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.”

A CS Prof.-led proposal has been selected to receive a California Education Learning Lab award of up to $650,000. The proposal, “A’s-for-All (A4A): Scaling Mastery Learning Through Technology, Advocacy, Policy, and Partnerships” was led by CS Profs. Armando Fox and Dan Garcia in partnership with California State University, Long Beach, and El Camino College. The grant is designed to scale successful Learning Lab projects, expanding the positive impacts of STEM in public higher education. A4A proposes to build upon an open-source technology platform from UIUC to reorient formative and summative assessment toward mastery learning, ultimately providing students every opportunity to learn and demonstrate proficiency in various areas of introductory computer science courses. The scaling proposal will develop concept mapping tools so that faculty and students can track progress in student learning, and implement automated approaches to provide more flexibility for the ways in which students are able to demonstrate proficiency/mastery of the course.

Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao has won the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Young Computer Architect Award, which recognizes outstanding research contributions by an individual in the field of Computer Architecture, and who received their Ph.D. within the last six years. Shao's work focuses on specialized accelerators, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. The award was presented last week at the 49th edition of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '22) in New York City, New York. 

EECS Prof. Emerita Ruzena Bajcsy and her daughter, Klara Nahrstedt, are the first mother-daughter pair to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  Bajcsy has been a member of the NAE since 1997 and Nahrstedt, the Chair of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was elected in February.  The two sat down for a Fireside Chat at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications last month to discuss the accomplishment.  “I’m a proud mother,” Bajcsy said. “And I’m thrilled to have been in this profession we have both shared.”  Bajcsy is known for her work in human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, image processing, and artificial vision, as well as her cross-disciplinary leadership.  Nahrstedt researches security across shared systems, including multimedia distributed systems, wired and wireless networks, mobile systems, power grids, and edge-cloud systems.  Both women faced daunting challenges during  their careers. “We were ridiculed, and we were doubted. But you have to be strong,” Bajcsy said.  They emphasized that building a strong support network was critical to success.  “I learned that because of my mother,” said Nahrsted, "and through it I quickly believed I could do whatever I put my mind to.”  Following in their footsteps, Bajcsy's granddaughter and Nahrstedt's niece, Andrea Bajcsy, is currently a doctoral candidate at Berkeley EECS, in her final term.  She is slated to start as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon in Fall 2023.

EECS Prof. Emeritus Kam Lau has received the 2022 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA).  Caltech's highest honor, the DAA is presented each year "to a small number of alumni in recognition of personal and professional accomplishments that have made a noteworthy impact in a field, on the community, or in society more broadly."  Lau was cited for "his innovations in and commercialization of laser diode and radio-over-fiber technologies that broadly enable today's wireline and wireless high-speed internet access as well as enabling progress in interplanetary exploration, radio astronomy, and particle physics research, and for his remarkable artistic contributions to the Chinese ink painting movement." While still in high school, Lau joined the first wave of the New Ink Painting Movement in Hong Kong, blending traditional Chinese ink and wash painting with a modern sensibility.   He earned three degrees from Caltech: a B.S. and M.S. in 1978,  and a Ph.D. in 1981.  He joined Ortel Corporation as a founding staff member and taught at Columbia University for two years before coming to Berkeley. His development of the ultra-stable radio frequency (RF) over fiber system made ultra-precise, long-distance synchronization of antennas possible, and enabled both ground-based communication networks and spaceborne planetary radar imaging systems.

CS Prof. Jelani Nelson has won the Best Paper Award at the 2022 ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) on June 13th.  The symposium is a collaboration between three ACM Special Interest Groups: Management of Data (SIGMOD), Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), and Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI).  Nelson's award is for a paper he co-wrote with Huacheng Yu titled "Optimal Bounds for Approximate Counting," in which they describe research on the asymptotic space complexity of maintaining an approximate counter as it is dynamically incremented, proving both new upper and lower bounds that for the first time match up to a constant factor, completely resolving a problem that was first studied in the late 1970s.

CS Prof. Emeritus Christos Papadimitriou has won the 2022 IEEE Computer Society Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award.  This award was created "to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation or expansion and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier."  Papadimitriou was cited "for fundamental contributions to Computer Science, via the development of the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its application to the natural and social sciences."  He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and the brain.  He has also published three novels: “Turing,” “Logicomix” and “Independence.”  Papadimitriou is currently teaching at Columbia University.

CS Prof. Jitendra Malik has been selected as one of two 2023 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecturers (FRL). This Lectureship is bestowed by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate to recognize faculty “whose research has changed the shape of their discipline” and invite them “to share their innovative work with the broader campus community and the public.”  Each lecturer will present a talk on a topic of their choice in April 2023. Malik, who also holds appointments in vision science, cognitive science, and bioengineering, is known for his research in computer vision, computational modeling of biological vision, computer graphics, and machine learning.  Several well-known concepts and algorithms arose in this work, such as anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging, shape contexts and R-CNN. He has won numerous awards including an IEEE CS Computer Pioneer Award in 2019.

Berkeley Artificial Intelligence researchers are joining forces with climate experts, government agencies, and industry, as part of the new Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Climate Initiative, a multi-disciplinary student-led hub dedicated to fighting climate change.  The effort is being led by co-founding director CS Prof. Trevor Darrel and organized by three of his graduate students, Colorado Reed (co-advised by Kurt Keutzer), who will help lead the initiative, Medhini Narasimhan, and Ritwik Gupta (co-advised by Shankar Sastry).  Their objective is to develop AI techniques that address problems with data processing, particularly involving massive data sets. To maximize the benefit to other researchers studying the same problems around the world, all work done by the initiative will be openly published and available without exclusive or proprietary licensing.  One of their first projects, “The Fate of Snow,” will be a collaboration between BAIR Climate Initiative researchers and other scientists and policy experts on the Berkeley campus, Berkeley Lab (LBNL), Meta AI (which belongs to Meta Platforms, Inc.) and the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes. The researchers plan to apply AI methods to a multitude of openly available weather and satellite data sources to estimate how much water is in the Sierra Nevada snowpack and forecast what that will mean for streadmflow in the region.