Awards season is underway in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), and several professors’ and students’ research papers have received recognition in various national and international conferences. In this new series we highlight recent awards.
Selvanayagam and Eleftheriades
Michael Selvanayagam, a PhD student supervised by ECE Professor George Eleftheriades, won the 2014 IEEE Antenna and Propagation Piergiorgio L.E. Uslenghi Prize Paper Award. Selvanayagam will receive a certificate and honorarium during the IEEE Antenna and Propagation Symposium Awards Banquet in Memphis, Tennessee on July 9, 2014.
The award recognizes the most significant contribution to IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters in the preceding year.
This was the fourth major IEEE journal paper award for the Eleftheriades group. “The essence of this paper,” says Eleftheriades, “is to take an electromagnetic field equation which is an abstract concept and translate it into a circuit, and circuits are what electrical engineers know how to deal with the most.”
An, Betz and Steffan
Mathew An was delighted to win the Best Paper Award for his paper “Speeding Up FPGA Placement: Parallel Algorithms and Methods” at the recent Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM) held in Boston. “I wasn’t aiming for any kind of recognition beyond publication, and I wasn’t expecting to be nominated and then to actually get the prize,” he said.
FCCM is one of the top conferences in the FPGA field, the original and premier forum for presenting and discussing new research into FPGAs and other reconfigurable hardware over the past two decades.
An is co-supervised by Professors Vaughn Betz and Greg Steffan, both collaborators. “The paper showed how to speed up the most time-consuming step in the FPGA computer-aided design flow, which is placement, by leveraging many processors in parallel,” said Professor Betz. “Matthew’s work is the first to show a large speed-up without significantly reducing the quality of the circuit implemented in the chip.”
Poshtkouhi and Trescases
Shahab Poshtkouhi, a PhD student supervised by Professor Olivier Trescases, garnered the Best Paper Award at the International Power Electronics Conference(IPEC) held in Hiroshima, Japan May 18- 22, 2014.
Poshtkouhi’s paper emerged on top of 611 submissions. “We didn’t know my paper won until later stages,” he said. ”It was already a big deal for me that my paper was chosen among the first 15 reviewed by the conference committee.”
Poshtkouhi’s paper that discusses how to enhance the efficiency of power while transforming solar power to electrical power is only one aspect of a long term project—the next step is to demonstrate the setup experimentally over the summer months.
Mahtani, Barchet and Kherani
The Advanced Photovoltaics and Devices Research Group collected two first-place awards at the 2014 Next Generation Solar Photovoltaics Canada National Scientific Conference. This event at the Université de Montréal, drew together many photovoltaic experts and students from a wide range of disciplines from all across Canada, in addition to industry representatives.
Pratish Mahtani, a doctoral candidate supervised by Professor Nazir Kherani, took home the First Place Award HQP Research Talk Competition for his talk entitled “The use of grid-based triode RF PECVD (radio-frequency plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition) to achieve ultrahigh quality silicon heterostructures.”
Another first place award was handed to David Barchet, an MASc candidate with the Kherani group, for his poster “Low-Temperature Ozone Native Oxide-Based Surface Passivation of Silicon.”
Congratulations to the recipients! The next ECE Awards Round-up appears next week.
More information:
Mireille Khreich
Communications Assistant
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-1999; mireille.khreich@utoronto.ca