News

ECE students might have chatted with Prof. Brian Evans during his Friday coffee/advising hours, or in the new first-year graduate student mentoring program he coordinates, or in a student organization he advises. In weekly coffee hours, now running for 19 years, Prof. Evans has been providing a comfortable space for undergraduate and graduate students to talk about what’s on their mind and help each other. But his involvement extends further beyond the ECE department to the university community as a whole. And “whole” is what he strives to make our community.

The Applied Mechanics Division (AMD) of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has selected WNCG professor Nanshu Lu to receive the 2022 Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award. Shawn Chester, an associate professor of New Jersey Institute of Technology, was selected jointly with Lu to receive the award, which recognizes special achievements of young researchers in applied mechanics.  Read the full article via the Department of Aerospace Engineering

Pneumonia has emerged as a life-threatening complication of COVID-19, accounting for nearly half of all patients who have died from the novel coronavirus in the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic. Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, pneumonia was responsible for more than 43,000 deaths in 2019.

Four Texas ECE students have been awarded Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.

Advances in machine learning are announced every day, but efforts to fundamentally rethink the core algorithms of AI are rare.

WNCG faculty member Todd Humphreys has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Humphreys was one of five faculty members from The University of Texas at Austin to receive the award for 2019. The PECASE is the “highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers who are beginning their independent research careers and who show exceptional promise for leadership in science and technology.”

Embedded systems often operate on sensitive data in safety-critical environments, including transportation, health care, and industrial control. Embedded software can leak information about the activity and data via physical side-channels, such as electromagnetic (EM) fields, which can be measured with ease by an adversary using modest equipment. Such measurements can be used to profile programs, find anomalies in the software, identify sensitive information, and most fundamentally, reveal what instructions are being executed on the system.

WNCG alumnus Prof. Siddhartha Banerjee has been named a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award. Banerjee received his doctorate from Texas ECE in 2013. As a member of WNCG, he was advised by Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai and Sujay Sanghavi. He is currently an Assistant Professor of operations research and information engineering at Cornell University, and he also serves as a technical consultant for popular rideshare service Lyft.

Evdokia Nikolova, Assistant Professor in Texas ECE, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for her work on "AitF: Collaborative Research: Algorithms and Mechanisms for the Distribution Grid.”  The goal of this project is to “help the distribution grid and its participants transition from its current functionality of serving mostly traditional consumers, to the future grid that needs to sustainably integrate prosumers, renewables and distributed energy resources.”

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.