CS Prof. Jelani Nelson has won the 2022 Computing Research Association Education (CRA-E) Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award.  This award recognizes "individual faculty members who have provided exceptional mentorship, undergraduate research experiences and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing."  Nelson was cited for exceptional mentoring of undergraduate students at a time when "interest in graduate school and research careers is relatively low" and graduate students are crucially needed for "the health of the computing research pipeline."  The award will be presented at a conference later this year.

CS Profs. John Kubiatowicz and Ken Goldberg, along with Berkeley's Director of Research IT, Ken Lutz, have collaborated with the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS) and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) to create an animated series called "Tuff Pupil" which teaches children, ages 7 to 10,  about important cyber security concepts and other global STEM issues. Familiarizing children with these topics has become even more critical since the full-scale adoption of computers for remote learning in response to the pandemic.  Tuff Pupil has so far launched three 5-minute animated video episodes featuring "high school hip hop duo" Taye and Flori (Tommy Soulati Shepherd and Kaitlin McGaw of Grammy-nominated Alphabet Rock) who rap about data privacy in catchy ways that evoke the Schoolhouse Rock shorts of the 1970s and 80s. Parents, educators, librarians and community leaders are encouraged to share these videos with children in their "homes, schools and youth organizations to support conversations about how to safely and smartly use the internet."  New episodes are planned for 2022 which will demystify everyday phenomena related to "data science, climate disruption, contagion, clean energy, and artificial intelligence."

CS Associate Prof. Laura Waller, and Assistant Profs. Sarah Chasins and Nilah Ioannidis, are among the newest cohort of scientists to be named Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigators.  The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Program, open to faculty from Stanford, UCSF, and UC Berkeley, funds "innovative, visionary research with the goal of building and sustaining an engaged, interactive, and collaborative community of researchers that spans across disciplines and across the three campuses to help solve critical challenges in biomedicine."  Waller leads the Computational Imaging Lab, which develops new methods for optical imaging designed jointly with optics and computational algorithms; Chasins' research focuses on programming languages and program synthesis, with an emphasis on work that brings together programming systems, HCI, and data science; and Ioannidis works on computational methods for personal genome interpretation, including machine learning tools to predict the clinical significance of rare genetic variants of unknown significance and statistical methods to link genetic variation with personal complex disease risks.  Recipients  receive $1M in unrestricted gift funds over a nonrenewable 5-year term ($200,000 per year).

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson has won the 2022 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  Recognized as one of the world's preeminent awards for engineering achievement, the prize "honors an engineer whose accomplishment has significantly impacted society by improving the quality of life, providing the ability to live freely and comfortably, and/or permitting the access to information."  Patterson, and his co-recipients, John Hennessy, Stephen Furber, and Sophie Wilson, were cited "for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips."  Patterson began the seminal Berkeley RISC project in 1980 to design a basic, neutral, freely-available set of microprocessor instructions that could be used in different types of machines and which could be optimized for different characteristics, like efficiency, physical size, and monetary cost.  When different devices are capable of running the same machine code, a better quality, higher-performance machine can replace a less expensive, lower-performance machine without having to replace software.  The open-source Berkeley RISC design was later commercialized by Sun Microsystems as the SPARC architecture, and inspired the ARM architecture used in virtually all new computer chips in the world today.  The biennial Draper prize is open to both NAE members and non-members worldwide, and comes with a $500K cash award.

EE Prof. Chunlei Liu has been named a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)  The ISMRM is an international, nonprofit, scientific association "whose purpose is to promote communication, research, development, and applications in the field of magnetic resonance (MR) in medicine and biology and other related topics and to develop and provide channels and facilities for continuing education in the field." Fellowships are bestowed to recognize "a significant and substantial contribution to research in a field within the Society’s purposes, who have contributed in a significant manner to the development of the Society...and/or who have made a significant contribution to education in MR."  Liu is known for pioneering higher-order tensor diffusion MRI,  which utilizes higher-order tensor statistics (variance, sknewness, kurtosis etc.) to measure the diffusion processes in biological tissues. He is also credited with developing susceptibility tensor imaging for mapping bio-magnetism.

CS Profs. Alistair Sinclair and Shafi Goldwasser have won inaugural Test of Time awards at the 2021 Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).  Sinclair won the 20 Year award for his paper, “A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with non-negative entries," which solved a problem that had been open for decades. Goldwasser won the 30 Year award for "Completeness theorems for non-cryptographic fault-tolerant distributed computation," which showed how to compute a distributed function even if up to one-third of the participants may be failing, misbehaving, or malicious.  The awards were presented at the 2021 STOC conference in June.

CS alumna and Prof. Shafi Goldwasser (Ph.D. '84, advisor: Manuel Blum) has won the 2021 Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) Test of Time Award.  This award "recognizes papers published in past Annual IEEE Symposia on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) for their substantial, lasting, broad, and currently relevant impact. Papers may be awarded for their impact on Theory of Computing, or on Computer Science in general, or on other disciplines of knowledge, or on practice."  Goldwasser is among five co-authors who won the award in the 30 year category for their groundbreaking complexity theory paper "Approximating Clique is Almost NP-Complete," which used the classification of approximation problems to show that some problems in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed. 

EECS Prof. Stuart Russell is slated to direct the future Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, which aims to make ethics and social equity more central to scientific decision-making, and which will try to ensure that the public has a greater say in future scientific advances.  The new center will combine forces with a sister center at the University of Cambridge, UK, to connect scientists, ethicists, and the public, in necessary and intentional discussions about the potential impacts of scientific discoveries.  “In addition to answering fundamental questions about the ethics of science, the Kavli Center is going to create a generation of scientific leaders who have seen how other scientific disciplines grapple with ethical problems and who have real training in the philosophical analysis of these questions,” said Russell. “It’s not just about changing public policy, it’s about changing what it means to be a good scientist in every discipline that can have an impact on the public.”

EECS Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao has won the inaugural Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications (ModSim) 2021 Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili (Sudha) Award.  This award recognizes "researchers who showcase the most outstanding contribution to the field of computer modeling and simulation" during the annual ModSim Workshop, which primarily features younger talent in the scientific community.  Shao presented "Enabling Holistic Machine-Learning Hardware Evaluation via Full-System Simulation," which described the Gemmini project's "systolic-array based matrix multiplication accelerator generator" that enables users to explore and evaluate different deep neural network accelerators.  The research was presented during a multi-part Rapid Fire flash talk/digital poster session.

EECS Prof. Murat Arcak and his graduate student He Yin have won the second Systems & Control Letters (SCL) Brockett-Willems Outstanding Paper Award. Their paper, "Reachability analysis using dissipation inequalities for uncertain nonlinear systems," published in SCL Volume 142, on August 2020, was deemed the best of 295 papers submitted to the journal in the two-year period between January 2019 through December 2020.  Co-authors include former ME Prof. Andrew Packard, who died in 2019, and Packard's former graduate student, Peter Seiler.  SCL hopes to present the award at the 25th International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS) which will be held in Bayereuth, Germany, in September 2022.