Girish Pahwa has won the 2022 IEEE Electron Device Society (EDS) Early Career Award. Dr. Pahwa is an assistant professional researcher at Berkeley EECS and is currently the executive director of the Berkeley Device Modeling Center (BDMC), whose leadership includes EE Profs. Chenming Hu and Sayeef Salahuddin. His research interests include device modeling, simulation, and benchmarking of emerging nanoscale technologies. Awarded annually, the EDS Early Career Award recognizes and supports technical development within the EDS field of interest. Recipients are given a plaque and a check for $1,000 at the EDS Awards Dinner, held in conjunction with the international Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), which will be held in San Francisco, CA this year.

An interdisciplinary team of industry and academic researchers led by EECS Prof. Alexandre Bayen has completed its most ambitious real-time traffic experiment to date. The project was led by the CIRCLES Consortium, an effort led by UC Berkeley and Vanderbilt University, involving collaborators from five universities and multiple government agencies. The experiment tested 100 partially automated vehicles in real traffic with the aim of improving overall traffic flow. Operating out of a massive control center designed to monitor one section of I-14 in Nashville, TN, the researchers used AI to build on existing adaptive cruise control systems to smooth phantom jams collaboratively. Their results show a positive energy impact. “Driving is very intuitive. If there’s a gap in front of you, you accelerate. If someone brakes, you slow down. But it turns out that this very normal reaction can lead to stop-and-go traffic and energy inefficiency,” said Prof. Bayen. “That’s precisely what AI technology is able to fix—it can direct the vehicle to things that are not intuitive to humans, but are overall more efficient.” 

CS Profs. Dawn Song and David Wagner have won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) Test-of-Time Award. The 2011 paper titled, “Android Permissions Demystified,” by Felt, Chin, Hanna, Song and Wagner, was the first paper to examine real-world security issues in Android applications' use of permissions. The paper has been cited 1985 times and is still taught in graduate courses today. The award was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the flagship conference of the ACM SIGSAC, which took place in Los Angeles this year.

Theory Ph.D. student Fred Zhang (advisor: Jelani Nelson) has won the Best Student Paper Award at ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) 2023. The paper titled, “Online Prediction in Sub-linear Space'' was co-authored by Binghui Peng of Columbia University. The ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, or “SODA,” conference showcases “research topics related to design and analysis of efficient algorithms and data structures for discrete problems.” 

EECS Associate Prof. Prabal Dutta has won the 2022 ACM SenSys Test of Time Award. The paper by Dutta, Dawson-Haggerty (Ph.D. ‘14), Chen, Liang, and Terzis titled, “Design and Evaluation of a Versatile and Efficient Receiver-Initiated Link Layer for Low-Power Wireless,”  was recognized “for pioneering the use of synchronous transmissions in low-power protocols by exploiting their benefits at the MAC layer and pushing the limits of radio operation.” Established in 2014, the “ToTA” recognizes papers that are at least 10 years old and have demonstrated long-lasting impact on network embedded sensing system science and engineering. “It's a real testament that so much of the field traces its roots to Berkeley,” said Dutta.

EECS Prof. Emeritus and alumnus David A. Hodges (M.S. 1961; Ph.D. 1966) passed away on November 13th. He was 85. A former engineering dean and EECS department chair, Prof. Hodges began his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories before joining the EECS faculty in 1970 where his pioneering contributions to the design of integrated circuit (IC) chips and use of silicon-based metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) technology challenged the conventional wisdom of the era. His landmark research led to the rapid development of devices, technologies, and standards that not only were instrumental to the growth of the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley but continue to have a tremendous impact today. After 28 years of active service wherein he supervised 27 completed doctoral dissertations, 91 completed master's degrees, co-authored 3 books, 130 technical publications, and 6 patents, Prof. Hodges remained a stalwart of the department, mentoring and championing new faculty and shaping the department culture for decades to come. Prof. Hodges was a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the NAE. He won the IEEE Education Medal (1997), the Berkeley Citation (1998), and was inducted into the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame (2013). A tremendous teacher, collaborator, colleague, and mentor, Prof. Hodges will be dearly missed.

EE Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vicentelli was awarded the "Honoris Causa" Doctorate in Electronic Engineering for his research in electronic design, both in integrated circuits and in electronic systems, at the 40th Anniversary of the Tor Vergata, University of Rome. He was recognized for his contribution to Tor Vergata's 40-year commitment to university-industry partnerships. With an h-index of 124, Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is the author of more than 1,000 scientific articles, 19 books on integrated systems, and design methodologies and tools. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Sciences of Turin. At the celebration, he presented a talk, “From punch cards to Artificial Intelligence: The Perspective of a Life.” Later this month, he will be elected as a Foreign Member of the Academy for the Class of Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences at the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino.

CS and IEOR Prof. Ken Goldberg and his lab at BAIR have won multiple best paper awards this year. “Autonomously Untangling Long Cables” won the Best Systems Paper at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference in June 2022. “Automated Pruning of Polyculture Plants” won Best Paper at the IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) in August 2022. At this year’s IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), held in October, the paper titled, “Speedfolding: Learning Efficient Bimanual Folding of Garments” took the top spot out of 3500 submissions to win the IROS Best Paper Award. The common thread among these results is the application of advances in deep learning to solve robot manipulation problems. “I feel lucky every day that I get to work in this uniquely stimulating environment with the world's most brilliant, creative, and dedicated students, staff, and faculty," said Goldberg.

CS Prof. Joe Hellerstein has won the IEEE VIS Test of Time Award for a paper he co-wrote with Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke, and Jeffrey Heer in 2012 titled, “Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study.” The paper considered how visual analytics are used within organizations and provided an accessible framework for the abstraction of high-level tasks and user archetypes. “Before this work we struggled to find the vocabulary to use, now we have framings that are easy to remember and conceptualise the space nicely,” said the award committee. "The paper has received an impressive quantity of citations and patent citations, is still relevant today, and continues to be cited frequently." The IEEE VIS Test of Time Award recognizes articles published at previous conferences whose contents are still vibrant and useful today and have had a major impact and influence within and beyond the visualization community.  

A research team led by EE Prof. Boubacar Kanté has created a new type of semiconductor laser, accomplishing an elusive goal in the field of optics: the ability to emit a single mode of light while maintaining the ability to scale up in size and power. The team showed that a structured semiconductor device implementing what they call an “open-Dirac potential” functions as a perfect, scalable laser cavity. They demonstrate that the laser emits a consistent, single wavelength, regardless of the size of the cavity. “Increasing both size and power of a single-mode laser has been a challenge in optics since the first laser was built in 1960,” said Kanté. “Six decades later, we show that it is possible to achieve both these qualities in a laser. I consider this the most important paper my group has published to date.”