EECS News Spring 2007

Avideh Zakhor was featured in an Air Force Military Command article titled, “3-D Models of Urban Environments to Aid Military Efforts”.  Professor Zakhor is the lead of an Air Force Office of Scientific Research-funded team that has built 3-D digital surface models of urban environments out of airborne laser scans with complementary roof-and terrain-shape, and texture maps them with aerial imagery.  This is done for the first time in a fast, scalable and automated way.
August 9
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Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli honors A. Richard Newton in a paper titled “Remembering Richard” published in the August issue of IEEE Trans. on CAD of Integrated Circuits and Systems. Richard Newton, an EECS professor and Dean of the College of Engineering, passed away on January 2, 2007.
July 30
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S. Shankar Sastry, NEC Distinguished Professor and former department chair of EECS, has been appointed the new dean of the College of Engineering. He also served as director of the Information Technology Office of the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and most recently as director of the CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) and the Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley.
Friday, July 20
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Graduate student Donovan Lee has been awarded the Best Student Paper Award for his paper entitled “WetFET - A Novel Fluidic Gate-Dielectric Transistor for Sensor Applications” at the 2007 International Symposium on VLSI Technology, Systems and Applications (VLSI-TSA) held in Hsin Chu, Taiwan.  Coauthors are EECS student Xin Sun and professors Tsu-Jae King Liu and Roger T. Howe.
July 10
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Eric Brewer was featured in a TMC.net article titled, “Point-to-point Wi-Fi Brings Internet to All,” about the development of cellular technology in sparsely populated rural areas of developing countries. Brewer and colleagues at TIER, the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions project at UC Berkeley, have created a wireless system called Wi-Fi over Long Distance Networks (WildNets) that can beam the internet to remote communities many hundreds of kilometres away from a dense population centre.
July 9
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Ken Goldberg has been named the new director of the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, effective July 1. “New media are changing the ways that we perceive, learn, communicate and experience the world,” said Goldberg. “What is 'new' is accelerating rapidly with emerging technologies, but is deeply rooted in powerful aesthetic, social and political forces. We're exploring phenomena such as visual privacy, networked games and appropriation rights from cross-disciplinary and global perspectives.” Goldberg comes to the job with experience crossing the boundaries between technology and the humanities.
>>More
July 2
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Graduate student Mohan Dunga has been awarded the Best Student Paper Award for his paper entitled “A Versatile Multi-gate MOSFET Compact Model for Mixed-mode Circuit Simulation” at the 2007 International Symposium on VLSI Technology held in Kyoto, Japan.  Coauthors are EECS students Chung-Hsun Lin and Darsen Lu.  Their advisors are Prof. Chenming Hu  and  Prof. Ali Niknejad.  Together with IEDM, this symposium is one of the two top conferences in the field.
June 27
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Jianbo Shi and Jitendra Malik have been awarded the IEEE Longuet-Higgins prize for their paper, “Normalized Cuts and Image Segmentation”, CVPR 1997, for a contribution that has stood the test of time. It is awarded to a paper published at the CVPR 10 years ago judged to have had the most lasting impact.
June 21
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Alan Smith has won the 2008 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award.  This award is given for contributions to the performance analysis of computer storage systems, including improvements to disk caches, prefetching and data placement.
June 19
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Joe Hellerstein, along with co-authors Peter Haas and Helen Wang, won the SIGMOD "Test of Time" Award for the paper deemed to be most influential from the conference ten years earlier. The paper, “Online Aggregation” from the 1997 ACM SIGMOD Conference, was chosen from a number of potential candidates for the lasting impact that it had by opening up new database research directions. This is the second time he has won this award - the first being in 2002.
June 19
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EECS alumni Boon Thau Loo (Ph.D. '06) won the 2007 SIGMOD Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis “The Design and Implementation of Declarative Networks”.  He was co-advised by Joe Hellerstein and Ion Stoica.
June 19
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Google has licensed the 3D city modeling software resulting from the Visualization MURI program for which Prof. Avideh Zakhor acted as lead principal investigator from 2000 to 2006. Zakhor's research team at the video and image processing lab at UC Berkeley has created the first fully automated, fast, scalable data acquisition system and post-processing software which use collected data to build photo-realistic 3-D models of urban environments suitable for walk-throughs as well as fly-throughs. This software is closely related to the Google Earth product and can potentially enable Google to provide 3D maps to its users.
June 1
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On May 25, 2007, Randy Katz will receive an honorary doctorate from University of Helsinki. He is being honored for his contributions in the field and his active role in developing Ph.D. student co-operation between UC Berkeley EECS and University of Helsinki Computer Science departments.
May 17
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EECS Ph.D. students Hyuck Choo (Richard Muller, advisor) and David Garmire (James Demmel, advisor) won first place in the 2007 Hong Kong University International Science and Technology Business Competition for their proposal entitled “NanoRay”. One in eight submissions qualified to be among the 13 finalist teams that were sent from campuses around the world. First-place prize is $10,000 US.
May 9
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Two EECS Ph.D. students, Jacob Abernathy (advisor Peter Bartlett) and Tyson Condie (advisor Joseph Hellerstein) have been selected to receive Yahoo!’s inaugural Key Technical Challenges (KTC) grants. This very competitive award is given to outstanding PhD students who are doing research in very important and challenging areas. Awardees are each given $5,000 of unrestricted funds for support of their research activities.
May 3
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Ken Goldberg was awarded an Isadora Duncan Award (aka an Izzie) for Best Music/Score/Text for Ballet Mori (he was also the Concept Director). He was presented the award at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Monday.
April 26
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Leon Chua has been chosen to be the recipient of the IEEE Vitold Belevitch Circuits and Systems Award for 2007. This award is given "to honor a person with fundamental contributions in the field of circuits and systems."
April 18
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EECS senior undergrad John Torous has been named recipient of the Bechtel Achievement Award. This is the highest honor awarded by the College of Engineering to a graduating senior for outstanding scholastic achievement and service to the College, campus, and community.
April 18
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EECS Professor Ruzena Bacjsy is one of the leaders in a newly formed national alliance, Empowering Leadership: Computing Scholars of Tomorrow, or the Empowering Leadership (EL) Alliance. Supported by a $2 million, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation and directed by Rice University, this alliance will engage underrepresented minority students in computing disciplines at majority institutions in a nationwide network.
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EE alumna Belle Wei, currently dean of the College of Engineering at San Jose State University (SJSU), has been named Educator of the Year in the 2007 EE Times Annual Creativity in Electronics (ACE) Awards competition.
April 16
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Three EECS faculty are recipients of 2006 awards from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM):

Robert K. Brayton - the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award. This award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that significantly affect the practice of computing. Prof. Brayton received this award for his pioneering contributions to logic synthesis and electronic system simulation, which enabled rapid circuit design technologies for the electronic design automation industry.

Daniel Klein - the Grace Murray Hopper Award. This award recognizes the outstanding young computer professional of the year. Prof. Klein received this award for the design of the first machine learning system capable of inferring a high-quality grammar for English and other languages directly from text without human annotations or supervision.

Sue Graham - the Distinguished Service Award. Prof. Graham has demonstrated extensive service to the computing community, both nationally and abroad. In the U.S., she was a member of the first President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), whose report resulted in a significant increase in federal research funding for IT. She has also served on committees of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council and the President's Committee on the National Medal of Science. Internationally, she served on the Panel for International Review of UK Computer Science Research, and co-chaired the Japan - U.S. Forum on the Future of Supercomputing.
April 2
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EE grad student Douglas Densmore has been awarded the UC Chancellor's Post Doc award for 2007-2008. He is a member of Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli’s research group, a member of the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC) and the Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (CHESS). His research interests are in system level design of embedded systems, computer architecture, digital logic design and design-for-test.
March 23
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EECS Ph.D. Asa Kalavade was named one of the 2007 "Women to Watch" by Mass High Tech, the journal of New England technology. She is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tatara Systems in 2001. Dr. Asa Kalavade has over 17 years of experience in the areas of wireless, multimedia services, and real-time embedded systems. >>More
March 9
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Connie Chang-Hasnain has been selected for the 2007 Nick Holonyak Jr. Award by the Optical Society of America. The award was given to her for significant contributions to the control of diode lasers: vertical cavity surface emitting laser arrays, injection locking and slow light”.
March 5
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QUALCOMM's Wireless Reach BREW Application Funding Program challenged developers to create the most innovative BREW public service application in one of five areas: healthcare, education, public safety, governance and the environment. John Canny’s MILLEE ( Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies ) software has been named a recipient of a QUALCOMM grants for $100,000. More>>
February 27
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David Wagner was quoted in a New York Times article titled “Panel Cites Voter Error, Not Software, in Loss of Votes” about the investigation of voting software that could have caused up to 18,000 votes to be lost in a disputed Congressional race in Sarasota County, Florida.
February 24
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EECS and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) professor Ken Goldberg and Prof. Dezhen Song of Texas A&M University were featured in a P2PNET article titled “ACONE versus Woody”. They have developed the Automated Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments (ACONE) system to be installed in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge to help natural scientists from Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology and the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission find the rare ivory-billed woodpecker.
February 20
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EECS alumnus Gary S. May (M.S. ‘87, Ph.D. ‘91) has received the 2006 Mentor Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The Mentor Award is given to an individual for extraordinary leadership that increases the involvement of underrepresented groups in the science and engineering fields. Prof. May is the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. More>>
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EECS grad student Andrea Frome was featured in an Engineering News article titled “Engineers Rock -- Out of the EECS department comes a hot new band”. By day Frome researches content-based image navigation, retrieval and object recognition of 2-D images in Jitendra Malik’s Computer Vision Group. By night, she is Lady X, lead singer of Lady X and the Positive Eigenvalues, a rock band whose repertoire includes the Rolling Stones and Violent Femmes. Frome rocks out with professors Michael Jordan (drums/guitars/vocals) and Christos Papadimitriou (keyboards/vocals) and other post-docs and graduate students.
February 14
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The research work of Prof. Connie Chang-Hasnain and her grad students were featured in a KGO 7 news article titled “Berkeley Scientists Makes Major Laser Breakthrough--Could Make HD DVD's Cheaper." They have found a way to make a better mirror that can improve the performance of lasers, and may usher in an era of new products.
February 13
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Newton Professorship Established to Honor Late Berkeley Engineering Dean.
The College of Engineering at UC Berkeley, in partnership with the EDA Consortium, a trade association of companies in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry, announced today that a $1 million endowed faculty professorship has been established to honor the late Dean A. Richard Newton.
February 9
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Eric Brewer was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), as announced by NAE today. He received the award for the design of Highly Scalable Internet Services. Established in 1964, NAE operates under the Congressional charter granted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1863. Its members consist of the nation's premier engineers, who are elected by their peers for extraordinary contributions to engineering.
February 9
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Dan Klein and Sanjit Seshia have received received National Science Foundation CAREER Awards. Dan Klein received the award for his research proposal, "Discriminative, Syntactic Machine Translation." Sanjit Seshia received the award for his research proposal, "Robust Reactive Systems through Verification and Learning." The award recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
January 31
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Bin Yu's, paper, "Perceptual audio coding using adaptive pre- and post-filters and lossless compression", co-authored with three, Dr. Gerald Shuller of Frauhofer-Institute fur Digitale Medientechnologie, Germany, Dr. Dawei Huang of Bell Labs China, and Dr. Bernd Edler of Leibniz Universitaet Hannover, Germany, has been selected to receive a 2006 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. This honor will be presented at ICASSP2007.
January 31
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Vivek Subramanian was quoted in a SF Gate article titled “Intel shrinks, speeds chips up -- Process includes new materials; rival IBM claims similar change”. Intel Corp. has found a way to make smaller, faster microprocessors, using new materials besides silicon to open and close the transistor gates on its next generation of chips, making them more energy efficient.
January 27
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The Nanoscale Science and Engineering (NSE) Graduate Group at UC Berkeley is launching a new summer high-school apprenticeship research program (SHARP).  High school students will have the opportunity to do hands-on scientific investigations in a dynamic research with graduate student researchers in NSE faculty laboratories, gaining first-hand experience in how science research is conducted. More about SHARP and application requirements.
January 24
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UC Merced chancellor.UC Santa Cruz engineering dean and EECS Ph.D. alumnus Sung-Mo (Steve) Kang has been named chancellor of UC Merced. Kang is expected to take office on or about March 1, 2007.
January 17
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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