EE graduate student Vasuki Narasimha Swamy (adviser: Anant Sahai) and CS graduate student César Torres (adviser: Eric Paulos) have won inaugural Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants.  These grants offer financial support to selected doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computing.  Of the 200 applicants, only 12 were chosen.  Vasuki's research topic is “Real-time Ultra-reliable Wireless Communication” and César's is “Hybrid Aesthetics – A New Media Framework for the Computational Design of Creative Materials, Tools, and Practices within Digital Fabrication.”

Alumnus Edgar Solomonik (CS Ph.D. '14,  adviser: James Demmel) has won the Alston S. Householder Prize XX (2017)  for the best dissertation in numerical linear algebra.  The Householder prize, which is presented once every three years at a Symposium held in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra, has two winners this year.  Edgar's dissertation,  titled "Provably Efficient Algorithms for Numerical Tensor Algebra," also won the EECS Department's David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for truly outstanding research. Edgar is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ana Arias has been selected for the 2017 Research and Development Award from the Flexible and Printed Electronics Conference, organized by FlexTech, a consortium that supports the development of flexible electronics. The FLEXIs recognizes outstanding work and achievements of organizations and individuals active in flexible hybrid electronics (FHE). The four categories include Research & Development, Innovation & Commercialization, Industry Leadership, and Education Leadership. Associate Professor Arias is recognized for the development of flexible medical sensors and printed flexible devices. Her breakthrough research has led to the creation of flexible receiving coils for magnetic resonance imaging devices and devices for impedance sensing for the detection of early pressure ulcers in vivo.

Alistair Sinclair has been awarded the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Service Award. This award is presented on the basis of value and degree of services to the computing community including activities on behalf of the ACM, other computer organizations, and/or other entities. Prof. Sinclair is recognized for his role in the spectacular success of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in taking collaboration in the field to an entirely new level.

EECS alumni Aaron Wagner has been selected as the winner of the 2017 James L. Massey Research and Teaching award for young scholars of the IEEE Information Theory Society. This award recognizes outstanding achievement in research and teaching by Society members under 40 years of age in the Information Theory community. Currently he is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 2005 (advisor was Prof. Venkatachalam Anantharam). His current research interests are at the intersection of information theory and other fields including networking, statistics, queueing theory, security, computational linguistics, and learning. He is particularly interested in network information theory, distributed compression and its application to peer-to-peer networks, secure communication over timing and photonic channels, and communication and classification in learning-limited environments.

EECS graduate student Wenting Zheng (advised by Ion Stoica and Raluca Ada Popa)  has won the prestigious 2017-18 IBM PhD Fellowship.   Wenting works in the RISELab and her research involves system security and distributed systems. The IBM Ph.D. fellowship is an "intensely competitive worldwide program that honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study." Only 50 fellowships are awarded worldwide annually.

Prof. Richard Karp and coauthors Jacob Scott, Trey Ideker and Roded Sharan have received the 2017 RECOMB (International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology) Test of Time Award for their paper "Efficient Algorithms for Detecting Signaling Pathways in Protein Interaction Networks". Prof. Karp also won awards at RECOMB 14 and RECOMB 16.

Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller has been awarded the 2017 Keysight Early Career Professor Award. The Keysight Early Career Professor Award is established to recognize and encourage excellent research enabling design, test or measurement of electronic systems. The program seeks to establish strong collaborative relationships between Keysight researchers and leading professors early in their careers and to highlight Keysight's role as a sponsor of university research. Prof. Muller's expertise is in the research and commercialization of implantable medical devices and in developing microelectronic and integrated systems for neurological applications. She is also the Co-founder of Cortera Neurotechnologies, Inc. a medical device company founded in 2013 that is commercializing a neural implant device and has released a family of products for the animal neuroscience research market. At Cortera, she held positions as CEO and CTO.

EECS major Sam Kumar is a runner up for the 2017 University Medal.  Candidates for the University Medal must have overcome significant challenges, made a difference in the lives of others and carry a GPA of 3.96 or higher.  Sam is involved in research related to software-defined buildings, has spent each semester volunteering time as a tutor, allowing him to give back to a community that he said has been instrumental to his time as a student. One of his favorite memories from Cal involves a class in Sanskrit.  "Before we got to the literature, we had to learn the basics. We started were reading simple passages and doing vocabulary exercises to get the basics, but eventually I was able to read authentic texts from thousands of years ago. Being able to read an ancient language – after only two semesters of studying – was a breathtaking moment for me.”    Sam will receive a $500 award as a tribute to his academic efforts and, after graduation, he plans to work on a Ph.D. in computer science.

Professors Jan Rabaey and Pieter Abbeel were named in the top 5 of the 2017 top 50 pioneers by the “De Tijd” (translation buttons provided above the article), the Belgian equivalent of the Financial Times. Prof. Rabaey is currently the scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) as well as the director of the FCRP Multiscale Systems Research Center (MuSyC), and is involved with the Donald O. Pederson Center for Design Automation (DOP), SWARM Lab,  CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR), TerraSwarm Research Center, and the  Center for Neural Engineering & Prostheses (CNEP). His research interests include ultra-low energy wireless exploring the boundaries of ultra-low energy design and the design of microscopic systems, including all components from energy sources, conversion and storage, interfaces, digital and mixed signal. Prof. Abbeel is currently a member of the steering committee of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Center (BAIR) and is involved with the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHCAI), Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC), Center for Automation and Learning for Medical Robotics (Cal-MR) and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR). His current research area is primarily studying deep learning for robotics, where learning could be from demonstrations (apprenticeship learning) or through the robot's own trial and error (reinforcement learning). Targeted application domains include autonomous manipulation, flight, locomotion and driving.