CS alumna Prof. Marti Hearst (B.A. '85/M.S '89./Ph.D. '94,  advisor: Robert Wilensky), whose primary appointment is in the School of Information, has been named to the 2021 inaugural class of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) Academy. SIGIR Academy membership recognizes the "principal leaders in IR" who have made "significant, cumulative contributions" to the development of the field, and whose "efforts have shaped the discipline and/or industry through significant research, innovation, and/or service."  Hearst literally wrote the first book on Search User Interfaces in 2009.   She is known for her early work on automating sentiment analysis and word sense disambiguation, including the invention of an algorithm known as "Hearst patterns" which is widely used in commercial text mining applications including ontology learning.  She also developed a now well-known approach to automatic segmentation of text into topical discourse boundaries, called TextTiling.  Hearst is an Edge Foundation contributing author and a member of the Usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Her current research interests include user interfaces for search engines, information visualization, natural language processing, and MOOCs.

CS Prof. Jelani Nelson has won the 2022 Computing Research Association Education (CRA-E) Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award.  This award recognizes "individual faculty members who have provided exceptional mentorship, undergraduate research experiences and, in parallel, guidance on admission and matriculation of these students to research-focused graduate programs in computing."  Nelson was cited for exceptional mentoring of undergraduate students at a time when "interest in graduate school and research careers is relatively low" and graduate students are crucially needed for "the health of the computing research pipeline."  The award will be presented at a conference later this year.

Alumni Eric Fosler-Lussier (Ph.D. 1999, advisor: Nelson Morgan) and Luca Daniel (Ph.D. 2003, advisor: Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli) have been named 2022 Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  The grade of Fellow is conferred upon a members of IEEE "with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest."  Fosler-Lussier, now a professor Computer Science and Engineering, Biomedical Informatics, and Linguistics, and the Associate Chair of Computer Science and Engineering at Ohio State University, was cited "for contributions to spoken language technology by integrating linguistic models with machine learning." Daniel, now a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, was cited "for contributions to modeling and simulation of electronic systems."  IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization for electronic and electrical engineers.

CS Associate Prof. Laura Waller, and Assistant Profs. Sarah Chasins and Nilah Ioannidis, are among the newest cohort of scientists to be named Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigators.  The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator Program, open to faculty from Stanford, UCSF, and UC Berkeley, funds "innovative, visionary research with the goal of building and sustaining an engaged, interactive, and collaborative community of researchers that spans across disciplines and across the three campuses to help solve critical challenges in biomedicine."  Waller leads the Computational Imaging Lab, which develops new methods for optical imaging designed jointly with optics and computational algorithms; Chasins' research focuses on programming languages and program synthesis, with an emphasis on work that brings together programming systems, HCI, and data science; and Ioannidis works on computational methods for personal genome interpretation, including machine learning tools to predict the clinical significance of rare genetic variants of unknown significance and statistical methods to link genetic variation with personal complex disease risks.  Recipients  receive $1M in unrestricted gift funds over a nonrenewable 5-year term ($200,000 per year).

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson has won the 2022 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  Recognized as one of the world's preeminent awards for engineering achievement, the prize "honors an engineer whose accomplishment has significantly impacted society by improving the quality of life, providing the ability to live freely and comfortably, and/or permitting the access to information."  Patterson, and his co-recipients, John Hennessy, Stephen Furber, and Sophie Wilson, were cited "for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips."  Patterson began the seminal Berkeley RISC project in 1980 to design a basic, neutral, freely-available set of microprocessor instructions that could be used in different types of machines and which could be optimized for different characteristics, like efficiency, physical size, and monetary cost.  When different devices are capable of running the same machine code, a better quality, higher-performance machine can replace a less expensive, lower-performance machine without having to replace software.  The open-source Berkeley RISC design was later commercialized by Sun Microsystems as the SPARC architecture, and inspired the ARM architecture used in virtually all new computer chips in the world today.  The biennial Draper prize is open to both NAE members and non-members worldwide, and comes with a $500K cash award.

EECS alumnus Anantha Chandrakasan (B.S. '89/M.S. '90/Ph.D. '94, advisor: C. V. Ramamoorthy), has been awarded the 2022 IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal.  The award recognizes "outstanding technical contributions in science and engineering, of great impact to IEEE fields of interest."   Chandrakasan, who is currently an EECS professor at MIT and the dean of the MIT School of Engineering, was cited for his “contributions to ultralow-power circuits and systems, and leadership in academia and advancing diversity in the profession.”  He spearheaded a number of initiatives that opened opportunities for students, postdocs, and faculty to conduct research, explore entrepreneurial projects, and engage with EECS. These programs include “SuperUROP,” a year-long independent research program that provides tools for students to do publication-quality research; the Rising Stars program, an annual event that convenes graduate and postdoc women for the purpose of sharing advice about the early stages of an academic career; and StartMIT, an independent activities period class that provides students and postdocs the opportunity to learn from and interact with industrial innovation leaders. Chandrakasan is also known for his leadership of the MIT Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group, whose research projects have addressed security hardware, energy harvesting, and wireless charging for the internet of things; energy-efficient circuits and systems for multimedia processing; and platforms for ultra-low-power biomedical electronics.  He also serves as co-chair of the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT-Takeda Program, and the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology, and chairs the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. 

EE Prof. Chunlei Liu has been named a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM)  The ISMRM is an international, nonprofit, scientific association "whose purpose is to promote communication, research, development, and applications in the field of magnetic resonance (MR) in medicine and biology and other related topics and to develop and provide channels and facilities for continuing education in the field." Fellowships are bestowed to recognize "a significant and substantial contribution to research in a field within the Society’s purposes, who have contributed in a significant manner to the development of the Society...and/or who have made a significant contribution to education in MR."  Liu is known for pioneering higher-order tensor diffusion MRI,  which utilizes higher-order tensor statistics (variance, sknewness, kurtosis etc.) to measure the diffusion processes in biological tissues. He is also credited with developing susceptibility tensor imaging for mapping bio-magnetism.

CS Profs. Alistair Sinclair and Shafi Goldwasser have won inaugural Test of Time awards at the 2021 Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).  Sinclair won the 20 Year award for his paper, “A polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the permanent of a matrix with non-negative entries," which solved a problem that had been open for decades. Goldwasser won the 30 Year award for "Completeness theorems for non-cryptographic fault-tolerant distributed computation," which showed how to compute a distributed function even if up to one-third of the participants may be failing, misbehaving, or malicious.  The awards were presented at the 2021 STOC conference in June.

CS alumna and Prof. Shafi Goldwasser (Ph.D. '84, advisor: Manuel Blum) has won the 2021 Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) Test of Time Award.  This award "recognizes papers published in past Annual IEEE Symposia on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) for their substantial, lasting, broad, and currently relevant impact. Papers may be awarded for their impact on Theory of Computing, or on Computer Science in general, or on other disciplines of knowledge, or on practice."  Goldwasser is among five co-authors who won the award in the 30 year category for their groundbreaking complexity theory paper "Approximating Clique is Almost NP-Complete," which used the classification of approximation problems to show that some problems in NP remain hard even when only an approximate solution is needed. 

EECS Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao has won the inaugural Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications (ModSim) 2021 Dr. Sudhakar Yalamanchili (Sudha) Award.  This award recognizes "researchers who showcase the most outstanding contribution to the field of computer modeling and simulation" during the annual ModSim Workshop, which primarily features younger talent in the scientific community.  Shao presented "Enabling Holistic Machine-Learning Hardware Evaluation via Full-System Simulation," which described the Gemmini project's "systolic-array based matrix multiplication accelerator generator" that enables users to explore and evaluate different deep neural network accelerators.  The research was presented during a multi-part Rapid Fire flash talk/digital poster session.