For the past year, students across several Cockrell School of Engineering departments have been applying their classroom training to tackle a large-scale engineering challenge: Design, build, test and race a vehicle run on solar power.

Prof. Deji Akinwande has received a 3-year grant from the Army Research office (ARO) to fund new material and device research based on silicene, a two-dimensional form of silicon which was invented in the last few years. This 2D silicon promises to be of greater impact than graphene with direct compatibility with existing silicon vlsi technology.

Prof. Vijay Janapa Reddi has been named as a recipient of a 2013 Intel Early Caeer Faculty Honor Program Award. According to Intel, the goal of this program is to find the rising stars in academic research with less than 5-years of faculty experience and connect them with Intel’s researchers. Awardees are chosen through an annual competitive nomination and selection process at select schools in the US, EU, China and Taiwan. Awardees are given a significant cash award to fund their travel to Intel for networking purposes and to help advance their research agenda.

Profs. Sanjay Banerjee, Emanuel Tutuc, Frank Register, Deji Akinwande, Rod Ruoff (ME) and their collaborators have received a five-year, $7.8 million nanoelectronics grant from SRC and NIST.

Prof. Jeff Andrews and his students Sarabjot Singh and Harpreet Dhillon for receiving a Best Paper Award at the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications in Budapest, Hungary.

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.