EECS News Fall 2011

Pieter Abbeel has been selected as a winner of the the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Research Program (YIP) award. The AFOSR YIP supports scientists and engineers who have received Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last five years and show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering; enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators; and increase opportunities for the young investigator to recognize the Air Force mission and related challenges in science and engineering.
January 5
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Jan Rabaey is one of three new honorary doctors at Lund UniversityÕs Faculty of Engineering. Founded in 1666, Lund University, located in Sweden, is today one of the largest, oldest and broadest universities in Scandinavia and is consistently ranked among the world's top 100 universities. In 1999 Robert Bordersen received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lund.
December 24
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The EECS Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) has received the Outstanding Chapter Award for 2010 Ð 2011. This coveted award is a mark of great distinction for a college chapter. Chapters are judged on their activities of service to others, and all chapters with exemplary programs can win. The award plaque will be formally announced and presented at the ECEDHA Annual Meeting Award banquet on March 26.
December 23
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Prof. Randy Howard Katz, United Microelectronics Corporation Distinguished Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley has received the Public Service Medal (Friends of Singapore) National Day Award. This award recognizes foreign talent who have rendered commendable public service to Singapore. Prof. Katz is also a member and former Chairman of Singapore's Institute for Information Communications Research (I2R) Scientific Advisory Board.
December 20
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Eric Schmidt has been named Alumnus of the Year 2012 by the Cal Alumni Association, UC Berkeley. This is the highest honor awarded to a prominent alumnus/a who has achieved distinction through exceptional contribution to our international, national, state, or community welfare. As CEO, and now executive chairman Dr. Schmidt has helped Google grow from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology and information and a household word.
December 20
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EECS Ph.D. student Adrienne Porter Felt, whose advisor is David Wagner, was featured in an IT security Tech Republic blog titled “Android apps and advertising: A bit too cozy”. Adrienne reports that marketing companies supplying ads to Android apps are privy to the same user information supplied to the app developer.
December 13
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Susan Graham was also elevated to IEEE Fellow. IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation. Prof. Graham is recognized for her contributions to programming language design and implementation and for service to the discipline of computer science.
November 30
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Dr. Patricia Derler, a postdoctoral visitor in Prof. Edward Lee's CHESS research center focusing on the PTIDES effort, has been awarded her degree sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae (under the auspices of the President of Austria). Only one out of 2500 doctoral graduates per year achieve this honor. Dr. Derler was awarded a golden honorary ring of Austria by Heinz Fischer, the president of Austria.
November 25
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Murat Arcak and Ahmad Bahai have been elevated to IEEE Fellow. Prof. Arcak is being recognized "for contributions to theory and application of nonlinear observer design and the passivity approach to control of distributed systems" and Prof. Bahai is being recognized "for contributions to multi-carrier wireless and wire-line communication systems".
November 23
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Randy Katz and Stuart Russell have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Fellows are recognized for meritorious efforts to advance science or its applications.
November 23 Krste Asanovic and Armando Fox has been named a 2011 Distinguished Scientist by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery. The ACM Distinguished Member Recognition Program recognizes ACM members who have made significant accomplishments or achieved a significant impact on the computing field. Recipients of this honor include computer scientists and engineers from some of the world’s leading corporations, research labs and universities who made significant advances in technology that are having lasting impacts on the lives of people across the globe.
November 23
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EECS grad students Baruch Sterin (advisor is Prof. Robert Brayton) and Michael Zimmer (advisor is Prof. Edward Lee) won first place (tied with another team) at this year's ICCAD CADathlon (a programming competition). The team is from the DMA (Design, Modeling and Analysis) research area (DMA is the new name for DES). For the past 2 years Baruch Sterin was also on the UC Berkeley team with Tobias Welp. On both occasions, the DMA team won second place.
November 15
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Robert Brayton is the 2011 ACM/SIGDA Pioneering Achievement Award recipient “for outstanding contributions to the field of Computer Aided Design of integrated systems over the last several decades”. This was awarded on Monday Nov. 7 at the International Conference on Computer Aided Design in San Jose.
November 9
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The European Design Automation Association is recognizing Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli with the 2012 EDAA Lifetime Achievement Award. Past recipients of this award are Kurt Antreich, Hugo De Man, Jochen Jess, Robert Brayton, Tom Williams, Ernest Kuh, Jan Rabaey, Daniel Gajski and Melvin A. Breuer. Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is invited to receive the award at the Opening Ceremony of the DATE2012 conference on March 13, 2012 in Dresden.
November 9
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Lotfi Zadeh will receive an Honorary Doctorate from Obuda University, Budapest, Hungary. Since Prof. Zadeh does not travel long distance, the President of the University and his associates traveled to Berkeley to award him the degree in a small ceremony here, linked in real time with the ceremony in Budapest. This is another great honor, and is his 25th honorary doctorate.
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Ron Fearing and grad student Kevin Peterson’s research work on DASH (Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod) +Wings was featured in an ABC.com article & video titled “Mechanical flying cockroach unveiled at Cal lab”. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security issued a proposal for a disposable robot that could be used in search and rescue missions. The lab unveiled a contender: a mechanical cockroach with wings.
UC Newscenter article More>>
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EECS Grad students Sriramkumar Venugopalan's (advised by Prof. Chenming Hu) research on "SPICE modeling of FinFETs and other Multi-Gate FETs" and Asif Khan's (advised by Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin) work on "Experimental proof-of-concept demonstration of ferroelectric negative capacitance" have recently been awarded Silver awards in the 5th TSMC Outstanding Student Research Award in their respective categories: "Electronic Device, Process and Patterning Technologies" and "Physics and Chemistry of Electronic Materials".
October 27
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EECS grad student Chintan Thakkar, whose advisor is Prof. Elad Alon, has been awarded a 2011 Intel Ph.D. Fellowship. The Intel PhD Fellowship program focuses on research in Intel’s technical areas; Hardware Systems Technology and Design, Software Technology and Design, and Semiconductor Technology and Manufacturing. This is a very prestigious award, and winning students are recognized as being tops in their areas of research.
October 25
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Prof. Ron Fearing’s research on the Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod (DASH) was featured in a UC Berkeley Newscenter article titled “Robotic roach gets wings, sheds light on evolution of flight”. DASH is a six-legged robotic bug with wings. In an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight.
October 20
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Armando Fox was chosen as a Gilbreth Lecturer to give a talk on cloud computing before members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) at its annual meeting. The Armstrong Endowment for Young Engineers-Gilbreth Lectures, named in honor of Lillian M. Gilbreth, the first woman inducted into the NAE, were established in 2001 by the Council of the NAE as a means of recognizing outstanding young American engineers and making them more visible to the NAE membership. More>>
October 18
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Susan Graham has been selected as the winner of the 2011 ACM–IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. This award is given jointly by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society for outstanding contributions to programmability or productivity in high-performance computing together with significant community service or mentoring contributions. Prof. Graham in receiving this award in recognition of her work for foundational compilation algorithms and programming tools; research and discipline leadership; and exceptional mentoring. More>>
September 30
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EECS alum Salman Avestimehr, who graduated from here a few years ago with the Sakrison Award and is now a faculty member at Cornell, won the 2011 PECASE (Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers) Award. This award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. More>>
September 27
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Ali Javey has received the first ASPIRE Prize (APEC Science Prize for Innovation, Research and Education), presented to him by the U.S. Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu. This award is made in recognition of young scientists who have demonstrated a commitment to both excellence in scientific research, as evidenced by scholarly publication, and cooperation with scientists from otherAsia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) member economies. More>>
September 14
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The research work of EECS graduate student Asif Khan and Professor Sayeef Salahuddin was featured in a UC Berkeley News Center article titled, “Ferroelectrics could pave way for ultra-low power computing”. The engineers demonstrated for the first time that in a capacitor made with a ferroelectric material paired with a dielectric – an electrical insulator – the charge accumulated for a given voltage can, in effect, be amplified, a phenomenon called negative capacitance. The team report their results in the Sept. 12 issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters.
September 13
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Changhwan Shin (Ph.D. 2011), who is advised by Professors Tsu-Jae King Liu and Bora Nikolic, won the Best Paper Award at the 2010 European Solid State Device Research Conference (ESSDERC), for the paper entitled "Tri-Gate Bulk CMOS technology for Improved SRAM Scalability". The award ceremony will be held at ESSCIRC/ESSDERC 2011 in Helsinki, Finland next week.
September 7
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Ravi Ramamoorthi is the recipient of the 2011 Okawa Foundation Research Grant from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. Established in 1986 as a non-profit organization to promote the growth and development of the information and telecommunications fields, this award recognizes excellence and potential in young IT researchers.
September 1
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EECS graduate student Oriol Vinyals has been named the 2011 Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship winner. Oriol has been working with Professors Nelson Morgan and Ruzena Bajcsy, focusing on applied machine learning problems involving multimodal signals such as speech and vision. The main work during the fellowship will aim to investigate how to efficiently do inference on challenging human computer interaction scenarios. Microsoft Research is eager to recognize and support outstanding fellows to advance the state of computer science and to strengthen collaborative relationships with academic institutions.
August 25
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CS KickStart is a program designed for incoming freshman students that are interested in computer science, but have little experience with it. This year 24 female students participated in a week long intensive program learning programming concepts, visited Google, and heard from faculty, students, and alumnae about opportunities in computer science. This program was founded by grad students Floraine Berthouzoz and Colleen Lewis, supported by faculty advisors Ruzena Bajcsy and David Wagner and an advisory board of nine UC Berkeley professors and staff. CS KickStart is supported by a grant from NSF and generous support from Adobe, Facebook, Google, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, and Northrup Grumman. More>>
August 23
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Pieter Abbeel has been named to the prestigious list of 35 of the world's top young innovators by Technology Review magazine. Prof. Abbeel is being recognized for his research in algorithms that enable robots to learn new tasks. Abbeel's team has enabled robots to perform such concrete skills as tying surgical knots or folding towels and socks. To complete those tasks, robots must be able to identify and pick out the target items and then determine how to correctly manipulate them. Currently he has focused on applying his machine-learning research to surgical and personal robotics.
UC News Center article
August 23