EE Prof. Ana Claudia Arias has been conferred an honorary doctorate from Tampere University in Finland. Prof. Arias is one of 14 distinguished individuals to receive an honorary doctorate at Tampere University's inaugural conferment ceremony, including Ban Ki-Moon, former secretary general of the United Nations. Tampere University, as it is known today, was established in 2019 after the merger between the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology. The honorary doctorate, among the new Tampere University’s highest recognitions, is awarded for "excellence in fields represented at the Univesity and other exceptional scientific, artistic or social merits." As part of its three-day ceremony to "highlight the value of and respect for research and education," honorary doctors receive the "doctoral hat" as a symbol of academic freedom. 

CS Prof. Vern Paxson has won the USENIX Security Test of Time Award. Originally published in 1998, Prof. Paxson’s paper, “Bro: A System for Detecting Network Intruders in Real-Time,” was selected for its lasting impact on the research community and by traditional publication metrics; as of this writing, “Bro” has been cited 3852 times according to Google Scholar. “The paper belongs in the compendium of ‘must read’ classic papers for any graduate security course,” according to the award committee. The award will be presented at the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, which takes place in Boston, MA this year.

EECS Prof. Laura Waller is the subject of a feature by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative titled, “A Day in the Life of an Imaging Scientist: Laura Waller.” In it, Prof. Waller describes her day-to-day while she juggles raising a family, cultivating creativity and collaboration in her labs, and mentoring her graduate students through the pandemic. Waller is known for her work in computational imaging. In 2021, she was elected a Fellow of The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) for her work in computational microscopy. In the same year, she won the Adolph Lomb Medal presented by Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America). “I really love this field, because it’s very creative. There are new ideas and new things to think about all the time, but it’s also grounded in real applications.”

A team of UC Berkeley researchers led by Assistant Prof. Natacha Crooks has won $5M to advance blockchain research and education programs. The team, which includes CS Profs. Sanjam Garg, Dawn Song, and Shafi Goldwasser, along with members of Berkeley Haas, Berkeley Law, and Imperial College London will launch a new center that advances decentralization technology. The international, interdisciplinary center aims to help democratize access to data and ensure that data remains secure. “Decentralization technology facilitates the egalitarian exchange of data between people who don’t trust each other," said Prof. Crooks. “We have to build decentralized technology that is truly scalable, private and secure.” The funding is provided by the Algorand Foundation as part of the Algorand Centres of Excellence (ACEs) Program, which has awarded a total of $50M to 10 universities from around the world.

EECS alumnus Paul Debevec (Ph.D. ‘96, advisor: Jitendra Malik) will receive the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award at the Television Academy’s 74th Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards. The award recognizes Debevec for his pioneering work on high dynamic range imaging, image-based lighting, and photogrammetry–techniques that are now standard within the VFX industry for computer-rendered images and graphics. Debevec is also recognized for his work with LED lighting, which “further laid the groundwork” for its use in virtual production, and “has seen a rapid growth as a tool for lighting actors on virtual stages," according to the Television Academy. Debevec is currently the director of research, creative algorithms, and technology at Netflix, and is an adjunct research professor at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. He received ACM SIGGRAPH's first Significant New Researcher Award in 2001, a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in 2010, and the SMPTE Progress Medal in 2017. Debevec co-authored the 2005 book, "High Dynamic Range Imaging," chaired the SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival, served as Vice President of ACM SIGGRAPH, as well as co-chair of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Sci-Tech Council. 

CS graduate student Xin Lyu (advisors: Jelani Nelson and Avishay Tal) has won the Best Student Paper Award at the Computational Complexity Conference (CCC) 2022. The solo-authored paper titled “Improve Pseudorandom Generators for AC^0 Circuits” was one of two co-winners of the Best Student Paper Award at CCC, which is an annual conference on the inherent difficulty of computational problems in terms of the resources they require. Organized by the Computational Complexity Foundation, CCC is the premier specialized publication venue for research in complexity theory.

A paper co-authored by CS Prof. Alvin Cheung has won the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper at the 43rd Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 2022. The paper titled, “Synthesizing Analytical SQL queries from Computation Demonstration,” introduces a tool called Sickle, a new end-user specification, programming by computation demonstration, for greater efficiency in analytical SQL queries. PLDI is the premier forum in the field of programming languages and programming systems research, covering the areas of design, implementation, theory, applications, and performance.

EECS alumnus Gary S. May (M.S. '88/Ph.D. '91, advisor: Costas Spanos), the first Black chancellor of UC Davis, is the focus of an Inside Higher Ed story highlighting the unique bond between three Black Berkeley Engineering alumni in the 1980s, all of whom have gone on to lead top research institutions. Reggie DesRoches has become the president of Rice University, and Darryll Pines is the president of the University of Maryland, College Park. The three met at Berkeley where they studied different fields of engineering. The article describes the unique landscape of diversity in the era before Proposition 209, and interviewed EECS staff emerita, Sheila Humphreys for the story, who was then the EECS director of diversity, as well as Dean Liu who said this past academic year (2021-22) “is the first year that we ended up with a higher percentage [of undergraduate underrepresented minorities] then even before Prop 209.” In fostering the minority engineering programs (MEP) of the 1980s, Sheila attributes the "unwavering administrative support" of the late Dean Pister, and a "comprehensive, whole-student approach."

CS Prof. Ion Stoica has won the 2023 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. Presented annually, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1986 for outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications. The award is named in honor of Dr. Koji Kobayashi, who has been a leading force in advancing the integrated use of computers and communications. Stoica was cited “for contributions to the design of cloud and computer network services.” Stoica’s research is focused on cloud computing and networked computer systems. He is the Executive Chairman and co-founder of Databricks and an ACM Fellow. Previous winners of this award include Profs. Kannan Ramchandran and Jean Walrand, and the late Prof. Emeritus Elwyn Berlekamp.

CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, the Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), and the Dean of the School of Information has been elected to become an Honorary Member of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). Each year, the Council of the LMS considers the election of Honorary Members of the Society amongst distinguished mathematicians who are not normally resident within the United Kingdom. Chayes was cited for “fundamental contributions to many of the most prominent topics in the mathematics, computation, and application of network science, data science, and allied areas,” and credited for co-inventing “the field of graphons.”