"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.

EECS Profs. Hany Farid and Alexei Efros will be working with Facebook to help develop new methods to improve detection of fake content, fake news and misinformation campaigns. Facebook has launched $7.5 million partnership with three universities, including UC Berkeley, to create the technology.  Farid is a long-time crusader for holding social media companies accountable for removing and preventing harmful content, and Efros specializes in artificial intelligence, graphics and computer vision.  Some immediate steps that can be taken include having the company hire more people to monitor the site, charging a nominal fee to use the service, redefining Facebook and other tech giants as publishers--rather than as platforms, and creating unambiguous rules.

EE Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller is the subject of a Berkeley Engineering article titled "Machines that heal."  She is using her expertise in integrated circuits to build tiny, implantable devices that are intelligent, safe and so minimally invasive that they can last over the course of a patient’s lifetime.  “I’m absolutely passionate about finding treatments and maybe someday cures for neurological diseases,” says Muller. “Almost everyone knows someone impacted by neurological diseases like epilepsy, Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. That’s why this is such an important area to invest time and resources into.”

Two EECS professors have won awards from the IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems (TCCPS).  Edward Lee won the Technical Achievement Award, which recognizes significant contributions to the field sustained throughout the recipient's career, ‘‘for pioneering and fundamental contributions to the design, modeling and simulation of cyber-physical systems.’’  The previous winner was Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli in 2017.  Sanjit Seshia won the Mid-Career Award, which recognizes a mid-career researcher who has made outstanding contributions to the field, ‘‘for fundamental contributions to formal methods for cyber-physical systems design and to cyber-physical systems education.’’  The previous recipient was Prof. Alexandre Bayen in 2018.