EECS graduate student Zichao Ye (advisor: Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) is among five winners selected by the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) to showcase their Ph.D. projects to the global power electronics community.  Ye's thesis, titled "Hybrid Switched-Capacitor Power Converters: Fundamental Limits and Design Techniques," focuses on a topological effort to drastically improve the performance of existing power electronics using a hybrid approach, in which both inductors and capacitors are used in the voltage conversion and power transfer process.  During his presentation in April, Ye highlighted one of his hybrid converter designs:  a 48V-to-12V cascaded resonant converter for more efficient data center which demonstrated 99% peak system efficiency and 2500 W/in3 power density.  PELS Thesis (P3) Talk Award winners are chosen by the PELS Education Digital Media Committee during an annual competition.

EECS Prof. Emerita Ruzena Bajcsy has won the PAMI Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Achievement Award.  This award is presented biennially by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee for Pattern Analysis and Machine Learning (TCPAMI) to honor outstanding "researchers in Computer Vision who have made major contributions to the field over their career and who have influenced the field in an extraordinary way."  Bajcsy founded the pioneering General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Lab in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.  The GRASP Lab was one of the first groups to foster interdisciplinary research between computer and cognitive scientists, electrical and mechanical engineers, and psychologists.  Her robotics research focused on computer vision, tactile perception, and the problem of system identification. Her work in medical imaging involved coupling a digital anatomy atlas with elastic matching algorithms in order to automatically identify anatomic structures of the brain.  This now standard technology was first used in X-ray tomography and later with MRI and positron image tomography.  At Berkeley, Bajcsy was the founding director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) in 2001, a collaboration between four University of California campuses.   Before coming to Berkeley, she headed the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.  EECS Prof. Jitendra Malik, one of the speakers at ICCV 2021 where the award was announced, said "Ruzena has been a pioneer in so many ways, with her work on active perception, medical image analysis, robotics and her mentorship of generations of researchers in whom she has inculcated the highest of values. Her career is full of many, many 'firsts.'"

CS Prof. Stewart Russell has been selected as the 2021 BBC Reith Lecturer.  Considered among the most prestigious lecture series across all fields, Reith Lectures are delivered annually by leading authorites invited by the BBC "to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest."   Russell will deliver four lectures this fall, held in four locations across the UK, on the subject of "Living With Artificial Intelligence." The series, which will be and broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service as well as made available on BBC Sounds, will "explore the impact of AI on our lives and discuss how we can retain power over machines more powerful than ourselves."  The first lecture, titled "The Biggest Event in Human History," will be held in London and will cover the birth of AI; the second lecture, in Manchester, will cover "AI in Warfare;" the third, in Ediburgh, will cover "AI in the Economy;" and the final lecture, in Newcastle, is titled "AI: A Future for Humans?"  Russell, who is the Director of the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.  His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries.

EECS Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu has been selected to receive the 2021 IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Education Award.  This award is presented annually by EDS to honor "an individual who has made distinguished contributions to education within the field of interest of the Electron Devices Society."  Liu, who is currently the dean of Berkeley Engineering, was cited “For outstanding contributions to education in the field of electron devices and achievements on diversity and inclusion.”  She has been a strong advocate for fostering inclusion and respect for women and members of underrepresented minorities in engineering.  She was the first woman to Chair the EECS department (2014), the second woman to join Intel's board of directors (2016), and the first woman elected dean of the Berkeley College of Engineering (2018).  She won the Chang-Lin Tien Leadership in Education Award in 2020.   Liu is also renowned for her research into novel semiconductor devices, non-volatile memory devices, and M/NEMS technology for ultra-low power circuits.  She is probably best known for the development of polycrystalline silicon-germanium thin film technology for applications in integrated circuits and microsystems; and as the co-inventor of the three-dimensional FinFET transistor  which is the design that is used in all leading microprocessor chips today.

EECS alumnus Yang You (Ph.D. '20, advisor: James Demmel) has won the IEEE Computer Society Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researcher Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing.  The focus of his research is efficient deep learning on distributed systems. He is known for developing the industry benchmark LARS (Layer-wise Adaptive Rate Scaling) and LAMB (Layer-wise Adaptive Moments for Batch training) optimizers to accelerate machine learning on HPC platforms.  His team broke the world record of ImageNet training speed in 2017 and the world record of BERT training speed in 2019, and his training techniques have been used by many tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.  You made the Forbes 30 Under 30 2021 Asia list for Healthcare and Science in April and is now a Presidential Young Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore.

Sumit Gulwani (Ph.D. '05, advisor: George Necula), now a Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, has been selected to receive the 2021 Max Planck-Humboldt Medal for "automatic programming and computational education."  Gulwani, who won the ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation award and the MSR Ph.d. Fellowship while at Berkeley, is an expert in program analysis and artificial intelligence.  He shaped the field of program synthesis, which emerged around 2010, by developing algorithms that can efficiently generate computer programs from very few input-output examples, natural-language-based specification, or from just the code and data context. His work made it possible for non-programmers to program tedious, repetitive spreadsheet tasks, and enabled productivity improvements for data scientists and developers for data wrangling and software engineering tasks. Recently, Gulwani has also been using the tools of program synthesis for computer-aided education of pupils and students. Starting from the automatic correction of learners' work in programming education, he further evolved this line of work to detect misunderstandings and give learning feedback and grades, also in subjects like mathematics and language learning. He is also the inventor of the popular Flash Fill feature in Microsoft Excel.  The award will be presented during a ceremony in Berlin on November 3, 2022.

CS Prof. Katherine Yelick has been named UC Berkeley's next vice chancellor for research.  She will take over the role from EECS Prof. Randy Katz on January 1, 2022.  Yelick is an expert in the field of parallel computing and currently serves as executive associate dean in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS).  “Kathy Yelick is one of the most talented leaders I have ever worked with — she listens, sees the big picture, and co-creates and implements phenomenal solutions,” said Jennifer Chayes, the CDSS Associate Provost. “I cannot imagine a better vice chancellor for research, and we at CDSS look forward to working with Kathy in her new role.” Yelick spent 11 years in leadership and management roles at Berkeley Lab (LBNL), where she oversaw a variety of initiatives, including the opening of new computing facility Shyh Wang Hall, the founding of the Berkeley Quantum collaboration, the formation of the lab’s machine learning for science initiative, and the launch of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project.  “UC Berkeley’s research community is uniquely positioned to tackle some of the world’s most important social and scientific problems, from climate change and public health to equity and social justice,” Yelick said. “I think it’s important to bring together diverse expertise and perspectives, and I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues across academic disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences to the physical and biological sciences, engineering, professional schools and beyond.”

Graduate students Sagnik Bhattacharya (B.A. CS and Statistics '21) and Jay Shenoy (B.A. CS '21) are recipients of the 2022 Siebel Scholars award.  The Siebel Scholars program annually recognizes "exceptional students from the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, and bioengineering."  Bhattacharya, a 5th Year Masters student and TA for CS 70 (Discrete Math and Probability), is interested in machine learning theory and its applications in data science.  He is currently working with Prof. Jonathan Shewchuk on the theory behind deep linear neural networks.  Shenoy is working on computational imaging with Prof. Ren Ng, as well as problems in autonomous vehicle simulation in the Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (iCyPhy) group.  Siebel Scholars receive a $35,000 award for their final year of studies. "On average, Siebel Scholars rank in the top five percent of their class, many within the top one percent."

CS Prof. Ali Ghodsi will be the inaugural speaker for "The Tale of a Success" entrepreneurship series, hosted by the Iranian Students of California (ISC) in collaboration with the Berkeley Iranian Students Association in America (ISAA).  Ghodsi is a co-founder and the CEO of enterprise software company Databricks, a start-up which grew out of the AMPLab project that is now valued at $38B. He was one of the original creators of the open source project Apache Spark, and "the ideas from his academic research in resource management and scheduling and data caching have been applied to Apache Mesos and Apache Hadoop."  The lecture series features stories by successful Iranian-American entrepreneurs "who have all built category-defining tech companies."  Ghodsi will give his presentation via Zooom webinar on October 14th.