Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Student Awards

Graduate students Viswanathan Subramanian and Prem Kumar Ramesh, along with Professor Arun K. Somani, received Second International Conference on Dependability’s Best Paper Award in June. Their paper was titled “Managing the Impact of On-Chip Temperature on the Lifetime Reliability of Reliably Overclocked Systems.”

Graduate students Matthew Clausman, Mark Tannian, and Jonathan Watson all received the university’s Teaching Excellence Award. The award honors and encourages outstanding achievement by graduate students in teaching. Graduates students Sudha Anil Kumar Gathala, Atul Madhavan, Edward “Jason” Stanek, Natarajan Viswanathan, and Zhen Yu all received the university’s Spring or Summer 2009 Research Excellence Award. The awards are given each semester to recognize graduate students at the time of their graduation for outstanding research accomplishments as documented in their theses and dissertations.

Daniel Stone, a senior in electrical engineering, won the Student Alumni Leadership Council’s Student Leadership Recognition Award last spring. Stone graduated in May 2009.

Six graduate students—Osameh Al-Kofahi, Benjamin Jackson, Licheng Jin, Sasha Kemmet, Jin-Wei Tioh, and Bojian Xu—each won the ECpE Graduate Research Innovation and Progress Award (GRIP). GRIP awardees are evaluated on their research productivity and nominated by ECpE faculty throughout the calendar year. This is the second year for these awards.

Two computer engineering students—Shane Griffith and Cory Kleinheksel—were awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship this year. A third student, Cory Simon, received an honorable mention for the award. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program funds three years of study—up to $121,500—in master’s or doctoral degrees focusing on research in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This year, 950 students nationwide received fellowship awards.

The following electrical and computer engineering graduate students received the summer and fall 2008 Research Excellence Award from the university:  Siddhartha Khaitan, David Johnson, Jiang Lin, Harold Salazar, and Linfeng Zhang. The award recognizes graduate students at the time of their graduation for outstanding research accomplishments as documented in their theses and dissertations.

Alex Lee, junior in electrical eng­ineering, received the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Student Leadership Award. The award is presented to three engineering junior or senior students who demonstrate outstanding leadership in major college-wide, university, community, or professional organizations

PhD student Osameh Al-Kofahi coauthored a paper with Professor Ahmed Kamal that won the Best Paper Award at the Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks Symposium of IEEE's 2008 Global Communications Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. Their paper was one of 11 papers chosen to receive this award from more than 1,000 papers presented at the conference. The paper is titled, "Scalable Redundancy for Sensors-to-sink Communication."

Koray Celik, ECpE graduate student; Soon-Jo Chung, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and electrical and computer engineering and director of the Aerospace Robotics Laboratory; and Arun K. Somani, ECpE department chair and Anson Marston Distinguished Professor, won the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Electro/Information Technology in May 2008. The paper entitled, "Mono-Vision Corner SLAM for Indoor Navigation,"presents a real-time monocular vision-based range measurement method for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for an autonomous micro aerial vehicle with significantly constrained payload.  The proposed navigation strategy assumes a GPS-denied manmade environment, whose indoor architecture is represented via corner-based feature points obtained through a monocular camera.

Graduate students Baozhen Chen and Chengwu Tao, along with Assistant Professor Santosh Pandey, received the Best Student & Postdoc Paper Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and National Institute of Health’s Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative conference on Life Science Systems and Applications in November 2007. The paper was titled, “A Novel Floating-Gate Biosensing Device with Controlled Charge-Modulation.”