CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson has won the 13th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies.  He shares the award with John Hennessy of Stanford University "for taking computer architecture, the discipline behind the central processor or 'brain' of every computer system, and launching it as a new scientific area."  The citation says that Patterson and Hennessy "are synonymous with the inception and formalization of this field.  Before their work, the design of computers – and in particular the measurement of computer performance – was more of an art than a science, and practitioners lacked a set of repeatable principles to conceptualize and evaluate computer designs. Patterson and Hennessy provided, for the first time, a conceptual framework that gave the field a grounded approach towards measuring a computer’s performance, energy efficiency, and complexity.”  They jointly created RISC, an architecture that underpins the design of central processors and is at the heart of virtually every data center server, desktop, laptop, smartphone, and computer embedded in an Internet of Things device.  Their landmark textbook, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, was first published in 1989 and is still considered “the bible” of computer architecture.  The pair won the ACM A.M. Turing Award for their achievements in 2017.  Patterson participated in a Frontiers of Knowledge Award interview video.

EE Prof. Kam Lau has won the 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Microwave Theory & Techniques Society (MTT-S) Microwave Power Award.  This award recognizes an individual or a small team who have made outstanding pioneering technical contributions that advance microwave theory and techniques, which are described in an archival paper published at least 20 years prior to the year of the award.  Lau was cited for “pioneering developments and commercialization of RF over fiber devices, systems and applications which launched the microwave photonics industry.”   He is known for developing an ultra-stable radio frequency (RF) over fiber system for ultra-precise, long-distance synchronization of antennas, which has enabled both ground-based communication networks and spaceborne planetary radar imaging systems.

Senior EECS student Steven Cao has won a Computing Research Association (CRA) 2021 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award, and senior Stephen Tian was named runner-up.    The award recognizes significant contributions to computing research projects.  Cao (nominated by Prof. Dan Klein)  worked with the Berkeley Natural Language Processing group, where he developed new methods in syntactic parsing for one project, and contributed to the development and testing of new methods to provide more accurate translations between languages in another.  He also worked on developing new and provably correct blockchain protocols and on several projects related to medical imaging.  He co-authored seven papers, including first authorship on papers at three conferences.  He served as Teaching Assistant for two courses while also acting as a research mentor for the group.  Tian (nominated by Prof. Sergey Levine) demonstrated how a robotic finger with a touch sensor could perform myriad tasks using the same reinforcement learning algorithm in one project, and proposed a novel algorithm to allow a robot to achieve a variety of goals indicated as goal images in another.  He co-authored several papers at at least three conferences,  and served as a TA, while also volunteering at events for local high school students.   Ryan Lehmkuhl  (nominated by Prof. Raluca Ada Popa)a was a finalist, and Joey Hejna (nominated by Prof. Pieter Abbeel) received an honorable mention.

CS Profs. Sanjit Seshia and John Canny have been named to the 2020 class of fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in recognition of their fundamental contributions to computing and information technology.  Seshia, whose PhD thesis work at Carnegie Mellon on the UCLID verifier and decision procedure helped pioneer the area of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) and SMT-based verification, and who has led the development of technologies for cyber-physical systems education based on formal methods, was cited "for contributions to formal verification, inductive synthesis, and cyber-physical systems."  Canny, who has explored roofline design for machine learning, improved inference and representations for deep learning, and is best known for creating the widely used Canny edge detector, was cited "for contributions in robotics, machine perception, human-computer interaction, and ubiquitous computing."  Prof. Emeritus Manuel Blum (now at Carnegie Mellon) was also among the 95 scientists inducted into the 2020 class who represent the top 1% of ACM members.

EECS grad student and alumnus Jake Tibbetts (B.S. EECS/Global Studies '20) has won the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ 2020 Leonard M. Rieser Award.   Winners of the award have published essays in the Bulletin's Voices of Tomorrow column, and are selected by the Bulletin’s editorial team for recognition as "outstanding emerging science and security experts passionate about advancing peace and security in our time."  Tibbetts received the award for his article “Keeping classified information secret in a world of quantum computing,” published in the Bulletin on February 11, 2020.  “In his piece, Jake Tibbetts accomplished the kind of deep, thoughtful, and well-crafted journalism that is the Bulletin's hallmark," said editor-in-chief John Mecklin. "Quantum computing is a complex field; many articles about it are full of strange exaggerations and tangled prose. Tibbetts' piece, on the other hand, is an exemplar of clarity and precision and genuinely worthy of the Rieser Award.”  Tibbetts is a fellow at the NNSA-supported Nuclear Science and Security Consortium, and has previously worked as a research assistant at the LBNL Center for Global Security Research.  He has made contributions to the Nuclear Policy Working Group and the Project on Nuclear Gaming at Cal, and made the EECS news last year for his involvement in creating the online three-player experimental wargame "SIGNAL," which was named the Best Student Game of 2019 by the Serious Games Showcase and Challenge (SGS&C).  The Rieser Award comes with a $1K prize.

EECS Prof. Ruzen Bajcsy has won the 2021 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Medal For Innovations In Healthcare Technology.  The award is presented "for exceptional contributions to technologies and applications benefitting healthcare, medicine, and the health sciences."  Bajcsy, who has done seminal research in the areas of human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, computerized radiological/medical image processing and artificial vision, was cited “for pioneering and sustained contributions to healthcare technology fundamental to computer vision, medical imaging, and computational anatomy.” In addition to her significant research contributions, Bajcsy is also known for her leadership in the creation of the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, globally regarded as a premiere research center.  She is especially known for her comprehensive outlook in the field, and her cross-disciplinary leadership in successfully bridging the once-diverse areas of robotics, artificial intelligence, engineering and cognitive science.  EECS Prof. Thomas Budinger previously received the Health Care Innovations medal in 2018.

CS Prof. Michael I. Jordan has been awarded the 2021 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Ulf Grenander Prize in Stochastic Theory and Modeling.   The prize, which was established in 2016, recognizes "exceptional theoretical and applied contributions in stochastic theory and modeling." It is awarded for "seminal work, theoretical or applied, in the areas of probabilistic modeling, statistical inference, or related computational algorithms, especially for the analysis of complex or high-dimensional systems." Jordan, who has a split appointment in Statistics, was cited for "foundational contributions to machine learning, especially unsupervised learning, probabilistic computation, and core theory for balancing statistical fidelity with computation."  He is known for his work on recurrent neural networks as a cognitive model in the 1980s, formalizing various methods for approximate interference, and popularizing Bayesian networks and the expectation-maximization algorithm in machine learning.  The prize is awarded every three years, making Jordan the second recipient of the honor.

CS Prof. and alumna Dawn Song (Ph.D. '02, advisor: Doug Tygar) has won the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) Outstanding Innovation Award.  This award recognizes "outstanding and innovative technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory and/or development of commercial systems."  Song was cited "for contributions to systems and software security, in particular, dynamic taint analysis for vulnerability discovery and malware detection."  She pioneered the BitBlaze Binary Analysis Infrastructure, a unified binary program analysis platform used to provide novel solutions to computer security problems, including automatic vulnerability discovery and defense, in-depth malware analysis, and automatic extraction of security models for analysis and verification.

EECS alumnus and Prof. Ali Niknejad (M.S. '97/Ph.D. '00, advisor: Robert Meyer) has won the 2020 Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Research Award.  This award recognizes researchers in both technology and design who have made “a lifetime of great impact to the semiconductor industry.”  Niknejad was cited for “noteworthy achievements that have advanced analog, RF, and mm-wave circuit design and modeling, which serve as the foundation of 5G+ technologies.”  Stanford ME Prof. Kenneth Goodson also won the award this year.  “Research is the engine of innovation in the semiconductor industry, enabling breakthroughs that power our economy and help solve society’s great challenges,” said John Neuffer, SIA president and CEO. “The work of Drs. Goodson and Niknejad has greatly advanced chip technology and helped keep America at the leading edge of innovation.”  Niknejad, who previously received the 2012 ASEE Frederick Emmons Terman Award for his textbook on electromagnetics and RF integrated circuits, will accept the SIA award during the 2020 SIA Leadership Forum and Award Celebration on November 19th.

CS Assistant Prof. Natacha Crooks has won the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Dennis M. Ritchie dissertation award for her thesis titled "A Client-Centric Approach to Transactional Datastores."  The award, which recognizes creative research in software systems, was bestowed upon a dissertation which a colleague described as "a landmark, with deep and beautiful results in transactions and distributed consistency, and systems that exploit them."  The award committee commented that "Natacha Crooks’ thesis achieves something rare: a new conceptual framework for client-centric consistency and two efficient systems built on those insights. The document for this attractive package is accessible (in part) to undergraduates and the advanced material is very clearly written. With the enduring popularity of consistency as a research topic in distributed systems for the past several decades it is surprising that a breakthrough as large as Natacha’s took as long as it did."  The work was done at the University of Texas, Austin, advised by Lorenzo Alvisi and Simon Peter.