The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) recently recognized Professor Yale Patt and Dr. Tse-Yu Yeh for work they did 15 years ago. Every year the symposium selects one paper that has had the most impact on the field (in terms of research, development, products or ideas) during the intervening years. This year the paper was Alternative Implementations of Two-Level Adaptive Branch Prediction.

ECE's External Advisory Committee gave Professor Jeff Andrews their first High Gain Award for his work in ad hoc wireless networks. The High Gain Award was established to recognize exceptional contributions to the mission of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. Dr. Andrews recently received a $400K National Science Foundation CAREER award and a $6.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Jeff's research is at the forefront of his field. says Chairman Tony Ambler.

One of the most impressive and important people in the history of wireless communications, Dr. Irwin Jacobs, lectured on the future of wireless devices and applications. Dr. Jacobs co-wrote a seminal textbook on wireless communication back in the late 1960's (Wozencraft & Jacobs, still in use today) when an MIT professor, before founding Link-a-bit (the grandfather company of the San Diego telecommunications industry) and then co-founding Qualcomm with Andrew Viterbi. He was their CEO for the first two decades of their existence (until 2 years ago).

In a very heated IC global routing contest at the International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD), the BoxRouter team from UT led by Dr. David Pan won 2nd place in the industry-strength 3D category. BoxRouter was based on a DAC 2006 paper by Minsik Cho and David Pan which helped to generate the recent renaissance of global routing research.

ECE graduate student Gunjan Gupta and Professor Joydeep Ghosh just missed the best research paper award at the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. Their paper, Bregman Bubble Clustering: A Robust, Scalable Framework for Locating Multiple, Dense Regions in Data, came in second out of 776 submissions. Their research addresses the problem of grouping data in meaningful ways.

Prof. Jeff Andrews was recently chosen as a recipient of a $400K National Science Foundation CAREER award.  The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) recognizes promising young faculty members using a highly competitive peer-review process.

ECE professor Ross Baldick was recently elevated to IEEE Fellow. Each year, following a rigorous evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellows Committee recommends a select group for one of IEEE's most prestitious honors. Dr. Baldick was recognized for contributions to analysis of power system economics.

Electrical & Computer Engineering professor Ari Arapostathis was elected fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Fellows are academic and industry professionals with extraordinary accomplishments in the field of electrical engineering. Arapostathis was elected for his contributions in nonlinear and stochastic control as well as applications in power systems. Currently, he is developing control techniques that would allow U.S. Navy ships' power systems to continue operating after sustaining damage.

Kaibin Huang, jointly supervised by Professors Jeff Andrews and Robert Heath, won Best Student Paper Award at the Global Telecommunications Conference. The paper, Multi-Antenna Limited Feedback for Temporally-Correlated Channels: Feedback Compression, was also authored by Bishwarup Mondal, R. W. Heath, Jr., and J. G. Andrews. The GLOBECOM conference is one of the two biggest communications conferences every year (the other is ICC).

The third annual Edison Lecture featured ECE professor and renewable energy authority, Dr. Mack Grady, and some of the country's leading lights in wind and solar power. The free interactive show included audience participation, give-aways, and demonstrations which brought the excitement of technology alive. Speakers discussed the ongoing transition from finite, expensive, and polluting energy sources to clean and cheap energy.

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