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.

Each year, the D-STOP Symposium brings together top experts in the field of automated vehicles, connected infrastructure and new mobility services to share their emerging research that will impact the future of transportation planning and technology.

Over 80 percent of annual car crashes could be prevented by vehicular  communications, a recent NHTSA report demonstrates. To improve vehicular communications and substantially improve safety benefits for all, TxDOT funded the Communications and Radar-Supported Transportation Operations and Planning (CAR-STOP).

Envision an early cubist painting by the famous artist Pablo Picasso. To the untrained eye, the painting can look like a jumbled series of boxes overlapping and intertwining with each other. But the art of cubism is about exploring the world from multiple perspectives. The painting, which at first looks like boxes, is actually a city seen from multiple perspectives.

WNCG Faculty and students met on Sunday with researchers from the Center for Transportation Research (CTR) and other UT Austin Cockrell School Engineers during the first-ever UT Village at SXSW Interactive 2015. This year's event featured panels and interactive research demonstrations and was open to all SXSW Interactive 2015 Badge Holders. Click the image below to view the complete slideshow from the day's events.  

In 2013, 32,719 fatalities resulted from traffic crashes, most of which were caused by driver error. Across the globe, people are facing longer commutes and five Texas communities are in the top 26 most congested cities in the United States. Traffic congestion creates about 4.8 billion hours of travel delay and affects the environment through increased carbon footprints and higher fuel consumption.

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.