Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 EECS Distinguished Alumni Awards!  The CS winners are Noam Nisan (academia) and Kimberly Keeton (industry); and the EE winners are Bruce Hajek (academia) and Nickhil Jakatdar (industry). Noam Nisan (Ph.D. 1988, advisor: Richard Karp), currently a CS professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was cited "For fundamental contributions to computational complexity theory and the creation of the field of algorithmic mechanism design;" Kimberly Keeton (M.S. 1994/Ph.D. 1999, adviser: David Patterson), currently a principal engineer at Google, was cited "For leadership in the research and the production of computer data and storage systems, and for mentoring the next generation of computer scientists and engineers;"  Bruce Hajek (Ph.D. 1979, advisor: Eugene Wong), currently an ECE professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was cited "For his prodigious and fundamental research contributions to stochastic processes, information theory, and communications and computer networks; for his sustained and worldwide influence as a beloved teacher and mentor; and for his major leadership role in electrical and computer engineering;" and Nickhil Jakatdar (Ph.D. 2000, advisor: Costas Spanos), currently the CEO of GenePath Diagnostics, was cited for "For serial entrepreneurship and visionary leadership across several sectors, with profound impact to the microelectronics industry and to the developing world." Their awards will be presented at the 2022 Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS) on April 25th.

A paper with lead author EECS postdoc Efrat Shimron and co-authors EECS graduate student Ke Wang, UT Austin professor Jonathan Tamir (EECS PhD ’18), and EECS Prof. Michael Lustig shows that algorithms trained using "off-label" or misapplied massive, open-source datasets are subject to integrity-compromising biases.  The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), highlight some of the problems that can arise when data published for one task are used to train algorithms for a different one.  For example, medical imaging studies which use preprocessed images may result in skewed findings that cannot be replicated by others working with the raw data.  The researchers coined the term “implicit data crimes” to describe research results that are biased because algorithms are developed using faulty methodology. “It’s an easy mistake to make because data processing pipelines are applied by the data curators before the data is stored online, and these pipelines are not always described. So, it’s not always clear which images are processed, and which are raw,” said Shimron. “That leads to a problematic mix-and-match approach when developing AI algorithms.”

UC Davis Chancellor and EECS alumnus Gary S. May (M.S. '88/Ph.D. '91, advisor: Costas Spanos) took the stage with UC President Michael V. Drake and Presidents Emeriti Janet S. Napolitano and Mark G. Yudof  for the UCD Chancellor's Colloquium on March 8th.  The four discussed the challenges they faced and lessons learned during their tenures in office.  Topics included the impact of the pandemic on campus communities, the importance of public health, and the efficacy of remote learning; the university's federal lawsuit over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program; approaches to managing UC funding cuts, including maintaining access to retirement plans and student aid;  and America's cultural and democratic future, including ways that universities might help shape it.

Three EECS alumnae are featured in a 150W Black Women Matter web page recognizing the legacies of Black women at Cal as part of the 2022 Black History Month celebrations.  The web page, which was put together by EECS Emerita Director of Diversity Sheila Humphreys, highlights 31 Cal pioneers whose lives spanned the past 120 years.  The EECS Department is represented by: Arlene Cole Rhodes (Ph.D. '89, advisor: S. Shankar Sastry), the first Black woman to earn an EE doctorate from Berkeley; 2020 EE Distinguished Alumna Valerie Taylor (M.S. '86 / Ph.D. '91, advisor: David G. Messerschmitt ), the first Black chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University; and Melody Ivory (M.S. '96/Ph.D. '01, advisor: Marti Hearst), the first Black woman to earn a CS doctorate in from Berkeley.

Lee Julian Purnell is the first Black student who is known to have graduated from the EECS department. He was born in Washington, D.C. in 1896, graduated from Berkeley High in 1915, was a superb track athlete, and earned a B.A. from Cal in 1919.  He got his B.S. in Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1921, where he and another student were said to be the first pair of Black students to graduate from MIT in the same class together.  He received his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Berkeley in 1929, and eventually settled into a career at Howard University, where he served as the Dean of Engineering for 20 years.  Learn more about Lee Purnell in the EECS Newsletter.

CS alumna Prof. Marti Hearst (B.A. '85/M.S '89./Ph.D. '94,  advisor: Robert Wilensky), whose primary appointment is in the School of Information, has been named to the 2021 inaugural class of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) Academy. SIGIR Academy membership recognizes the "principal leaders in IR" who have made "significant, cumulative contributions" to the development of the field, and whose "efforts have shaped the discipline and/or industry through significant research, innovation, and/or service."  Hearst literally wrote the first book on Search User Interfaces in 2009.   She is known for her early work on automating sentiment analysis and word sense disambiguation, including the invention of an algorithm known as "Hearst patterns" which is widely used in commercial text mining applications including ontology learning.  She also developed a now well-known approach to automatic segmentation of text into topical discourse boundaries, called TextTiling.  Hearst is an Edge Foundation contributing author and a member of the Usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Her current research interests include user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and MOOCs.

EECS alumnus Anantha Chandrakasan (B.S. '89/M.S. '90/Ph.D. '94, advisor: C. V. Ramamoorthy), has been awarded the 2022 IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal.  The award recognizes "outstanding technical contributions in science and engineering, of great impact to IEEE fields of interest."   Chandrakasan, who is currently an EECS professor at MIT and the dean of the MIT School of Engineering, was cited for his “contributions to ultralow-power circuits and systems, and leadership in academia and advancing diversity in the profession.”  He spearheaded a number of initiatives that opened opportunities for students, postdocs, and faculty to conduct research, explore entrepreneurial projects, and engage with EECS. These programs include “SuperUROP,” a year-long independent research program that provides tools for students to do publication-quality research; the Rising Stars program, an annual event that convenes graduate and postdoc women for the purpose of sharing advice about the early stages of an academic career; and StartMIT, an independent activities period class that provides students and postdocs the opportunity to learn from and interact with industrial innovation leaders. Chandrakasan is also known for his leadership of the MIT Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group, whose research projects have addressed security hardware, energy harvesting, and wireless charging for the internet of things; energy-efficient circuits and systems for multimedia processing; and platforms for ultra-low-power biomedical electronics.  He also serves as co-chair of the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT-Takeda Program, and the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology, and chairs the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. 

EECS alumnus Warren “Woody” Hoburg (M.S. '11/Ph.D. '13, advisor: Pieter Abbeel), one of the first graduates of NASA's Artemis astronaut basic training program in 2020, has been assigned to launch on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission – the sixth crew rotation flight aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.  Hoburg will pilot the spacecraft when it is expected to launch from a Falcon 9 rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in 2023.  This will be his first mission into space.  At the time of his selection as an astronaut, Hoburg was a commercial pilot and an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.  His research focused on efficient methods for design of engineering systems.

2003 Distinguished CS Alumnus Madhu Sudan (Ph.D. '92, advisor: Umesh Vazirani) has won the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Hamming Medal.  This award recognizes "exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems, and technology."   Sudan was cited “for fundamental contributions to probabilistically checkable proofs and list decoding of Reed-Solomon codes.”  He won the Berkeley EECS Sakrison Memorial Award for his graduate thesis, worked as a researcher at both the IBM Watson Research Center and Microsoft Research, was a professor of EECS and the Associate Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, and is now a professor at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).  Sudan is known for his contributions to theoretical computer science, particularly for advancing the theory of probabilistically checkable proofs, which is a way to recast a mathematical proof in computer language for additional checks on its validity, and for developing error-correcting codes.

2008 Distinguished CS Alumna Deborah Estrin (B.S. EECS '80) has won the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) John von Neumann Medal.  The award recognizes “outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology.”  Estrin, whose research interests include technologies for caregiving, immersive health, small data, participatory sensing and public interest technology, was cited for “her leadership in mobile and wireless sensing systems technologies and applications, including personal health management.”  Now a professor at Cornell, Estrin was the founding director of the National Science Foundation Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA, where she pioneered the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real-time data about the physical world. She also co-founded the nonprofit startup Open mHealth, which creates open data sharing standards and tools that allow developers of health applications to store, process, and visualize data.