Tom Nelson was recently awarded second place for his paper, "Reduced Complexity Trellis Detection of SOQPSK-TG." The award along with a $500 prize will be officially presented to Tom on October 24 at The International Telemetering Conference (ITC) held in San Diego California.

Dr. Clark Taylor was recently awarded the Young Investigator Award by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. He will be funded for three years to study "Vision-Assisted Navigation for Miniature Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)." Dr. Taylor was one of 21 recipients selected this year from 145 different applicants. The AFOSR.s Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) is "to support scientists and engineers who have received Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last five years (on or after 1 May 2001) and who show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research.

Dr. Brent Nelson was recently featured as an invited speaker at the 2006 IEEE Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP 2006). Dr. Nelson was one of two invited presenters for a special session on Configurable Computing Machines. This invited session was a part of the activities at ASAP this year marking the 20th year anniversary of the conference. In his talk, Dr. Nelson presented the results of BYU research over the past decade on Configurable Computing Machines, specifically focusing on the development of the JHDL hardware description language and its use for the design, debug, and deployment of high-performance computing applications on configurable computing platforms. The ASAP conference was held September 11-13 in Steamboat Springs Colorado.

Prof. Karl Warnick published a book this week, Problem Solving in Electromagnetics, Microwave Circuit, and Antenna Design for Communications Engineering, with Peter Russer, Artech House, 2006. The book contains solution methods using differential forms notation for problems in basic electromagnetics, potentials and waves, static fields, waveguides, periodic structures and filters, antennas, and numerical electromagnetics. More

Dr. Travis Oliphant received a $2000 (community-donated) honorarium and a standing ovation at August's SciPy conference at the California Institute of Technology prior to his presentations at the conference. The award was presented because of his work in leading the development of the open-source package NumPy 1.0 which combines the Numeric and Numarray array packages for Python into a single best-of-breed array package enabling Python to be used as a rapid-development system for scientific and engineering computing. NumPy is currently used by scientists and engineers at many companies, universities and government-institutions in the United States and throughout the world.

A paper by students Evan Zaugg, Derek Hudson and Prof. David Long won third place in the student papers at the 2006 International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium in Denver in Aug. Their paper was titled, "The BYU microSAR: A small, student-built SAR for UAV operation." It describes the world's smallest operational SAR system.

Undergraduate Jacob Huckaby, has been awarded a NCMR Scholars Program Scholarship by the National Consortium for MASINT Research (NCMR). MASINT is the Materials and Signals Intelligence organization, which is the parent of the Defense Intelligence Agency (among others). The scholarship is worth up to $10k for one year.Professor Dr. Gregory Nordin has a grant from MASINT for development of chemical and biological sensors based on photonics, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS, or more commonly known as micromachines), and microfluidics (lab-on-a-chip). Jacob is doing research with his group in that area.

UVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, sponsored its fourth annual Student UAV Competition at Webster Field Naval Base, Maryland last week. Of the eighteen undergraduate teams who competed, Brigham Young University placed second, a great accomplishment since it was the first time they competed.

The US Patent Office issued two patents to Dr. David Comer in March 2006. These new circuits were developed by Dr. Comer while consulting for Intel in the area of high-speed (10GHz) chip-to-chip data communications. The patents are entitled "Multiplier with Current Scaling" and "Multiplier Using MOS Channel Widths for Code Weighting."

Dr. Christian Peel (Ph.D., BYU, 2004) and Prof. Lee Swindlehurst have won the 2006 IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize in the Field of Communications Theory for their two-part paper "A Vector-Perturbation Technique for Near-Capacity Multiantenna Multiuser Communication," co-authored with Dr. Bert Hochwald of Beceem Communications, Inc. The paper appeared in the January and March, 2005, issues of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and presents a new approach for exploiting antenna arrays to communicate with a number of wireless terminals simultaneously. The award carries a $500 stipend for each author, and will be presented at the 2006 IEEE Globecom Conference to be held in San Francisco.

Posted April 28, 2006

Professors James Archibald and Wynn Stirling, along with graduate student Jared Hill and former undergraduate student Ryan Johnson, recently published the paper "Satisficing Negotiations" in the January 2006 issue of "IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C." The paper presents a theory of negotiation based on satisficing game theory which accommodates both cooperative and non-cooperative behavior, leading to effective solutions of challenging multi-agent problems. More...

Posted April 13, 2006

Undergraduates Josh Proulx and Ryan Clifford, working with advisors Dr. D.J. Lee and Dr. James Archibald on the Wireless EKG Senior Project, received honorable mention in this year's BYU Business Plan Competition and a cash prize of $500. They submitted a paper on this project to the 19th IEEE International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems and received very high reviews. They will present their published paper on Jun. 22-23 at the Symposium in Salt Lake City. More...

Posted April 4, 2006

Prof. Aaron Hawkins received the Excellence in Scholarship Award at the College Dinner on 9 March 2006. The award is a college-level award that recognizes leadership in the conceiving and operation of research programs that benefit students, faculty, society and the institution. Aaron has an impressive record of quality scholarship and student mentoring, curriculum development, and collaboration with colleagues both at BYU and at other institutions. Prof. Hawkins received a plaque and a $1,000 stipend.

Posted March 24, 2006

Prof. Karl Warnick recieved the Faculty Award from the Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the College Dinner on 9 March 2006. The award is a department-level award that recognizes achievement in scholarhip, teaching, and university/professional citizenship. Prof. Warnick has an impressive record in externally funded research and is currently serving as the accreditation coordinator for the electrical engineering and computer engineering degrees. The award includes a plaque and a $500 stipend.

Posted March 24, 2006

PhD student Welson Sun and advisor Dr. Mike Wirthlin along with collaborator Stephen Neuendorffer from Xilinx corporation presented the paper "Combining Module Selection and Resource Sharing for Efficient FPGA Pipeline Synthesis" at the ACM International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays. The conference was held from February 23-24 in Monterey, California. More...

Posted March 1, 2006

Intel recently selected BYU ECEn alumnus Knut S. Grimsrud as an Intel Fellow. Since 1980, Intel has named only seventy-one fellows and Grimsrud is one of nine new fellows this year. Grimsrud received his electrical engineering BS, computer engineering MS, and Ph.D. degrees from BYU, finishing in 1993. He currently leads an Intel research and development group responsible for mainstream and consumer storage inferface definition and enabling.

Posted March 1, 2006

Dr. D.J. Lee and Ph.D student Xiaoqian Xu, along with S.K. Antani, L.R. Long, and G.R. Thoma of the National Library of Medicine presented "Relevance Feedback for Shape-based Pathology in Spine X-ray Image Retrieval" at SPIE Medical Imaging, Picture Archive and Communication Systems (PACS) and Imaging Informatics. The Conference was held Feb. 11-16 in San Diego, CA.

Posted February 27, 2006

The work of Dr. D.J. Lee and others involved in the Fish Recognition Project was recently featured in an article in Vision Systems Design. The project uses visual image processing to simplify tracking the size and movements of specific fish populations. More...

Posted February 9, 2006

Dr. Lee Swindlehurst, ECEn faculty member and Department Chair, was chosen to receive an IEEE Signal Processing Society 'Best Paper' award for 2005 for "Blind and Semi-Blind Equalization for Generalized Space-Time Block Codes," which appeared in the October 2002 IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. The paper was co-authored by Dr. G. Leus, a member of the faculty of the Delft University of Technology. The award will be presented at a ceremony at ICASSP2006.

Posted February 3, 2006

Graduate Student J.D. Anderson won 'Best Student Paper' at the October 2005 SPIE Optics East, Robotics Technologies and Architectures, Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XVIII, in Boston, MA. His submission, "FPGA Implementation of Vision Algorithms for Small Autonomous Robots," will appear in the conference proceedings (vol. 6006-46, p. 401-411). Faculty members D.J. Lee and J.K. Archibald were advisers for the paper.

Posted January 31, 2006