CS Prof. Emeritus Christos Papadimitriou has won the 2022 IEEE Computer Society Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award.  This award was created "to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation or expansion and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier."  Papadimitriou was cited "for fundamental contributions to Computer Science, via the development of the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its application to the natural and social sciences."  He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and the brain.  He has also published three novels: “Turing,” “Logicomix” and “Independence.”  Papadimitriou is currently teaching at Columbia University.

CS Prof. Jitendra Malik has been selected as one of two 2023 Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lecturers (FRL). This Lectureship is bestowed by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate to recognize faculty “whose research has changed the shape of their discipline” and invite them “to share their innovative work with the broader campus community and the public.”  Each lecturer will present a talk on a topic of their choice in April 2023. Malik, who also holds appointments in vision science, cognitive science, and bioengineering, is known for his research in computer vision, computational modeling of biological vision, computer graphics, and machine learning.  Several well-known concepts and algorithms arose in this work, such as anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging, shape contexts and R-CNN. He has won numerous awards including an IEEE CS Computer Pioneer Award in 2019.

Berkeley Artificial Intelligence researchers are joining forces with climate experts, government agencies, and industry, as part of the new Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Climate Initiative, a multi-disciplinary student-led hub dedicated to fighting climate change.  The effort is being led by co-founding director CS Prof. Trevor Darrel and organized by three of his graduate students, Colorado Reed (co-advised by Kurt Keutzer), who will help lead the initiative, Medhini Narasimhan, and Ritwik Gupta (co-advised by Shankar Sastry).  Their objective is to develop AI techniques that address problems with data processing, particularly involving massive data sets. To maximize the benefit to other researchers studying the same problems around the world, all work done by the initiative will be openly published and available without exclusive or proprietary licensing.  One of their first projects, “The Fate of Snow,” will be a collaboration between BAIR Climate Initiative researchers and other scientists and policy experts on the Berkeley campus, Berkeley Lab (LBNL), Meta AI (which belongs to Meta Platforms, Inc.) and the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes. The researchers plan to apply AI methods to a multitude of openly available weather and satellite data sources to estimate how much water is in the Sierra Nevada snowpack and forecast what that will mean for streadmflow in the region.

CS Prof. Stuart Russell has won the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence  (IJCAI) 2022 Award for Research Excellence.  This award is one of the IJCAI's highest honors and recognizes "a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results."   Russell was cited for "fundamental contributions to the development of Bayesian logic to unify logic and probability, the theory of bounded rationality and optimization, and learning and inference strategies for operations in uncertain environments."  Stuart is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UCSF and founder and vice-president of Bayesian Logic, Inc.  He founded and leads the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) and is the co-author of one the most popular AI textbooks in the world, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, the Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science (CDSS) and the Dean of the School of Information, will be awarded an honorary doctorate from Bard College in New York on May 28th.   Chayes is known for her work on phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, and algorithmic game theory, and is a world expert in the modeling and analysis of dynamically growing graphs.  Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including both theory and applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision making, and climate change.  Chayes earned her B.A. in Biology and Physics from Wesleyan in 1979  and her Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Princeton in 1983.  She served as a professor of Mathematics at UCLA for over ten years before leaving to co-found the Theory Group at Microsoft Research Redmond in 1997.  She opened Microsoft Research New England in 2008, where she served as Managing Director until she left for Berkeley in 2020.

Sky Computing Lab, the latest 5-year collaborative research lab launched out of Berkeley EECS, aims to build a new backbone for interconnected cloud computing, a milestone that would revolutionize the industry. The lab will leverage distributed systems, programming languages, security, and machine learning to decouple the services that companies want to implement from the choice of a specific cloud, with the goal of transforming the cloud into an undifferentiated commodity, much like the Internet. Google, IBM, Intel, Samsung SDS, and VMware are among the founding sponsors of the lab. The lab's team is comprised of over 60 members, including students, staff, and EECS faculty like Alvin Cheung, Natacha Crooks, Ken Goldberg, Joseph Gonzalez, Joe Hellerstein, Mike Jordan,  Anthony Joseph, Raluca Ada Popa, Koushik Sen, Scott Shenker, and Dawn Song. CS Prof. Ion Stoica, who will lead the lab, says “Sky will knock out current barriers and accelerate the transition to the cloud, which will accelerate the progress across different fields.”

EECS Assistant Prof. Nika Haghtalab and CS Assistant Prof. and Associate Prof. in the School of Information, David Bamman, are quoted in a Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) article about the resiliency and determination of the 2022 graduating class, particularly during the pandemic. “This generation of students has persevered, despite these global challenges, to forge a real community with their peers,” said Bamman. They also anticipated the ways the graduates will use their new skills to shape our collective future. “We need graduates who understand the technical methods of data science, their limitations and sources of bias, and the broader context in which information is used to drive policy, inform decision-making, and shape opinion,” Bamman said.  Haghtalab noted that “this is a great time to enter the workforce and contribute to the shaping of data science and computing for the advancement and betterment of the world.”

CS Assistant Prof. Angjoo Kanazawa has won the Society of Hellman Fellows Evergreen Fellowship.  The Society of Hellman Fellows is an endowed UC program administered by the Vice Provost for the Faculty that provides research funding "to promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their chosen fields."  Kanazawa's research lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. She is focused on building a system that can capture, perceive, and understand the complex ways that people and animals interact dynamically with the 3-D world--and can use that information to correctly identify the content of 2-D photos and video portraying scenes from everyday life.

EECS Associate Prof. Raluca Ada Popa is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award.  This award recognizes an outstanding young computer professional who has made a single recent major technical or service contribution to the field of computer science before the age of 35.  Popa was recognized for her work in the area of design of secure distributed systems, specifically systems that "protect confidentiality against attackers with full access to servers while maintaining full functionality."  Her approach focuses on protecting the confidentiality of data stored on remote servers by providing confidentiality guarantees for areas where servers need to store encrypted data, thus allowing data to be processed without decrypting.  Although computing on encrypted data is still only theoretical, Popa's solution involves building systems for a broad set of applications with common traits, and then utilizing encryption schemes on just these traits so that they can perform most computations on encrypted data.  Some of her systems have been adopted into or inspired systems such as SEEED of SAP AG, Microsoft SQL Server’s Always Encrypted Service, and others.  The award comes with a prize of $35,000.