Three Berkeley Ph.D. students win Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships

Berkeley EECS Ph.D. students Tess Despres, Ran (Thomas) Tian, and Chenfeng Xu have won Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships (QIF). Since 2009, the QIF has aimed “to enable students to pursue their futuristic innovative ideas.”

Despres and co-author Alex Bellon from UCSD were selected for their work, “Crowd-Sourced and Private IoT Device Updates.” Advised by Prabal Dutta, Despres’ research focuses on wireless networks and privacy-preserving technologies. She was previously an engineer on Microsoft’s Xbox motherboard team and is now a part of Lab 11, a research group at Berkeley focused on embedded systems research.

Xu and Tian were selected for their work on”Efficient Online Map Generation: perception Models for Geometries and Semantics, LLMs for Topology.” Xu is co-advised by ME Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka and EECS Professor Kurt Keutzer. He is affiliated with BAIR, MSC lab, and PALLAS. Tian is co-advised by Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka and Professor Andrea Bajcsy (EECS Ph.D. 2022, advisors: Anca Dragan and Claire Tomlin) from Carnegie Mellon University. This month Tian was also named a 2024 Robotics: Science and Systems Pioneer, a top 30 early career researcher in the robotics field.