ECE Faculty Jaijeet Roychowdhury and Nikos Sidiropoulos were elected Fellows by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Board of Directors.

Professor Roychowdhury was honored for his contributions to simulation and automated macromodelling of integrated circuits. Adjunct Associate Professor Sidiropoulos was honored for his contributions to signal processing for communications. Currently, Professor Sidiropoulos is a faculty member at Technical University of Crete in Greece but continues his association with ECE as an adjunct professor.

The grade of IEEE Fellow is awarded to recognize extraordinary accomplishments in one of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number of IEEE Fellows selected in any one year is limited to no more than one-tenth of one percent of the total IEEE membership.

University of Minnesota Electrical and Computer Engineering graduates Patrick Delaney (May '08), Matthew Beckler (CE May '08), and current student Caleb Braff, are one of twelve finalist teams in the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation's 2008 Collegiate Inventors Competition. They have been awarded a $2000 finalist prize for their Solar LED Lighting Innovation low powered economical device that provides many hours of light to areas without electricity.

The ECE team, whose advisor is Professor Paul Imbertson, will be competing for the grand prize of $25,000 during Global Entrepreneurship Week (Nov. 17-23) at the Kauffman Foundation headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri.

Other finalist teams represent Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, University of Texas at Dallas, Harvard Medical School, University of Michigan, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

Abbott Fund, the philanthropic foundation of the global health care company Abbott, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are the competition sponsors.

ECE graduate student Shuo Guo has won the best paper award at the Fifth IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (MASS 2008) for her paper, "On Accurate and Efficient Statistical Counting in Sensor-Based Surveillance Systems," by Shuo Guo, Tian He, Mohamed Mokbel, John A. Stankovic, and Tarek F. Abdelzaher. This paper reports work done with her advisor, Professor Tian He (from the Computer Science Department), and colleagues. The award comes with a plaque and $500.