ECE News

ECE Professor Jim Coleman is passionate about his research in the area of photonics, and he is currently exploring new and challenging possibilities in the area of nanophotonics, especially nanostructures.

ECE Professor Stephen Boppart’s proposal, “Investigating Tumor Growth Dynamics Using Multimodal Contrast Agents and Optical Coherence Elastography,” was chosen to receive $1 million under the NIH Research Challenge grant program.

ECE Assistant Professor Deming Chen and ECE Professor Wen-mei Hwu have received the best paper award at the IEEE Symposium on Application Specific Processors 2009.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invited CSL researcher Professor Todd Coleman to join its Information Science and Technology (ISAT) study group for a three year term beginning this fall. The group carries about 30 people and only invites the brightest new scientists and engineers to be members.

ECE Professor George Gross was recently awarded the IEEE Power Engineering Society Technical Committee Prize Paper Award for his paper entitled “A General Formulation for LMP Evaluation.”

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have awarded ECE Associate Professor Brian Cunningham and Dr. Richard Zangar of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory a grant to fund the development of diagnostics that can detect the presence of cancer in the human blood stream.

ECE Professor Michael Loui, along with several undergraduate researchers, found that regular study sessions facilitated by knowledgeable leaders led to improved exam grades.

The Information Trust Institute (ITI) at the University of Illinois and its partner institutions have been recruited to contribute towards the ongoing development of a resilient, secure Smart Grid in the United States, following the announcement of a major award of research support.

Earlier in October, 38 members of the Science and Engineering Club from Champaign’s Countryside School paid a visit to Everitt Lab as part of a field trip hosted in part by ECE Professor Jennifer Bernhard.

ECE graduate student Albert Liao (BS PHYS ‘07, MS ECE ‘08) was recently awarded the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI) Hans J. Coufal Fellowship to continue his current research at Illinois.

ECE Assistant Professor Olgica Milenkovic believes a cure for cancer could be a reality, thanks to cross-disciplinary research she is conducting with Illinois colleagues in microbiology and pathobiology.

ECE PhD candidate Anh Van was recently selected to participate in the prestigious fourth annual National Graduate Student Research Festival sponsored by the National Institute of Health (NIH).

A team of students from the University of Illinois won second place in the 2009 Solar Decathlon design competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.

ECE Professor Stephen Boppart is the 2009 recipient of the Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award.

ECE senior Martin McCormick once thought mind reading was a talent reserved for superheroes in the comics. But he’s not so sure anymore.

ECE Professor Yi Ma, graduate students Shankar Rao and Hossein Mobahi, and 2006 PhD ECE alumnus Allen Yang won the 2009 Best Student Paper Award (Sang Uk Lee Award) at the Asian Conference on Computer Vision.

The winners of the Best Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Nanotechnology are Justin Koepke and Joshua Wood, graduate students in ECE Professor Joe Lyding’s research group.

It took students from departments across the Illinois campus working for countless hours over nearly two years, but the Gable Home has made its move from south campus to the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

High up in the ionosphere, plasma bubbles invisible to the naked eye wreak havoc on communication and navigation systems back on Earth. ECE Assistant Professor Jonathan Makela hopes to change that through the Remote Equatorial Nighttime Observatory of Ionospheric Regions (RENOIR) project.

John Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder Chair in Engineering Innovation in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and an affiliate of ECE, has been named a 2009 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

ECE Associate Professor Patrick Chapman has been researching ways to convert human motion to usable energy.

On September 11, ECE ILLINOIS honored seven of its alumni at its annual Alumni Banquet.

On September 18, 2009, a ceremony was held to unveil a plaque honoring the achievements of ECE Professor Nick Holonyak Jr.

ECE Professor Jianming Jin recently published a book, Finite Element Analysis of Antennas and Arrays (John Wiley, 2009) with Douglas Riley of Northrop Grumman.

ECE Professor Emeritus N. Narayana Rao spent his summer doing what he likes to do best--teaching.

An electrical engineering component will be added next summer to the Girls Adventures in Mathematics, Engineering, and Science, or G.A.M.E.S. camp, sponsored by Women in Engineering.

ECE Professor Umberto Ravaioli is working with the National Center for Learning and Teaching in Nanoscale Science and Engineering to research nanotechnology education from middle school through college.

Google and Lime have teamed up to provide a scholarship for students with disabilities. This year five students were recognized in the first round of this scholarship; among them was ECE ILLINOIS’s Matthew Strom.

ECE Professor Emeritus Richard M. Brown died Saturday, August 22, at the Meadowbrook Health Center in Urbana. He was 85.

ECE Assistant Professor Xiuling Li is a recipient of a Young Faculty Award from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The University of Illinois is one of 20 teams competing in this year’s Solar Decathlon, a biannual competition that brings together teams from all over the world to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses.

Students and faculty alike have soaked up the last days of freedom and are preparing for another year of classes, quizzes, homework, and exams.

ECE Assistant Professor Deming Chen organized and led a tutorial at the 46th Design Automation Conference in San Francisco on July 31.

ECE Illinois is again one of the top-ranked engineering departments in the country, according to the 2010 annual survey by U.S. News and World Report.

ECE Professors Doug Jones and Todd Coleman are spearheading a new initiative on neuroengineering that will enable novel brain-machine interfaces and other breakthroughs.

ECE Assistant Professor Matthew Gilbert is doing research on the Bose-Einstein condensation effect, a phenomenon that one day could change the future of devices like the iPhone.

ECE Professors Sean Meyn and Tamer Basar are part of a research team that recently received a three-year, $1.03 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to tackle complex questions regarding energy markets.

Out of 6,000 engineers working for Rockwell Collins, ECE graduate student Brian Herting (MSEE ’03) is one of three to be named Corporate Engineer of the Year.

Alfred Cho (BSEE ’60, MSEE ’61, PhD ’68) is a 2009 recipient of the Rusnanoprize.

ECE Professor Philip Krein is working on a way to make small-scale electricity grids more reliable.

ECE graduate student Jie-Bang (Stephen) Yan has received a Croucher Foundation Scholarship from Hong Kong. This prestigious scholarship’s purpose is to encourage students from Hong Kong to work toward their PhDs overseas.

ECE graduate student Han Wui Then’s idea to apply transistor laser technology to develop an ultra-linear laser source earned him a spot as a finalist for the 2009 Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize.

ECE Professor Michael Loui has assisted the Information Trust Institute in obtaining a grant from the National Science Foundation to offer the Undergraduate Research Internship again this summer.

On July 13, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a collection of bills dubbed the “Illinois Jobs Now!” plan. Contained within these bills were funds to support the construction of the new ECE building, John Bardeen Hall.

ECE Assistant Professor Lynford Goddard is one of 100 beginning researchers who received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor given to young researchers by the U.S. government.

ECE Associate Professor Minh Do recently received the Young Author Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. His paper describes computational techniques for visual information representation that mimic the way that the human visual system works.

ECE graduate student William Snodgrass was recognized with the Best Student Paper Award at the Compound Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology Conference (CS MANTECH).

On June 30 ECE Professor Elyse Rosenbaum led “Making Engineering Fun,” an all-day workshop for 18 teachers of grades 4 through 8. The workshop covered four units: microelectronics, waves, static electricity, and heat.

On June 30, College of Engineering Dean Ilesanmi Adesida announced the selection of ECE ILLINOIS Professor Andreas Cangellaris as department head for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

ECE Professor Narendra Ahuja was recently honored with the T. A. Stewart-Dyer and F. Trevithick Prize for his work on the use of computer vision for railroad engineering.

Murali Venkatesan and Nicholas Watkins have developed a portable AIDS diagnostic platform that can be used to diagnose AIDS quickly and accurately. The device analyzes the number of CD-4 cells in a patient’s blood sample.

Next summer, ECE junior Sumit Dutta will have the unique opportunity to work as an intern for NASA. Dutta is a recipient of a 2009 NASA Aeronautics Scholarship, one of only 25 students to receive such an honor this year nationwide.

Researchers have constructed a light-emitting transistor that has set a new record with a signal-processing modulation speed of 4.3 gigahertz, breaking the previous record of 1.7 gigahertz held by a light-emitting diode.

After working for the last year and a half, the students involved with the 2009 Solar Decathlon finally received the most important part of the project: the house.

ECE graduate student Rui Wang won the Best Student Paper Award at the 25th International Review of Progress in Applied Computational Electromagnetics held in Monterey, California in March.

ECE Professors Narendra Ahuja, Thomas Huang, and William Sanders are among an elite group of 59 professors to receive a 2009 HP Labs Innovation Research Award. The program creates opportunities for colleges, universities and research institutes to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.

ECE graduate student Farzan Farbiz won the Best Student Paper Award for his presentation at the 2008 IEEE International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS) in Phoenix Arizona. The paper, titled “Modeling of Majority and Minority Carrier Triggered External Latchup,” sets up design guidelines for designers to improve reliability, as well as time to market.

ECE Professor Michael Loui has received the King Broadrick-Allen Award for Excellence in Honors Teaching for distinguished teaching and service to the Campus Honors Program. The program gives this annual award to a faculty member who has made great contributions to the program.

Fast and affordable genome sequencing has moved a step closer with a new solid-state nanopore sensor being developed by researchers at the University of Illinois.

ECE graduate student Diego Hernando won the Isidor I. Rabi Award from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine for his paper and research on separating water and fat in medical imaging.

The Intel Foundation PhD Fellowship Program provides fellowship awards for graduate students pursuing cutting-edge work in the fields that relate to Intel’s business and research interests. These fellowships are highly competitive, and receiving one is a major distinction in a student’s career.

At the University of Illinois, students are nothing if not resourceful, finding class projects in discarded material. One example is ECE graduate student Grant Pitel's group project of installing solar panels on top of Everitt Lab.

“People do not like to talk about it that much, but hearing aids do not work very well,” said ECE Associate Professor Jont Allen. “It’s not like they’re useless, they just don’t work like real ears.”

In recognition of his achievements, Dan Dobberpuhl (BSEE ’67) received the Alumni Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Engineering from the College of Engineering during the Student and Alumni Honor Awards Convocation held May 1.

ECE Professor Benjamin Wah is the recepient of the 2009 Tsutomu Kanai Award from the IEEE Computer Society “for outstanding contributions to the theory and applications of distributed multimedia and nonlinear optimization algorithms.”

ECE Assistant Professor Todd Coleman is part of a research team which will be receiving equipment from the Air Force to build a Traffic Timing Analysis Testbed (TTAT). TTAT will be used to generate traffic in order to address a broad range of problems related to traffic analysis.

On a nice day, it's not uncommon to see someone picking a guitar on the quad, or even a circle of people pounding away on drums.  But two seven-foot Tesla coils spouting bolts of electricity? That's bound to turn some heads. At least that was the experience of Electronic Services Shop Technician Mark Smart when he performed as the headliner for the 2009 annual conference of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS). The conference, held on the campus of Sweetwater Sound in Fort Wayne featured a variety of papers, master classes, and of course, concerts from electronic musicians around the country and the globe.

Alumnus Marwan Simaan (PhD ’72) was recently named interim dean for the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orlando. Simaan continues to work on several research projects, including one that is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

ECE Assistant Professor Jonathan Makela is the 2009 recipient of the ECE’s Ronald W. Pratt Teaching Award. Makela was surprised to win the award, but was happy to receive recognition for his hard work. “It feels great to be recognized by the students and faculty for the effort that I put into teaching,” he said.

Alfred Cho (BSEE ’60, MSEE ’61, PhD ’68) was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame class of 2009 during a ceremony on May 2. Cho, who holds 85 patents, has also been the recipient of the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology.

ECE graduate student Robert Gregg has been awarded the 2009 Hugo Schuck Award by the American Control Council (ACC) for his work on control methods for dynamic walking robots. Gregg won the best student paper for the same research at last year’s ACC.

ECE Assistant Professor Yun Chiu and PhD student Wenbo Liu recently presented a parallel analog-to-digital converter (ADC) array chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) that won them the 46th DAC/ISSCC Student Design Contest Award.

Graduates, we invite you and your family to join us for brunch on Sunday, May 17, at 9:30 to celebrate the many hours you spent in the classroom, the long hours working in the lab, and the thousands of slices of pizza you consumed during your time here. Space is limited, so be sure to register by May 8 at www.ece.illinois.edu/brunch.

ECE Assistant Professor Xiuling Li and graduate research assistant Seth Fortuna have found a new way to make transistors smaller and faster. The technique uses self-assembled, self-aligned, and defect-free nanowire channels made of gallium arsenide.

The University of Illinois is home to numerous groups, committees, and organizations. Among these, few have the level of responsibility of the Student Sustainability Committee. This committee is charged with evaluating and recommending projects to receive funds from two student fees: the sustainable campus environment fee and the cleaner energy technologies fee. ECE graduate student Suhail Barot serves as the committee chair.

The San Francisco Bay Area used to be home two Illinois alumni groups. However, in 2008 these groups merged into one, which currently has around 1,500 members. ECE alumnus Phillip Lachman (BSEE ’04) is the vice president of events, South Bay, for the group.

ECE Professor Milton Feng has been named an associate of the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) for the Fall 2009 semester. This is one of the most prestigious distinctions given to faculty on the Urbana-Champaign campus.

ECE Professor P. R. Kumar has been named the 2009 recipient of the Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award. This award recognizes faculty in the College of Engineering who have received national or international acclaim for dedication to academic excellence through teaching and research and have made exemplary contributions to the understanding of their fields.

The deadline for applying to the 2009 Nano-Biophotonics Summer School, to be held June 1-12 in Urbana, is April 15. Topics covered include principles of nano-biophotonics, technology and methods of investigation, and current research. There will also be leading speakers from Illinois and across the United States. Apply now to be part of this unique program.

A new edition of ECE Professor Shun Lien Chuang’s book Physics of Photonic Devices was recently published as part of the Wiley Series in Pure and Applied Optics. The book introduces the topic for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in electrical and computer engineering, material science, and physics.

ECE Professor R. Srikant has been invested as the Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Srikant is internationally known for his work on communication problems related to the Internet and more recently for research on wireless networks.

After decades of studying airglows in the Northern Hemisphere, ECE Professor Gary Swenson and a team of atmospheric physicists are moving their research south.

Scientists at the University of Illinois have successfully demonstrated a microwave signal mixer made from a tunnel-junction transistor laser.

ECE Associate Professor Patrick Chapman and his graduate student Piotr Wiczkowski performed an in-depth study for the Illinois Center for Transportation and the Illinois Department of Transportation to determine the feasibility of using wind to provide electrical power at highway rest areas, weigh stations, and team section buildings.

Matt Carroll, who runs the copy room in the ECE Publications Office, was named a recipient of the 2009 Chancellor's Distinguished Staff Award. This prestigious award annually recognizes staff employees for their exceptional accomplishments and service to the University.

In the search for improved scheduling algorithms, ECE Professor Benjamin Wah and his student Chih-Wei Hsu could be a source of important breakthroughs. They recently received the Best Temporal Satisficing Planner Award in the Deterministic Track of the Sixth International Planning Competition.

ECE PhD candidate Greg Lucas, ECE graduate student Scott Cromar and ECE Assistant Professor Deming Chen were recently awarded the ASP-DAC’s Best Paper Award for their paper “FastYield: Variation-Aware, Layout-Driven Simultaneous Binding and Module Selection for Performance Yield Optimization.”

ECE graduate student John Sartori and Computer Science graduate student Ahsan Arefin placed third in this year’s Real Time System’s Symposium (RTSS) CiberMouse competition.

ECE graduate student John Wright received $30,000 as the winner of the third Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize. Wright has developed new mathematical tools that drastically improve the accuracy of facial recognition systems.

ECE Assistant Professor Olgica Milenkovic believes that it’s possible to create more consistently effective vaccines--and that the solution is better math.

ECE PhD candidate Zhiguo Qian recently learned that his paper was selected as the “Best Student Paper” during the IEEE 17th Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems.

ECE Professor Gary Eden has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was recognized for “seminal interdisciplinary contributions to ultraviolet lasers, photochemical vapor deposition, ultrafast spectroscopy, and microcavity plasma devices.”

Graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon, holds remarkable promise for future nanoelectronics applications. Whether graphene actually cuts it in industry, however, depends upon how graphene is cut, say researchers at the University of Illinois.

The University of Illinois has announced the opening of its first research center outside the U.S. The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) is located at Singapore's Fusionopolis and marks a landmark collaboration with Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

By pushing carbon nanotubes close to their breaking point, researchers at the University of Illinois have demonstrated a remarkable increase in the current-carrying capacity of the nanotubes, well beyond what was previously thought possible.

ECE Professor Jim Coleman has always been very involved in his professional community and is now being both awarded and promoted for his achievements and his many years of service in the photonics community.

ECE Professor Kanti Jain has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering. He was among 65 engineers selected for membership in the NAE, which was established in 1964 under a charter from the National Academy of Sciences as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers.

The Illinois Solar Decathlon team recently received two major grants to assist in developing its project house for the 2009 Solar Decathlon. The Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation provided $200,000 and the Department of Energy has provided $100,000 through the National Renewable Energy Lab.

By integrating a solid-state electron emitter and a microcavity plasma device, researchers at the University of Illinois have created a plasma transistor that could be used to make lighter, less expensive, and higher resolution flat-panel displays.

Our dear friend and colleague Ralf Koetter passed away peacefully in Munich on Sunday night. He was a gentleman and a scholar and he will be greatly missed.

Imagine walking into a hospital to have surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. Now imagine walking out that same day. That is ECE Illinois Assistant Professor Michael Oelze’s vision for the future of cancer treatment.

ECE Assistant Professor Eric Pop has received a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), a second annual program sponsored and promoted within the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) that funds proposed research by young faculty from around the country.

ECE Professor Stephen Boppart was recently named a Fellow by the Optical Society of America (OSA) for his numerous contributions to the field of optics.

Imagine spending six years trying to engineer strained films only a few nanometers thick, to prevent them from curling up and destroying themselves. Now, imagine receiving a five year grant from the National Science Foundation to exploit that exact same phenomenon. For ECE Assistant Professor and Beckman Institute affiliate Xiuling Li, that's exactly what happened.

Metallic carbon nanotubes have been proposed as interconnects in future electronic devices packed with high-density nanoscale circuits. But can they stand up to the heat?

Beware thieves and other ne'er-do-wells: Those sunglasses and other disguises may soon no longer protect your identity if ECE Associate Professor Yi Ma and his group have anything to do with it.

The Illinois Star Challenge team, made up of ECE graduate students and led by Professors Thomas Huang and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, took third in the Star Challenge, a multimedia retrieval competition comprising over 50 teams from around the globe.

ECE Professor Rashid Bashir recently honored by two major organizations, being named a Fellow of IEEE and of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).

On September 12, ECE Professor Emeritus Floyd Dunn (BSEE ’49, MSEE ’51, PhD ’56) received the William J. and Francis J. Fry Award given by the International Society for Therapeutic Ultrasound.

ECE freshman Ryan Mancl spent November 6-9 in Cologne, Germany, competing on the USA team in the World Cyber Games (WCG). Mancl has been involved in gaming for the past three years, the last two at a competitive level.

ECE Professor and Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) researcher P. R. Kumar received a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich).

On February 10, 2009, this unique career event will give companies an opportunity to recruit outstanding electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science students. Registration is now open, but space is limited. Sign up today!

As Congress debates the pros and cons of an automaker bailout, researchers at Illinois have developed economic models and methods that could help economists better understand the potential outcome of such stimulus packages.

Promoting Undergraduate Research in ECE (PURE) aims to create research opportunities for undergraduates, in particular freshman and sophomores.

Edward Ernst (BSEE ’49, MSEE ’50, PhD ’55) died November 14. He was 84. Over the course of his career, Ernst proved to be a strong advocate for engineering education.

The Fabrication Laboratory on the ground floor of Everitt Lab is the highlight of every College of Engineering tour that comes through the building. Recently, a new mural has been added, which depicts three men who were influential in the field of circuits and in this lab.

University of Illinois juniors and seniors in all areas of engineering are coming together for a year-long class focused around building a satellite that will eventually go into orbit. The course is ENG 491CU1: Interdisciplinary Design Project, and the project they are designing is called a CubeSat.

ECE freshman Alex Suchko participated in the FIRST Robotics competition during his senior year in high school, where he won the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award. He plans to continue working on robotics projects while at Illinois.

ECE Professor Doug Jones's Active Constellation Extension (ACE) method for peak power reduction has been included in the new second-generation digital video broadcast standard, which will be used for digital television in a majority of countries across the world.

ECE Illinois is hosting its first ever young alumni event in Chicago on Thursday, November 13. Break out your bowling ball and get ready to roll. Or just come and mingle.

College of Engineering Dean Ilesanmi Adesida recently announced the selection of ECE Illinois Professor Andreas Cangellaris as interim department head for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

On Friday, October 24, a symposium and dinner was held in honor of ECE Illinois Professor Nick Holonyak Jr. on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

ECE Assistant Professor Gabriel Popescu has teamed up with the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology to determine the success of his "diffraction phase microscopy [DPM]" technique on brain cells.

The University of Illinois has greatly expanded its horizons with the establishment of a new research center in Singapore. The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) will be part of Singapore’s new science and technology complex, Fusionopolis, which opened on October 17.

In August, ECE Professors Andrew Singer and Bruce Hajek completed the Ironman triathlon held in Louisville, Kentucky.

ECE Professor Thomas Huang was recently named a 2008 Academician by Academia Sinica, a preeminent academic institution in the Republic of China (Taiwan).

ECE Professor Tamer Basar has been named the interim director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois. The Beckman Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute devoted to basic research in the physical sciences, computation, engineering, biology, behavior, and cognition.

The Information Trust Institute (ITI) on the Illinois campus received $1.25 million in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to support scholarships for undergraduate students who are working towards careers in information trust.

“I felt that there was a drastic misunderstanding of the sciences by the humanities,” said ECE Professor Stephen Levinson. “And I felt that because of that, there is a real need to try to bring the two together and to try to repair the rift.”

Scientists at the University of Illinois have developed a new class of disposable, microplate-based optical biosensors capable of detecting protein-DNA interactions.

Like an age-guesser at a carnival, computer software being developed at the University of Illinois can fairly accurately estimate a person's age.

Rashid Bashir, Abel Bliss Professor of the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Bioengineering, and his students led the development of one of the latest lab-on-a-chip technology.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was recently named the world’s first CUDA Center of Excellence by the NVIDIA Corporation, a world leader in visual computing technologies.

PC Magazine recognized Illinois as the "top wired college" in the nation for 2008. Illinois had been ranked sixth in the 2006 rankings.

"We tend to forget nanotechnology is barely a gleam in broader society," explained Arden Bement Jr., director of the National Science Foundation.

In July, ECE alumnus Dirk Meyer (BSEE ’83) was named chief executive officer of Advance Micro Devices (AMD).

In July, ECE Professor Jean Pierre Leburton was named a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP). Based in London, the IOP is devoted to increasing the understanding and application of physics.

ECE Professor Gary Swenson, ECE Assistant Professor Jonathan Makela, and ECE Associate Professor Farzad Kamalabadi are part of a team that made it through the first round of selections for NASA's Small Explorer (SMEX) Program.

In the 2009 annual survey by U.S. News and World report, ECE Illinois and the College of Engineering continued to show the strength of their curricula.

In August, the University of Illinois and Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMUT) signed an agreement that would allow HCMUT to use Illinois’s ECE curriculum. In addition, the contract formalizes an exchange program for undergraduate students between the universities.

On August 14, HP Labs announced that ECE Professor Narendra Ahuja received an HP Labs Innovation Research Program Award for his proposal "3D Reconstruction of Dynamic Real-World Objects and 3D Motion Aided Gesture Recognition."

An Orientation Program for new graduate students will take place on August 20, 2008. Students will be able to meet with other graduate student and become more familiar with the department and its facilities.

ECE Professor William H. Sanders has been named acting director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) at the University of Illinois. He replaces Ravi K. Iyer, who was recently appointed Illinois's interim vice chancellor for research.

ECE Assistant Professor Jonathan Makela was recently honored with two prestigious, international awards for young scientists. The awards recognize his outstanding research of the ionosphere.

ECE Professor Ravi K. Iyer (ECE), together with Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) Research Professor Zbigniew Kalbarczyk, has received a 2008 IBM Faculty Fellow Award.

Molly M. Tracy has been named Associate Dean for Advancement for the College of Engineering, pending approval of the Board of Trustees.

The Center for Nanoscale Chemical-Electrical-Mechanical Manufacturing Systems (Nano-CEMMS) recently received a National Science Foundation $12.5 million grant renewal for an additional five years. University of Illinois ECE professors and graduate students play an integral role at the center, which encompasses researchers from various backgrounds, as they work to develop and improve the latest technologies.

ECE graduate student Robert Gregg recently received the award for best student paper at the 2008 American Control Conference. The paper, "Reduction-Based Control with Application to Three-Dimensional Bipedal Walking Robots," was co-authored by ECE Professor Mark W. Spong.

ECE Professor and Donald Biggar Willett Scholar Andrew Singer was selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's 14th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He was one of 82 rising engineers chosen from more than 230 applicants.

The Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois 2008 summer research internship program is in full swing, with 19 undergraduate students from across the world participating.

ECE Professor Thomas Huang and his graduate students are currently developing and improving ways for society to communicate on a more personal level. Through a variety of algorithms and applications, the researchers are experimenting to make technological advances even more appealing.

ECE Associate Professor Mark Hasegawa-Johnson recently became a member of the Articulograph International Steering Committee (AISC), a group of volunteers trying to provide standard human subjects safety information for new users of the Electromagnetic Articulograph.

ECE Professor Kent Choquette has been named the recipient of the 2008 Engineering Achievement Award from the Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS), a society within IEEE. Choquette received this award for development of the monolithic selectively oxidized vertical cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). The award will be presented to Choquette at the annual LEOS meeting in November.

In May, ECE senior Momei Qu was named the 2008 Arthur Ashe Jr. Female Sport Scholar of the Year. This award is sponsored by the journal Diverse: Issues in Higher Education and is named in memory of African American tennis great Arthur Ashe.

A paper co-authored by ECE Professor David M. Nicol and his student Nabil Schear has brought home the Best Paper award from the 22nd ACM/IEEE/SCS Workshop on Principles of Advanced and Distributed Simulation (PADS 2008).

The ECE Alumni Board of Directors has announced its alumni award winners for 2008. Recipients will be honored at the 39th Alumni Awards Banquet on September 5.

ECE Professor Philip Krein and Associate Professor Patrick Chapman recently received funding from the Office of Naval Research to further investigations dedicated to improving electric machine design.

Philip Krein, Grainger Endowed Director’s Chair Professor in Electric Machinery and Electromechanics, received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power Electronics Society’s 2008 Distinguished Service Award.

Both the Herschel Space Observatory, which will orbit far from earth, and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), which will be built on the top of the Chilean Andes, will employ superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) receivers based on a theory that ECE Professor John Tucker developed from 1974 to 1980.

Imagine receiving an e-mail from a friend or colleague that does not include any text. Instead, when you open the letter, a synthetic talking face appears on the screen and delivers the message, complete with facial expression and emotion. While it may seem far-fetched, ECE Professor Thomas Huang and his graduate students are developing ways to make it a reality.

ECE Professor Elyse Rosenbaum recently finished her first year teaching introductory engineering to fifth graders at Stratton Elementary School in Champaign, but she will not stop there. As a part of her National Science Foundation funded research project, Rosenbaum aims to improve local students’ interest in obtaining an engineering degree from a four year university.

ECE Professor P.R. Kumar and his students have been studying new dimensions of wireless networks, merging the fields of communication and computation with control. Kumar anticipates the next phase of the information technology revolution to provide ad-hoc wireless networks, or those without an infrastructure similar to that of a cell phone tower, that can be customized to interact with the physical world and alter it.

Shun Lien Chuang, the Robert C. MacClinchie Distinguished Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, received a 2008 Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists.

Professor Ravishankar ("Ravi") Iyer, the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering and director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), has been chosen to serve as interim vice chancellor for research for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pending approval of the Board of Trustees.

The University of Illinois’ Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) team was recently ranked third out of 53 teams at the Virginia International Raceway competition and finished 13 out of 104 teams at this year’s Michigan International Speedway event.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the University of Illinois’ Biological Computer Laboratory in 1958, and two organizations recently contributed to a celebration of this milestone.

Through the Web site known as Connexions, University of Illinois ECE professors, faculty members, and graduate students are able to upload their learning materials, such as textbooks or handouts, onto the Internet and make the information available faster and for free.

ECE alumnus Rob Kennedy was recently named the 2008 Illinois Alumni Club of Greater Washington, D.C.’s Illini of the Year. Kennedy has been co-president of C-SPAN since December 2006 and co-chief operating officer of the company since 1995.

As the technology leader for fiber optic components that employs more than 4,000 engineers globally, Finisar has agreed to an all-stock merger with a leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance optical subsystems, Optium Corporation.

This year marks an important centennial and a semicentennial for ECE Illinois and the University of Illinois. The late ECE professor and transistor inventor John Bardeen was born on May 23, 1908, and what Bardeen considered to be his greatest brainchild—the theory of superconductivity—was published in 1957.

One Llama Media, Inc., a Champaign-based startup company co-founded by May 2007 ECE graduate, Amit Sudharshan, has developed a music search engine uniquely tailored to identify your individual music listening style.

The Continuum Fingerboard, a unique musical instrument designed and built by ECE Illinois alumnus and professor Lippold Haken, plays an important role in the music featured in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Three representatives from the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan recently made a trip to Illinois for an ITRI Delegation Workshop. Sin-Yuan (Stephen) Cho, researcher with the International Business Center (IBC); An-Yu (Andy) Wu, deputy general director of the SoC Technology Center (STC); and Sheng-Fu Horng, deputy general director of Electronics and Optoelectronics Research Labs (EOL), participated in research presentations by several ECE faculty members as part of their collaboration with Illinois.

ECE alumnus John Orr has been appointed provost and senior vice president of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) of Worcester, Mass., after a yearlong, nationwide search. Orr received both his bachelor’s and PhD from ECE Illinois.

The Student Alumni Ambassadors and the University of Illinois Alumni Association recently named their selections for the 2008 Senior 100 Honorary; ECE students Lawrence Han, Catherine Wah, and Elaine Wah were among the many honored.

Rich Templeton, chairman, president, and CEO of Texas Instruments (TI), recently spoke to students and faculty members at a lecture on campus sponsored by the ECE Department. Focusing on the topic of semiconductor innovation, Templeton discussed the potential to solve critical problems in the areas of energy, health care, power efficiency, and public safety.

ECE researchers Kyekyoon "Kevin" Kim and Hyungsoo Choi have developed a new low-temperature, catalyst-free technique for growing copper nanowires.

Professor Weng C. Chew, Y.T. Lo Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, was granted the 2008 Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Antennas and Propagation Society “for outstanding contributions to education in the fields of electromagnetic theory and computational electromagnetics.”

Professor James Coleman, Intel Alumni Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and former PhD student S. David Roh recently earned a United States patent for their research and development of the dual distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) grating semiconductor laser.

An Apple spokesman announced on April 23 that the company will be purchasing P.A. Semi, a semiconductor business founded by ECE Illinois alumnus and 2003 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient, Dan Dobberpuhl.

Three ECE students, Matt Davis, Terry Chen, and Tristan Griffith, will enter their target-shooting robot in a competition that is part of the 16th Annual DEFCON Computer Security Conference in Las Vegas August 8-10.

The ECE Department has announced the Outstanding Junior and Senior scholarship awardees for 2008.

Irfan Ahmad, associate director for the Illinois Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST), recently attended a High Tech Caucus in Nanotechnology Information and Product Display hosted by various congressmen on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

ECE Associate Professor Jont Allen is researching speech processing patterns that may help detect hearing loss and improve functioning of hearing devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants.

Marie-Christine Brunet, ECE lecturer and chief adviser, was recently granted the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

ECE Professors Greg Timp and Bruce Wheeler have been named IEEE fellows for the class of 2008. The title of IEEE fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and accomplishments that have significantly added to "the advancement or application of engineering, science, and technology."

ECE Professor Tamer Başar was formally inducted as a Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair at an investiture ceremony held Monday, March 24. Basar was one of four University of Illinois professors named a Swanlund Chair, the highest endowed title at the University, in September 2007.

The ECE Department and the Grainger Foundation will honor 21 students with Grainger Power Engineering Awards at a banquet on April 23 at the Grainger Library on campus. The $6,000 awards will be given to electric power engineering students who completed or will complete their bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD degrees between December 2007 and October 2008. 

ECE juniors Janis Lee, Kirsten Stark, and Yanzhu (Morgan) Wang have been awarded Microsoft Technical Scholarships, which guarantees them a 12-week salaried internship at Microsoft Corporation in Redmond, Washington.

The Optical Society of America (OSA) has awarded ECE Professor Kanti Jain the prestigious David Richardson Medal for achievements in the field of optical engineering.

When ECE Assistant Professor Todd Coleman searched for a way to enhance communication between computer networks, he turned to the world's most efficient communications model: the human brain.

ECE assistant professors Deming Chen, Matthew Frank, and Xiuling Li recently received Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Fourth year ECE PhD candidate Raymond Yun Fu has been named a recipient of the 2007 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad. The award, announced this month, recognizes students across all research-based doctoral degree fields in 31 countries.

ECE Professor R. Srikant is designing new technology that would enable communications networks to recover in the event of a wide-spread outage.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced a joint research endeavor with Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation that aims to enable commodity systems to make use of parallel computing techniques previously relegated to the realm of supercomputers.

Along with ECE Professor Greg Timp, Professor Jean-Pierre Leburton is studying DNA sequencing using a synthetic nanopore, part of an effort to make DNA sequencing faster and more cost effective.

ECE Associate Professor Brian Cunningham was recently named a recipient for a 2008 Xerox Award for Faculty Research.

ECE Professor George Gross and graduate student Rajesh Nelli recently received the best paper award in the Electrical Power Systems restructuring track at the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences for their paper, “An Integrated Architecture for Demand Response Communications and Control.”

A stamp commemorating the achievements of former ECE faculty member and two-time Nobel Prize-winner John Bardeen will be unveiled at a ceremony on campus Thursday, March 6.

The Cyber Trust Program of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted funding to nine Illinois researchers, including ECE Assistant Professor Nikita Borisov, who are studying methods to improve the reliability and security of information systems.

In early February, ECE graduate student John Wright was notified that he was a recipient of the prestigious Microsoft Research Fellowship, the goal of which is to "represent the best and brightest from North America," according to the Microsoft Research Redmond lab.

Scar-free tissue regeneration, precision-controlled release of ingested or injected drugs, and other medical marvels are a step closer to reality thanks to new research by ECE researchers Kyekyoon “Kevin” Kim and Hyungsoo “Soo” Choi.

ECE Professor Brian Cunningham and his research team are currently developing technology aimed to improve devices used to protect U.S. soldiers’ eyes during combat. Even though the researchers have had much progress in the past two and a half years, they are continuing to make advances.

Calling all ECE alumni and students! The Alumni-Student Reception is set for Friday, March 7, from 5 to 7 pm in 159 Everitt. Don't miss this chance to connect with alumni and students during EOH weekend. Registration is required.

Two ECE students traveled to the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) National Conference where they interacted with other students, alumni, and corporate professionals to develop engineering skills through several design competitions and technical paper presentations.

Nick Holonyak, Jr., the John Bardeen Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at Illinois, will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Holonyak was selected for his invention of the first practical light emitting diode, in addition to the body of work on transistor and laser electronics generated over the span of his career (55+ years).

The Information Trust Institute (ITI), a multidisciplinary, cross-campus research unit in the College of Engineering at Illinois, is seeking undergraduate applicants for its 2008 summer research internship program.

ECE Professor Naresh Shanbhag and Associate Professor Andrew Singer, as well as Illinois graduates and others, were recognized for the creation of a new clock and data recovery circuit at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), where they received the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits Best Paper Award.

ECE Professor David Nicol was awarded the ACM Special Interest Group on Simulation (SIGSIM) Distinguished Contributions Award at the Winter Simulation Conference in early December.

ECE Professor K.Y. Norman Cheng has developed a new method to enhance infrared detectors through a modification of their nanostructures. Cheng said people typically use mercury cadmium telluride alloy for detectors, which can potentially be very hard to make into two-dimensional arrays because of the material’s non-uniformity.

ECE Illinois is pleased to announce its scholarship recipients for the 2007-2008 academic year. The following 46 students will receive a total of nearly $100,000 in scholarship money. Hometowns appear in parenthesis, if available.

Thanks to a $1.5 million donation from The Grainger Foundation, Lake Forest, Illinois, scholarships will be given to freshmen enrolling in electrical or computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign starting with the Fall 2008 semester.

After conducting several studies of the upper atmosphere with remote sensing in 2007, ECE scientists Gary Swenson, Alan Liu, Chet Gardner, and Steven Franke have decided to conduct their third long-term study at the Cerro Pachon mountaintop in Chile.

ECE Professor Ravi Iyer and Speech and Hearing Science Professor Kenneth Watkin are among a group of researchers who will develop and test a modified battlefield helmet integrated with sensors to record the effects of blast injuries in real time.

The ECE Department is seeking nominations for its distinguished alumni awards. Nominations are due Feb. 1.

During an opening ceremony last summer, the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) christened its newest research center of the Institute of Biomedical and Health Engineering after Paul C. Lauterbur.

ECE graduate student Shih-Hao Lee was recently granted the Best Student Paper Award at the 16th Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging for a paper on an improved electromagnetic full-wave analysis of multilayer printed circuit boards, or PCBs. He was one of two students to receive the honor.

ECE Professors Nick Holonyak Jr. and Milton Feng, post doctoral researcher Gabriel Walter, and former post doctoral researcher Richard Chan have received a second patent for their invention of the world's first transistor laser, a device that significantly changes the science and technology of lasers and introduces basic changes in the traditional transistor and what is known about its operation.

ECE Professor Philip Krein and former ECE graduate student Alexis Kwasinski's research paper on preparing telecommunication companies for sudden disasters was recently named best technical paper for its contribution to power electronics and telecommunications power systems at the 2007 International Telecommunications Energy Conference (INTELEC).

ECE Professor Kanti Jain and postdoctoral researcher Junghun Chae have devised a new technique for patterning indium tin oxide films, a component of flat panel displays, which simplifies the current manufacturing process and could potentially save money.

ECE Professor John Tucker likes to tell a story that pretty well captures what set John Bardeen apart from many other great minds of 20th century physics.

December 2007 marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the major scientific theories of the twentieth century, the Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity, formulated by the late ECE and physics professor John Bardeen along with postdoc Leon Cooper and graduate student J. Robert Schrieffer.

ECE students Yun Fu and Xi Zhou, in collaboration with ECE Professor Thomas S. Huang, recently received the 2007 DoCoMo USA Labs Innovative Paper Award at the IEEE International conference on Image Processing.

ECE Professor Sean Meyn recently completed writing his second book, entitled Control Techniques for Complex Networks, which he said focuses on trying to bring complex networks down to a manageable size in order to visualize behavior and simplify the construction of control solutions.

Computer science graduate student Vartika Bhandari and ECE Professor Nitin Vaidya want to improve the future of wireless technology.

ECE Professor Nick Holonyak Jr. was recognized this fall with a University historical marker honoring him and his development of the quantum-well laser.

Fifty years ago this fall, ECE Professor Emeritus George Swenson found himself caught up in the frenzy of scientific and technical activity surrounding the Soviet launch of Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite.

ECE Professor Norman K.Y. Cheng has received the MBE Innovator Award, a recognition that acknowledges individuals whose innovative work has significantly advanced the field of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).

Dr. Irfan Ahmad, associate director at the University of Illinois Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, is one of six recipients of the 2007 Champaign-Urbana International Humanitarian Award. The honor, which recognizes “significant contributions to international understanding, cooperation, friendship, and development,” strives to educate the public about local and global community connections.

ECE Professor Gregory Timp was recently elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. He is one of the 11 University of Illinois faculty members to earn the nomination.

ECE Professor Doug Jones and Rama Ratnam, assistant professor in neurobiology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, have developed technology that further enables biologists to study frog chorusing behavior.

Illinois' "Elementhouse" placed ninth overall (out of 20 entries) in the US Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon competition. The eight-day event culminated with an awards ceremony on Friday, October 19, on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Rashid Bashir, formerly a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, has been named the new director of the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory (MNTL), pending approval of the Board of Trustees. Bashir will hold a Bliss Professorship, with appointments in ECE and the Department of Bioengineering.

By placing quantum dots on a specially designed photonic crystal, ECE Illinois researchers have demonstrated enhanced fluorescence intensity by a factor of up to 108. Potential applications include high-brightness light-emitting diodes, optical switches, and personalized, high-sensitivity biosensors.

ECE Professor Mark W. Spong has been named the first recipient of the Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS) Fumio Harashima Award for Innovative Technologies, an honor created earlier this year to recognize outstanding contributions to the IROS community.

Graduate student Yue Lu was recently granted the IBM Student Paper Award at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. The paper, co-written by ECE Professor Minh Do, is entitled "Finding optimal integral sampling lattices for a given frequency support in multidimensions."

M. Tamer Başar, the Nearing Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is one of four University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professors recently named a Swanlund Chair, the highest endowed title at the University. The award recognizes faculty members who have made outstanding contributions in their fields.

ECE Professor Kanti Jain and his collaborators have been awarded a $6.3 million Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant for their proposal "Direct Digital Manufacturing of Airfoils." The team intends to develop a new direct digital manufacturing technology known as Large Area Maskless Photopolymerization (LAMP) to manufacture airfoils, a key component of high-performance engines for airplanes, tanks, and other systems.

This summer, ECE Associate Professor Steve Lumetta taught at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (HCMCUT) in Vietnam as part of a two-week long expedition funded through the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training (MOET).His trip, from July 11 to July 27, was part of a larger initiative by MOET to modernize the Vietnamese education curricula, including instructional content, teaching methodology, management, and evaluation.

ECE Professor William D. O'Brien Jr. and Assistant Professor Michael L. Oelze, along with collaborators from Illinois and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, were awarded a 5-year, $5.2 million Bioengineering Research Partnership grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Cancer Institute for their project "Quantitative Ultrasonic Imaging of the Breast."

The University of Illinois has been ranked third on the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) list in engineering/technology and computer sciences by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Small Times magazine has ranked the State of Illinois eighth on its list of leading nanotechnology states. The ranking is based, at least partially, on the quality of the state's university programs.

ECE Professor Mark Spong, a Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering, has received a patent from the U.S. Patent Office for his invention entitled, "Method and System of Compensating Wave Reflections in Transmission Lines."

ECE undergraduate and graduate students are part of a University of Illinois team selected by the Department of Energy to participate in the 2007 Solar Decathlon in Washington, D.C., for eight days starting October 12. The biennial competition challenges 20 college and university teams from the U.S., Canada, and Europe to build and manage homes powered by solar energy.

The University of Illinois has been named an OpenSPARC Center of Excellence by Sun Microsystems, Inc. The Center represents a collaboration between the University of Illinois Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and Sun in support of OpenSPARC, a global community that fosters the creation of tools and derivative chip designs based on Sun's UltraSPARC T1 processor.

ECE Professor Jean Pierre Leburton and postdoctoral research associate Maria Gracheva were recently named Best Paper Finalists at the Seventh International Conference on Nanotechnology (IEEE- NANO 2007) for their paper entitled, " Simulation of electrically tunable semiconductor nanopores for DNA sequencing."

An Illinois-Princeton team won first place in the Software League for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2007 Semantic Robot Vision Challenge (SRVC) competition on July 26. Team members include ECE graduate students Juan Carlos Niebles and Jia Li; Rahul Mehta, ECE undergraduate; Fei-Fei Li, former ECE assistant professor who is now at Princeton University; and Princeton students Richard Socher and Brendan Collins.

Cagri Dagli, a current ECE graduate student; ECE alumni Nemanja Petrovic and Shyamsundar Rajaram; and ECE Professor Thomas S. Huang, were recently recognized at the 2007 IEEE International Workshop on Semantic Learning Applications in Multimedia (SLAM) with a Best Paper Award. The SLAM workshop took place during the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Minneapolis on June 18. Their paper entitled, “Diverse Active Ranking for Multimedia Search” was similarly honored at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Hong Kong last summer.

Early this year, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign received recognition from PC Magazine, in partnership with The Princeton Review, as one of the top ten wired colleges in the nation. At sixth on a list of 20, the publication considers Illinois one of the "most connected, plugged-in, and high-tech campuses in the country."

ECE alumnus Alfred Cho was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bush during a White House ceremony on July 27. Cho was recognized for his contributions to the invention of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), which was invented in the late 1960s by Cho and J.R. Arthur at Bell Telephone Laboratories.

ECE Associate Professor Andrew Singer is part of a University of Illinois team that was awarded a 2007 Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI) grant as a member institution of a project headed by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) entitled, "Underwater Acoustic Propagation and Communications: A Coupled Research Program."

ECE Professor J. Gary Eden has been recognized with the C.E.K. Mees Medal by the Optical Society of America (OSA), "for seminal interdisciplinary contributions to ultraviolet lasers, photochemical vapor deposition, ultrafast spectroscopy and microplasma devices, and for strengthening international collaborations in these areas of optics and photonics."

ECE Professor Shun Lien Chuang has received the 2007 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award from the IEEE Laser and Electro-Optics Society for "contributions to the development of the fundamental theories of strained quantum-well lasers and the physics of optoelectronic devices."

ECE Professor James J. Coleman has been awarded the 2008 IEEE David Sarnoff Award for "leadership in the development of highly reliable strained-layer lasers."

ECE Illinois researchers have developed a new laser configuration, the composite-resonator vertical-cavity laser (CRVCL), that could potentially achieve higher speeds than a traditional vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL).

A semiconductor membrane designed by ECE Illinois researchers could offer more flexibility and better electrical performance than biological membranes. Built from thin silicon layers doped with different impurities, the solid-state membrane also could be used in applications such as single-molecule detection, protein filtering, and DNA sequencing.

ECE Professor Andrew Singer will compete in the Ironman Lake Placid on July 22, 2007, not just because he is a driven competitor, but because he wants to help fight cancer.

The University of Illinois Information Trust Institute, directed by ECE Professor William H. Sanders, has taken a major step forward, announcing plans to expand across campus its mission to improve the trustworthiness of large-scale systems that are critical to society, such as health care systems and technology, agriculture systems, air transportation systems and emergency response systems.

A new computational tool in nanotechnology research has been developed at the University of Illinois for simulating ion transfers in artificial membranes, decreasing time requirements for certain computations from years, in some cases, to days. ECE Professor Umberto Ravaioli and his students with the Computational Multiscale Nanosystems group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, have cultivated the technology called BioMOCA.

The White House said recently that President Bush intends to name Linda Katehi, ECE professor and provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science.

ECE Professor Lippold Haken's invention, a musical instrument called the Continuum Fingerboard, is being featured on famous Indian film composer and musician A.R. Rahman's Third Dimension North American Tour this summer.

Recent ECE graduate Anish Thakkar has a bold plan for his summer. On May 26, Thakkar and about 20 fellow Illinois students began riding their bicycles from New York City to San Diego.Surely this ride would be an adventure that would fill many memories. But this ride is more than just the excitement of cycling the open road and camping along the roadside. Thakkar and his fellow riders are part of Illini 4000, an organization whose goal is to raise $100,000 for cancer research and cancer programs.

ECE Illinois researchers are developing panels of microcavity plasma lamps that may soon brighten people's lives. The thin, lightweight panels could be used for residential and commercial lighting, and for certain types of biomedical applications.

Two long-time ECE faculty members were recently invested during a special ceremony in a full auditorium at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications building on campus. Shun Lien Chuang was named a Robert C. MacClinchie Distinguished Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and J. Gary Eden became the first Gilmore Family Endowed Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering.

P.R. Kumar, Franklin Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his former Ph.D. student Arvind Giridhar, will receive the 2007 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize for their paper on in-network computation in wireless sensor networks.

ECE Professor Michael Loui was recently appointed to an ad hoc committee overseen by the National Academies’ Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. The ad hoc committee is responsible for developing the third edition of the Academies’ guide to responsible conduct of research, On Being a Scientist.

Students enrolled in the Advanced Digital Systems Lab (ECE 395) are not only free of homework and tests but also gain experience and knowledge they need for the future.

Through the acquisition of Intersymbol Communications, Inc., in March 2007, Champaign-Urbana researchers, businesses, residents, and University students will now benefit from having a large, public company, Finisar Corporation, Inc, in the University of Illinois Research Park.

Prith Banerjee, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an alumnus of ECE Illinois, was named senior vice president, research, and director of HP Labs on May 2.

The Student Alumni Ambassadors and the University of Illinois Alumni Association recently announced their selections for the 2007 Senior 100 Honorary. ECE students Alex Kaplan, Benjamin Krop, David Tabriz, and Rahil Jogani were among those honored for their academic standing as well as their involvement and leadership throughout the campus and Champaign-Urbana.

ECE students are part of a pioneering new class this semester that?s preparing them to be leaders in the parallel computing revolution. In a unique arrangement, the class is co-taught by David Kirk, chief scientist at graphics-processing industry leader NVIDIA, and Wen-mei Hwu, the AMD Jerry Sanders Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois.

Approximately 40 ECE students participated in the 2007 Google Games, the brainchild of University of Illinois engineering students and representatives from Google. The competition included original sudoku, logic, and programming puzzles created by Googlers. There was also a Lego bridge-building contest to see which team could build the strongest and most aesthetically pleasing bridge out of a random set of Legos. 

Google representatives will be on campus Saturday, April 14, to host a day of team competition for Illinois students. Yes, March Madness is over, and that means it's time for the 2007 Google Games: team puzzle solving, Lego bridge-building, and an "athletic" competition of an entirely different sort. Fans are invited to watch starting at noon at Siebel Center, room 2405.

The Education Group of the National Science Foundation
Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for Power (TCIP) project have developed two interactive Java-based activities geared towards teaching middle school and high school students about power and energy, and the national power grid. In collaboration with the College of Education’s Office for
Mathematics, Science and Technology Education (MSTE), related curriculum materials for teachers have also been developed and pilot-tested in schools.

ECE graduate student Dominic Siriani received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) award on March 26. "I was surprised in the best sort of way, and that feeling carried me through the entire week," Siriani said. "Honestly, I'm still extremely excited, and I feel very privileged and honored to be in my position."

Yelp.com is quickly becoming the next sensation on the Internet with Illinois roots.  Founded by ECE alumnus Jeremy Stoppelman and Computer Science alumnus Russel Simmons, who is also a graduate of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy®  (IMSA), Yelp is the first online service to combine social networking with personal reviews of restaurants, shopping, night life, hotels, and more. Users rely on reviews from current friends or make new ones based on common interests.

Paul C. Lauterbur, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2003 for his pioneering work in the development of magnetic resonance imaging, died this morning at his home in Urbana.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — To find prey and avoid being preyed upon, fish rely on a row of specialized sensory organs along the sides of their bodies, called the lateral line. Now, a research team led by Chang Liu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has built an artificial lateral line that can provide the same functions in underwater vehicles.

Two Austrian scholars have done their part to distill and preserve a University of Illinois legacy. Albert Müller and Karl Müller (no relation), professors at the University of Vienna, will visit Champaign-Urbana March 28 – April 1 to release the published results of their work...

ECE Alumnus Steve Sullivan (MSEE '91, PhD '97) received an Academy Award for Scientific and Engineering for his contribution in the design and development of the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) Image-based Modeling System. Colin Davidson, Max Chen, and Francesco Callari shared the award.

The American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) presented ECE Professor William O'Brien, Jr. the 2007 William J. Fry Memorial Lecture Award for his many contributions to the scientific progress of diagnostic medical ultrasound on March 16 at the 2007 AIUM Annual Convention in New York City.

P.A. Semi, Inc., a semiconductor company led by alumnus Don Dobberpuhl (BSEE '67), recently announced its success in developing the "most power-efficient high-performance processor ever designed."

Michael Callahan possesses the ability to speak and share his thoughts and ideas with others. This ability to communicate serves as the motivation behind Callahan’s latest innovation. The 24-year-old winner of the first $30,000 Lemelson-Illinois Student Prize hopes to give disabled people back the ability to speak for themselves.

ECE Professors Brian Cunningham and Michael Oelze were recently awarded 3M Nontenured Faculty Grants (NTFG), giving them both an unrestricted $15,000 that they will use to conduct scientific research.

In January, ECE Professors Gary Swenson, Steven Franke, and Chet Gardner traveled to Peru to investigate an observatory site that is a candidate for future operation of upper atmosphere instruments. The information-gathering trip will help with site selection for a long-term study in 2008.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the first government-funded exchange students from Vietnam since the Vietnam War are working towards their masters and doctorate degrees in science and engineering.

As graduates, they became major players in the technology world, establishing such companies as PayPal and YouTube. Now, even before graduation, students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will get a chance to launch their own start-up companies.