CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson has won the 2022 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  Recognized as one of the world's preeminent awards for engineering achievement, the prize "honors an engineer whose accomplishment has significantly impacted society by improving the quality of life, providing the ability to live freely and comfortably, and/or permitting the access to information."  Patterson, and his co-recipients, John Hennessy, Stephen Furber, and Sophie Wilson, were cited "for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips."  Patterson began the seminal Berkeley RISC project in 1980 to design a basic, neutral, freely-available set of microprocessor instructions that could be used in different types of machines and which could be optimized for different characteristics, like efficiency, physical size, and monetary cost.  When different devices are capable of running the same machine code, a better quality, higher-performance machine can replace a less expensive, lower-performance machine without having to replace software.  The open-source Berkeley RISC design was later commercialized by Sun Microsystems as the SPARC architecture, and inspired the ARM architecture used in virtually all new computer chips in the world today.  The biennial Draper prize is open to both NAE members and non-members worldwide, and comes with a $500K cash award.

EE Prof. Chunlei Liu has been named a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)  The ISMRM is an international, nonprofit, scientific association "whose purpose is to promote communication, research, development, and applications in the field of magnetic resonance (MR) in medicine and biology and other related topics and to develop and provide channels and facilities for continuing education in the field." Fellowships are bestowed to recognize "a significant and substantial contribution to research in a field within the Society’s purposes, who have contributed in a significant manner to the development of the Society...and/or who have made a significant contribution to education in MR."  Liu is known for pioneering higher-order tensor diffusion MRI,  which utilizes higher-order tensor statistics (variance, sknewness, kurtosis etc.) to measure the diffusion processes in biological tissues. He is also credited with developing susceptibility tensor imaging for mapping bio-magnetism.

CS Profs. Alistair Sinclair and Shafi Goldwasser have won inaugural Test of Time awards at the 2021 Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).  Sinclair won the 20 Year award for his paper, “A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with non-negative entries," which solved a problem that had been open for decades. Goldwasser won the 30 Year award for "Completeness theorems for non-cryptographic fault-tolerant distributed computation," which showed how to compute a distributed function even if up to one-third of the participants may be failing, misbehaving, or malicious.  The awards were presented at the 2021 STOC conference in June.

CS alumna and Prof. Shafi Goldwasser (Ph.D. '84, advisor: Manuel Blum) has won the 2021 Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) Test of Time Award.  This award "recognizes papers published in past Annual IEEE Symposia on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) for their substantial, lasting, broad, and currently relevant impact. Papers may be awarded for their impact on Theory of Computing, or on Computer Science in general, or on other disciplines of knowledge, or on practice."  Goldwasser is among five co-authors who won the award in the 30 year category for their groundbreaking complexity theory paper "Approximating Clique is Almost NP-Complete," which used the classification of approximation problems to show that some problems in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed. 

EECS Prof. Stuart Russell is slated to direct the future Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, which aims to make ethics and social equity more central to scientific decision-making, and which will try to ensure that the public has a greater say in future scientific advances.  The new center will combine forces with a sister center at the University of Cambridge, UK, to connect scientists, ethicists, and the public, in necessary and intentional discussions about the potential impacts of scientific discoveries.  “In addition to answering fundamental questions about the ethics of science, the Kavli Center is going to create a generation of scientific leaders who have seen how other scientific disciplines grapple with ethical problems and who have real training in the philosophical analysis of these questions,” said Russell. “It’s not just about changing public policy, it’s about changing what it means to be a good scientist in every discipline that can have an impact on the public.”

EECS Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao has won the inaugural Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications (ModSim) 2021 Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili (Sudha) Award.  This award recognizes "researchers who showcase the most outstanding contribution to the field of computer modeling and simulation" during the annual ModSim Workshop, which primarily features younger talent in the scientific community.  Shao presented "Enabling Holistic Machine-Learning Hardware Evaluation via Full-System Simulation," which described the Gemmini project's "systolic-array based matrix multiplication accelerator generator" that enables users to explore and evaluate different deep neural network accelerators.  The research was presented during a multi-part Rapid Fire flash talk/digital poster session.

EECS Prof. Murat Arcak and his graduate student He Yin have won the second Systems & Control Letters (SCL) Brockett-Willems Outstanding Paper Award. Their paper, "Reachability analysis using dissipation inequalities for uncertain nonlinear systems," published in SCL Volume 142, on August 2020, was deemed the best of 295 papers submitted to the journal in the two-year period between January 2019 through December 2020.  Co-authors include former ME Prof. Andrew Packard, who died in 2019, and Packard's former graduate student, Peter Seiler.  SCL hopes to present the award at the 25th International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS) which will be held in Bayereuth, Germany, in September 2022.

EECS Prof. and dean of Engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu has written an opinion piece for the Mercury News in which she explains why "the country urgently needs to reinvest in semiconductor design and manufacturing, including the development of a highly trained workforce."  She argues that America's lack of a skilled semiconductor manufacturing workforce, in the face of a global semiconductor chip shortage, is a matter of national security because it leaves the country vulnerable to geopolitical instability. "Systems that we rely upon for communications, commerce, defense and more are in jeopardy because the United States has lost its leadership in semiconductor manufacturing over the past three decades."  She appeals to Congress to address the issue and says "we need to double the number of students trained in microelectronics graduating today from all U.S. colleges and universities."  This will require "universities across the nation to collaborate with each other and to partner with industry" to create a geographically-distributed American Semiconductor Academy "with participating schools sharing curricula, facilitating access to industry-leading software tools and coordinating hands-on training for students."

EECS Prof. Emeritus Lotfi Zadeh (1921 - 2017) is being honored with a Google Doodle feature today.  In 1964, Zadeh conceived a new mathematical concept called fuzzy logic which offered an alternative to rigid yes-no logic in an effort to mimic how people see the world.  He proposed using imprecise data to solve problems that might have ambiguous or multiple solutions by creating sets where elements have a degree of membership. Considered controversial at the time, fuzzy logic has been hugely influential in both academia and industry, contributing to, among other things, "medicine, economic modelling and consumer products such as anti-lock braking, dishwashers and elevators."   Zadeh's seminal paper, "Fuzzy Sets -- Information and Control," was submitted for publication 57 years ago today.

CS Prof. Michael Jordan has co-written an article in Wired titled "The Turing Test Is Bad for Business" in which he argues that now that "computers are able to learn from data and...interact, infer, and intervene in real-world problems, side by side with humans," humans should not try to compete with them but "focus on how computers can use data and machine learning to create new kinds of markets, new services, and new ways of connecting humans to each other in economically rewarding ways."  Jordan wrote the article because many AI investors are focusing on technologies with the goal of exceeding human performance on specific tasks, such as natural language translation or game-playing. “From an economic point of view, the goal of exceeding human performance raises the specter of massive unemployment,” he said. “An alternative goal for AI is to discover and support new kinds of interactions among humans that increase job possibilities.”