EECS Assistant Prof. Joseph Gonzalez is the focus of a profile for the Association for Computing Machinery's "People of ACM" series.  Gonzalez, who works at the intersection of machine learning and data systems, desribes how and why his field has grown over time, where it might be heading, and what challenges might need to be addressed in the future.  "Today progress is largely limited by creativity and our budget for compute resources and data," he says. "Machine learning frameworks...provide the necessary abstractions to hide the complexity of differentiation, optimization, and parallel computation, freeing the modern data scientist to focus on the learning problem. These frameworks build on advances in data systems and scientific computing to unlock new parallel hardware."

A paper written by recent graduate Elizaveta Tremsina (B.S. '19 CS/Physics/Applied Math) has taken third place in the undergraduate category of the 2019 ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) Grand Finals.  The paper, titled "Your Story Recorded in a Magnet: Micromagnetic Simulations of Spin-Orbit Torque in Multi-layer Structures," was a continuation of the first place poster she presented at the 2018 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.    "I am extremely thankful to the Berkeley EECS department for the amazing 4.5 years and for the unique chance to participate in cutting-edge research with Dr. Salahuddin's group and also attend the Tapia conference (my first one back in 2016 and last year)," she said. "I hope that more Berkeley undergrads participate in this competition in the future, be it at Tapia or other ACM conferences."  Tremsina was presented with her award at the ACM awards banquet last weekend.

EECS alumna Nadia Heninger (B.S. '04) has won the 2019 Borg Early Career Award (BECA).  The BECA  is given to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions and who has contributed to her profession, especially in the outreach to women.  After graduation, Heninger earned a Ph.D. from Princeton and is currently an associate professor in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.  She is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack, for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routers and other embedded devices, and for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the NSA to decrypt large amounts of internet traffic via the Logjam vulnerability.

"Improved Subthreshold Swing and Short Channel Effect in FDSOI n-Channel Negative Capacitance Field Effect Transistors," has won the 2018 IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) George E. Smith Award.  The paper was co-authored by current postdoc Korok Chatterjee, graduate student Ava J. Tan, former postdocs Daewoong Kwon,  Angada B. Sachid, Ajay K. Yadav and Hong Zhou, EE Profs. Chenming Hu and Sayeef Salahuddin, and LBNL's Roberto dos Reis. The award recognizes the best paper appearing in a fast turn around archival publication of the IEEE Electron Devices Society, targeted to IEEE Electron Device Letters.

CS alumnus Mark D. Hill (Ph.D. '87, advisers: David Patterson and Alan J. Smith) has won the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award, considered the most prestigious award in the computer architecture community.  Hill, who is currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, was cited "for contributions to memory consistency models and memory system design."  Widely regarded as the leading memory systems researcher in the world today, Hill made seminal contributions to the fields of cache memories, memory consistency models, transactional memory, and simulation.   His thesis advisor, David Patterson, won the Eckert-Mauchly award in 2008.  It will be presented at the 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in June.

Assistant Profs. Rikky Muller (EE) and Ren Ng (CS) have been selected to receive awards from the Hellman Faculty Fellows Fund.  The fund supports "substantially the research of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research."   Muller won for "Networks of Neural Dust" and Ng won for "Oz Vision:  New Principles for Color Display, and An Experimental Platform for Neuroscience."

Assistant Prof. Alvin Cheung has won an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).  The paper, titled "View-Centric Performance Optimization for Database-Backed Web Applications," was co-authored by his student at the University of Washington, Cong Yan, and colleagues at the University of Chicago: Junwen Yang, Chengcheng Wan, and Shan Lu.

Prof. Ken Goldberg is the subject of an interview in Robotics Business Review (RBR) Insider with the tag line "Working at the intersection of art, robotics, and social media, Dr. Ken Goldberg shares his thoughts on making robots less clumsy when grabbing objects."  Goldberg has a joint appointment in IEOR and is the Director of the CITRIS People and Robots Initiative as well as the AUTOLAB.  He says "my proudest moment was when I was hired at UC Berkeley in 1995. Since I was a kid in the 1960’s I’ve always idolized Berkeley including the Free Speech Movement – and social justice movements during a time when its students questioned authority. Berkeley is a public university and has this amazing reputation in terms of innovation and rigor, not only in the sciences and engineering, but also in the arts, humanities and social sciences."

EECS PhD student Justin Yim (with advisor EECS Prof. Ron Fearing and ME undergraduate co-author Eric Wang) has won the best student paper award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (May 20-24, Montreal) for his paper "Drift-free Roll and Pitch Estimation for High-acceleration Hopping."  The robot "Salto" (Saltatorial Agile Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles) was previously restricted to only indoor operation in a room equipped with a motion tracking system. In the newest paper, Salto can now estimate its own position by combining its onboard inertial sensor with a model of its takeoffs and landings. This improved estimate allows
Salto to hop outside with human steering.

A paper co-authored by freshly minted alumnus Tianshi Wang (Ph.D. '19, winner of the 2019 EECS David Sakrison Memorial Prize for "truly outstanding research") and Prof. Jaijeet Roychowdhury has won Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) 2019.  The paper, titled "OIM: Oscillator-based Ising Machines for Solving Combinatorial Optimisation Problems" will be presented at the conference in Japan next week.