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Department News
2009   2008   2007  

2008

December 2008

Wired Magazine cover story

Wired Magazine features a cover story on Professor Aydogan Ozcan lens-free cell phone technology, which is receiving attention from several other news agencies.

December 2008

Lab on a Chip journal article

A UCLA press release highlights a recent article published in the Lab on a Chip journal by Professor Aydogan Ozcan. The article demonstrates a holographic lens-free imaging approach for telemedicine applications.

December 2008

Physics Today feature article

The work by Prof. Jalali's group on control of optical Rogue waves has been featured in Physics Today in a news article entitled: "Taming rogue waves to create switchable supercontinua". Read more.

December 2008

DOE Awards Supercomputer Access to Cutting-Edge Projects

The allocations of supercomputing and data storage resources will be made under DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, which supports computationally intensive, large-scale research projects. Two projects under Professor Warren Mori will be renewed for INCITE 2009. "Petascale Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Plasma Based Accelerators" (PI) and "Three-Dimensional Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Fast Ignition" (co-PI).

December 2008

Willson Appointed as IEEE Distinguished Lecturer

Professor Alan Willson was appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for 2009.

December 2008

Rahmat-Samii to serve as Charimain of the USNC-URSI

Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii will serve as the chairman of the United States National Committee of the International Union of Radio Science (USNC-URSI). He will serve in this capacity from Jan. 2009 to December 2011, and will represent the US to the international radio science community of URSI. He was the Chair-Elect of USNC-URSI in last three years. URSI coordinates international studies, research, applications, scientific exchange, and communication in all fields of radio science from telecommunications and radio astronomy to medicine. URSI is supported by the National Academies of many nations representing all aspects of Radio Science within its 10 commissions.

December 2008

Best Student Paper Finalist

Adolfo Anta was one of the 4 finalists for the best student paper award at the 47th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control with the paper "Space-time scaling laws for self-triggered control of nonlinear systems" authored by Adolfo Anta and Paulo Tabuada, advisor.

November 2008

Professor Jia-Min Liu receives Distinguished Alumnus Award

Professor Jia-Min Liu has been selected as the 2009 prominent alumnus in National Chiao-Tung University Hsinchu, Taiwan (NCTU) and will receive the Distinguished Alumnus Award.

November 2008

New Patent by Professor Ali H. Sayed

US Patent 7,415,285 on "Reducing Power Control Errors in Wireless Communication Systems" by Professor A. H. Sayed and his former Ph.D. student M. Aldajani was used on August 19, 2008. More patents by Professor Sayed at this link.

November 2008

Professor Aydogan Ozcan receives 2009 IEEE LEOS Young Investigator Award

Assistant Professor Aydogan Ozcan has been selected to receive the 2009 IEEE LEOS Young Investigator Award from the IEEE Society for Photonics. The LEOS Young Investigator Award was established to honor an individual who has made outstanding technical contributions to photonics (broadly defined) prior to his or her 35th birthday. The award consists of a certificate of recognition and an honorarium of $1000. Professor Ozcan is being recognized for his pioneering contributions to non-destructive nonlinear material characterization techniques, near-field and on-chip imaging and diagnostic systems.

Professor Aydogan Ozcan joined the department in July 2007. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2005. After a short post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford, he was appointed as a Faculty Member at the rank of Instructor at Harvard Medical School before joining UCLA in the summer of 2007, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering leading the Bio and Nano-Photonics Laboratory. Dr. Ozcan holds 10 licensed and 9 pending US patents for his inventions in nanoscopy, wide-field imaging, nonlinear optics, fiber optics, and optical coherence tomography. He is also the co-author of more than 60 peer reviewed research articles in major scientific journals and conferences. Professor Ozcan’s research interests include photonics and its applications to nano and bio-technology, including but not limited to (a) imaging the nano-world, especially in bio-compatible settings; (b) providing powerful solutions to global health related problems such as measurement of the cell count of HIV patients in resource limited settings; (c) rapid and parallel detection of hundreds of thousands of molecular level binding events targeting microarray based proteomics and genomics; and (d) monitoring of the biological state of 3D engineered tissues.

November 2008

Paper published in IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine

The paper entitled "A novel portable bipolar near-field measurement system for millimeter-wave antennas: Construction, development and verification" by Tim Brockett and Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii appeared on the cover page of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine.

November 2008

Graduate Student Receives Best Paper Award

Graduate student S. Farhad Razavi (Professor Yahya Rahmat-Sammii, advisor) received the second best paper student award and prize at the 2008 Antenna Measurement Techniques Association (AMTA) Annual Symposium. The paper was entitled "On the robustness of planar near-field measurements to probe positioning errors".

November 2008

Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award

Professor Mihaela van der Schaar has received the Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award from IBM Research Watson.

November 2008

Conference Best Presentation Award

EE Graduate student Victoria Wang (Professor Dejan Markovic, advisor) was awarded the "best presentation award" in Session 9 (Tools for Robust Design) at the 2008 SRC TECHCON Conference for her presentation on "A Design Model for Random Process Variability and Its Applications".

November 2008

Research Monograph Published

Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii and former graduate student Fang Yang publish a research monograph on "Electromagnetic Band Gap Structures in Antenna Engineering", Cambridge Press, 2008.

November 2008

Professor Yao Co-chairs Workshop

Professor Kung Yao co-chairs with colleagues from the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology an NSF sponsored workshop on "Bioacoustics Monitoring in the Terrestrial Environment" at the James Reserve, October 2008.

November 2008

Professors Kaiser and Sarrafzadeh Featured on the Discovery Channel Website

Smart cane technology by Professors William Kaiser and Majid Sarrafzadeh is featured on the website of the Discovery Channel.

October 2008

LA Times Focus on Engineering

The October 19, 2008 issue of the LA Times ran in their classifieds section a "Focus on Engineering. Read more.

October 2008

UCSD Funds Faculty Research

UCSD funds research by Professor Puneet Gupta on "New Directions in Design-Aware Manufacturing".

October 2008

NSF Funds Faculty Research

The NSF funds research by Professor Lieven Vandenberghe on "Large-Scale Semidefinate Programming Algorithms and Software for Control, Signal Processing, and System Identification."

October 2008

NIH Funds Faculty Research

The National Institute of Health funds research by Associate Professor Jack Judy on "A Miniature, Implantable, Many-Channel, and Wireless Neural Recording, Processing and Telemetry System".

October 2008

IEEE LEOS Newsletter Features UCLA Electrical Engineering Professor

Research led by Assistant Professor Aydogan Ozcan on lensfree on-chip cytometry is presented as the cover article of the IEEE LEOS newsletter, October Issue. Read more.

October 2008

Outstanding Conference Paper Award

Assistant Professor Aydogan Ozcan received the Outstanding Paper Award at the 2008 Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Fall Meeting.

October 2008

Cisco Funds Faculty Research

The Cisco Collaborative Research Initiative funds research by Professors Danijela Cabric, Mani Srivastava, and John Villasenor on Collaborative, Spatially Aware Spectrum Sensing for Security and Network Management.

October 2008

US Navy Funds Faculty Research

US Navy funds research by Professor Jason Woo on "Ultra-High Performance Scalable RF MOSFETS".

October 2008

UCD Funds Faculty Research

UCD funds research by Professor Kang Wang on "Biologically Assembled Quantum Electronics".

October 2008

2008 Outstanding Young Researcher Award

Professor Panagiotis D. Christofides has been selected as the recipient of the 2008 Outstanding Young Researcher Award given by the Computing and Systems Technology Division of the AIChE.

October 2008

Nanotechnolgy Features UCLA Electrical Engineering Professor

Research led by Associate Professor Diana Huffaker is featured on the cover of Nanotechnology's October 2008, volume 19, number 43 issue. The article is entitled "Improved photoluminescence efficiency of patterned quantum dots incorporating a dots-in-the-well structure". Read more.

October 2008

Best Conference Paper Award

EE graduate student Yen-Liang Shue (Professor Abeer Alwan, advisor) won the best student paper award at Interspeech 2008, held September 22-26, in Brisbane, Australia.

September 2008

NIH Funds Faculty Research

The National Institute of Health funds research by Assistant Professor Aydogan Ozcan on "Plasmonic Microscopy".

September 2008

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Features UCLA Electrical Engineering Professor

September 16th's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences features on the front cover Professor Vwani Roychowdhury's paper with graduate student Joseph Kong, and ex-student Nima Sarshar (MS EE 2003). This paper has been featured in news articles internationally, including in the New Scientist, and several news papers in India and Germany. Read more.

September 2008

Watson Emerging Leaders in Multimedia

Graduate student Fangwen Fu (Professor Mihaela van der Schaar, advisor) was selected as one of only 12 IBM "Watson Emerging Leaders in Multimedia". He was also offered a grant to visit IBM Watson in October 2008, and present his research.

September 2008

Sandia National Laboratory Funds Faculty Research

Sandia National Laboratory funds research by Associate Professor Diana Huffaker on "GAAS Nonorod Schottky and PN Junction Diodes".

September 2008

Triton Systems Funds Faculty Research

Triton Systems funds research by Professor William Kaiser on "Triton/FFP: Embedded Microsensors for Health Monitoring of High-Temperature Composites".

August 2008

Advanced Accelerator Concepts Prize

Professor Chan Joshi receives the Inaugural 2008 Advanced Accelerator Concepts Prize for his "outstanding contributions to the science and technology of advanced accelerator concepts."

August 2008

Okawa Foundation Award

Assistant Professor Aydogan Ozcan is selected to receive the 2009 Okawa Foundation Award for his work on bio and nano-photonics.

July 2008

IBM Faculty Award

Professor Mihaela van der Schaar is selected to receive a 2008 IBM Faculty Award. She received the same award twice before in 2005 and 2007. The IBM Faculty Awards is a competitive international program to foster collaboration among researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM organizations and to promote educational innovation in disciplines and locales of strategic importance to IBM. IBM does not accept unsolicited requests or proposals for Faculty Awards. Candidates must be nominated by an IBM employee with common interests who will serve as a liaison for the collaboration. Awardees may be nominated for an award renewal, and renewal nominations engage in the same competition as first-time nominations.

June 2008

Third IEEE Programming Challenge

EE and CS graduate students Y. Hu (Professor L. He, advisor) and V. Shih (Professor R. Majumdar, advisor) win the third IEEE Programming Challenge at the IEEE International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis, held June 4-6, 2008, in Lake Tahoe.

June 2008

Plasma Physics Junior Faculty Award

Assistant Professor Chris Niemman receives the Plasma Physics Junior Faculty Award from the Department of Energy to fund his research on ultra-bright laser based x-ray sources.

June 2008

Best Conference Paper Award

The paper entitled "Finite Element Analysis of Dielectric Metamaterial Structures Excited by an NRD Guide" by N. Michishita, T. Ueda and Professor T. Itoh receives the 2008 Research Award at the 26th Conference of Japan Society for Simulation Technology.

June 2008

National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow

Associate Professor Diana Huffaker has been selected to receive the prestigious National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow (NSSEFF) Award from the Department of Defense. NSSEFF provides grants to top-tier researchers from U.S. universities to conduct long-term, unclassified, basic research of strategic importance to DoD. Up to $3 million of research support is granted to each NSSEFF Fellow for up to five years. Professor Huffaker received the award in recognition of her project entitled "Exploring Dissimilar and Nanomaterials Integration as a Platform for New Medium and Long Wave Infrared Device Functionality". [More]

May 2008

Best Student Paper Award

Jae Kim and Chih-Wei Yao (Professor A. Willson, advisor) are selected to receive the 2008 Best Student Paper Award at the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (IEEE ISCAS) held in Seattle, for their paper entitled "A Programmable 25 MHz to 6 GHz Rational-K/L Frequency Synthesizer with Digital K_vco Compensation."

May 2008

DARPA Awards Major Contract to UCLA Electrical Engineering Faculty Members

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a multi-year contract totaling close to $7.2M to a team of researchers led by UCLA Electrical Engineering faculty member and Director of the Physical and Wave Electronics Area, Professor Jason Woo, to develop a revolutionary switching device. DARPA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. The project is in collaboration with Jazz Semiconductor and other UCLA Engineering faculty including Electrical Engineering Professors Chi On Chui, Frank Chang, and Kang Wang and Materials Science Professor Ya-Hong Xie.

The basic device is an asymmetric tunnel transistor that takes advantage of band-to-band tunneling to produce characteristics that include ultra steep sub-threshold slope and Ion/Ioff ratio up to 1000x better than state-of-the-art MOSFET devices. Such devices will be designed to be scalable, have the ability to dramatically reduce circuit power consumption in both the on and off states, and be capable of integration with future SOI wafer based advanced CMOS nodes.

May 2008

Scientific American Features Article by UCLA Electrical Engineering Researchers

An article by Professor V. Roychowdhury and post-doctoral scholar M. Simkin, entitled "Theory of Aces: High Score by Skill or Luck?" and published in April 2008 in the Journal of Mathematical Sociology is featured in Scientific American under the heading: "Was the Red Baron just lucky?"

May 2008

Professor Frank Chang Awarded 2008 Pan Wen-Yuan Award

Professor Frank Chang has been awarded the 2008 Pan Wen-Yuan Award. The award is regarded as Taiwan's most prestigious technical award.

April 2008

UCLA Electrical Engineering Researchers Develop Model for the WWW

An article by Professor V. Roychowdhury and his post-doctoral fellow M. Simkin, entitled "A theory of web traffic," Europhysics Letters, 82 (2008), is featured on a number of online sites with the title "Scientists Construct Model for the World Wide Web." The story is also reported in a number of international online magazines [1], [2], and [3].

April 2008

Textbook on Adaptive Filters by Professor Sayed

Professor A. H. Sayed publishes a new textbook (his fifth book) entitled Adaptive Filters, Wiley, NJ, 2008.

April 2008

Professor Sayed chairs ICASSP 2008

Professor A. H. Sayed chairs the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ( ICASSP 2008), Las Vegas, March 30-April 4, 2008. The meeting is the main and largest Signal Processing conference worldwide and attracted over 2060 attendees.

March 2008

DARPA Young Faculty Award

Assistant Professor and Samueli Fellow Benjamin Williams is selected to receive a prestigious Young Faculty Award (YFA) from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development agency for the U.S. Department of Defense. The YFA program supports revolutionary research ideas proposed by young non-tenured faculty members. The ideas are expected to be of critical value for future technology developments by the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO) at DARPA. Professor Williams received the award for his research entitled "Nanowire Heterostructure Intersublevel Optoelectronics." [More]

March 2008

Three new Endowed Chairs in Electrical Engineering

The Dean's Office announced the establishment of three new Endowed Chairs in Electrical Engineering: The Charles P. Reames Chair, The Wintek Chair, and The Drs. Jane J. and Tien T. Yang Term Chair. The Electrical Engineering department is grateful to the donors for their support. These new chairs bring the number of endowed chairs in the department to a total of seven (7) chairs.

March 2008

Vice-President Publications of IEEE Signal Processing Society

Professors Ali H. Sayed is elected to serve as Vice President-Publications of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, one of the largest societies within IEEE. The Vice President-Publications is a voting member of the Society's Board of Governors and of the Executive Committee, and chairs the Society's Publications Board.

March 2008

UCLA Chancellor Award for Postdoctoral Research

Daniel Solli (Professor Bahram Jalali, advisor) has been awarded the UCLA Chancellor Award for Postdoctoral Research. The Award honors his discovery of Optical Rogue Waves, a work that was published in the December issue of Nature.

March 2008

Best Paper Award at International Conference

Professors William Kaiser and Majid Sarrafzadeh, along with collaborators from the UCLA Medical School and the Veteran’s Administration, have been awarded the Best Paper Award at BodyNets 2008 for their paper entitled: "The SmartCane System: An Assistive Device for Geriatrics." BodyNets is an annual conference focused on the topic of sensor networks applied to biomedical monitoring.

The Smart Cane system developed by Professors William Kaiser and Majid Sarrafzadeh has also been selected to be presented as a demonstration at the Microsoft TechFest 2008, which is hosted by Microsoft Research. Very few teams outside of Microsoft are invited to this event.

February 2008

Hitachi joins the Department's Industry Affiliate Program

Hitachi has joined the department's Industry Affiliates Program. Along with Qualcomm, Boeing, Viasat, and Synplicity, earlier in November 2007 and January 2008, Hitachi is the fifth company to join the IAP program in recent months. Hitachi is a leading global electronics company. The company offers a wide range of systems, products and services in market sectors including information systems, electronic devices, power and industrial systems, consumer products, materials and financial services.

February 2008

Best Paper Award at International Conference

A paper by Professor M. C. Frank Chang and co-authors (J. Cong and and G. Riemann) entitled "CMP Network-on-Chip Overlaid with Multi-band RF-Interconnect" receives the Best Paper Award at the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA).

February 2008

UCLA Electrical Engineering Professors M. C. Frank Chang and Yahya Rahmat-Samii Elected to the Prestigious National Academy of Engineering

Professors M. C. Frank Chang and Yahya Rahmat-Samii have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional lifetime distinction accorded to American engineers. Professor Chang was honored for the development and commercialization of GaAs power amplifiers and integrated circuits, and Professor Rahmat-Samii was honored for his contributions to the design and measurement of reflector and handheld-device antennas. They are both now among a select 2,227 academy members nationwide, along with 194 foreign associates. [More]

January 2008

EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award

Assistant Professor P. Gupta receives the 2007 European Design Automation Association (EDAA) Outstanding Dissertation Award in the topic "New directions in physical design, design for manufacturing and CAD for analog circuits".

January 2008

Paper Receives Design Contest Award

The paper "XCXO: An Ultra-low Cost Ultra-high Accuracy Clock System for Wireless Sensor Networks in Harsh Remote Outdoor Environments" by T. Schmid, J. Friedman, Z. Charbiwala, Y. Cho, and Professor M. Srivastava is selected as a winner for the 2008 Student Design Contest held by the DAC/ISSCC and Design Automation Conferences.

January 2008

Graduate Student Receives Best Student Paper Award

Ph.D. student Harish Rajagopalan (Professor Y. Rahmat-Samii, advisor) is awarded first place in the 2008 Student Paper Competition by The United States National Committee for the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). The award is for his paper entitled "RF MEMS Actuated Reconfigurable Reflectarray: A Novel Patch-Slot Element Design."

January 2008

Graduate Student Receives IEEE Young Author Best Paper Award

Ph.D. student Qiyue Zou (Professor A. H. Sayed, advisor) receives the 2007 IEEE Signal Processing Young Author Best Paper Award based on his paper on "The Cramer-Rao Lower Bound for Bilinear Systems, published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 54, no. 5, pp. 1666-1680, May 2006, and co-authored with L. Zhiping and R. Ober.

January 2008

HKN wins Outstanding Chapter Award

The HKN Student Organization (Professor Alan Willson, advisor) wins its third straight HKN Outstanding Chapter Award from the HKN National Organization.

January 2008

ViaSat joins the Industry Affiliates Program

The department is pleased to announce that ViaSat has joined its Industry Affiliates Program. ViaSat produces innovative satellite and other wireless communication products that enable fast, secure, and efficient communications to any location. They bring today's new communications applications to people out of reach of terrestrial networks, in both commercial and government markets. For more information on the IAP program, current members, and its benefits, please visit the IAP website.

January 2008

Online MS Program

The department starts offering an Online MS Program in Signal Processing and Communications and in Integrated Circuits as part of the HSSEAS Master of Science in Engineering Program. Other areas of specialization are being planned. The primary purpose of the Online MS Program is to enable employed engineers and computer scientists to enhance their technical education beyond the Bachelor of Science level and to enhance their value to the technical organizations in which they are employed. [More]