Electrical and Computer Engineering

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Alumni Relations

March 2, 2010

Build18 Gets Students Gadgeting

A robotic head that can track your face and move in time when you clap, or a sweatshirt for bicyclists with buttons on the sleeves that activate LED "turn signals" on the back of the shirt. Sounds like products that might be coming to a store near you, right? Well they might. Someday. But for now they're ECE student projects under way as part of the department's student-led Build18 initiative.

Launched as a pilot project at the end of the 2009 spring semester, Build18 is a week of "tinkering and gadgeting" that encourages groups of students to innovate and create solutions to problems of their own choosing, free from the threat of tests, formal exams and project reviews. With the help of corporate sponsors and additional resources of lab space, equipment and conference rooms supplied by the ECE Department, students at all levels can find a few friends and finally tackle the project that lack of time or resources once prevented.

December 9, 2009

Lakshmanan Receives Best Student Paper Award

ECE Ph.D. Student, Karthik Lakshmanan, is the principal author of a paper that received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium held in Washington DC from December 2-4, 2009.

The paper, titled "Coordinated Allocation, Scheduling and Synchronization on Multiprocessors," is coauthored by Professor of ECE and CS, Raj Rajkumar, and Dr. Dionisio de Niz, ECE alum who is currently at the CMU Software Engineering Institute.

This work addresses the emerging field of chip-multiprocessors which represent a dominant new shift in the field of processor design.

December 3, 2009

Three ECE Faculty Elected IEEE Fellows

The ECE Department congratulates our three newly elected IEEE Fellows, Class of 2010: B.V.K. Vijaya Kumar, Asim Smailagic and Peter Steenkiste.

B.V.K. Vijaya Kumar, Professor of ECE, is elected "for contributions to biometric recognition methods."

Asim Smailagic, Research Professor of ECE and ICES, is elected "for contributions to wearable, pervasive, and context aware computing"

Peter A. Steenkiste, Professor of CS and ECE, is elected "for contributions to optimization and monitoring techniques for distributed communication systems

IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

November 9, 2009

Faculty, Students Have Two Papers in IEEE Micro Top Picks

Two ECE adjunct faculty members, current and former Ph.D. students and researchers, have two papers in the upcoming January/February issue of IEEE Micro Top Picks.

The papers, whose co-authors include adjunct ECE/CS faculty members Babak Falsafi and Anastasia Ailamaki, former Ph.D. student Tom Wenisch, and current Ph.D. student Michael Ferdman, represent some of the year's most significant research publications in computer architecture based on novelty and long term impact.

Read more...

September 22, 2009

iPhone App Developed by ECE Alums Takes Off

Snapture, a new iPhone app that went on sale September 21 at Apple's AppStore, is designed to change the way people take pictures on their iPhone -- and it was developed by three recent ECE graduates.

Snapture Labs, founded by ECE alums (L to R) Bowei Gai, Samir Shah and Ajay Panagariya, and Occipital, a TechStars-funded startup that develops state-of-the-art computer vision in mobile applications, brought the technology to market after a nearly two-year effort.

Within the first 48 hours, according to the team, they made it as high as number 16 in sales. The Apple store has a total of about 85,000 apps. The app made news on Wired's website today.