Electrical and Computer Engineering

News headlines

August 27, 2009

Kovacevic Delivers Two Plenary Talks

Jelena Kovacevic, professor of Biomedical Engineering & ECE and director of the Center for Bioimage Informatics, is in Novi Sad, Serbia this week to deliver a plenary talk at the 14th General Meeting of European Woman in Mathematics. Her talk is titled "Problems in Biological Imaging: Opportunities for Mathematical Signal Processing.

Earlier this summer, Kovacevic delivered a plenary talk at the "20 Years of Wavlets" Conference at DePaul University in Chicago titled "Wavelets in the Real World."

August 19, 2009

Bay Area Alumni Gathering A Success

Over 270 ECE and SCS alumni from all eras gathered in the San Francisco Bay area for the annual summer picnic on July 25. Held at Sam's Chowder House in Half Moon Bay, the event also was attended by several faculty from the Silicon Valley campus.

Susan Farrington, ECE's Director of Alumni and Relations, and SCS Director of Alumni Relations Tina Carr hosted the gathering. Check out the photo galleries for both the Bay Area and the Boston gathering held this July and read Susan's report on the West Coast event.

Keeping an 'i' on the 'Burgh

So we all know that government often lags behind in its use of technology. But thanks to Professors Priya Narasimhan and Rajeev Gandhi, Pittsburgh has become the first city in the U.S. to have it's own iPhone app. And it's FREE, compliments of the same folks who bring you YinzCam- team members Justin Beaver, Jeremy Kanter, Dan Burrows and Karl Fu helped to develop and release the new iBurgh app.

See a car-eating pothole? Clogged storm drain? iBurgh lets users communicate directly with the city's non-emergency complaint system to report the problem. Just take a photo and the location is geotagged and sent directly to the city's server.

August 18, 2009

O'Donoughue Wins Best Student Paper Award at Acoustical Conference

ECE graduate student Nicholas O'Donoughue's research on improving natural gas pipeline safety has won him his second Best Student Paper Award this year, this one at the 157th Acoustical Society of America meeting in May. The paper, coauthored with his advisor Jose´ Moura and several other CMU researchers, is titled "Single-Antenna Time Reversal of Guided Waves in Pipes."

O'Donoughue's research was recently featured on CMU's homepage.

ECE Group Wins Best Paper at Domain Specific Languages Conference

Assistant Research Professor Franz Franchetti, Ph.D. students Frédéric de Mesmay and Daniel McFarlin, and Professor Markus Püschel won a best paper award at the Conference on Domain Specific Languages, July 2009, in Oxford, UK.

The paper, titled "Operator Language: A Program Generation Framework for Fast Kernels," describes a formal framework to extend the program generation system SPIRAL beyond its traditional domain of linear transforms. SPIRAL has been developed at ECE over the last decade and is able to replace the human programmer in the development of performance library software.