EECS Professor Emeritus Theodore “Ted” Van Duzer passed away peacefully in his sleep on October 24th. He was 95. Ted was born in Piscataway Township, New Jersey in 1927. At 17, he joined the Navy as a radio technician, his entrée into a career in electrical engineering. With assistance from the G.I. Bill, he earned a bachelor's degree at Rutgers University, a master’s degree at UCLA, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley where he served on the faculty from 1961 to 2014. Ted was co-author of two books, “Principles of Superconductive Devices and Circuits” and “Fields and Waves in Communications Electronics.” He was an IEEE Life Fellow, co-founder of Conductus, and an inductee into the National Academy of Engineering. In spite of his many professional honors, however, of most importance to him was his family and the many lifelong friendships with his Ph.D. students, visiting researchers, and ASC/IEEE colleagues. A memorial will be held at the First Presbyterian Church of Eureka on December 30th at 2:00 pm. In lieu of flowers or gifts, the family asks that donations be made to the church. If you would like to support the university in honor of Prof. Van Duzer, please reach out to gifts@eecs.berkeley.edu to learn more about the Ted Van Duzer Endowed Professorship.

CS Associate Professor Ren Ng has been elected as an Optica Fellow. Optica (formerly OSA) has inducted 129 members from 26 countries to the Society’s class of 2024 Fellows. Founded in 1916, Optica is a global society that works to advance the science and technology of light. Ng was honored “for pioneering work developing light field cameras, as well as seminal contributions in 3D view synthesis and human visual perception.” Ng was named a Sloan Fellow in 2017 and a Hellman Fellow in 2019, the same year that he received the Jim and Donna Gray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Computer Science.

Professor Emeritus Chenming Hu, former chief technology officer at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), has been awarded the Taiwan Presidential Science Prize "for advancing Taiwan's Semiconductor Industry." The award, established in 2001, is presented every two years to the most distinguished scientists in Taiwan and is given to innovative researchers who have made monumental contributions to international research in the fields of mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and applied sciences. Particular emphasis is given to scholars whose work has had a major impact on these fields in Taiwan. The award was presented to Hu by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. Hu, alongside Berkeley EECS colleagues, pioneered the FinFET transistor, which is widely used in high-performance processors around the world.

CS Associate Professor Alvin Cheung has won the 2023 Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Early Career Research Contribution Award. The award, which includes a $2,000 prize, recognizes researchers who have made a significant impact through a specific contribution to the field since completing their Ph.D. Separately, a paper by CS Professors Joseph Gonzalez and Joseph Hellerstein, co-authored by Yucheng Low, Aapo Kyrola, Danny Bickson, and Carlos Guestrin, received the 2023 VLDB Test of Time Award. Their paper, "Distributed Graphlab: A framework for machine learning in the cloud," was published at VLDB 2012. The authors were nominated for this award by the research community, and the winner was selected based on the paper's impact through its consequent products and services, and follow-through research by the community. The VLDB awards recognize excellence in the field of database research and development. The awards are presented annually at the VLDB conference, which is one of the premier conferences in the database field.

EECS graduate students Yicheng Zhu and Jiarui Zou, and post-docs Ting Ge and Nathan Ellis have won the 2023 IEEE Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) Best Paper Award. Their paper, "A 48-V-to-1-V Switching Bus Converter for Ultra-High-Current Applications,” demonstrated a new dc-dc power converter topology and control technique for data center power delivery applications, capable of sourcing 1200 A of current at 1 V supply voltage. The hardware prototype used to validate the concept achieved the highest power density and efficiency combination of any prior work, academic or industrial. Next, the researchers are working with industry partners to transition this record-breaking concept to next-generation GPU/CPU computing platforms for AI and machine learning applications. IEEE COMPEL is the premier control and modeling conference for power electronics, having brought together world experts in the field for the last 24 years. Three best papers were selected this year from the total accepted 84 papers, based on originality, contribution to the field, and quality of presentation at the conference. 

EECS Professor Emerita Ruzena Bajcsy was awarded the Berkeley Citation, the university’s highest honor, at a special event on Tuesday, Sept. 5. The surprise announcement was made at the end of a special event to commemorate The Past and Future of Robotics and Machine Learning Based on 250 Years of Research Experience. Tsu-Jae King Liu, dean of the College of Engineering, presented the award. The Berkeley Citation is awarded to distinguished individuals whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields. Bajcsy, whose storied career spans over 50 years, conducted seminal research in the areas of human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, computerized radiological/medical image processing, and computer vision. Among her numerous awards and firsts, Bajcsy was the first-ever woman to receive a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in the United States. She is renowned for her intellectual leadership, tireless work ethic, and inspiring approach to research and mentorship. Bajcsy is widely considered the foremost role model of generations of educators and researchers in computer science and engineering.

Tsu-Jae King Liu’s leadership of the nation’s top public school of engineering is continuing for a second term. Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin announced on August 1st in a campus message that Liu has accepted her reappointment as dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. “We extend our sincere congratulations to Tsu-Jae on her reappointment, effective as of July 1, 2023,” they stated in a campus announcement. “Her exceptional leadership, vision and unwavering commitment to the college and to UC Berkeley have set a remarkable precedent, and we look forward to seeing Berkeley Engineering’s continued growth and success under her leadership and guidance.” King Liu is the Roy W. Carlson Distinguished Professorship in Engineering in EECS. Her research activities are presently in advanced materials, fabrication processes and devices for energy-efficient electronics. She has authored or co-authored over 500 publications and holds over 90 patents. Professor Liu is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and serves on the board of directors for Intel Corporation. “My goal is for Berkeley Engineering to exemplify excellence in all that we do to benefit people and society through innovation and collaboration,” said Liu. “I look forward with excitement to seeing all that we will accomplish together as a community in the years ahead.”

EE Professor Venkat Anantharam and Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Professor Cheuk-Ting Li have won the 2023 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. The award is given annually “for an outstanding publication in the fields of interest to the Society appearing anywhere during the preceding four calendar years.” The paper “A unified framework for one-shot achievability via the Poisson matching lemma,” by Li and Anantharam, appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in February 2021, when Li was a postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley EECS. Li is now an assistant professor at the CUHK. Anantharam, who is an IEEE Fellow, received this award once before in 2008 for the paper “Bits Through Queues.”

CS Professor Alyosha Efros has won the Thomas S. Huang Memorial Prize. The Huang Memorial Prize was established in 2020 by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI). The prize, which is awarded annually at the IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), recognizes exemplary research, teaching, mentoring, and service to the computer vision community. Thomas S. Huang was a pioneering scholar “who left deep impressions in multiple fields including computer vision and image processing, and a role model who contributed to the growth and well-being of several generations of researchers in the community.” The award includes a cash prize of $3,000 and a commemorative plaque.