News

Every Spring, Texas ECE’s Awards Banquet celebrates the achievements of the department’s outstanding students and faculty. Three WNCG members were among those honored at this year’s event, which was held last week on May 6. WNCG Student Ahmed Kord won the prestigious Graduate Student Excellence Award for 2018-2019. The department confers this prize annually on one graduate student who has demonstrated “high academic achievement in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.”

WNCG faculty member Constantine Caramanis was one of five associate professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) promoted to full professor this spring. Caramanis joined UT ECE and WNCG in the fall of 2006; he is currently the WNCG’s assistant director. His research interests include: Decision-making under uncertainty, Statistical learning and data driven decision-making, Large scale networks and computation, and Adaptive Control and Optimization.

While much work has been done to further image quality for cameras and smart phones in the visible light spectrum, WNCG student Todd Goodall and his advisor Prof. Bovik have expanded their research to include the quality of infrared images. “As far as Prof. Bovik and I know, no one has thoroughly studied the natural scene statistics of infrared images,” Goodall states. “Other general image statistics have been studied, but no one has considered the perceptually-relevant natural statistics..”

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) recently awarded four UT Austin faculty $1 million for a study regarding effects and reparation efforts following WMD attacks on interdependent networks.