ECE Awards Roundup: Sept. 12, 2014

In this week’s installment of ECE Awards Roundup, we celebrate wins from members of the Communications and Computer groups.

Xu, Lo and Qian

Feihu Xu brought home the Best Student Paper Prize from QCrypt2014, selected as the strongest of more than 2oo papers.

Top researchers in the field of quantum cryptography flocked from around the globe for the fourth international conference on quantum cryptography (QCrypt), held in Paris in early September.

Xu, a PhD student co-supervised by Professors Hoi-Kwong Lo and Li Qian, was thrilled with the win. “I was very happy to win at this highly competitive conference,” said Xu. “It proved to me that the hard work really pays off.”

Quantum cryptography aims to achieve security from fundamental physical principles, such as the quantum mechanical phenomenon of entanglement and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. QCrypt is a conference for students and researchers working on all aspects of quantum cryptography. The main goals of the conference are to represent the previous year’s best results and to support the building of a research community in quantum cryptography.

Xu is planning to apply to vacant post doctoral positions after graduation, and is also considering becoming a faculty member in the long term.

Anderson, Brown and the LegUp Team

The research group led by Professor Jason Anderson and Steven Brown received major recognition this month, winning the Community Award at this year’s International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) in Munich, Germany.

The Community Award is given to “authors who have made a significant contribution to the community by providing some material or knowledge in an open format that benefits the rest of the community.” The group was chosen for its contributions to open-source high-level synthesis, primarily through its LegUp project. LegUp is one of the only open-source high-level synthesis tools available, and has been downloaded over 1000 times by researchers around the world.

The win came as a surprise to Professor Anderson, as none of the nominees had been notified in advance. “It’s terrific to be recognized for contributing to the international FPGA research community,” said Professor Anderson. “We’re honoured to receive the FPL Community Award, which I think is a testament to the excellent team of graduate students who have built LegUp.”

More information:
Marit Mitchell
Senior Communications Officer
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
416-978-7997; marit.mitchell@utoronto.ca