EECS Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao, Associate Prof. Prabal Dutta, and alumnus Deepak Pathak have won 2022 Okawa Foundation Research Grants. The Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications recognizes "studies and analyses in the fields of information and telecommunications." Shao, whose research interests are in computer architecture, was awarded for her work on building domain-specific systems at scale. Dutta, whose research interests include energy-efficient cyber-physical systems and applications of sensor networks and Internet-of-things technology, was awarded for his work on a new kind of radio architecture, called “backsplatter,” and combining it with conventional radios. Pathak, who is now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, was recognized for his work “Towards Continually Improving Robots in the Wild.” They comprise three of the seven U.S. recipients who were awarded $10,000 grants this year.

CS Profs. Dawn Song and David Wagner have won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) Test-of-Time Award. The 2011 paper titled, “Android Permissions Demystified,” by Felt, Chin, Hanna, Song and Wagner, was the first paper to examine real-world security issues in Android applications' use of permissions. The paper has been cited 1985 times and is still taught in graduate courses today. The award was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the flagship conference of the ACM SIGSAC, which took place in Los Angeles this year.

Theory Ph.D. student Fred Zhang (advisor: Jelani Nelson) has won the Best Student Paper Award at ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) 2023. The paper titled, “Online Prediction in Sub-linear Space'' was co-authored by Binghui Peng of Columbia University. The ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, or “SODA,” conference showcases “research topics related to design and analysis of efficient algorithms and data structures for discrete problems.” 

EECS Associate Prof. Prabal Dutta has won the 2022 ACM SenSys Test of Time Award. The paper by Dutta, Dawson-Haggerty (Ph.D. ‘14), Chen, Liang, and Terzis titled, “Design and Evaluation of a Versatile and Efficient Receiver-Initiated Link Layer for Low-Power Wireless,”  was recognized “for pioneering the use of synchronous transmissions in low-power protocols by exploiting their benefits at the MAC layer and pushing the limits of radio operation.” Established in 2014, the “ToTA” recognizes papers that are at least 10 years old and have demonstrated long-lasting impact on network embedded sensing system science and engineering. “It's a real testament that so much of the field traces its roots to Berkeley,” said Dutta.

CS and IEOR Prof. Ken Goldberg and his lab at BAIR have won multiple best paper awards this year. “Autonomously Untangling Long Cables” won the Best Systems Paper at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in June 2022. “Automated Pruning of Polyculture Plants” won Best Paper at the IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) in August 2022. At this year’s IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), held in October, the paper titled, “Speedfolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments” took the top spot out of 3500 submissions to win the IROS Best Paper Award. The common thread among these results is the application of advances in deep learning to solve robot manipulation problems. “I feel lucky every day that I get to work in this uniquely stimulating environment with the world's most brilliant, creative, and dedicated students, staff, and faculty," said Goldberg.

CS Prof. Joe Hellerstein has won the IEEE VIS Test of Time Award for a paper he co-wrote with Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke, and Jeffrey Heer in 2012 titled, “Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study.” The paper considered how visual analytics are used within organizations and provided an accessible framework for the abstraction of high-level tasks and user archetypes. “Before this work we struggled to find the vocabulary to use, now we have framings that are easy to remember and conceptualise the space nicely,” said the award committee. "The paper has received an impressive quantity of citations and patent citations, is still relevant today, and continues to be cited frequently." The IEEE VIS Test of Time Award recognizes articles published at previous conferences whose contents are still vibrant and useful today and have had a major impact and influence within and beyond the visualization community.  

Edward Lee has won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED) Technical Achievement Award. Prof. Lee is the inaugural recipient of the lifetime achievement award, and was honored “for foundational contributions on modeling and design of embedded, real-time, and cyber-physical systems.” Created in 2022, the Technical Achievement Award is designed “to recognize significant and sustained contributions to research and/or system implementations made by the awardee through the lifetime." Prof. Lee also received an honorary doctorate from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) in May.

Roxana Infante is the recipient of the 2022 EECS/ERSO Wil Zeilinger Staff Excellence Award. Established in 1992 in honor of Wil Zeilinger, Cory Hall’s first department engineer, the Zeilinger Award is the most prestigious staff honor in the EECS department and is presented annually to the staff member who best embodies "a spirit of service cheerfully given for the general good." Over the course of Roxana’s 12-year career at UC Berkeley, she has provided outstanding service to many 5-year research labs, including the ParLab, BerkeleyDrive, and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR). According to one nominator, “She truly is one of the kindest, most cheerful, and thoughtful people I’ve ever met, let alone had the pleasure of working with.”

EECS Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao is among the 15 recipients of the Intel Rising Star Award this year. Awarded annually, the Intel Rising Star Award (RSA) program supports early-career faculty whose research is groundbreaking and demonstrates the potential to disrupt industries. Recipients are chosen for “innovative teaching methods and for increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in computer science and engineering.” Prof. Shao’s research focuses on improving the scalability, efficiency, and programmability of heterogeneous platforms from edge devices to data centers. In collaboration with senior technical leaders at Intel, Prof. Shao plans to explore the intersection of architectural prototyping, algorithm development, and programming support for heterogeneous accelerators: “As we enter the golden age of computer architecture, there are tremendous opportunities to innovate across the stack in the hardware community. I'm excited to work with our students, faculty members, and industry collaborators to build novel systems together!" said Shao. 

CS Prof. Raluca Ada Popa was interviewed as a Featured ACM Member as part of the "People of ACM" bulletin. As the Co-Director of RISELab and SkyLab, two labs aiming to build secure intelligent systems for the cloud and for the sky of cloud, she spoke about her research interests, which include security, systems, and applied cryptography. “I love both to build systems that can solve a real-world problem and to reason about deep mathematical concepts,” she said. Aiming to predict the direction of her research, she outlined her renewed focus on confidential computing, a major shift in the cloud computing landscape, which she said “will revolutionize data systems in industry in the coming years…[through] the combination of hardware security via hardware enclaves and cryptographic techniques. Many organizations have a lot of confidential data that they cannot share between different teams in their organization or different organizations. Sharing it would enable better medical studies, better fraud detection, increased business effectiveness, and other benefits.”