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Prof. Vishwanath, together with Prof. Srinivasan at Ohio State University, has received a grant for the development of the theory and implementation of full duplex radios from the Department of Defense. Profs Vishwanath and Srinivasan plan to demonstrate architectures for MIMO full duplex radios as well as develop secure communication protocols using full duplex communication.

This free one-day event at the British National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (London) on Wednesday, February 22 will present results of current jamming detection, and consider emerging threats such as meaconing and spoofing. The seminar runs from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Interested participants must pre-register online.

What's the predictable endpoint of the trend toward ever cheaper, ever smaller, and ever more sensitive GPS? It's the GPS dot: a GPS tracking device first featured in the movie 'The Da Vinci code' and now moving inexorably from fiction to non-fiction. The GPS dot will fundamentally re-order our lives. We'll buy dots in bulk and stick them on everything we own worth more than a few tens of dollars.But there is a dark side to the dot. Did you know that it's not illegal to track your family, your friends, or even your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend with a GPS dot?

Prof. David Pan, Prof. Joydeep Ghosh and graduate students Duo Ding and Bei Yu have received the 2012 ASP-DAC Best Paper Award for their paper 'EPIC: Efficient Prediction of IC Manufacturing Hotspots With A Unified Meta-Classification Formulation.' ASP-DAC is one of the premier conferences for Electronic Design Automation. ASP-DAC 2012 is the seventeenth annual international conference on VLSI design automation in Asia and South Pacific region, one of the most active regions of design and fabrication of silicon chips in the world.

Prof. Gustavo de Veciana was given the 'best technical talk award' by Cisco and Intel at their two day Video-Aware Wireless Networks (VAWN) Conference in San Jose, CA. The VAWN program was established in 2010 to help Intel and Cisco develop new ways for coping with the rapidly escalating demand for video consumption over wireless networks, and includes academics from USC, UCSD, Cornell, UT Austin, and Moscow State, as well as participation by Intel and Cisco engineers, and Verizon. The UT Austin team is leading an effort to re-engineer wireless networks by optimizing for perceptual quality.

Professor Al Bovik gave the Keynote Address at the European Workshop on Visual Information Processing that was held in Paris, France in July 2011. The title of his talk was Perceiving Distortions in Visual Signals. In this talk, Professor Bovik delivered his opinions on the current state and future of video quality assessment. He opined that significant future gains are likely to be found in modeling human perception of video distortions, but also modeling human behavioral reactions to distortion.

Three WNCG faculty were promoted from Associate Professor to Professor in December 2011 (new title effective Sept. 2012). Robert Heath, Jeffrey Andrews, and Sanjay Shakkottai joined UT Austin in 2002. They were the only three faculty in ECE promoted to Professor this year, and all were 'early' promotions. Constantine Caramanis, on the faculty since 2006, received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor.

WNCG welcomes its newest faculty member, Joydeep Ghosh, Ph.D. Dr. Gosh joined the UT-Austin faculty in 1988 after being educated at IIT Kanpur, (B. Tech '83) and The University of Southern California (Ph.D). He is the founder-director of IDEAL (Intelligent Data Exploration and Analysis Lab) and a Fellow of the IEEE. His research interests lie primarily in intelligent data analysis, data mining and web mining, adaptive multi-learner systems, and their applications to a wide variety of complex engineering and AI problems. Dr.

Crown Castle International Corp. (NYSE:CCI), one of the country's largest independent owners and operators of shared wireless infrastructure, recently became an Industrial Affiliate of the WNCG at The University of Texas at Austin. Crown Castle owns, operates, and leases towers and other infrastructure for wireless communications. The company offers significant wireless communications coverage to 92 of the top 100 US markets and to substantially all of the Australian population.

As of Jan. 15, Prof. Robert W. Heath, Jr. became the fourth Director of the WNCG. Sanjay Shakkottai, who became Associate Director a year ago, will continue in his role as the Associate Director. Prof. Heath has been with UT Austin since January 2002 and was recently promoted from Associate Professor to Professor, official as of September 2012. He received his B.S. and M.S. from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D from Stanford University. Prof. Heath brings his experience in working in industry, government, and military funded projects to the leadership of WNCG. Prof.