Students groups at The University of Texas at Austin hosted the first annual Hack for Good competition on Saturday, April 21 in the Engineering Education and Research Center on campus.

Matthew Johnson, a senior in Texas ECE, along with his teammates Suyi Tu, a Master’s student in Business Analytics at UT, and Hang Zhu and Ye Zhang of Rice University, took first place in The Data Open hosted by Citadel Securities and CorrelationOne.

Prof. Edison Thomaz of Texas ECE has received a Google Faculty Research Award for his proposed research work on "Identifying Acoustic Biomarkers of Mental Health and Well-Being in Voice-Based Interactions with Conversational Assistants in the Home".

Prof. Robert Heath of Texas ECE along with his former students Jeonghun Park, Chan-Byoung Chae and their co-author Min Soo Sim have received the 2018 Journal of Communications and Networks Best Paper Award.

Prof. Al Bovik of Texas ECE along with former students Ming-Jun Chen and Che-Chun (Tony) Su and his collaborators Do-Kyoung Kwon (Texas Instruments) and Lawrence K. Cormack (UT-Austin’s Department of Psychology) have received he 2018 European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) Best Paper Award.

Prof. Alex Dimakis of Texas ECE was one of three distinguished speakers o give a plenary talk at the 52nd annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) at Princeton University on March 23, 2018. Prof. Dimakis delivered a talk entitled "Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Compressed Sensing."

Prof. Mikhail Belkin of Texas ECE has been promoted to Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics. Fellows are Members of distinction who have made significant scientific and technical contributions in the multidisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging. They are honored for their technical achievement, for their service to the general optics community, and to SPIE in particular. More than 1,300 SPIE members have become Fellows since the Society's inception in 1955.

Prof. Ali Yilmaz of Texas ECE has been named the recipient of the 2017 Intel Corporate Research Council (CRC) Outstanding Researcher in System Integration award.  Prof. Yilmaz was recognized for “Completing high-quality research on layered-medium integral-equation methods for full-wave electromagnetic analysis of electronic packages influencing the direction of the electronic design & analysis industry.”

Engineers worldwide have been developing alternative ways to provide greater memory storage capacity on even smaller computer chips. Previous research into two-dimensional atomic sheets for memory storage has failed to uncover their potential — until now.

Texas ECE PhD student Hyoyoung Jeong was awarded a distinguished Silver Prize in the Bio Engineering & Life Science Division at the 24th Annual Samsung HumanTech Paper Awards. Out of approximately 2,000 papers, only the top 2% are selected for the Silver Prize. The Silver Prize winners receive approximately $10,000 in total for the student and their supervisor in prize money. The topic of Hyoyoung's awarded paper is "Battery-Free, Wireless, Multimodal Stretchable Electronic Tattoos Exploring a Modular Concept." He is supervised by Prof.