UT ECE Professor Andreas Gerstlauer's student Ardavan Pedram (co-advised with Prof. Robert van de Geijn in Computer Science) has received the Best Poster Award at the Ph.D. Forum of the 27th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS).

IPDPS is the flagship conference of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) and among the premier venues for parallel, distributed and cloud computing. It was held May 20-24, 2013 in Boston.

Prof. David Pan will be recognized at the upcoming 2013 Design Automation Conference which will be celebrating its 50th Anniversary June 2-6, 2013 in Austin. Dr. Pan was named a DAC Top 10 Author in Fifth Decade for being one of the top 10 most prolific authors for DAC's fifth decade. Dr. Pan will also receive the DAC Prolific Author Award - DAC 25 Club in recognition of the more than 25 papers he has presented at the Design Automation Conference.

A new paper by Prof. Alex Dimakis and others is currently featured on Facebook Publications, which collects scientific papers written by Facebook employees and researchers. The paper on XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data developed a new coding scheme for Facebook storage servers. The paper was co-written by Maheshwaran Sathiamoorthy, Megasthenis Asteris, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Ramkumar Vadali, Scott Chen and Dhruba Borthakur.

Nvidia announced Tuesday April 30, 2013 that its Tegra team has been bolstered by Deepu Talla, a former Texas Instruments executive who used to head TI’s SoC business. Talla is now an Nvidia VP and he will head the company’s Tegra business unit. Talla has extensive experience in mobile computing, with ten years of service at Texas Instruments. He received his Ph.D from The University of Texas at Austin in 2001.

Professor Ali Yilmaz has received the W. A. “Tex” Moncrief Grand Challenge Faculty Award from The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES). The award will provide Dr. Yilmaz with resources to conduct research related to computational challenges in brain mapping.

UT’s Solar Car Team has been trying to a win a solar car race for more than a decade. This year the team has a $50,000 donation in their arsenal, an advantage team members hope will help them win the Formula Sun Grand Prix this summer.

Bobby Epstein, chairman of Austin’s Circuit of the Americas racetrack, announced the donation of $50,000 to the team, which will help purchase critical parts for the roughly $100,000 solar car, called TexSun. Epstein said COTA made the donation because it wants to be involved in supporting a local effort to develop the cars of the future.

The University of Texas at Austin Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (UT ECE) hosted the Spring 2013 Senior Design Open House on Wednesday, April 24, 2013. UT ECE undergraduate seniors presented demonstrations of their projects spanning two semesters of work.

UT ECE professor Brian Evans and his students Karl F. Nieman, Jing Lin and Marcel Nassar have received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Powerline Communications and Its Applications.

The paper is entitled Cyclic Spectral Analysis of Power Line Noise in the 3-200 kHz Band and was co-authored with Freescale engineer Dr. Khurram Waheed. The IEEE ISPLC was held on March 25-27, 2013, in Johannesburg, South Africa.

UT ECE alumnus Duo Ding has received the 2013 ACM Outstanding PhD Dissertation Award in Electronic Design Automation! Dr. Ding is Prof. David Z. Pan’s student and received his PhD in August 2011. He is currently with Oracle Microelectronics in Austin. His PhD dissertation is entitled “CAD for Nanolithography and Nanophotonics”.