News

Prof. Andrea Alù has been named the recipient of the the 2014 Outstanding Young Engineer award from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society.  The Outstanding Young Engineer Award of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) recognizes an outstanding young MTT-S member who has distinguished himself/herself through a sequence of achievements which may be technical (within the MTT-S Field of Interest), may constitute exemplary service to the MTT-S, or may be a combination of both.

The next generation of wireless networks will become the dominant means for video content delivery, leveraging rapidly expanding cellular and local area network infrastructure. We believe that video networks at every time-scale and layer should operate and adapt with respect to perceptual distortions in the video stream.

A team of researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Unversity of Texas at Austin (UT ECE) led by Prof. Andrea Alù has built the first-ever circulator for sound. The team’s experiments successfully prove that the fundamental symmetry with which acoustic waves travel through air between two points in space (“if you can hear, you can also be heard”) can be broken by a compact and simple device.

The research of two professors in the Wireless and Networking Communications Group (WNCG) has been recognized as some of the most interesting scientific discoveries coming out of Texas in 2013. UT ECE professor Dr. Andrea Alu's discoveries on ultrathin invisibility cloaks and Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics professor Dr. Todd Humphrey's work on spoofing GPS signals were both recognized by Texas Monthly on their year-end list. Read More on TexasMonthly.com

UT ECE professor Dr. Al Bovik has been named the recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society  2013 Society Award for "fundamental contributions to digital image processing theory, technology, leadership and education." The Society Award honors outstanding technical contributions in a field within the scope of the Signal Processing Society and outstanding leadership within that field. In addition to receiving the Society Award, Dr. Bovik was author on two IEEE Signal Procssing Best Papers for 2013. 

UT ECE professors Dr. Robert Heath and Dr. Alan Bovik have each received a Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for 2013. The Society gives up to six paper awards every year for papers published in each of its transactions and magazine over the five years leading up to the awards.

Three WNCG professors received new endowments from the Cockrell School of Engineering. Jeff Andrews received The Cullen Trust for Higher Education Endowed Professorship in Engineering #1, Robert Heath received The Cullen Trust for Higher Education Professorship in Engineering #6, and Andrea Alù received the David Doris Lybarger Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering. The large number of endowments WNCG and the ECE department received this year is a testament to our faculty and their exceptional accomplishments.

In August, WNCG Professor Francois Baccelli co-organized a workshop at the Issac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge (UK) with Venkat Anantharam (Berkeley), Sergey Foss (Heriot-Watt) and Peter Glynn (Stanford). The workshop was titled Stochastic Processes and Communication Science. The workshop was focused on probabilistic techniques for the analysis of networks, with central applications in communications, social networks and energy systems. The meeting concentrated around three major mathematical themes: stochastic networks, big data analysis, spatial stochastic models.

WNCG graduate student Zhuoran Zhao has won a Best in Session Award at the 2013 SRC TECHCON Conference held in Austin, Texas on September 9-10, 2013. Zhao won for his submission 'Automated, Retargetable Back-Annotation for Host Compiled Performance and Power Modeling.' TECHCON 2013 highlights the best of SRC-sponsored research, while showcasing the students performing the research. Zhuoran Zhao is a WNCG graduate student in the Integrated Circuits and Systems area. He is advised by Andreas Gerstlauer.

WNCG graduate Dr.Oluwasanmi Koyejo won the Amazon Best Student Paper Award for'Constrained Bayesian Inference for Low Rank Multitask Learning' with WNCG professor Joydeep Ghosh at The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). UAI isis the premier international conference on research related to representation, inference, learning and decision making in the presence of uncertainty, and typically has a 12-14% acceptance rate for oral papers.Koyejo was advised by Dr. Joydeep Ghosh.