that uses speculation to reduce the cost and simplify the design of BFT state machine replication.