Alumna Barbara Grosz (CS M.S. '71/Ph.D. '77), Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).  The award recognizes the work of a researcher who has made sustained and impactful contributions to the field of Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing. Grosz has spent her career working to make human-computer interactions as fluent as human-to-human interaction. Her recent research has focused on fundamental problems in modeling collaborative activity, developing systems ("agents") able to collaborate with each other and their users, and constructing collaborative, multi-modal systems for human-computer communication.  Her current research projects focus on using results of prior work to improve health care coordination and enhance K-12 science education.

CS alumna Justine Sherry (M.S. '12/Ph.D. '16 advisor: Sylvia Ratnasamy) has won the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Networking and Data Communication.  Justine's thesis was on "Middleboxes as a Cloud Service," and brought the benefits of cloud computing to the networking domain.  Justine is now assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

Undergraduates Richard Li (CS), Veeral Patel, Yian Liou (EECS), and Roy Tu (EECS, graduated 2016) have qualified for the 2nd Annual Cambridge 2 Cambridge Cybersecurity Challenge (C2C), which will be held July 24-26, 2017 at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in England.  Conceived as a way to create a greater cybersecurity collaboration between the US (MIT CSAIL) and UK, the C2C gives students the opportunity to explore creative ways to combat global cyber attacks and acquire and hone crucial skills.  Along with gaining a sense of accomplishment, building friendships overseas, and receiving guidance from mentors in leading security organizations,  top students will earn glory, medals, and a share of $20K in cash prizes.  The competition will be a live three-day showdown with over 100 competitors from 25 universities in the US and UK.

Zephyr, the solar vehicle built by UC Berkeley's CalSol team (including sophomore Wen Rui Liau, one of Prof. James Demmel's research students), has won the 2017 Formula Sun Grand Prix (FSGP).  The FSGP is an annual nationwide solar vehicle race that takes place on closed-loop race tracks. From July 6-8, in Austin, Texas, competing teams tested the limits of their vehicles in handling curves, braking, and acceleration.  The winner, determined by the total number of laps completed--minus penalties--over three days of racing, was Zephyr with 228 laps completed and zero penalties.

EECS alumnus Paul E. Jacobs (B.S. '84/M.S. '86/Ph.D. '89) has been named U.C. Berkeley's 2017 Alumnus of the Year.  After graduating from Berkeley, Paul rose up the ranks at Qualcomm, which had been co-founded by his father, and is currently serving as Executive Chairman.  He won the IEEE Weber Managerial Leadershiip Award in 2014 and the Distinguished Industry Leader Award in 2015.  Paul has donated millions of dollars to the College of Engineering and CITRIS, endowed an engineering professorship, served on a number of important University boards, and funded the creation of the eponymous Jacob's Hall.

CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan has been selected to receive a 2017 Okawa Foundation Research Grant.  This award recognizes promising young faculty members in the fields of information and telecommunications, and comes with a $10K prize.  The presentaton ceremony will be held on September 20th in San Francisco.

The Turing Award 50th Anniversary celebration was held at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco on June 23-24, 2017.   CS Professors Stuart Russell and Michael Jordan participated on a panel discussion about advances in deep neural networks, Prof. Umesh Vazirani moderated a panel on quantum computing.  Prof. Emeritus and Turing winner Michael Stonebraker discussed the legal ramifications of collecting data from a growing number of devices with different encoding formats, and alumnus and Turing winner Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) participated on a panel about the end of Moore's Law.

The ACM A.M. Turing Award is considered the "Nobel prize of computing," and comes with a $1 million prize for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field.   EECS faculty have won four:  Richard Karp for theory and efficiency of algorithms (NP-completeness) in 1985, William Kahan for numerical analysis (floating-point) in 1989, Manuel Blum for computational complexity theory and cryptography in 1995, and Michael Stonebraker for modern database systems in 2014.  EECS alumni have won seven: Ken Thompson (B.S. '65/M.S. '66) for operating systems theory (UNIX) in 1983, Niklaus Wirth (Ph.D. '63) for computer languages (EULER/Pascal, etc.) in 1984, Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) for distributed, personal computing (workstations, networks, etc.) in 1992, Douglas Englebart (MS. '53/Ph.D. '55) for interactive computing in 1997, Leonard Adleman (Ph.D. '76) for public-key cryptography in 2002, and Shafi Goldwasser (M.S. '81/Ph.D. '84) with Silvio Micali (Ph.D. '82) for cryptography and complexity theory in 2012.

EE graduate student Vasuki Narasimha Swamy (adviser: Anant Sahai) and CS graduate student César Torres (adviser: Eric Paulos) have won inaugural Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants.  These grants offer financial support to selected doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computing.  Of the 200 applicants, only 12 were chosen.  Vasuki's research topic is “Real-time Ultra-reliable Wireless Communication” and César's is “Hybrid Aesthetics – A New Media Framework for the Computational Design of Creative Materials, Tools, and Practices within Digital Fabrication.”

Alumnus Edgar Solomonik (CS Ph.D. '14,  adviser: James Demmel) has won the Alston S. Householder Prize XX (2017)  for the best dissertation in numerical linear algebra.  The Householder prize, which is presented once every three years at a Symposium held in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra, has two winners this year.  Edgar's dissertation,  titled "Provably Efficient Algorithms for Numerical Tensor Algebra," also won the EECS Department's David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for truly outstanding research. Edgar is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Alistair Sinclair has been awarded the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Service Award. This award is presented on the basis of value and degree of services to the computing community including activities on behalf of the ACM, other computer organizations, and/or other entities. Prof. Sinclair is recognized for his role in the spectacular success of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in taking collaboration in the field to an entirely new level.