• October 15, 2000

  

• October 22, 2000

  

• October 30, 2000

  
  

  Professor Frank Tittel perches on the edge of the Marsaya volcano outside of Managua, Nicaragua. For additional information on the Laser Science Group's volcano experiment, check out the Rice News.

• November 5, 2000

  
  

  Image of a transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of a collection of hollow nanoshells made of titanium dioxide. Crystals are made of these hollow shells and characterize their optical properties. For additional information, contact Professor Daniel Mittleman.

• November 14, 2000

  
  

  Take the Abercrombie Lab area devoted to microprocessor-level hardware and special computer engineering projects, stir in a desire to modernize the computer engineering curriculum, add enthusiasm on the part of Patrick Frantz (Executive Director of the Center for Multimedia Communications) and Professor Cavallaro, sprinkle in money to purchase high-performance Dell Computers from Rice's Information Technology Group, and bake quickly (renovation to first day of class was 6 weeks!). Out of the oven springs an award-winning (Texas Instruments Elite Lab) senior DSP lab using state-of-the-art DSP development environments.

• November 21, 2000

  
  

  This is a photograph of a Mid-IR diode laser based gas sensor placed in a SUV at the Santiago crater rim of Masaya volcano. Professor Frank K. Tittel can be seen in the background. For additional information, see the Laser Science Group homepage.

• November 27, 2000

  
  

  This is a photograph of a robot built for Elec 201: Introduction to Engineering Design. The robot was built in 1999 by Ilana Bromberg, Erin Engelhardt, and Pete Irot. The 2000 LEGO Robot Contest will be held on Sunday, December 3 at 1:30pm in Duncan Hall. For additional information, contact Professor James F. Young at young@rice.edu.

• December 10, 2000

  
  

  This is a photograph of a prototype board developed by Sundance DSP which is accelerating the simulation of the algorithms which are being developed for Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) advanced receiver structures. Researchers involved in the Texas Instruments-Nokia-Rice Wireless Communication Testbed Project include Professors Behnaam Aazhang and Joseph Cavallaro. For additional information, please check the Center for Multimedia Communication.

• January 1, 2001

  
  

  Undergraduate students reviewing a poster presented during the Elec 301 (Signals and Systems) poster presentation on December 14.

• February 21, 2001

  
  

  ECE grad student Jeremy Pearce working on his Elec 599 project using the new `T-Ray 2000' installed in Dr. Mittleman's Lab in February by technicians from Picometrix, Inc. Rice is acting as the beta test site for this new device, the world's first commercial terahertz spectrometer.

• April 22, 2001

  
  

  Professor Emeritus J. Boyd Pearson, Jr., stands at an intersection at Wright-Patterson AFB. Pearson recently received an "Outstanding Recognition" award from the NSF "For pioneering contributions to research and education in multivariable and robust control systems under continuous NSF funding from 1973-1998." He received this award at "PearsonFest: New Directions in Dynamical Systems and Control", a workshop in his honor held at Rice March 9-10, 2001.

• July 20, 2001

  
  

  Pictured is a set of vials displaying the growth sequence of gold nanoshells made in the Halas group. The solutions mark the progression of electroless gold plating onto a core silica nanoparticle with a 171 nm diameter. The red solution is gold colloid with a 20 nm diameter. The amount of gold deposited on the silica core increases from left to right. The first three vials contain particles with islands of gold increasing in size. The next three solutions are of complete gold nanoshells with shells of thickness 8 nm, 13 nm, and 40 nm, respectively.

• October 21, 2001

  
  

  This image shows a reconstruction of a curved reflecting surface, formed using terahertz multistatic imaging. This imaging system mimics the data acquisition and signal processing used in geophysical processing, and therefore could be useful for studying table-top model systems. Kirchoff migration accurately reproduces the anticlines and the syncline in this model reflector. For more information, contact Dr. Mittleman or see his web page at www-ece.rice.edu/~daniel/Mittleman.html.

• December 9, 2001

  

  Winners of the ELEC 201 Introduction to Engineering Design, 2001 LEGO Robot contest. Team #4, Manny "Mac Daddy" de la Mora (Junior in Anthropology), Sid "Chief Sloth Artist" Byrd (Junior in Computer Science), and Kathryn "Kat" Dalton (Senior in Chemistry and Spanish), with their robot PimpBot. For more information on the course (sponsored by Industrial Affiliate Motorola) see http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/legolab

• January 27, 2002

  

  Autocorrelation traces of Gordana Ostojic's ultrafast Ti:Sa laser in Jun Kono's lab. The traces show compensation of the group-velocity-dispersion of a highly dispersive acousto-optic deflector using a "double decker" prism pair pre-chirper constructed by Vijay Iyer and Brad Losavio in Peter Saggau's lab at the Baylor College of Medicine . This work was presented at the Photonics West conference this January. Such a pre-chirper could be included in an eventual fast scanning two-photon microscope for neural tissue studies. Autocorrelation traces obtained by Vijay Iyer. http://www.bcm.tmc.edu/scbmb/faculty/faculty/saggau.html

• March 3, 2002

  
  

  The ECE Department invited several potential graduate students to meet with faculty and students and to tour the campus February 21-24. Picture of current ECE graduate students and potential ECE recruits at Buca di Beppo on Friday, February 22. Photo courtesy of Krishna K. Mukkavilli.

• March 25, 2002

  
  

  Professors Behnaam Aazhang and Joseph Cavallaro participating in the culture fair of international students at Rice.
  

  "2 ECE Profs. dressed up
  as Maharajas (kings) one fine day.
  One wondered how he got into this mess,
  while the other, folding hands, said "Namaste".
  Everyone who missed the show
  with the perenially-entertaining duo at their height
  needs to be shown this abolutely hilarious sight
  Needless to say, they landed on the ECE web page."
  

• April 21, 2002

  
  

  Professor Naomi Halas, winner of the Live Oak Soil and Water Conservation District 2002 Conservationist of the Year Award, proudly displays the turkey she recently shot on her Live Oak County Ranch.

• June 17, 2002

  
  

  ECE Seniors Erik Welsh and Patrick Murphy presenting their poster entitled "A Mobile Testbed for GPS-Based ITS/IVC and Ad Hoc Routing Experimentation" at the Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium (RURS) on April 21. Both Erik and Patrick will be entering the ECE graduate program this Fall.

• August 11, 2002

  
  

  Naomi Halas' research on "The Optical Properties of Nanoshells" made the cover of the August issue of Optics & Photonics News (OPN).

• September 15, 2002

  
  

  Gamma-ray bursts -- quick, extremely intense bursts of gamma rays (see Artist's conception above, left) -- are one of the most energetic, and yet enigmatic, phenomenon in the known universe. Graduate student Rebecca Willett and Professor Robert Nowak have developed a new method based on wavelets for estimating the time-varying intensity of these bursts (above, right). Their technique may help astrophysicists determine whether these bursts are due to star formation, supernovae, or other cataclysmic events.

  The Artist's conception on the left was taken from an article on CNN.com at http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9909/29/gamma.rays/

• December 23, 2002

  
  

  Winners of the ELEC 201 LEGO robot contest: Tiffany Truss (sophomore, undeclared engineer, Wiess College), Stephanie Clark (sophomore, art major, Baker College), and Gary Printy (senior, ELEC major, Baker College), with their robot Disco Stu.

  Disco Stu lost his first game, but went on to win six straight games to reach the final round, where he won using a simple, elegant strategy. Disco Stu's strategy required only three turns, a bit of line following, and finding a wall, and his reliable execution led to success. For more details, go to http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/legolab.

• February 24, 2003

  
  

  First autocorrelation traces obtained using a newly constructed Multi-Photon Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (MP-FCS) apparatus in Neal Waxham's lab at the University of Texas-Houston in the Texas Medical Center. Work done by ECE graduate student Vijay Iyer. Traces represent the autocorrelation of photon-counting data obtained from Rhodamine Green dye fluorescence in free solution. Such traces allow parameters such as concentration and diffusion constant to be obtained for low concentrations of fluorescent molecules in very small (femtoliter) volumes, in a variety of molecular environments.

• April 21, 2003

  
  

  Graduate Student Vinay Ribeiro won "Best Student Paper Award" at the Passive and Active Measurement (PAM) Workshop in La Jolla, CA. His work was on modeling the dynamics of end-to-end paths through the internet. His tool "PathChirp", developed in colloboration with ECE Professor Richard Baraniuk, ECE Faculty Fellow Rolf Riedi, and Jiri Navratil and Les Cottrell from Stanford, sends "probe packets" through the internet and then statistically analyzes when they arrive at the receiver to determine the critical network paramaters like the bandwidth ("connection speed") available to users.

• June 1, 2003

  
  

  Professor Behnaam Aazhang puts the finishing touches on one of Rice's latest "MicroGnomes", micro-sized wireless sensor nodes for building sensor networks in the Center for Multimedia Communications (CMC) lab in Duncan Hall.
  

  For more on Rice's communications and sensor networking research, see http://cmc.rice.edu.

• August 19, 2003

  
  

  Justin Romberg and Ramesh (Neelsh) Neelamani walk off into the sunset at Coronado Beach in San Diego after attending Wavelets X, the final conference of their Rice graduate career. Both recently completed their doctoral research with advisor Richard Baraniuk. Justin is off to a postdoc at Caltech and Stanford, Neelsh a position in Exxon-Mobil's research division.

• September 14, 2003

  
  

  Construction will begin in October on the new Rice Nanofabrication Facility, in the south wing of Abercrombie. This will be a class 100/1000 clean room, with capabilities for photolithography, RIE, CVD, and various other processing tools. Completion is scheduled for May 2004.

  For additional information, please see the recent Rice News article.

• April 2004

  

  ECE Senior Paul Rodriguez part of team that wins second place at Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) Academic Olympiad. For additional information, go to http://www.ece.rice.edu/News/alaes-conf04.html.

• May 17, 2004

  
  

  Don Johnson holding up the championship yellow jersey he received for 5 years as the ECE Department Chair. He was presented with this jersey at a surprise "Stepping Down" party held in his honor on May 4, 2004.

• May 23, 2004

  
  

  Jun Kono has led a group of researchers in a study of semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). In the image above, the peaks represent the amount of light given off by semiconducting carbon nanotubes via "interband photoluminescence", a quantum process that emits light whose photon energy is given by the band-gap width (See Rice Press Release).

  A paper describing this research has been published in Science. The article has also been covered by several science and technology websites, including: http://physicsweb.org, http://www.innovations-report.com, http://www.betterhumans.com, and http://nanotechweb.org

• August 27, 2004

  
  

  This is a FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) simulation of a multilayer nanostructure, or a nanomazrushka. This movie depicts the time evolution of the electric fields in a plane which bisects the nanostructure. This system, created and studied here at Rice, recently appeared in Science (Vol 302, Issue 5644, 419-422). Researchers involved include Chris Oubre, Peter Nordlander, Emil Prodan, Naomi Halas and Corey Radloff.

• September 8, 2004
  
  

  William Mantzel, a Masters student in the Rice DSP group hoists a wireless sensor node 30m up into the rain forest of the Los Amigos Conservation Area in Peru. The goal of the project is to deploy a distributed network of wireless sensors to measure microclimatic conditions in a delicate vanilla palm swamp. William, undergraduate Tom Mowad, and advisor Prof. Richard Baraniuk are collaborating with the Botanical Research Institute of Texas and are supported by the Moore Foundation.

• October 11, 2004
  
  

  Rice Networks Group (RNG) and Technology for All (TFA) are building a multi-hop wireless network using current off-the-shelf hardware as both a proof-of-concept for the Rice Transit Access Points (TAPs) Group and a cost-effective broadband internet service provider to the low-income communities of Southeast Houston. Joseph Camp, a masters student advised by Dr. Ed Knightly, spent the summer working at TFA to design the network and will continue to work with TFA this semester to deploy the network. Pictured in Figure 1 from left to right are Jesse Linares(TFA), Pete Rodriguez (TFA), and Joseph Camp (Rice Networks Group) with the first directional and omni-directional antennae for the TFA Wireless Network.

  The TFA Wireless Network will serve as an initial platform for the multi-hop wireless backhaul platform of custom hardware that is being developed by physical layer, media access layer and routing layer groups on the TAPs project using the Center for Multimedia Communication (CMC) Lab and extending throughout the Rice campus. Seen in Figure 2, the nine square miles of TFA wireless coverage all shared from one wired connection offers a glimpse of the future with TAPs.

Last modified: October 11, 2004