Josephine Williamson, the EECS Director of Administrative Services, has been selected to receive the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award (COSA), which is the highest honor bestowed upon staff by the Chancellor. COSAs are presented to individuals and teams who, in addition to performing their normal job duties with excellence, also demonstrate exceptional initiative in contributing to the UC Berkeley campus community.
The paper “X-Trace: A Pervasive Network Tracing Framework”, authored by EECS alumi Rodrigo Fonseca (Ph.D. ’08) and George Porter (Ph.D. ’08) and Professors Randy Katz, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica, has received the 2017 Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) Test-of-Time Award. X-Trace was not the first tracing framework, but it was influential given that it was effectively the first framework for end-to-end tracing to focus on generality and pervasiveness. The researchers implemented X-Trace in protocols and software systems, and in their prize-winning paper, they set out to explain three different use scenarios: domain name system (DNS) resolution; a three-tiered photo-hosting website; and a service accessed through an overlay network.
Graduate students Radhika Mittal (advisors: Sylvia Ratnasamy and Scott Shenker) and Sam Chiu-Wai Wong (advisor: Christos Papadimitriou) have won 2017 Google PhD Fellowships. This is one of the highest honors available for Computer Science graduate students. Each selected university is permitted to nominate two students and Google awards approximately 15 named fellowships per year. Radhika, whose area is Computer Networking, was awarded a Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship in 2013. Sam, who is interested in the area of Algorithms and Complexity, won Best Paper at the IEEE FOCS Symposium in 2015 and has been awarded an IBM Scholarship.
CS graduate student Baiyu Chen (advisor: Alexei Efros) and Anthony Barrs were awarded top prize and $50,000 for their design at the Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge. Their idea, profiled in an article for Fortune, was to construct a "Hyperlane," or a single platform the size of four interstate lanes that would run parallel to pre-existing highways in order for self-driving cars to travel at high speeds with no chance of getting into a jam.
CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan and EECS alumna Yoky Matsuoka (B.S. '93) are among Interesting Engineering's "17 Awesome Women Engineers" who are revolutionizing the engineering field in 2017. Anca is described as "one of the rising stars of the robotics scene" as the head of the InterACT Lab at UC Berkeley which specializes in human/robotics interactions, algorithms and compatible artificial intelligence systems." Yoky is "a hot commodity among major tech companies" as the CTO of Alphabet Nest.
Assistant Prof. Ren Ng has been selected to receive the 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in the category of Computer Science. 126 early-career scholars are chosen to receive this prestigious award and represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals, 69 National Medals of Science, 16 John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.
Prof. Marti Hearst has been elected into the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Academy. The SIGCHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction. Prof Hearst's HCI research includes user interfaces for search, information visualization of text, web site usability, and innovation in education. She wrote Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on this topic and her search projects include usability analysis of search results clustering, the TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for navigation and search. Faceted navigation became the standard search interface for e-commerce, digital libraries and image collections for at least a decade.
Prof. Michel Maharbiz, Prof. Yun Song, Associate Prof. Laura Waller, Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller, and Assistant Prof. Nir Yosef are among the thirteen UC Berkeley faculty chosen to receive up to $1.5 million each over the next five years by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The investigator awards are the first individual grants by the CZ Biohub as it seeks to foster unconventional scientific exploration and encourage researchers to invent new tools to accelerate the pace of discovery. “I am humbled and speechless,” said Prof. Maharbiz. “This is an ambitious endeavor and I can’t wait to get started and be part of it. I really do believe we, collectively, can make a big impact on diseases over the next decade, and I’m really excited to be a part of this.”
Alumnus Kylan Nieh (CS BA/Business BS 2014) has made the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30: Enterprise Technology list. While still a student, Kylan started his own public speaking and leadership course at the Haas School of Business and became the youngest recipient of the Business Teacher of the Year Award in 2014. After graduation, Kylan became the youngest Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn Students.
Jacobs Hall, home of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation has received a Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. LEED scores buildings on how well they meet various measures of sustainability and Platinum is the highest level of certification possible. Jacobs Hall is the first UC Berkeley facility to achieve platinum status.
