CS Prof. Michael I. Jordan has won the prestigious John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  The award was established in 1990 to acknowledge "outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology."    Jordan, who was ranked as the world's most influential computer scientist in 2016 by Science magazine, was cited for "For contributions to machine learning and data science."  Jordan began developing recurrent neural networks as a cognitive model in the 1980s, was prominent in the formalisation of variational methods for approximate inference, and popularised both the expectation-maximization algorithm and Bayesian networks among the machine learning community.  Jordan is the fifth Berkeley CS faculty member to win this award.

EECS Prof. Katherine Yelick was honored with an HPCwire Editor’s Choice Award for Outstanding Leadership in HPC at the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC19).  Yelick, who serves as the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and who was the director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC)  from 2008 to 2012,  is widely recognized for her leadership in research to improve the programmability of high performance computing (HPC) through innovations to programming languages and runtime systems.  Her contributions to design and compiler research were key to the success of patrician global address space (PGAS) for expressing applications with irregular communication patterns on parallel machines, and she is well known for co-inventing the Unified Parallel-C and Titanium languages.

Recently hired Prof. Jelani Nelson and Assistant Profs. Raluca Ada Popa, Joseph Gonzalez,  Alvin Cheung, Aditya Parameswaran, and Natacha Crooks, have joined veteran Profs. Joseph Hellerstein and Ion Stoica to form a new cohort of faculty at Berkeley who will conduct academic research into systems to analyze and manage data.   The group, which also includes IEOR Assistant Prof. Barna Saha, will focus on diverse facets of data systems, from protecting data security, to developing systems for massively-scalable machine learning, to working with data distributed across the globe.  “Data systems have become the foundation not only of computer science, but of modern society.  And they are changing fast,” said Hellerstein. “This amazing new cohort is evidence of Berkeley’s commitment to drive diverse innovation and train the next generation of data systems engineers.”

Two papers co-authored by Berkeley EECS authors won ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Awards at the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) 2019.  "Duet: An Expressive Higher-Order Language and Linear Type System for Statically Enforcing Differential Privacy" co-authored by Prof. Dawn Song (Ph.D. '02, advisor: Doug Tygar), graduate student Lun Wang, undergraduate researcher Pranav Gaddamadugu, and alumni Neel Somani (CS B.A.  '19), Nikhil Sharma (EECS B.S. '18/M.S. '19),  and Alex Shan (CS B.A. '18), along with researchers in Vermont and Utah, and "Aroma: Code Recommendation via Structural Code Search" co-authored by Prof. Koushik Sen (along with authors at Facebook and UC Irvine), won two of the five honors awarded at the top programming language conference, part of the ACG SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) in October.  

CS alumna and Prof. Down Song (Ph.D. '02, advisor: Doug Tygar) is the subject of a New York Times article titled "Building a World Where Data Privacy Exists Online."  One of the world’s foremost experts in computer security and trustworthy artificial intelligence, Song founded a startup called Oasis Labs to build a new platform based a paradigm in which people control their data and are compensated for its use by corporations.  She and her colleagues believe that by marrying specialized computer chips and blockchain technology, they can build a system that provides greater scalability and privacy protection.  This year, Song made the Wired25  list top 25 innovators as well as Inc.'s second annual Female Founders 100 list as a "Money Mover."

Design Innovation from Nature, a new collaboration among the Colleges of Environmental Design, Letters & Science, and Engineering at Berkeley, will be holding an Art + Nature Symposium co-hosted by the University of Tokyo this weekend, November 9-10, 2019.   The symposium will explore how biological models stimulate the curiosity of today’s designers and researchers, and will bring together various lectures by experts from the fields of art, architecture, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, robotics, and biology.  Two of the lectures will by EECS Profs. Ron Fearing and Robert Full.

EE Prof. Ming Wu has been named the 2020 recipient of the IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Robert Bosch Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Award.  The award was established in 2014 "to recognize and honor advances in the invention, design, and/or fabrication of micro- or nano- electromechanical systems and/or devices" with the proviso that individual contributions "be innovative and useful for practical applications."  Wu was selected "For pioneering contributions in MEMS optical switches and optoelectronic tweezers.”

Ion Stoica has won the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award. Created in 2001 by ACM SIGOPS, the award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC. Recipients are selected for “contributions that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark Weiser.”

Raluca Ada Popa has been named a Visionary in the MIT Technology Review's list of 35 Innovators Under 35.  Popa found a way to make computation on encrypted data practical.  Her systems secure computers by making data indecipherable to intruders instead of just relying on firewalls to keep them out.  She says her encryption techniques allow systems to operate as if they’ve been blindfolded. They’re able to compute on data without actually seeing it—which is opening the cybersecurity field to a host of new applications.  Her innovations are in use by companies like IBM.

CS Profs Dawn Song and Hany Farid are among Wired Magazine's list of 25 People Who Are Racing to Save Us (WIRED25 list of innovators for 2019). Song is the co-founder and CEO of Oasis Labs, a startup built around differential privacy—cryptographic techniques that allow companies to incorporate data into their algorithms without seeing the individual data points.   Song believes blockchain technology can help offer a secure home for data that doesn’t require trusting any one company with the keys to it.   Her system would enable you to copy your medical data to a location where researchers who are working to cure diseases could access it without compromising your privacy.  Farid is a pioneer of image science, having been one of the first to develop methods to detect when digital photos have been manipulated. He is now one of the leading authorities on Deepfakes: images, videos, or audio files fabricated or altered by machine learning.  Lately, Deepfakes have been used to mislead and manipulate the public during politicial elections.  “This used to be a boutique little field, but now we’re defending democracy,” says Farid.