EECS News Spring 2005

Professor David Wagner is co-principal investigator of a new endeavor called A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE). The National Science Foundation will provide $7.5 million over five years for researchers at UC Berkeley and five institutions nationwide to improve the reliability and trustworthiness of electronic voting technology. >>More
August 16, 2005
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Graduate students Zheng Guo, Sriram Balasubramanian, Radu Zlatanovici, and professors Tsu-Jae King and Borivoje Nikolic won the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design in San Diego, CA (ISLPED), for their paper "FinFET-Based SRAM Design".
August 3, 2005
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EECS PhD graduate Weilun Chao received the prestigious Werner Meyer-Ilse Award for excellence in x-ray microscopy, awarded at the tri-annual International X-ray Microscopy meeting, held this year (July) in Himeji, Japan. His work was recently published in Nature titled, "Soft X-ray Microscopy at a Spatial Resolution Better than 15 nm".
August 3, 2005
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Ken Goldberg received a 3 year grant from the National Science Foundation for a new research project: Collaborative Observatories for Natural Environments. This project is a collaborative effort by computer scientists and engineers from Texas A&M and UC Berkeley.
July 22, 2005
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Ming Wu’s research results on a new device called “optoelectronic tweezers” was published in the July 21 issue of Nature titled, "Massively Parallel Manipulation of Single Cells and Microparticles Using Optical Images". An “optoelectronic tweezer” will enable researchers to easily manipulate large numbers of single cells and particles using optical images projected on a glass slide coated with photoconductive materials.
UC Berkeley News Center
NSF (video)
PhysOrg.com
I-Newswire.com
July 22, 2005
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Martin Wainwright and Kathy Yelick have won 2005 Okawa Research Grants. These unrestricted grants,  for $10 K  each,  are awarded to only ten researchers in California each year.
July 13, 2005
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Two EECS professors have won the 2006 IEEE technical field awards:

Robert K. Brayton, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, for development of the field of logic synthesis from its early inception through industrial maturity.

Scott J. Shenker,  the IEEE Internet Award,  for contributions towards an understanding of resource sharing on the Internet.
June 30, 2005
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Ron Fearing’s research on biologically inspired synthetic gecko adhesives appeared in an “Economist” article titled “Technology that Imitates Nature”. The article describes “Biomimetics” where engineers study nature when looking for solutions to design problems. >>Article (pdf)
June 21, 2005
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Gene Wong will be presented this Saturday, June 18, in Virginia, with the 2005 IEEE Founders Medal, one of the highest honors in the IEEE.  It is given for outstanding contributions in the leadership, planning, and administration of affairs of great value to the electrical and electronics engineering profession. The citation reads: "For leadership in national and international engineering research and technology policy, for pioneering contributions in relational
databases."
June 16, 2005
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Michael Lieberman has won the Von Engel Prize for 2005, awarded by the International Scientific Committee (ISC) for work in the field of physics and technology of plasmas and ionized gases. Selection is based on longstanding and important contributions to the field, or an outstanding achievement giving new impulse to the field, or both. This prize is administered by the Board of the Faculty of Physical Sciences, University of Oxford.
June 15, 2005
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Dan Klein is a recipient of the prestigious Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship Award, instituted for the first time this year. Dan is one of five winners of the award. It includes a cash gift of $200,000, other Microsoft resources,  and the option of  exploring collaborations with MSR researchers.
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Ruzena Bajcsy has been elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society. She was elected “for promoting useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research”. The American Philosophical Society is the oldest learned society  in the country. Benjamin Franklin was its founder,  Thomas Jefferson was one of its early presidents.
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EECS alumna Margo Seltzer was one of six professors awarded 2005 Harvard College Professorships. Harvard recognizes professors who not only shine as researchers and writers but exceed expectations in teaching as well. Margo received her Ph.D. from the CS Division, Mike Stonebraker was her advisor.
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Avideh Zakhor is featured in a new UC Berkeley NewsCenter series that interviews professors about their fields and the paths that led them there. The interview is titled, “The Hungry Mind: Prof. Avideh Zakhor on being a science nerd in Iran, why Larry Summers made her mad, and what the heck a 4D model is.”
April 25, 2005
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EECS graduate student David Molnar is quoted about his research on e-passports in a Wired Magazine article about the privacy risks posed by new RFID passports the government plans to begin issuing. The article is titled “Feds Rethinking RFID Passport.”
April 26, 2005
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced funding for the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology (TRUST) at UC Berkeley. The TRUST center is expected to receive nearly $19 million over five years. EECS Professor Shankar Sastry is the principal investigator. >>More
April 11, 2005
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The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the nation's premier funder of unencumbered scientific exploration whose early dabbling in computer network design gave rise to the Internet, recently acknowledged to Congress that they were shifting their focus away from blue-sky research and toward goal-oriented and increasingly classified endeavors. Column by Washington Post writer Rick Weiss…
April 10, 2005
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Professor Kris Pister, co-founder of Dust Networks appeared in a SF Chronicle article, “Networking nodes share data: Wireless devices can act as remote controls for household or business”.
April 8, 2005
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Shankar Sastry has been named the new director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). The appointment, which is effective immediately, was announced today by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau.
UC Berkeley News article...
April 5, 2005
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Professor David Patterson was quoted in a New York Times article (registration required), “Pentagon Redirects Its Research Dollars.” The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is sharply cutting spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.
April 1, 2005
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U.S. News Rates EE Program #1

U.S. News and World Report magazine has rated U.C. Berkeley's graduate electrical/electronic/communications engineering as the nation's #1 program, tied with MIT. >>More
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Shankar Sastry was announced as recipient of the 2005 Ragazzini Award for outstanding contributions in automatic control education. It will be awarded at the American Control Conference early July 2005.
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Martin Wainwright has been selected as an Alfred Sloan Fellow for 2005 in Computer Science. This is one of the most prestigious awards available to junior faculty in the sciences. See the full list of winners...

Alumni who also won the award this year are Chris Umans (Caltech), Anupam Gupta (CMU), and Serge Belongie (UC San Diego). Four out of fourteen winners in computer science are Berkeley faculty or alumni.
February 25, 2005
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Professors David Culler, Roger Howe and William Kahan have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering:

David E. Culler, for contributions to scalable parallel processing systems, including architectures, operating systems, and programming environments.

Roger T. Howe, for contributions to the development of microelectromechanical systems in processes, devices, and systems.

William M. Kahan, for the development of techniques for reliable floating point computation, especially the IEEE Floating Point Standards.

The list of all the newly elected members can be found at the National Academies newspage.
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Professor Edward Lee was announced as the new Chair of the EE Division an Associate Chair of the EECS Department by EECS Chair Jitendra Malik, at the first faculty lunch of the semester on Monday, January 24.  Prof. Malik thanked outgoing EE Chair Roger Howe for his excellent service to the Division and the Department over the last few years.  Professor Lee takes on this new role on February 1.
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Professor Connie Chang-Hasnain  has been selected to be one of four recipients of the Lillian M. Gilbreth Lectures by Young Engineers award this year. The award is given to the best speakers voted by attendees of the NAE Frontiers of Engineering meetings.  Professor Chang-Hasnain will present her talk, "Progress and Prospects of Enabling Optoelectronic Devices for Broadband Communications" at the Gilbreth Lectures Symposium, Beckman Center in Irvine, CA on Feb. 10, 2005. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
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Professor James O'Brien was featured in a Time Magazine article titled "What Does Wind Really Look Like?" about his work as "one of the world's top experts on how to make computers simulate complex physical systems."
Jan. 10, 2005
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EECS Professor Emeritus Donald Pederson passed away December 25. In honor of Professor Pederson the College of Engineering is hosting a reception on Sunday, February 6, 2005 from 4-6 p.m. in 290 Hearst Memorial Mining Building on the Berkeley campus. For more information please contact Karl Leonard via email at rsvp-dop@coe.berkeley.edu or by phone at (510) 642-2487. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations be made to the Donald O. Pederson Scholarship Fund, c/o the Berkeley Engineering Fund, 208 McLaughlin Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720 -1722.
UC Berkeley News article
Mercury News article (registration required)
January 2005