EE Adjunct Prof. David Tse has won the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, awarded "for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems, and technology." Tse, who is currently a professor at Stanford, won “for seminal contributions to wireless network information theory and wireless network systems.”
2010 EECS distinguished alumna Theresa Huai-Ying Meng (M.S. '85/Ph.D. '88) has won the 2019 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal. The award is presented to an individual or team for "exceptional contributions to communications and networking sciences and engineering." Meng, who is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University and founder of Atheros Communications Inc., won "for technical contributions to and leadership in the development of wireless semiconductor technology." Meng is following in the footsteps of graduate advisor, David Messerschmitt, who won the award in 1999.
Profs. Elad Alon, Sayeef Salahuddin and Dawn Song have been elected to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellows class of 2019. An IEEE Fellowship is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation. Alon was elected for contributions to mixed-signal integrated circuit design and methodology, Salahuddin for contributions to low power electronic and spintronic devices, and Song for contributions to systems security and privacy.
EE Prof. Katherine Yelick, who is also the Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation’s largest scientific organization. AAAS fellows are members "whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished." Yelick was honored “for significant research contributions to programming languages, compilers and parallel computing, and for exceptional service to the computing research community.”
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) has established "The Soumitra Dutta Chair in Artificial Intelligence," named for CS alumnus Soumitra Dutta (M.S. '87/Ph.D. '90 adviser: Lotfi Zadeh), "to promote excellence and leadership in teaching, research, and development in the field of artificial intelligence and to facilitate wider and deeper interaction between the industry and IIT Delhi faculty and students." Dutta, the founding Dean of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, is best known for being the architect of the Global Innovation Index.
EE Prof. and Dean of Engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu as been elected to the 2019 Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC) Hall of Fame. Inductees must have demonstrated significant engineering or technical achievements, provided significant guidance in new and developing fields of engineering-based technology, and/or have managed or directed an organization making noteworthy contributions in design, manufacturing, production, or service through the uses of engineering principles and applications. They also must have contributed significantly to one or more technical societies and accomplished significant community service activities (or have provided noteworthy advice to governmental committees, etc.). King Liu is known for her contributions to nanoscale MOS transistors, memory devices, and MEMS devices. Other EECS inductees include Profs. Randy Katz (2018), Chenming Hu (2017), Paul Gray (2015), David Hodges (2012), and David Patterson (2005).
CS alumnus Diane Greene (M.S. '88), the CEO of Google Cloud, has been named to Data Economy's list of Americas 50: The world’s first top 50 North, Central and South American influencers. The list highlights "personalities who are leading data centres, cloud, edge computing and data through charting new innovations or technological breakthroughs, sheer investment or business acumen, or exceptional entrepreneurial skillsets."
2005 CS Distinguished Alumna Barbara Simons (Ph.D. '81) will be receiving the Athena Lifetime Achievement Award at the CITRIS Women in Tech Symposium on Friday, 11/16. Simons, who is a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is board chair of Verified Voting, a non-partisan organization that advocates for reliable and secure voting practices. She is the author of “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?” and is a long-time champion for programs to increase diversity in computer science and engineering. She will not be able to attend the conference but will make an appearance in a short video.
A paper written by CS Prof. David Culler and alumnus Jonathan Hui (M.S. '05/Ph.D. '08) in 2008 titled "IP is Dead, Long Live IP for Wireless Sensor Networks" has won the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) 2018 Test of Time Award. The paper dispelled the notion that IP cannot run on wireless embedded sensors and made a long term impact on standards like 6LoWPAN and platforms like Thread. The award recognizes papers that are at least 10 years old and have had long lasting impact on networked embedded sensing system science and engineering. Culler previously won this award in both 2014 and 2015.
A paper titled “Graphical Lasso and Thresholding: Equivalence and Closed-form Solutions” by IEOR PhD candidate Salar Fattahi and EE Assistant Prof. Somayeh Sojoudi has won the 2018 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Data Mining (DM) Best Paper Award. The paper compares the computationally-heavy Graphical Lasso (GL) technique, a popular method for learning the structure of an undirected graphical model, with a numerically-cheap heuristic method that is based on simply thresholding the sample covariance matrix. By analyzing the properties of this conic optimization problem, the paper shows that its true complexity is indeed linear (both in time and in memory) for sparse graphical models and solves instance as large as 80,000×80,000 (more than 3.2 billion variables) in less than 30 minutes on a standard laptop computer, while other state-of-the-art methods do not converge within 4 hours. The award recognizes excellence among DM members, particularly its student members, and was announced at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 5th.
