EE Prof. and Dean of Engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu has won a 2019 Asian American Distinguished Science and Technology Award  for "contributions to nanometer-scale field-effect transistor and micro-electro-mechanical relay technology for digital computation and memory applications.”   The award is part of the annual DiscoverE National Engineers Week program hosted by CIE/USA, and was presented at the 2019 Asian American Engineer of the Year  Award and Conference (AAEOY) on August 16th.

EECS Prof. Raluca Ada Popa has been selected for the Bakar Fellows Program, which supports faculty working to apply scientific discoveries to real-world issues in the fields of engineering, computer science, chemistry, and biological and physical sciences. With her Bakar Fellows Spark Award, Prof. Popa will design and build a data encryption platform that will enable collaborative machine learning studies by performing these multi-party computations under encryption.

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing has announced the creation of the Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lectures, named in honor of CS Prof. Emeritus Richard Karp, the Institute’s Founding Director. The series will feature talks by leading researchers in the foundations of computing including Sanjeev Arora (Ph.D. '94, advisor: Umesh Vazirani), Faith Ellen (Ph.D. '82, advisor: Richard Karp), Dan Gusfield (B.S. '73/Ph.D. '80, advisor: Richard Karp), Mike Luby (Ph.D. '83, advisor: Richard Karp), Antony P.-C. Ng (Ph.D. '92, advisor: Richard Brayton), Prabhakar Raghavan (Ph.D. '86, advisor: Clark Thompson), CS Prof. Scott Shenker, Vijay Vazirani (Ph.D. '84, advisor: Manuel Blum), and Karp, himself.  The lecture series will be launched in the Fall.

A viral real-time AI art application, co-created by three current and former graduate students of CS Prof. Alexei Efros, has won two coveted awards--Best in Show and Audience Choice--at the SIGGRAPH 2019 Real-Time Live Competition.  The interactive application, called GauGAN, was co-created by Ph.D. candidate Taesung Park during a summer internship at NVIDIA, along with alumni and NVIDIA researchers Jun-Yan Zhu (Ph.D. '17,  ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Disseration winner) and Ting-Chun Wang (Ph.D. '17), as well as NVIDIAs Ming-Yu Liu.  GauGAN is the first semantic image synthesis model that can turn rough sketches into stunning, photorealistic landscape scenes.

EECS alumna Valerie Taylor (M.S. '86/Ph.D. '91, advisor: David Messerschmitt), currently the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science division of Argonne National Laboratory, has been named a 2019 Argonne Distinguished Fellow.  Distinguished Fellows hold the highest scientific and engineering rank at the laboratory.  Taylor, whose research focuses in the areas of performance analysis and modeling of parallel, scientific applications, was a member of the EECS faculty at Northwestern University for 11 years before joining the Computer Science department at Texas A&M.  She has collaborated professionally with Argonne for most of her career.

Prof. Emeritus Leon O. Chua has been named a Celebrated Member of the IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS), an honor which recognizes "Fundamental Contributions to the Field of Electron Devices for the Benefit of Humanity."  An IEEE Fellow since 1974, Chua is just the 9th person to join this elite group, which includes Nobel Laureates George Smith and Herb Kroemer. Chua is widely known for his invention of the Memristor and the Chua’s Circuit. The award will be presented at the 2019 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in December.

Professors Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Scott Shenker have been named Distinguished Fellows of the International Engineering and Technology Institute (IETI) for 2019.  They are among 15 professors elected this year, joining well-known experts from all over the world, including Nobel Prize and Turing Award Laureates. Founded in 2015, IETI is a non-profit organization that promotes the innovations of Science, Engineering and Technology across the world. 

Prof. Aditya Parameswaran wins the Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) Early Career Award, which recognizes a researcher who has demonstrated research impact through a specific technical contribution of high significance since completing the Ph.D. The VLDB Endowment is a non-profit organization incorporated in the United States for the sole purpose of promoting and exchanging scholarly work in databases and related fields throughout the world. Prof. Parameswaran is cited "for developing tools for large-scale data exploration, targeting non-programmers.” 

Profs. Anca Dragan and Alvin Cheung have been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), which is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government to scientists and engineers in the early stages of their careers. Established in 1996, the PECASE acknowledges the contributions scientists and engineers have made to the advancement of science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) education and to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, and community outreach. Prof. Dragan was nominated by the National Science Foundation and Prof. Cheung was nominated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

EE Prof. Michael Lieberman has won the 2020 IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award for outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear and plasma sciences and engineering.  This IEEE-level Technical Field Award is the highest honor administered by the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society.  Lieberman was cited “For groundbreaking research and sustained intellectual leadership in the physics of low-temperature plasmas and their application.”  Prof. Ned Birdsall (1925-2012) won the inaugural award in 2011, making Berkeley EECS the only institution to have won two of these awards.