CS Prof. Ion Stoica has won the 2023 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. Presented annually, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1986 for outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications. The award is named in honor of Dr. Koji Kobayashi, who has been a leading force in advancing the integrated use of computers and communications. Stoica was cited “for contributions to the design of cloud and computer network services.” Stoica’s research is focused on cloud computing and networked computer systems. He is the Executive Chairman and co-founder of Databricks and an ACM Fellow. Previous winners of this award include Profs. Kannan Ramchandran and Jean Walrand, and the late Prof. Emeritus Elwyn Berlekamp.

CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, the Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), and the Dean of the School of Information has been elected to become an Honorary Member of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). Each year, the Council of the LMS considers the election of Honorary Members of the Society amongst distinguished mathematicians who are not normally resident within the United Kingdom. Chayes was cited for “fundamental contributions to many of the most prominent topics in the mathematics, computation, and application of network science, data science, and allied areas,” and credited for co-inventing “the field of graphons.”

Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao has won the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Young Computer Architect Award, which recognizes outstanding research contributions by an individual in the field of Computer Architecture, and who received their Ph.D. within the last six years. Shao's work focuses on specialized accelerators, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. The award was presented last week at the 49th edition of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '22) in New York City, New York. 

EECS Prof. Dan Klein and Assistant Prof. Angjoo Kanazawa have won 2022 Bakar Fellows Spark Awards.  These awards are designed to accelerate Berkeley faculty-led research "to tangible, positive societal impact through commercialization."  Bakar Fellows become part of a campus ecosystem that provides support and programs to assist them in introducing discoveries to the market.  Klein is developing a device that will allow users to communicate through computers by "silent speech"--that is, mouthing words without vocalizations. This technology, which may take the form of a headset that can track a user's facial muscles and translate it into sound, would benefit people with special needs as well as make it easier for everyone to hold private phone conversations in public.  Kanazawa plans to build 360 consumer cameras that can capture 4K video at 90 frames per second using an artificial intelligence framework and the latest volumetric neural rendering techniques.

CS Prof. Jelani Nelson has won the Best Paper Award at the 2022 ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) on June 13th.  The symposium is a collaboration between three ACM Special Interest Groups: Management of Data (SIGMOD), Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), and Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI).  Nelson's award is for a paper he co-wrote with Huacheng Yu titled "Optimal Bounds for Approximate Counting," in which they describe research on the asymptotic space complexity of maintaining an approximate counter as it is dynamically incremented, proving both new upper and lower bounds that for the first time match up to a constant factor, completely resolving a problem that was first studied in the late 1970s.

CS Prof. Emeritus Christos Papadimitriou has won the 2022 IEEE Computer Society Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award.  This award was created "to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation or expansion and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier."  Papadimitriou was cited "for fundamental contributions to Computer Science, via the development of the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its application to the natural and social sciences."  He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and the brain.  He has also published three novels: “Turing,” “Logicomix” and “Independence.”  Papadimitriou is currently teaching at Columbia University.

CS Prof. Jitendra Malik has been selected as one of two 2023 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecturers (FRL). This Lectureship is bestowed by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate to recognize faculty “whose research has changed the shape of their discipline” and invite them “to share their innovative work with the broader campus community and the public.”  Each lecturer will present a talk on a topic of their choice in April 2023. Malik, who also holds appointments in vision science, cognitive science, and bioengineering, is known for his research in computer vision, computational modeling of biological vision, computer graphics, and machine learning.  Several well-known concepts and algorithms arose in this work, such as anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging, shape contexts and R-CNN. He has won numerous awards including an IEEE CS Computer Pioneer Award in 2019.

EECS alumna and former Regents Chancellor's Scholar Divya Periyakoil (B.S. 2020) has won a Bloomberg Fellowship from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Bloomberg fellows are awarded full scholarships to pursue a Master or Doctor of Public Health at Johns Hopkins to tackle one of five critical health issues: addiction and overdose, adolescent health, environmental challenges, obesity and the food system, or violence. Periyakoil's fellowship is in the area of Environmental Challenges. As an undergrad, she was a Population Health Data Science Researcher in a project that focused on developing and applying machine learning, deep learning, and other forms of advanced analytic techniques and methodologies to advance environmental health research and devise innovative solutions to overcome environmental challenges to promote health equity. The project was part of a collaboration between two Berkeley groups, the Research in Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Energy (RAISE) Lab, which develops and integrates tele-health, sensors, analytics, and smart device technologies to lower health costs and improve outcomes, and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health's Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability, which studies how environmental exposures, like those resulting from climate change, impact the most vulnerable members of our community, such as children, pregnant women, people of low socioeconomic status, and laborers.

EECS graduate students Roderick Bayliss III (advisor: Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) and Vivek Nair (advisor: Dawn Song) have been selected to receive 2022 Hertz Fellowships.  One of the most prestigious awards of its kind, Hertz Fellowships support PhD students whose research show "the greatest potential to tackle society's most urgent problems." Bayliss is developing more efficient and power-dense types of power converters—devices that change the current, voltage or frequency of electrical energy—and inductors, which store energy, to help reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. He earned his B.S. and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering from MIT.  Nair is developing cutting-edge cryptographic techniques to defend digital infrastructure against sophisticated cyberthreats. He was the youngest-ever recipient of a B.A. and Master's in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and is the founder of Multifactor.com.  Their fellowships will fund up to five years of graduate research with "the freedom to pursue innovative ideas wherever they may lead."  Hertz Fellows also receive lifelong professional support, including mentoring and networking with a powerful community of more than 1,200 researchers.

Two of EECS Prof. Ren Ng's former graduate students, Pratul Srinivasan and Benjamin Mildenhall, jointly received an honorable mention for the 2021 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation Award.  This award is presented annually to the "author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering."  Srinivasan and Mildenhall, who both currently work at Google Research,  were recognized "for their co-invention of the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representation, associated algorithms and theory, and their successful application to the view synthesis problem."  Srinivasan’s dissertation, "Scene Representations for View Synthesis with Deep Learning," and Mildenhall’s dissertation, “Neural Scene Representations for View Synthesis,” addressed a long-standing open problem in computer vision and computer graphics called the "view synthesis" problem:  If you provide a computer with just a few of photographs of a scene, how can you get it to predict new images from any intermediate viewpoint?  "NeRF has already inspired a remarkable volume of follow-on research, and the associated publications have received some of the fastest rates of citation in computer graphics literature—hundreds in the first year of post-publication."