EECS News Fall 2008

Jitendra Malik has been elected as Fellow of ACM which is a significant honor. Fellows are recognized for their outstanding achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM.
January 6
______

The White House has honored Ravi Ramamoorthi for the 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), which is defined as "the nation's highest honor for faculty members that are beginning their independent research careers." This award provides $1M over five years. More>>
January 5
______

The White House has honored Sanjit Seshia with the 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), "the nation's highest award for scientists at the early stages of their careers". Professor Seshia is being recognized for his ground-breaking research in the fields of verification, learning and control for a new generation of survivable embedded systems. Also noted was his educational innovation in verification and in creating an undergraduate course on embedded systems. More>>
January 5
______

Bin Yu has been named AAAS Fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for distinguished theoretical contributions in statistics and machine learning and important engineering science applications, and for fostering and initiating interdisciplinary work in China and the United States.
January 5
______

Kenneth Mei has been awarded the 2009 IEEE Electromagnetics Award in recognition of his exceptional achievements and contributions to computational electromagnetics and Maxwellian circuits.
December 9
______

Professor Thomas A. Henzinger has been appointed the first president of IST (Institute of Science and Technology) Austria, a new research institute and graduate school near Vienna. Professor Henzinger assumes his new position on September 1, 2009. More>>
December 5
______

The Parallel Computing Lab (Par Lab) held its opening ceremony on Dec. 1, 2008 in Soda Hall. The Par Lab's research agenda will be driven by creating compelling applications that need much more computing horsepower to run well, focusing on the areas of personal health, image retrieval, music, speech understanding, and web browsers. The Par Lab will be funded $10M over 5-years by the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC) founded by Intel and Microsoft.
December 3
______

An interview profiling Richard Karp’s career as a faculty member to Kyoto Prize winner (Japan’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science) is featured in the Berkeley Science Review, Issue 15. Also featured is an article on the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) titled, "The Sound of New Music". David Wessel, co-director of CNMAT is also a faculty member of the Par Lab, a new EECS research center opening Dec. 1, 2008.
November 20
______

Chenming Hu has been selected to receive the 2009 IEEE Jun-Ichi Nishizawa Medal for technical contributions to MOS device reliability, scaling of CMOS and compact device modeling. Recipients are chosen for quality of the technical achievement, enhancement of technology, impact on the relevant technical community, impact on the profession and benefit to the society, publications and patents and the quality of the nomination.
November 17
______

Susan Graham has been awarded the 2009 IEEE John Von Neumann Medal for contributions to programming language design and implementation and for exemplary service to the discipline of computer science. Recipients are selected for truly outstanding contributions in computer hardware, software or systems art, scope is the processing of information and includes the subject areas of computer architecture, base technologies, systems, languages, algorithms, protocols and application domains, and overall strength of the nomination.
November 17
______

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincetelli has been selected to receive the 2009 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award for pioneering innovation and leadership in electronic design automation that have enabled the design of modern electronics systems and their industrial implementation. Recipients are chosen for groundbreaking contributions that have had an exceptional impact on the development of electronics and electrical engineering or related fields.
November 17
______

EECS graduate student Jike Chong has been selected to receive a Mayfield Fellowship, a year-long program at UC Berkeley that brings together grad students from Haas Business School, the College of Engineering and the School of Information Management. The program provides a broad entrepreneurship experience by combining ongoing mentoring with faculty, company executives, venture capitalists and Silicon Valley networking activities.
November 17
______

UC Berkeley's software tools team, lead by EECS post doc Douglas Densmore, won a gold medal (only 16 of 84 teams received this distinction) in MIT's International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition on November 8-9th. They were also awarded "best software tool". The members of the team include Matthew Johnson and Nade Sritanyaratana (both bioengineering undergrads) as well as Anne Van Devender (a participant in Berkeley's SUPERB summer program). More>>
November 13
______

Connie Chang-Hasnain has been selected as one of the new National Security Science and Engineering Fellows. This is a very prestigious recognition, honoring 8 distinguished scientists and engineers in its inaugural round. Selected from over 350 applicants, the eight researchers from the first NSSEFF competition "are expected to make considerable discoveries in the core science and engineering disciplines underpinning the technology of future DoD systems".
November 10
______

Anant Sahai was quoted in a MIT Technology Review article titled, “The Coming Wireless Revolution: Gadgets that operate over television frequencies promise to transform the wireless landscape”.  The FCC made the decision to allow megahertz frequency bands previously allocated to television broadcasters will now be opened to other device manufacturers. Prof. Sahai feels this will begin a “wireless revolution”.
______

Michael Clancy has been selected for the 2009 ACM Special Interest Group in Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Award for Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Education Community. This award honors an individual who has a long history of volunteer service to the computer science education community.
November 5
______

Yun Song has won a Packard Fellowship. Yun was one of twenty selected nationwide from all areas of science and engineering. The Fellowship Program provides each recipient with an $875,000 grant over five years.
October 16
______

EECS undergraduate student Scott Crawford was featured in an East Bay Business News article titled “Sandia lab tool puts Internet traffic on the map”. During his internship at Sandia National Laboratories Livermore, Scott and fellow intern Andrew Schran, under the mentorship of computer scientist Steve Hurd, developed SHINI, the Sandia Heuristic Intelligent Network Imaging tool that allows computer scientists to visualize connections between computers drawn as lines between points or color-coded “heat maps” on Google Earth.
EB Business Times (subsrciption required)
Podcast
October 1
______

Dave Patterson has won the 2008 Alumni Achievement in Academia Award from the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science. Recipients of this award are chosen for excellence in their fields as researchers and educators.
September 18
______

EECS alumnus Paul E. Jacobs, Ph.D. '89, is the recipient of the 2008 Berkeley Engineering Innovation Award. This award recognizes outstanding achievements by alumni in the field of engineering and technology. Selection of recipients is based on exemplary performance and recognition locally, nationally, or internationally in one or more of the following areas: professional achievement, academic achievement and public service achievement. More>>
September 11
______

Ron Fearing, head of the research group continuing their march toward creating a synthetic, gecko-like adhesive was featured in Langmuir, the online publication of the American Chemical Society. The article titled, “Engineers create new gecko-like adhesive that shakes off dirt” have reached their latest milestone creating the first adhesive that cleans itself after each use without the need for water or chemicals, much like the remarkable hairs found on the gecko lizard’s toes.
UC Newsroom
More>>
September 10
______

Two EECS alumni, Robert Wood, Ph.D. ’05 and Andrew Ng, Ph.D. ‘03 were named two of the 2008 Top 100 Young Innovators (under the age of 35) by MIT’s Technology Review. Robert Wood, now an assistant professor of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard, developed a revolutionary fabrication technique that allows engineers to make a range of very tiny parts for any kind of robot. Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford, founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project that can deduce how to pick up an object it's never seen before. More>>
September 3