CS alumnus Aviad Rubinstein (Ph.D. ' 17, advisor: Christos Papadimitriou) is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2017 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Hardness of Approximation Between P and NP.”  In his thesis, Rubinstein established the intractability of the approximate Nash equilibrium problem and several other important problems between P and NP-completeness—an enduring problem in theoretical computer science.  His work was featured in a Quanta Magazine article titled "In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium" in July. After graduating, Rubinstein became a Rabin Postdoc at Harvard and will join Stanford as an Assistant Professor in the fall.

Graduating CS senior Jacque Garcia, the president of Cal Boxing, is the focus of a Berkeley News article titled "Longtime fighter graduates as a champion."  Garcia, who grew up in Compton and is known for her “mental toughness, determination, dedication and positive attitude,” won the 2018 132-pound National Collegiate Boxing Association (NCBA) championship belt, an Outstanding Boxer Award, and a Cal Boxing women's third-place team award.  She was also both a Code2040 Fellow and CircleCI software engineering intern in 2017, and worked at the Hybrid Ecologies Lab in 2016 to help Ph.D. grad student Cesar Torres develop some features of a 2.5D Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool to reduce complexity of digital modeling by using grey-scale height maps.  Garcia credits the student organization Code the Change for her decision to eventually major in Computer Science. “Graduation is going to be very emotional,” says Garcia. “I didn’t start thinking about college until I was in the eighth grade. I didn’t know if I was going to go to college, I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it. It’s going to be a surreal moment. I can’t believe it’s happening.”

Three EECS students are in the top two teams which won the U.S. Imagine Cup Finals in San Francisco this week.  In the three-day event, sponsored by Microsoft, competing teams from across the United States presented and demoed their tech projects to a panel of VIP judges.  Will Huang (EECS M.Eng. program) and Vedant Saran (EECS senior) are on the 1st place U.C. Berkeley Pengram team, which received a $10k prize plus a $1k Judges' Mixed Reality Award.  The Pengram team built an AR/VR platform which allows engineers from around the world to be holographically ‘teleported’ into a workspace when needed.   Alvin Wan (EECS senior) is on the UC Berkeley/Johns Hopkins Boomerang team, which placed 2nd and received an $8k prize plus a $1k Judges' Data & IoT Award. The Boomerang team created a hybrid device and smartphone platform that monitors inhaler location for patients with asthma, notifying them of missing devices. The 6 winning teams will advance to the Imagine Cup World Finals this summer, where they will represent the United States for the chance to take home the trophy and win the $100,000 grand prize.  The competition is designed to empower "the next generation of computer science students to team up and use their creativity, passion and knowledge of technology to create applications that shape how we live, work and play."

EECS alumnus Alex Stamos (B.S. '01), currently the Chief Security Officer at Facebook, will be the featured speaker on May 10 at the 2018 Robert Kahn & Patrice Lyons Lecture, hosted by the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY).   The title of his talk is "Building Security for All." Stamos is an expert in global scale infrastructure, designing trustworthy systems, and mobile security, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and industry events, including Black Hat, RSA, DEF CON, Milken Global, Amazon ZonCon, Microsoft Blue Hat, FS-ISAC, and Infragard.   Before Facebook, Stamos served as the CISO of Yahoo, where he led the security team to develop innovative security technology and products. He was also the co-founder of security consultancy iSEC Partners, a company that helped hundreds of companies build secure and safe systems.  CCNY ranks #2 in the Chronicle of Higher Education among public colleges with the greatest success in ensuring the social mobility of their student body.

EE alumnus Leonard Shtargot (B.S. '01) has been awarded the title of Analog Devices Fellow, a distinguished technical position given to engineers who "contribute significantly to the company’s success through exceptional innovation, leadership and an unparalleled ability to unite and mentor others."  Shtargot joined Linear Technology after graduation and is currently leading an R&D team focused on high performance power management ICs for automotive, industrial, and telecom markets. His citation says he has "contributed innovations in power conversion technology and designed several families of high-performance DC/DC switching regulators focusing on new circuits, high-voltage silicon process improvements, advanced flip-chip package designs, and test techniques. These products have been widely adopted by the automotive and industrial technology sectors. Leonard is also a hands-on teacher who mentors other engineers and often can be found in the lab or test floor helping his colleagues solve technical problems."

Prof. Scott Shenker has been named the 2017 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award recipient.   The award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.   Shenker is honored for pioneering contributions to fair queueing in packet-switching networks, which had a major impact on modern practice in computer communication. His work was fundamental to helping the internet grow from a tool used by a small community of researchers to a staple of daily life used by billions.   Previous winners of this award include EECS Chair Prof. James Demmel and Prof. Emeritus Robert Brayton.

EE alumnus Ram Vasudevan (B.S. '06/M.S. '09/Ph.D. '12) is the recipient of a 2018 Young Investigator award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR).  Vasudevan is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.  He was chosen for the proposal “Real-Time Certified, Safe Control Synthesis for Autonomous Systems.”  The Young Investigator Program (YIP) is one of the nation’s oldest and most selective science and technology based research programs.  Its purpose is to fund early-career academic researchers whose scientific pursuits show outstanding promise for supporting the Department of Defense, while also promoting their professional development.

Prof. and alumnus Umesh Vazirani (Ph.D. '86) and alumnus Sanjeev Arora (Ph.D. '94) have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).  Membership is awarded in recognition of distinguished and continuing achievements in original scientific research.  Vazirani is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of EECS and the co-director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center (BQIC). His research interests lie primarily in quantum computing.  Arora, whose interests include uses of randomness in complexity theory and algorithms,  efficient algorithms for finding approximate solutions to NP-hard problems (or proving that they don't exist), and cryptography, is now the Charles C. Fitzmorris Prof. of Computer Science at Princeton University.

Prof. Alexandre Bayen has won the 2018 Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems (TC-CPS) Mid-Career Award.  This award recognizes a mid-career researcher from either academia or industry who has demonstrated outstanding contributions to the field of cyber-physical system (CPS) in his/her career development. CPS addresses the close interactions and feedback loop between the cyber components such as sensing systems and the physical components such as varying environment and energy systems.   Bayen is the director of the Institute for Transportation Studies and heads the Mobile Sensing Lab, which focuses on applications of control and optimization to problems involving data collected by mobile sensors, in particular onboard phones and connected wearables.  His research project Mobile Millennium includes a pilot traffic-monitoring system that uses the GPS in cellular phones to gather traffic information, process it, and distribute it back to the phones in real time.

Prof. Jitendra Malik has won the 2018 Award for Research Excellence from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization (IJCAI).  The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. The recipients of this honor, including CS Prof. Michael Jordan who won in 2016, are considered among "the most illustrious group of scientists from the field of Artificial Intelligence."  Malik is known for his research in computer vision.  The award will be presented at the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-ECAI 2018) in Stockholm, Sweden, in July.