Texas ECE offers a PhD degree in 8 different academic tracks, but students can also take advantage of the immense variety of resources for interdisciplinary work at The University of Texas at Austin. PhD students will participate in state-of-the-art research along with faculty researchers. Holding a Masters of Science degree is not required to enter or even complete the PhD program. However, a student entering the PhD program without an MSE from ECE or a related field also may choose to pursue and receive the MSE along the way to the PhD with typically no or little additional effort beyond that already required for the PhD, although over a longer time period than a student within the MSE program. Students within the PhD program are expected to enroll in at least 3 hours of research problems or, later, dissertation courses each semester, which cannot be counted toward the MSE. As such, they will typically require 5-6 long semesters to complete the MS program.<br>This track involves research and design in the following fields: (1) Communications and networking: all aspects of transmission of data, including: wireless communications, communication theory, information theory, networking, queueing theory, stochastic processes, sensor networks, (2) Data science and machine learning: all aspects of extraction of knowledge from data, including: algorithms, data mining, optimization, statistics, pattern recognition, predictive analytics, human-machine interaction, artificial intelligence, and (3) Controls, signals, and systems: estimation and detection, signal, image and video processing, linear and nonlinear systems.