CS Assistant Prof. Aditya Parameswaran has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD)/Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) for his joint paper: “ShapeSearch: A Flexible and Efficient System for Shape-based Exploration of Trendlines.”  The paper proposes the implementation of ShapeSearch, a tool that mitigates issues with existing visual analytics tools, such as limited flexibility, expressiveness, and scalability.  The paper was one of two that received the top award out of over 144 accepted research papers and 450 submissions to ACM SIGMOD/PODS, the premiere international conference on the theoretical aspects of database systems.

EECS alumna Olivia Hsu (B.S. '19) will be giving a speech at the national 2020 IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) virtual graduation celebration on Saturday, May 30, 2020.  Hsu is the winner of the 2019 IEEE-HKN Alton B. Zerby and Carl T. Koerner Outstanding Electrical or Computer Engineering Student of the Year Award, and is the representative for the Mu (Berkeley) Chapter, which has won the IEEE-HKN Outstanding Chapter Award every year since 2001.   While at Berkeley, Hsu co-founded the student group Space Technologies at Cal (STAC) and won the 2019 EECS Arthur M. Hopkin award, which recognizes outstanding EE undergraduates who "demonstrate seriousness of purpose and high academic achievement."  She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford with a focus on computer architecture, digital circuits, and computer systems.  IEEE-HKN will host the event for the first time this year in place of the campus commencement ceremonies which  have been cancelled nationwide. 

Incoming CS graduate student Meena Jagadeesan has won a 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.  The fellowship program honors the contributions of immigrants and children of immigrants to the United States by investing in the education of a select group of new Americans who are "poised to make significant contributions to US society, culture or their academic field." Jagadeesan, whose parents emigrated from India, is a senior in a joint B.A./M.A. program at Harvard University where she is studying algorithmic questions, especially those arising in machine learning and economics.  She has won a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher award and one of her papers, which involved the study of a dimensionality reduction scheme, was selected as an oral presentation at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).  Each Fellow will receive up to $90K in financial support over two years.

The EECS department has eleven faculty members who rank among the top 100 most cited computer science & electronics scholars in the world. UC Berkeley ranked #4  in the global list of universities with the highest number of influential scholars in 2020 (35, up from 24 in 2018).  Profs. Michael Jordan, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Jitendra Malik, Trevor Darrell, David Culler, Shankar Sastry, Randy Katz, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Lotfi Zadeh and Dawn Song all ranked in the top 100 with an H-index score of 110 or higher, a measure that reflects the number of influential documents they have authored.   Jordan ranks fourth in the world, with an H-index of 166 and 177,961 citations.  The H-index is computed as the number h of papers receiving at least h citations among the top 6000 scientist profiles in the Google Scholars database. 

CS Prof. Michael I. Jordan, one of the world’s foremost researchers of machine learning, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering and Technology from Yale University.  Since 1702, honorary degrees have been the most significant recognition conferred by Yale, and signal "pioneering achievement in a field or conspicuous and exemplary contribution to the common good." Jordan's citation reads: "Facing an uncertain and complex world, you harness the power of human and machine learning to solve daunting problems. By bridging disciplines and following your curiosity, you have made possible what was once only imagined. Explorer of new domains, champion of big ideas: in recognition of the doors you have opened and the networks you have built, we proudly bestow on you this Doctor of Engineering and Technology degree."  Jordan is known for his foundational work at the interface of computer science and statistics, and for his applied work in computational biology, natural language processing, and signal processing.

CS alumnus Mark Hopkins (B.A. CS '00) has been appointed to a tenure-track position in the department of Computer Science at Reed College in Oregon. He will be part of the division of Mathematical and Natural Resources where he will study uncertain reasoning and machine learning, with a particular interest in how these can be applied to computational linguistics.  Hopkins earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2005 and had managed Project Euclid at the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Washington state before being hired as a visiting associate professor at Reed in 2018.

Four papers co-authored by EECS faculty (3 of which were co-authored by Prof. Dawn Song) have won Test-of-Time awards at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy today: "Efficient Authentication and Signing of Multicast Streams Over Lossy Channels," co-authored by Song (Ph.D. '02) and the late Prof. Doug Tygar (with Perrig and Canetti) in 2000, "Practical Techniques for Searches on Encrypted Data," co-authored by Song and Prof. David Wagner (with Perrig) in 2000, "Random Key Predistribution Schemes for Sensor Networks," co-authored by Song (with Chan and Perrig) in 2003, and "Outside the Closed World: On Using Machine Learning For Network Intrusion Detection" co-authored by Prof. Vern Paxson (with Sommer) in 2010.    IEEE-SP is considered the premier computer security conference and this four-fold achievement demonstrates Berkeley's preeminence in the field.

EECS alumna Andrea Goldsmith (B.A. ’86/M.S. ’91/Ph.D. ’94, advisor: Pravin Varaiya), who was named Berkeley EE Distinguished Alumna in 2018, has been named dean of Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.  Goldsmith has been a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford since 1999 and is a leader in the fields of information theory and communications. She helped lay the mathematical foundations for increasing the capacity, speed and range of wireless systems, and among her 29 patents are many inventions central to cell phone and Wi-Fi networks.  Earlier this month, Goldsmith became the first woman to win the Marconi Prize, said to be the highest honor in telecommunications research.  She has also been active in efforts to increase diversity in STEM fields and is the founding chair of the IEEE Board of Directors Committee on Diversity, Inclusion and Ethics.  When she starts her tenure as dean in September, she will oversee a school comprising six departments and four research centers, including new initiatives in bioengineering, data science and robotics, among others.

Freshly-graduate CS Ph.D. student Daniel J. Fremont (advisor: Sanjit Seshia) has won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED) Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award for his thesis on "Algorithmic Improvisation."  The award, which was established in 2013, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems.  Fremont's thesis proposes a theory of algorithmic improvisation to enable the correct-by-construction synthesis of randomized systems, and explores its applications to safe autonomy.