Reece Roth, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Tennessee, passed along a research paper to Sirous Nourgostar, a graduate student from Iran working under his supervision.

FORBES: The Spy in the Lab

Transphorm was co-founded in 2007 by CEO Umesh Mishra, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

FORBES: Google, Soros Gamble on Power Electronics Pioneer

At Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, electrical engineering professor Dong Ha and his team are in the early stages of studying how to employ body heat to power a circuit.

WSJ: Harnessing Energy From the Body to Power Devices

"Silicon photonics for years was an oxymoron, " said Joe Campbell, a specialist in the field who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Virginia.

WSJ: IBM Claims Breakthrough in Laser-Based Chips

In his Google blog post, Mr Thrun - professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University - insisted that safety was the "first priority" in the project.

BBC: Google tests cars that drive themselves

"For what it was invented for, the mouse does a good job, " said John Elias, co-inventor of the MultiTouch system and a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Delaware.

BBC: Handy future for gesture sensor

The unreliability - or "statistical variability" - of chips is a problem that many researchers were trying to deal with, said Professor Asen Asenov from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Glasgow.

BBC: Mistakes in silicon chips to help boost computer power

Hennessy, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science with 23 years at Stanford, has the right background to figure out the university's new role.

FORBES: Gilding The Ivory Tower

Within Korea University, the School of Electrical Engineering's Intelligent Signal Processing Lab (ISPL), headed by Professor Ko Hanseok, specializes in both image and speech processing.

CNN: The story