EECS News Spring 2010

Professor Emeritus Ernest S. Kuh will be honored at the 2011 ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD) for his contributions to the physical design community, to be held March 27-30, 2011. The (ISPD) provides a premier forum to exchange ideas and promote research on critical areas related to the physical design of VLSI systems.
August 17
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The 2010 Summer Undergraduate Program in Engineering Research at Berkeley - Computer Science in the Interest of Society (SUPERB-CSIS) finished a successful 8-week research program. SUPERB-CSIS brings together a group of diverse students to prepare and motivate them for graduate study. Their research focus is computer science in the context of solving societal problems, including health, national security and technology for underdeveloped countries. Meet the 2010 SUPERB-CSIS students.
August 17
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Avideh Zakohr’s research group was featured on ABC 7 KGO TV in a news story titled “Laser backpack creates instant 3D models”. They are doing research on using a new breed of miniature laser with an inertial management unit (IMU), like the ones that guide missiles to create 3D models. Designed in the form of a backpack, a person can collect data walking stairways, caves and places a robot cannot roll. This team’s research is also behind the technology used to create 3D views of major cities on Google Earth.
Daily Cal article
August 9
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Ali Javey’s research on nanopillars is featured in a MIT Technology Review article titled, “Nanopillars that Trap More Light.”  Many nanostructured materials have complex designs and require cumbersome fabrication methods to deposit multiple layers.  Prof. Javey’s technique to grow the nanopillars is relatively simple and low-cost that could lead to lower-cost solar cells and light detectors.
July 16
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Leon Chua has been selected as an IAS Fellow for this summer at the Institute of Advanced Study-Technical University of Munich. The IAS-TUM is a new high-profile program created by the Technical University of Munchen in connection with its selection as one of Germany's three “Excellent Research Universities”. Their board of advisers includes such luminaries as Nobel laureates Klaus von Klitzing and Bert Sakman. More>>
July 13
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Three distinguished EECS professors have been recognized this year with IEEE Technical Field Awards. Professor emeritus Charles Desoer has been awarded the 2011 Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award "for crucial conceptual research contributions to the behavior and the use of electrical circuits and systems." This award honors a researcher who has contributed to the theory of circuits. Connie Chang-Hasnain has won the IEEE David Sarnoff Award "for pioneering contributions to vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) arrays and tunable VCSELs." This award requires a singular outstanding achievement, originality, and recent impact (within five years). And Charles Birdsall, another of our fine emeritus faculty members, has received the 2011 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award "for theoretical investigations and fundamental discoveries involving microwave tubes, electron beam physics and particle-in-cell simulation of plasma physics." This award honors research in nuclear and plasma sciences.
July 2
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The research work of Professor Michel Maharbiz and his group are featured in an article titled “Lieutenant Bug – Cyborg insects report for duty” in the Spring 2010 issue of the Berkeley Science Review. These beetles can be flown with a hand–held control, much like hobby airplanes are flown with a joystick. The funding program, named Hybrid Insect Micro–Electro–Mechanical Systems (HI–MEMS), aims to take rein over insect locomotion, charging teams with the task of guiding an insect to a target with a radius of five meters from 100 meters away.
June 30
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Randy H. Katz is being honored by IEEE with the 2010 IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr., Education Medal. Professor Katz was chosen for his contributions to engineering education through influential textbooks, innovative curricular development, exceptional mentorship and inspired graduate and undergraduate teaching. This award is sponsored by The Mathworks, Inc.; Pearson Education, Inc.; National Instruments Foundation and the IEEE Life Members Committee.
June 18
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The EECS Department is pleased to announce the appointment of two new Chairs:

Costas Spanos is the newly appointed Chair of the EECS Department, effective July 1, 2010. Professor Spanos' research interests center on computer-aided manufacturing for integrated circuits, equipment modeling and control, process metrology, flexible manufacturing systems, as well as modeling, analyzing and diagnosing energy systems. He leads the Berkeley Computer-Aided Manufacturing (BCAM) project and is co-PI of the IMPACT project that address IC Design for Manufacturability. In 2004-05 he was named Director of the Electronics Research Laboratory; as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering from 2004-2008 he oversaw ERL's reorganization into the new Engineering Research Support Organization (ERSO). From 2008-2010 he served as the Chair of the EE Division and Associate Chair of EECS. He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2000), and in 2009 was appointed to the Andrew S. Grove Distinguished Professorship in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

David Culler is the newly appointed Chair of the Computer Science Division and Associate Chair of the EECS Department, effective July 1, 2010. Professor Culler is the world leader in sensor networks, having developed the operating system for them -- "Tiny OS" -- one of the most significant technologies to emerge in recent years. He has made fundamental contributions in several areas of computer systems, including parallel computing, high-performance clusters, scalable infrastructure for Internet services, and testbeds for global-scale networking innovation. In 2003 he was selected as one of /Scientific American/'s Top 50 Researchers. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2005, became a Fellow of IEEE in 2006, and in 2007 was appointed to the Howard Friesen Chair in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
June 14
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Joseph Hellerstein's work on the BLOOM language for cloud programming is on the 2010 Technology Review's TR10 - "the emerging technologies that will have the biggest impact on our world." The problem with current database languages is that they process data in static batches. They can't process data that is constantly changing, such as readings from a network of sensors. Bloom is a modification of these languages so that they can be used to quickly build any sort of application in the cloud--social networks, communication tools, games, and more. More>>
May 14
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Qualcomm’s believes that research and development is the key to harnessing the power of imagination and to discovering new possibilities. The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship was started with the goal to enable PhD students (in a team of two) in EECS to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas. In 2010, the Fellowship received 80 applications from teams at Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, UCSD and USC. Two out of six winning teams of the 2010 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship are from UCB EECS. They are Bor-Yiing Su and Bryan Catanzaro, recommended by Kurt Keutzer for “Parallel Object Recognition on Mobile Platforms”, and Maryam Tabesh and Amin Arbabian, recommended by Ali Niknejad for “Millimeter-wave Dual-Band Passive RFID using Antentronics”.
May 13
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Sayeef Salahuddin has been chosen to receive a 2010 Hellman Family Faculty Fund Award. This award helps ensure that important research by junior faculty receives needed support. Scholars in the physical and life sciences, engineering, the arts, humanities, and social sciences are eligible for the award. Recipients are selected principally because of the quality of their proposed research, Prof. Salahuddin will receive $38,000.
May 13
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Ruzena Bajcsy has been honored with the 2010 Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. This award recognizes individuals who by virtue of initiating new areas of research, development or engineering, have had a significant impact on development of the robotics and/or automation fields.
May 11
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Ali Javey is the winner of 2010 IEEE Nanotechnology Early Career Award. This award recognizes individuals who have made contributions with major impact on the field of nanotechnology and are chosen for their technical innovation and achievement, and impact on nanotechnology and engineering.
May 11
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EECS grad students Adrienne Felt, Bonnie Kirkpatrick, Daniela Rosner and Floraine Grabler have been chosen to receive Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships. These scholarships are awarded based on the strength of each candidate’s academic background and demonstrated leadership. Google hopes to encourage women to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders in the field. Recipients will each receive a $10,000 award for the upcoming academic year and will be invited to participate in all-expenses-paid networking retreats featuring workshops, speakers, panelists, breakout sessions and social activities at Google offices.
May 6
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Kris Pister’s research on “Smart dust” was featured in a CNN Tech article titled “’Smart dust’aims to monitor everything”. Hewlett-Packard recently announced it's working on a project called the "Central Nervous System for the Earth." In coming years, the company plans to deploy a trillion sensors all over the planet. The wireless devices would check to see if ecosystems are healthy, detect earthquakes more rapidly, predict traffic patterns and monitor energy use. The idea is that accidents could be prevented and energy could be saved if people knew more about the world in real time, instead of when workers check on these issues only occasionally.
May 6
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An EECS team led by professors Pieter Abbeel, Trevor Darrell and Stuart Russell, has been selected as one of the winners in Willow Garage's PR2 (Personal Robot 2) Beta Program. In this program Willow Garage gives away eleven robots worth over $4 million to eleven institutions and universities worldwide. The PR2 Beta Program is the start of a new long-term initiative to enable scientific breakthroughs in personal robotics and accelerate robotics research. Each participant in the program will contribute their research back to the open-source robotics community so that the community as a whole can build on each other’s progress.
May 5
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EECS graduate student Yaron Singer has been chosen to receive a 2010-2011 Facebook Fellowship. The Facebook Fellowship Program was launched this year to support Ph.D. students in the 2010-2011 school year who can help solve some of the biggest challenges facing the social web and Internet technology. Each fellow receives paid tuition and fees, a $30,000 stipend, conference travel and other benefits.
April 28
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Michael Jordan has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences for his contributions to the foundations and applications of machine learning. Members are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The National Academy of Sciences is a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare. More>>
April 28
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Leon Chua and Dawn Song have been named 2010 Fellows of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The citation credits Prof. Chua for the invention of “Brain-like Memristor circuits” and Dawn Song for “safe patches and applications to secure networked medical devices”.
April 15
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Jose Carmena has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation (NSF) 2010 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award. This award is one the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education and build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.
April 7
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The research work of EECS grad student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and Professor Pieter Abbeel is featured in a UC Newscenter article titled, “Researchers develop a robot that folds towels”. The team's technical innovation is a new computer vision-based approach for detecting the key points on the cloth for the robot to grasp, an approach that is highly effective because it depends only on geometric cues that can be identified reliably even in the presence of changes in appearance and texture.
April 5
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Tsu-Jae King Liu has been selected as one of the three recipients of the 2010 UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly Faculty Mentor Award (FMA). The Faculty Mentor Award, now in its sixth year, honors Senate and non-Senate members of the Berkeley faculty who have shown an outstanding commitment to mentoring, advising, and generally supporting graduate student researchers.
April 2
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Dan Klein is a recipient of the 2010 Distinguished Teaching Award. Recipients of this prestigious award are recognized for individual excellence in teaching that rises above good teaching: it incites intellectual curiosity in students, engages them thoroughly in the enterprise of learning, and has a life-long impact. This award, bestowed by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate's Committee on Teaching, is the highest honor for instruction given by UC Berkeley. Dan joins 12 previous winners in EECS (the second highest total on campus).
March 31
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Michael Jordan is the recipient of the 2009 ACM–AAAI Allen Newell Award. The Allen Newell Award is presented to an individual selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. Prof. Jordan is recognized for fundamental advances in statistical machine learning, a field which develops computational methods for inference and decision-making based on data. His work has had impact in signal processing, information retrieval, computational vision and natural language processing. More>>
March 30
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Jan Rabaey has received the 2010 Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Researcher Award, which recognizes researchers that have made a major contribution to the semiconductor industry. Jan is recognized for his leading research on communications and networking, design of low-power electronic systems, and innovative architectures for computing and signal processing. He has provided visionary leadership and direction for the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Gigascale System Research Center, the Multi-Scale Systems Center of the Focus Center Research Program (FCRP), and as director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center. More>>
March 19
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The Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the U.S. Department of State announce the launch of “Opinion Space” -- A Global Experiment in Open Dialogue”. Opinion Space is a visualization tool for world opinion developed by an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty at the UC Berkeley Center for New Media (Ken Goldberg, Director) in collaboration with new media experts at the U.S. Department of State. "Opinion Space” will harness the power of connection technologies to provide a unique forum for international dialogue. More>>
March 16
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Eric Brewer is the recipient of the 2009 ACM Infosys Foundation Award. He received this award for his design and development of highly scalable internet services and innovations in bringing information technology to developing regions. His recent work on technology for developing regions has had remarkable success in delivering information systems that are actually used to benefit tens of thousands of people and can be sustained with local resources. More>>
March 15
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UC Berkeley alumnus Charles P. Thacker is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2009 A. M. Turing Award, the "Nobel Prize" of Computer Science. He received the award in recognition of his pioneering design and realization of the Alto (computer), the first modern personal computer and for his contributions to the Ethernet and the Tablet PC. He is also winner of CS Distinguished Alumni Award (1996). Recently, Charles designed the Berkeley Emulation Engine 3 (BEE3) board based on FPGAs that are in use at many universities, including UC Berkeley. More>>
March 9
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Leon Chua has been chosen to receive this year's ISQED Quality Award at the annual International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED). ISQED Awards honor and pay tribute to technical & management professionals and leaders whose exceptional achievements and outstanding contributions have made a lasting impact on the field of quality electronic design. This a prestigious recognition that last year was given to EECS alumi Professor Robert Dutton from Stanford and Dr. Stan Williams from HP.
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March 8 EECS alumnus Zhong (John) Deng, Ph.D. ‘97 has been elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering. At 41, he is the youngest ever elected to that body. He is also the CEO of Vimicro, a fabless semiconductor company in Beijing which is listed on NASDAQ. His advisor was Theodore Van Duzer, his dissertation was on superconducting digital circuits.
March 3
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Sayeef Salahuddin has received a National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Initiative for Scientific Exploration (NISE) Award that will give him 1,000,000 computing hours for his project on “Electron Transport in Presence of Lattice Vibrations for Electronic, Spintronic and Photovoltaic Devices”. More>>
March 2
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $24.5 million for establishing the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S). The center will focus on 4 distinct themes, Nanoelectronics, led by Eli Yablonovitch, Nanomechanics, led by Tsu-Jae King, Nanomagnetics, led by Jeffrey Bokor and Nanophotonics, led by Ming Wu. UC Berkeley researchers will team up with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Contra Costa College, Los Angeles Trade Technical College and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to dramatically dampen electronics' appetite for power. More>>
February 23
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Ali Javey and Tom Griffiths are two of six young UC Berkeley faculty members who have been awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship. This award is given annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to scientists, mathematicians and economists who are at an early stage of their research careers. The Sloan Research Fellowships support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers, and often at pivotal stages in their work. More>>
February 18
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Michael I. Jordan is among six UC Berkeley faculty that have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Election to the NAE is considered one of the most prestigious professional distinctions accorded to an American engineer. Membership in the academy recognizes an individual's outstanding contributions to engineering research, including the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing and implementing innovative approaches to engineering education. Prof. Jordan was elected for his contributions to the foundations and applications of machine learning. More>>
February 17
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EECS alumnus Paul E. Debevec is receiving an Academy Award in science and engineering for his work on digital facial-rendering technology. Based on original research led by Debevec at the University of California at Berkeley and published at the 2000 SIGGRAPH conference, the Light Stage systems efficiently capture how an actor's face appears when lit from every possible lighting direction. From this captured imagery, specialized algorithms create realistic virtual renditions of the actor in the illumination of any location or set, faithfully reproducing the color, texture, shine, shading, and translucency of the actor's skin. Paul was a student of Prof. Jitendra Malik. More>>
February 10
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EECS junior Simran Chaudhry has been selected for the National Math and Science Initiative Young Leaders Program. This prestigious, competitive program in partnership with FORTUNE and ExxonMobil introduces girls who are college juniors majoring in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields to female executives at FORTUNE 500 companies. The Young Leaders will be required to give presentations to up to 200 girls in elementary and middle school math and science classes in their communities and will conclude with a Capstone Seminar in NYC to highlight lessons in leadership, careers in math and science fields, and lessons learned from the program participants.
January 11