This is the second in a series of news briefs designed to communicate significant and newsworthy accomplishments and events to faculty, staff, the dean, public affairs, and the external advisory board. I hope that you continue to find this series of communications to be insightful and useful.
Your feedback is very important and I would appreciate any suggestions to make it even more dynamic, interesting and informative. Continue to submit news and story ideas to our communications team and check out the news section of the ECE web site for the current features.
Thank you for making this a very successful year in ECE.
Best regards,
Professor Behnaam Aazhang, J.S. Abercrombie Professor and Department Chair
News highlights – November 2007 – May 2008
Rice again picked for TI's Leadership University Program
Texas Instruments has once again chosen Rice University as one of it primary academic partners for research into DSP. An inaugural member of TI's DSP Leadership University program, Rice's DSP researchers have won a new, three-year $1 million grant.
TI has named seven institutions to it's DSP Leadership University program, including Rice, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States; Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China; and the Indian Institute of Science in India.
Faculty Awards and Honors
The Harvard Law Center Berkman Center for Internet and Society has awarded Professor Richard Baraniuk for outstanding leadership on open access education platforms, specifically with the Connexions® project. This award was presented at the Berkman Center's 10th Anniversary Awards Dinner in May. Recipients of the Berkman Awards were chosen for their outstanding contributions to the Internet’s impact on society over the past decade.
Connexions wins $2M from Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has awarded $2 million to Rice's open-education program, Connexions. The two-year grant -- the fifth from the foundation to Connexions since 2002 -- will allow Connexions to develop a new generation of easy-to-use authoring software and to establish a user consortium to fund the program's future growth.
In addition, Baraniuk received the 2008 SPIE Wavelet Pioneer Award. The award was presented during the SPIE International Symposium on Defense and Security in Orlando, Florida.
Rebekah Drezek, associate professor in bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering, is a winner of the Presidential Mentoring Award, given annually to Rice faculty members who demonstrate a strong commitment to mentoring graduate or undergraduate students. She is also winner of this year's Charles W. Duncan Jr. Achievement Award for Outstanding Faculty, which recognizes accomplishment in scholarship and teaching.
The Rice University Women’s Resource Center has awarded Professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum the 2008 Impact Award. These awards recognized individuals who meet the following criteria:
- Demonstrate service to the campus and community;
- Demonstrate involvement and participation in student life/activities at Rice and/or beyond;
- Work to make a positive impact by raising awareness of women's issues affecting his/her community; and,
- Serve as a role model in the empowerment of women
Professor Kartik Mohanram is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. The CAREER award is NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. A major impact of this research, Design Optimization for Robustness to Single-Event Effects, is to enable ubiquitous low-cost highly reliable computing by expanding its reach to domains that lack the financial resources to acquire custom solutions.
The Nano/Bio Interface Center (NBIC) at the University of Pennsylvania selected Professor Naomi Halas for the Research Excellence Award, recognizing her significant research advances and contributions in the innovative synthesis of nanostructures. The Nano/Bio Interface Center is a Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC) that establishes connections among researchers from the Schools of Engineering and Applied Science, Arts and Sciences, and Medicine. She will accept the award and deliver a keynote lecture on October 29, 2008 at the University of Pennsylvania, during NanoDay@Penn.
NanoJapan won the Andrew Heiskell Award for Study Abroad, 2007-2008. Led by Professor Jun Kono, this highly competitive national award for international education is a great honor for both the NanoJapan program and Rice University. NanoJapan has been featured by the IIENetwork, as a "best practice" in international education.
The Institute of International Education (IIE) created these awards to promote and honor the outstanding initiatives in international higher education by IIENetwork member universities and colleges. By recognizing excellence and innovation, the Institute hopes to support IIENetwork members in their endeavors and to signal a new and important role for international education on campus. The official award presentation for 2008 recipients was held on Thursday, March 13, during the 3rd Annual IIEE Best Practices Conference.
Student Newswatch
2008 NSF Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
Jennifer Gillenwater, Stephen Schnelle, Samantha Summerson, and Traci Tsai received the 2008-2009 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This award is funded for a maximum of three years and can be used in any three, yearlong units (starting summer or fall) over a five-year period. Eva Dyer received honorable mention. Andrea Trevino, Rice class of 2007, is now a MS/Ph.D. student at University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign and has received the NSF graduate research fellowship.
NDSEG fellowship winners
Layla Booshehri, Brett Kaufman, and Stephen Schnelle have been awarded the highly competitive National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Administered by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), the NDSEG Fellowship is granted by the Department of Defense (DoD) to support students’ research interests that are important to national defense needs.
KAUST Discovery Award
Senior student Jaret Lee is a winner of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Discovery Scholarship. Jaret has worked with Professor Jun Kono on research in carbon nanotube spectroscopy. As one of the first students to participate in the NanoJapan Program, he worked with Dr. Kazu Suenaga and Dr. Sumio Iijima at the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba, Japan, studying nanotube peapods using transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Jaret returned to Japan last year to intern at NTT Photonics Laboratories, analyzing a micro-mirror device useful for packing optical devices.
Nokia Siemens Networks awards students for research accomplishments
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) awarded ECE students for their research accomplishments in February 2008. Nokia has been an enthusiastic supporter of Rice ECE and expects that the sponsorship of this seminar will further reinforce the relationship with Rice University, open avenues for future research collaborations, and provide more opportunities for new internships and graduate fellowships.
Professor Joseph Cavallaro, Dennis McCain, Technology Manager, and several researchers from NSN judged research proposals submitted by Rice students. Selection was based on content and scope of research, research approach and methodology, research application, future business in NSN, and presentation skills. Eight finalists made presentations and awards ranging from $1,000 to $2,500 were given for the best presentations.
Finalists were:
Debashis Dash - Bit Burglar: A Cognitive Bandwidth Sharing Framework
Chris Hunter - Random-Access Cooperative Networks
Marjan Karkooti - Distributed Decoding in Cooperative Communications
Brett Kaufman - 4G Spectrum Sharing in Cellular Networks
Joshua Robinson - Assessment of Urban Scale Wireless Networks with Terrain Maps and Small Number of Measurements
Pedro Santacruz - Adapted Model for MAC Under Channel Uncertainty
Yang Sun - Flexible and High Throughput FEC Decoder Architecture for 4G Wireless Standards
Michael Wu - Cooperative Diversity Method Based on Expected Symbol Error Rate
Prize Winners:
First: Debashis Dash
Second: Christopher Hunter
Third: Marjan Karkooti
Schlumberger Senior Design Project Award Winners
This year, Schlumberger’s representatives, Christopher Reed and Vasileios Balabanos, selected three projects for innovation, demonstration of technical skills, “real world” impact on the future, and oral presentation. Each Rice team member received a cash award.
The first prizewinner was an Intravenous Drip Monitor and Control System. Team members included Tyler Barth, Aaron Cottle, Chris Vaucher, Neha Kamat, and Ketan Shah.
The uShake Phone won second prize and was designed by Rob Smith and Barron Stone.
Earning third prize was the Near Infrared Camera for Underdrawing Imaging, created by Jennifer Gillenwater and J. Ryan Stinnett.
The advisors for the IV Drip Monitor were Maria Oden, Lecturer, Department of Bioengineering and Professor Lin Zhong. Lin Zhong was also the advisor for the uShake Phone. The advisors
for the NIR Camera were Professor Richard Baraniuk and Professor Kevin Kelly. J.D. Wise, Lecturer, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering was a facilitator for the event.
Alumni Spotlight
NSF CAREER Award recipients announced
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. He served as a research assistant for Professor Edward W. Knightly. In addition, Kuzmanovic was a teaching assistant and lecturer on call for various ECE courses. He earned his Ph.D. from Rice in 2004 and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1996 and 1999, respectively.
Since 2005, Kuzmanovic has been Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern University. He leads the Northwestern Networks Group, which is a part of the Northwestern Systems Research Group. This award will fund his research, Internet Audit: A Theory, Toolset, and Applications for a World without Net Neutrality.
Young Investigators Award announcements
Justin Romberg, Ph.D. 2003, has received the highly competitive Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigators Award (YIP) for fiscal year 2008. The YIP aims to attract outstanding new faculty member to naval research. It encourages their teaching and research careers by providing up to $100,000 a year for a period of three years, with additional funding for equipment or collaborative research with a Navy lab. He earned his Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering, co-authored many publications with Professor Richard Baraniuk, and was a Texas Instruments Distinguished Graduate Fellow. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 2006 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Boston University, Richard Averitt, Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, 1998, won a DARPA Young Investigator award. Richard Averitt came to Rice in 1991 after completing his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at UCSD Rick completed his Ph.D. in February 1998. His thesis is entitled "Gold Nanoshells: Optical Properties and Femtosecond Electron Dynamics." He worked with Professor Naomi Halas as a postdoctoral associate for a year after receiving his Ph.D. During this time his research was focused on understanding interface mediated hot-electron relaxation in metal nanoshells.
Conferences and Industry Events
Professor Ashutosh Sabharwal has been named organizer of Microsoft Research Summit. He will co-organize the annual Microsoft Research Summit, June 5-6, 2008. Themed "Cognitive Wireless Networking”, this role complements his work through the CMC, and the Wireless Open-Access Research Project (WARP), which has been adopted by 9 universities and 6 companies worldwide.
Save the Date - 2008 ECE Affiliates Conference, “Taming Complexity”
The annual affiliates conference, October 15, 2008, will feature keynote speaker, Partha Ranganathan, ECE alum and principal research scientist at Hewlett Packard Labs.
ECE Research Awards Summary
Announcement Period: September 2007-April 2008
John W Clark
UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center
9/1/07 - 8/31/08
"Software Algorithms for Image Manipulation and Feature Extraction on Positron Emission and Computer Tomography Scanners"
$33,120
Naomi J Halas
University of Houston (NIH flow-through); Keck Fellowship (Levin)
6/1/07 - 5/31/08
"Nanobiology Institutional Training Grant"
$26,219
Anatoily Kosterev (PI) and Frank K Tittel (Co-PI)
Washington Savannah River Corporation
12/10/07 - 9/30/08
"Quartz-Enhanced Photoacoustic Spectroscopy Development"
$95,224
Farinaz Koushanfar (collaborative w/colleagues from UCLA and the University of Virginia)
National Science Foundation
10/1/07 - 9/30/08
"Collaborative Research: CT-T: Manufacturing Variability-based Hardware Protection Techniques"
$50,000
Daniel Mittleman
Lockheed Martin Corporation
11/9/07 - 12/31/08
LANCER: Lockheed Martin Advanced Nanotechnology Center for Excellence at Rice University
$1,000,000
http://lancer.rice.edu
Kartik Mohanram
National Science Foundation
2/1/08 - 1/31/13
"CAREER: Design Optimization for Robustness to Single-event Effects"
$400,000
Frank K Tittel
Aerodyne Research, Inc. (STTR flow-through)
8/8/07 - 8/7/09
"Broadly Tunable High-Power External-Cavity Quantum Cascade Laser for Remote
Sensing"
$374,990