Department News

Professor Mike Wirthlin and graduate students Patrick Ostler and Nathan Rollins gave "The World is Our Campus" broader meaning Monday when they projected their schoolwork into outer space on the shuttle Endeavor.

ECEn graduate student Brent Williams who has finished his PhD and will formally graduate in August 2010, attended the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) last week along with 2000 other engineers. He won first place in the student paper contest, a very prestigious honor. The is the second time he has one first place at an IGARSS meeting. The first time was in 2008.

Professor Wynn C. Stirling's research interests include decision theory, multi-agent consectionol theory, detection and estimation theory and information theory. His new book ""Satisficing Games and Decision Making with Applications to Engineering and Computer Science"" is published by Cambridge University Press.

Michael Rice and Oluwasegun Tinubi won the "Best Paper" award at the International Telemetering Conference (ITC) this week. The paper, titled, "The Range Area Network: A New Approach to Aeronautical Telemetry" describes an application of sensor networks to test ranges. Oluwasegun who received his MS degree from BYU in August 2010, received is BSEE degree in his home country of Nigeria. After serving a mission, he enrolled in the ECE graduate program here at BYU.

Dr. Penry has been awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation's Computing and Communication Foundations Division for research leading to Assisted Partitioning and Automated Synthesis of Hybrid Manycore Simulators.

A record-breaking 16 BYU students are headed into graduate programs with a big financial boost from the National Science Foundation. The NSF recently announced the 2010 winners of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, which includes a three-year annual stipend of $30,000 plus $10,500 for tuition and fees, a one-time $1,000 travel allowance and access to the NSF's TeraGrid supercomputer for research.

Dr. Penry presented Exposing Parallelism and Locality in a Runtime

Dr. David G. Long and former Ph.D. student David Draper co-authored a paper selected for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society Transaction Prize Paper Award. Their winning paper, "Simultaneous Wind and Rain Retrieval Using SeaWinds Data," discusses methods to improve SeaWinds scatterometer wind estimation in the presence of rain.

Come and join us for a ECE on diplay. It will be held on April 1, 2010 1:00 -5:00 p.m. in the Wilkinson Center Garden Court. Come look at this challenging, rewarding, and in-demand field!

J. Kelly Flanagan received the Outstanding Alumnus Award for 2012 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University. Some of the highlights from his distinguished career are summarized below.

Professor David Long recieved a NASA Group Achievement Award "for outstanding accomplishments in the Characterization of Arctic Sea Ice Experiment (CASIE), conducted in Svalbard, Norway, July 2009". He and his students operated a small synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system aboard the CASIE unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to collect radar images of sea ice.

The feature article in the April 2009 issue of the Matlab Digest - Academic Edition highlights our very own ECEn 485. The article, entitled, ""Teaching Digital Communication Theory with Simulink at Brigham Young University,"" describes how Simulink has been used to enhance learning in the laboratory portion of ECEn 485. Follow this link to the April 2009 issue of the Matlab Digest.

Professor David G. Long presented the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecture on "Microwaves, Icebergs, and Global Warming" on 27 Jan 2009. The full lecture is available for viewing on the web at URL http://byubnew.byu.edu/talks/Talk.aspx?id=2994. In his talk he discussed the research he and his students have done in microwave remote sensing of land use, icebergs, sea ice, and Greenland. Describing the Earth's climate system in general terms he related sea ice formation to global circulation and climate. He showed how greenhouse gases affect energy absorption in the atmosphere and discussed how the recent increase in greenhouse gases is causing a rise in global temperature. He urged students to protect the environment, "Even with the doubt and uncertainty about climate change, things that reduce greenhouse gases generally have the effect of protecting and preserving the environment," he said. "By wise and efficient resource use, we can save both our money and the planet." He concluded by saying that ""It has been suggested that it is arrogant to think that humans could adversely affect the earth. I believe the reverse is true: my work in remote sensing has helped me realize that we are affecting the planet, including climate."

A paper co-authored by Kevin Clark and Dr. D. J. Comer recently appeared in the January 2009 issue of International Journal of Electronics (British). The article was entitled "Tuned negative capacitance circuitry for CMOS amplifier bandwidth extension.'' Kevin published an earlier article on this topic in the proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Electronics two years ago in Nice, France.

Dr. D. J. Lee and three of his Ph.D. students (Dong Zhang, Zhaoyi Wei, and Kirt Lillywhite) will be presenting 3 papers and 1 poster at the fourth International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC) on December 1~3 in Las Vegas, NV. Paper titles are ""Security Analysis for Spread-Spectrum Watermarking Incorporating Statistics of Natural Images"", .Accurate Optical Flow Sensor for Obstacle Avoidance"", .Unsupervised Video Shot Segmentation Using Global Color and Texture Information., and .Edge Detection from Global and Local Views Using an Ensemble of Multiple Edge Detectors.. Proceedings will be published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer.

Professor David G. Long was awarded the Karl G. Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecturer Award during the annual university conference. This award is the University's most prestigious faculty award, and is given for exceptional achievements in both scholarship and teaching. As a recipient of this award, Dr. Long will deliver the 2008 Maeser Distinguished Faculty Lecture at the University Forum Assembly scheduled for Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 11 a.m. in the Marriott Center.