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”.

UT ECE alumnus Onur Mutlu has been appointed the Dr. William D. and Nancy W.Strecker Early Career Professor in the Department of Electrical and ComputerEngineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

UT ECE professor Al Bovik has been selected as the 2013 recipient of the Honorary Member Award of the Society for Imaging Science and Technology.

Prof. Bovik was selected for the impact that his work has had on shaping the direction and advancement of the field of perceptual image processing. Al’s models of perceptual image quality are used throughout the television and cable industries to monitor and control image quality.

Until now, the invisibility cloaks put forward by scientists have been bulky devices - an obvious flaw for those interested in Harry Potter-style applications. However, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a cloak that is just micrometers thick and can hide three-dimensional objects from microwaves in their natural environment, in all directions and from all of the observers’ positions.

UT ECE professor http://www.ece.utexas.edu/directory/directory_details.cfm?id=79>Al Bovik has been awarded the 2013 SPIE Technology Achievement Award for Broad and Lasting Contributions to the Field of Perception-Based Image Processing.” According to SPIE, the SPIE Technology Achievement Award is given annually to recognize outstanding technical accomplishment in optics, electro-optics, photonic engineering, or imaging.

Two researchers at The University of Texas at Austin are making it possible for smart phone users on the Forty Acres to take a “Gander” at the digital space around them.

Thanks to a new mobile application and search engine called Gander, students, faculty and staff will be able to access instant, useful information about coffee shop traffic or school assignments that they wouldn’t otherwise get from a website.