The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) will bestow John B. Goodenough of The University of Texas at Austin with the highest honor in the engineering profession for the groundbreaking creation of the lithium-ion battery.

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. 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."

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.

UT ECE alumnus Hari Nair and his PhD advsisor Prof. Seth Bank received the best paper award at the 71st Device Research Conference (DRC) for their paper “3.4 µm Diode Lasers Employing Al-Free GaInAsSb/GaSb MQW Active Regions at 20°C.” The DRC is cosponsored by the IEEE Electron Device Society and is one of the two outstanding electronic device conferences.

Hari Nair is currently a postdoc at Cornell University. This is the second best paper award he has received for his work with Prof. Bank.

UT ECE students Michael Webb and Casen Hunger won the Fall 2013 EE 445L Embedded Systems Design contest on Friday, December 6, 2013 for their design of a soil monitoring system. Second place went to Amir Moghadam and Abhas Mishra for the development of a Jeopardy game. Third place went to Mitchell Crooks and John Matrix Elson for their design of an audio loop station.

UT ECE undergraduate students in EE 319K exhibited the hand-held video games that they designed and built. There was a three-way tie for first place in the competition. The 319K students were taught by Dr. Ramesh Yerraballi, Dr. Andreas Gertslauer, and Dr. Jonathan Valvano.

First Place Winners (Tie)

UT ECE Graduate Student Bei Yu won the Silver Medal at the ACM Student Research Competition – Graduate Track, held at the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD). Bei Yu is supervised by Prof. David Z. Pan.

The ACM Student Reserach Competition is sponsored by Microsoft Research, and is an internationally recognized competition involving research orojects from all areas of design automation.

UT ECE graduate students  Jhih-Rong Gao, Bei Yu, Xiaoqing Xu, and their advisor Prof. David Z. Pan won the 2nd Place Award at the ICCAD'13 CAD Contest in Mask Optimization. There are 87 teams from 9 regions around the world participated in the ICCAD'13 CAD Contest, which has three distinct contest problems. This mask optimization problem and benchmarks are provided by IBM, to advance the state-of-the-art of IC design for manufacturing (DFM).

UT ECE professor Alexis Kwasinski in collaboration with the Rochester Institute of Technology has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant as part of the CyberSEES program for work on investigating techniques to power cellular network base stations from renewable sources such as wind turbines and photovoltaic modules.