Prof. Armando Fox has been selected to receive the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2015 Karl. V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Recipients of this award are recognized for advancing new teaching methodologies; effecting new curriculum development or expansion in Computer Science and Engineering; or making a significant contribution to the educational mission of ACM. Prof. Fox was selected for his contributions to computing education through leadership and curriculum development in international online education; creating innovative courses, tools and inexpensive textbooks for software engineering; and outstanding teaching.

Prof. Scott Shenker has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The strength of the Academy lies in the intellectual leadership of its members and the wide range of expertise they bring to its studies and publications. The Academy membership encompasses over 4,600 Fellows and 600 Foreign Honorary Members and reflects the full range of disciplines and professions: mathematics, the physical and biological sciences, medicine, the social sciences and humanities, business, government, public affairs, and the arts. Among the Academy's Fellows are more than 250 Nobel laureates and 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

The paper by Prof. David Culler and former students Joseph Polastre and Jason Hill titled “Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks", in the Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems has been selected as a winner of the inaugural SIGMOBILE Test of Time award for 2016. The Berkeley MAC (B-MAC) was a pioneering contribution to media access control in TinyOS-based wireless sensor networks. B-MAC and its underlying low-power listening principle became a facto standard in sensor networks. It plays a lasting role in the development of new low power wireless technologies such as IoT.

According to Semantic Scholar, a search tool that uses AI to actually understand—to a limited extent—the content of published literature,  Prof. Michael Jordan is the most influential computer scientist on the web.  Semantic Scholar, developed at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is a "smart" search service for journal articles which is designed to quickly highlight the most important papers and identify the connections between them.  The project and its rankings are profiled in a Science article titled "Who’s the Michael Jordan of computer science? New tool ranks researchers' influence."   Profs. Jitendra Malik and Scott Shenker also rank in the top 7.

The paper titled "Crowdie: Feedback-Directed Instrumentation for Deployed JavaScript Applications", authored by Magnus Madsen (U. of Waterloo), Frank Tip (Samsung), Esben Andreasen (Aarhus U.), Prof. Koushik Sen (EECS) and Anders Moller (Aarhus U.) has been chosen to receive an ACM SIGSOFT (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering) Distinguished Paper Award. Less than 10% of the accepted papers and less than 2% of the total submissions have been chosen to receive this highly prestigious award.

Prof. Michael Jordan has been selected to receive the 2016 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) Research Excellence Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. Professor Jordan is recognized for his groundbreaking and impactful research in both the theory and application of statistical machine learning.

Prof. Ken Goldberg’s “People and Robots” CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) initiative is in Part 2 of Rolling Stone’s “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report”. One of the projects Prof. Goldberg is working on is the development of surgical robots to do the tedious work, allowing surgeons to focus on the important tasks.

Prof. Pieter Abbeel is featured in a Rolling Stone article titled “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1.”  Algorithms are the basis for modern day computing – data goes in, the computer does its thing, and the algorithm spits out a result. What’s new is that scientists have developed algorithms that reverse this process, allowing computers to write their own algorithms. This is called machine learning and is the idea behind the science of artificial Intelligence.

It is with sadness to announce that Prof. Chitoor V. Ramamoorthy (“Ram”) passed away on Thursday, March 10 at UCSD’s Thornton Hospital. All extended family members and friends are being directed to a workshop which will be held on May 5th in La Jolla for a memorial: www.TransKS.org. Sympathy cards may be sent to Mrs. Ramamoorthy at 558 Blackhawk Club Drive, Danville, CA 94506. Donations may be directed to the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award.

Prof. Dan Garcia has been selected to receive a National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) 2016 Undergraduate Research Mentoring (URM) Award. This award recognizes Academic Alliance representatives at non-profit U.S. Institutions for their outstanding mentorship, high-quality research opportunities, recruitment of women and minority students, and efforts to encourage and advance undergraduates in computing-related fields.