EECS News Fall 2006

Professors Vern Paxson and Tom Henzinger, as well as EECS alumni Jim Larus, Nick McKeown, and Peter Norvig, have been elected Fellows of ACM for their achievements in computer science and information technology.
January 9
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We are deeply saddened that our colleague, Dean Richard Newton, passed away from pancreatic cancer January 2, 2007.

His contributions to Engineering and to academia as a whole extended beyond the campus to the benefit of California, the nation, and international society. Richard was also a wonderful father and friend whose incomparable energy and kindness seemed to know no bounds. He will be greatly missed.

Celebrating the Life of Richard Newton

On Sunday, February 11, 2007 a celebration of the life and accomplishments of Dean A. Richard Newton will be held. More details and registration.
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The UC Berkeley Mu Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu is a recipient of the Outstanding Chapter Award (OCA) for 2005-06. This coveted award is a mark of distinction for a college chapter. Chapters are judged on activities of service to their fellow students, their department, their school and their surrounding community.
January 2
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David Patterson has been awarded the inaugural Katayanagi Senior Prize in Computer Science, recognizing his outstanding contributions to the field of computer science. The prize is named for Mr. Koh Katayanagi, founder of the Tokyo University of Technology, and is administered through an endowment at Carnegie Mellon University. Winners are selected by a joint faculty panel from both universities.
December 4
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Christos Papadimitriou and David Patterson were featured in a Daily Californian article titled, “Battle of the Brains -- Despite Universities’ Rift, Computer Science Departments Find Common Ground”. While the Cal Bears and Stanford Cardinals have long detested each other, UC Berkeley and Stanford also have a well-established academic relationship exemplified by the cooperative-competitive relationship between the computer science programs.
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Vivek Subramanian’s research in the development of fully printed transistor circuits used in chipless RFID tags and other applications was featured in a Yahoo Finance article titled “ Soligie Signs Research Agreement with UC Berkeley”. Soligie, a market leader providing printed electronic integrated solutions, announced they have entered into a research agreement funding work related to the development of manufacturing processes necessary in the printing of transistors for the emergent "Printed Electronics" market.
November 30
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Tsu-Jae King Liu and Clark Nguyen have been elected 2007 Fellows of the IEEE. This distinction goes to engineers who have demonstrated outstanding proficiency and achieved an extraordinary record of accomplishments in their profession.
November 27
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The UC Berkeley IEEE Student Branch launched a 10 week series of lessons for local East Bay high school students. The lessons are centered upon hands on electrical engineering and stresses intuition over equations. Students are provided with the tools and supplies to turn their newfound theoretical knowledge into tangible circuits. Thanks to a generous grant from the IEEE University Partnership Program, all supplies and materials are presented free of charge to students.
November 21
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Michael Jordan was elected as a 2006 Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications.
November 17
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Eric Brewer will be co-leading a team of students to work in Nakaseke District, Uganda as part of the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley. The project teams will work with the selected health professionals and community volunteers to integrate mobile phone technology into the local health care system, including its use for emergency "911" type service, remote medical consultations and health-related help-line services. For more information see the UC Berkeley Newscenter press release, “Blum Center launches global field initiatives”.
November 15
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The research work of CS grad student Ka Ping Yee, David Wagner and Marti Hearst was featured in a Science News Online article titled, “Ballot Roulette - Computer scientists and mathematicians look for better ways to vote”. Their research focuses on ways to reduce the complexity of programs used in touch-screen voting machines.
November 13
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Kristofer Pister's next phase of sensor network innovation, called "RF Time of Flight" was featured in an eWeek.com article titled, "Berkeley's Mesh Network: Dust in the RFID Wind".
November 6
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The TIER Research group, directed by Eric Brewer has partnered with Air Jaldi, India’s first wireless mesh network set up in a rural area, 7,000 ft. above sea level in the Himalayan region of Dharamshala. TIER is a UC Berkeley Wi-Fi research initiative, offering high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity solutions over long distance. For more information, read the article in Digital Communications.
November 3
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UC BERKELEY invites applications for several approved tenure-track positions in ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCES at the ASSISTANT PROFESSOR level, beginning in Fall Semester 2007. Exceptional candidates at the Associate Professor or full Professor levels may also be considered. We also consider possible joint appointments with other Berkeley departments.
October 25
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Professor David Patterson was quoted in an International Herald Tribune (France) article titled “Microsoft moving to in-house chip design”, about Microsoft turning to a new source of chip design: its own labs. This is a historic time in the computer industry," said David Patterson, "We're in the middle of a revolutionary change toward parallel computing that will absolutely involve both hardware and software."
October 19
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Professor David Wagner was quoted in a Wired News article titled "Building a Better Voting Machine". Wagner and his graduate students are looking at ways to edit the systems to bare essentials. "What we're trying to do is pare this stuff down to the absolute, minimum capabilities so that it's easy to review and certify the machines."
October 18
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Professor Ming Wu, member of an interdisciplinary team of scientists from UC Berkeley's College of Engineering, the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has secured a prestigious federal grant from the National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research initiative aimed at improving nanomedical research. Their discoveries could enhance methods of curing diseases like cancer as well as viral infections at the molecular scale. The nanomedicine grant, with a proposed budget of $7 million, will support the new NIH Nanomedicine Development Center for Cell Control.
October 19
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EECS undergrads John Torous (president of the IEEE student chapter) and Ken Elkabany attended the first Leaders Summit sponsored by the IEEE University Partnership Program (UPP) on September 28-29. They were presented with the first UPP Opportunity Grant of $2500 for their for-credit class, “IEEE Hands-on Electronics,” an introduction to electrical engineering for engineers and non-engineers. The student branch is taking this class on the road, bringing science learning to public high school students who might have little opportunity to learn about engineering as a career.
October 12
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Dean Richard Newton has been inducted to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Founded in 1780, elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business and public affairs.
October 10
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The MARCO Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC) was awarded a $24 million renewal covering the next three years. GSRC is one of the five MARCO centers, jointly funded by the semiconductor industry (SIA) and the Department of Defense. Under the directorship of Professor Jan Rabaey and including Berkeley faculty Keutzer, Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Seshia, and Wawrzynek, the renovated GSRC focuses on system level solutions to address the formidable challenges facing the semiconductor industry over the next two decades. For more information, see http://www.gigascale.org.
October 9
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Domenico Ferrari, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and former Chair of the CS Division, has been awarded the 2006 ACM SIGCOMM Award, the premier award in the networking field. The citation recognizes his work in Internet QoS architecture and wide-area network research testbeds, his leadership in managing the BSD Unix project and founding and establishing ICSI as a premier international networking research institution, and his dedication to educate the next generation of leaders in networking research.
October 2
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EECS graduate student Sara Bergbreiter has been awarded a scholarship to participate in the preconference technical all day session on Control during the Grace Murray Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing "Making Waves" Conference. CS grad student Hayley Iben has been selected to present her research on computer graphics at the Ph.D. Forum. Three EECS undergraduate and 13 graduate students are also attending the conference.
September 27
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Claire Tomlin was named a Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. It is an unsolicited prize that includes a half million dollars in cash and the unofficial moniker "genius grant.'' The grantees, nominated and chosen in secret, are rewarded for their exceptional creativity, record of achievement and potential for future success.
SF Gate article
UC Newscenter
September 19
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Vern Paxson has won the inaugural "SIGCOMM Test of Time" award for his paper "End-to-End Routing Behavior in the Internet," published at SIGCOMM'96. The award recognizes a paper published 10 to 12 years in the past in Computer Communication Review or any SIGCOMM sponsored or co-sponsored conference.
September 18
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David Patterson, sons Mike and David Jr. and EECS staff members John Keller and Lars Rohrbach (captain) rode bikes in the National Multiple Sclerosis Society fund raising bike tour “Waves to Wine 2006”. Their team, called “The Anti-MS Crew” won a trophy for the best team name and raised about $17,000 which made them the top fundraisers of the 1200 riders at the event.
September 13
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David Wagner’s research on internet security and David Culler’s wireless sensors were mentioned in an Inside Bay Area.com article titled “Tech firms move to improve safety”. The federal government is working to develop new technologies to secure the physical and digital world by funding operations like DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Bay Area based In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. This firm carries out its mission of connecting the intelligence community to companies developing bleeding-edge technology.
September 11
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Claire Tomlin and Maneesh Agrawala have been selected for the '06 Okawa Foundation Research Grant. This is a prestigious prize, highly competitive, and also carries a $10K research grant.
September 7, 2006
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Two EECS graduate students, Hyuck Choo and David Garmire were featured in a Lab Notes article titled “Mighty Microscanner”. They fabricated a pinhead-sized microscanner that can rotate a miniscule mirror back and forth 24,000 times per second with great precision. Under the guidance of professors Richard Muller and James Demmel they designed and built the microscanner in the Microlab of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC).
September 6
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EE graduate student Mike Huang was awarded first place for his poster and presentation on “Novel Subwavelength Grating Surface Emitting Laser” at NOW 2006 (Nano-opto Workshop), August 13-18. There were 44 poster submissons from students and post docs from institutes around the world. Co-authors of the research paper are Ye Zhou and Connie Chang-Hasnain.
September 1
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Alistair Sinclair was awarded the Fulkerson Prize for the paper "A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with nonnegative entries," coauthored with Mark Jerrum of the University of Edinburgh and Eric Vigoda of Georgia Tech., which appeared in JACM in 2004. This is a prestigious prize awarded every three years for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics, and is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society.
August 28
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EECS grad student Carmel Majidi’s research on micro-fiber array was featured in a EurekAlert.org and UC NewsCenter article titled “Engineers create gecko-inspired, high-friction micro-fibers”. Ron Fearing is the principal investigator of this team.
August 22
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Dave Patterson and the Oceanstore research project led by John Kubiatowicz was mentioned in a NY Times article titled “A Move to Secure Data by Scattering the Pieces” about an open-source project being developed for companies and government agencies to secure networked data. It offers a simple way to store digital documents and other files in slices that can be reassembled only by the computers that originally created the files.
August 22
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US News.com: America's Best Colleges 2007
The latest rankings from the USNews.com Report, “America’s Best Colleges 2007” have placed our undergraduate Electrical Engineering program at #3 and our undergraduate Computer Science program at #4. UC Berkeley's Engineering program overall ranked #2, tied with Stanford.
August 21
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The department is happy to announce the appointment of two new Chairs:

Edward Lee was appointed Chair of the EECS Department, effective July 1, 2006. His research interests center on design, modeling, and simulation of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is a director of Chess, the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems, and is the

Stuart Russell is the new Chair of the Computer Science Division and Assoc. Chair for the EECS Department. His research interests lie in the field of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, reasoning and decision making under uncertainty, intelligent agent architectures, and bounded rationality. Prof. Russell is director of the Center for Intelligent Systems, and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is also co-author of the standard text in artificial intelligence.
August 11