Spotlight

Austin, TX—Zak Kassas received the Research Excellence Award, which is awarded by the Graduate Engineering Council at the Graduate and Industry Networking (GAIN) Event. This award is granted to the best 10 graduate engineering research presentations out of 75 presentations at the GAIN Event as judged by representatives from the industry and faculty. GAIN is a broad Networking opportunity and an academically rigorous competition that allows The Cockrell School of Engineering to showcase its best and brightest graduate students.

Zak’s research focuses on devising novel techniques for opportunistic and collaborative navigation.

“State lawmakers may decide to ban drone surveillance of private property in Texas. A University of Texas professor fears that bill could hurt the research being done on those eyes in the sky. The university has an $80,000 drone that has been used by engineering professor Todd Humphreys to prove that the security of drones can be compromised.

“We showed that you can hack into a GPS system of one of these drones and like a tractor beam you can bring it down out of the air.” But, using that technology could be prevented in the future.

State Representative Lance Gooden (R, District 4) has introduced a bill called ‘The Texas Privacy Act’ that would ban drone surveillance of private property by everyone from aviation hobbyists to law enforcement.”

Continue reading the myFOXaustin article that features a video interview with Dr. Humphreys.

A drone, no bigger than a toy airplane, hovered north of the Texas Capitol, floating over the heads of lawmakers who were momentarily distracted from their morning meetings. Several of them gathered beneath it, faces tilted skyward, marveling over a pair of goggles that allowed them to watch live video of the craft’s panoramic bird’s-eye view.

But when the conversation turned to the reason for the demonstration, the tone shifted. Representative Lance Gooden, Republican of Terrell, said he was sponsoring legislation to prevent this futuristic technology — increasingly used by everyone from aviation hobbyists to law enforcement authorities — from capturing “indiscriminate surveillance.”

Continue reading the New York Times article, which features an interveiw with Dr. Humphreys.

Austin, TX—At the magazine’s annual Leadership Dinner, held during the ION-GNSS Conference, we gave the first GNSS Leadership Awards to four individuals for their respective work in the four fields of satellites, signals, services, and products. These are not lifetime or career achievement awards, but recognition of significant contribution in the last year or two. Think of them as the Oscars, the Academy Awards of GNSS, if you will, for significant recent achievement.

Several people were nominated in each category by a small group, then voted on by a larger group of about 40, including the magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the contributing editors, and a dozen industry executives.

In the Signals category: Todd Humphreys, Director, Radionavigation Laboratory, and assistant professor, University of Texas at Austin. Leader of several seminal studies on spoofing and jamming; testified this summer before Congress on the subject.

Continue reading the award notice that contains Dr. Humphreys’s acceptance speech.