Professor Joseph Hellerstein was awarded the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, citing innovative contributions in extensible query processing, interactive data analytics, and declarative approaches to networking and distributed computing. The award is given for innovative and highly significant contributions of enduring value to the development, understanding, or use of database systems and databases. Until 2003, this award was known as the “SIGMOD Innovations Award.” In 2004, SIGMOD, with the unanimous approval of ACM Council, decided to rename the award to honor Dr. E.F. (Ted) Codd (1923 – 2003) who invented the relational data model and was responsible for the significant development of the database field as a scientific discipline. SIGMOD, otherwise known as the the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data, is concerned with the principles, techniques and applications of database management systems and data management technology. Its members include software developers, academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, users, and students. SIGMOD sponsors the annual SIGMOD/PODS conference, one of the most important and selective in the field.

EECS Assistant Professor Alane Suhr has received an honorable mention for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Suhr’s dissertation, “Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems,” was honored “for formulating and designing algorithms for continual language learning in collaborative interactions, and designing methods to reason about context-dependent language meaning.” Suhr’s research is focused on natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. Suhr will be joining Berkeley EECS as an assistant professor in July 2023.

The U.S. News & World Report ranked both the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science graduate programs at Berkeley EECS among the top three graduate programs in the nation for 2023. Computer Science is ranked #1, tied with MIT and Stanford. Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering are ranked #2, tied with Stanford. The magazine based its rankings on responses from 202 engineering schools across the country, including data from fall 2022 and early 2023. This year, U.S. News included non-responders from the 220 schools surveyed, so long as they reported enough data to be eligible in 2022.

Two proposals led by CS Teaching Professor Narges Nourozi have won $4 million in funding from the National Science Foundation Directorate for STEM Education (NSF-IUSE). The proposals, “Transforming Introductory Computer Science Instruction with an AI-Driven Classroom Assistant” and “CUE-P: Establishing Servingness in Computing through Baskin Engineering Excellence Scholars Program” have been awarded approximately $2 million over four years, and $1.9 million over five years, respectively. The first proposal, INSIGHT, is a collaboration between North Carolina State University and UC Berkeley focusing on an AI-driven classroom assistant that holds significant transformative potential for yielding a deeper understanding of how students learn computer science with AI-driven classroom assistants and producing a set of practical instructional support principles for coding-enriched classroom interactions. The second proposal is a CUE Pathways project, wherein researchers from the Universities of California collaborate with eight California community colleges to study the effects of operationalizing servingness and transfer pathways between two- and four-year institutions to increase persistence, knowledge attainment, belongingness, graduation, and post-graduation outcomes.

Graduate students Nathan Brooks, Samantha Coday, Maggie Blackwell, Rose Abramson, and post-doc Nathan Ellis have won the IEEE COMPEL Best Paper Award for their paper, "Operation of Flying Capacitor Multilevel Converters At and Above Resonance." The paper was presented at the 23rd IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL), which took place in Tel Aviv, Israel. COMPEL is the premier conference on the latest advances in modeling, simulation, analysis, and control of power electronics devices, circuits and systems. The criteria for the award are based on the quality of the technical results, write-up, and presentation. The paper describes a new method for operating flying capacitor multilevel converters at and above resonance, which has proven to be more efficient and with better performance than existing methods. In addition to the best paper award, the group, advised by Professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, organized and presented a tutorial at the IEEE 7th Southern Power Electronics Conference (SPEC) in December 2022.

Alishba Imran, a 1st-year undergraduate student studying computer science, was named in Teen Vogue’s 21 under 21. The list recognizes those “who have made a substantial impact in both their communities and the world.” Imran, an undergraduate researcher in CS Prof. Ken Goldberg’s AUTOLab, focuses her work on using machine learning to solve real-world problems, like tracking counterfeit medication in the supply chain or using machine learning and physics to develop renewable energy storage devices. “I think the best things to work on are at the intersection of what you're good at, what you enjoy, and are a way for you to create value for the world,” said Imran.

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.” 

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. Raluca Ada Popa was interviewed as a Featured ACM Member as part of the "People of ACM" bulletin. As the Co-Director of RISELab and SkyLab, two labs aiming to build secure intelligent systems for the cloud and for the sky of cloud, she spoke about her research interests, which include security, systems, and applied cryptography. “I love both to build systems that can solve a real-world problem and to reason about deep mathematical concepts,” she said. Aiming to predict the direction of her research, she outlined her renewed focus on confidential computing, a major shift in the cloud computing landscape, which she said “will revolutionize data systems in industry in the coming years…[through] the combination of hardware security via hardware enclaves and cryptographic techniques. Many organizations have a lot of confidential data that they cannot share between different teams in their organization or different organizations. Sharing it would enable better medical studies, better fraud detection, increased business effectiveness, and other benefits.”