Ion Stoica has won the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award. Created in 2001 by ACM SIGOPS, the award is named in honor of Mark Weiser, a computing visionary recognized for his research accomplishments during his career at Xerox PARC. Recipients are selected for “contributions that are highly creative, innovative, and possibly high-risk, in keeping with the visionary spirit of Mark Weiser.”
Raluca Ada Popa has been named a Visionary in the MIT Technology Review's list of 35 Innovators Under 35. Popa found a way to make computation on encrypted data practical. Her systems secure computers by making data indecipherable to intruders instead of just relying on firewalls to keep them out. She says her encryption techniques allow systems to operate as if they’ve been blindfolded. They’re able to compute on data without actually seeing it—which is opening the cybersecurity field to a host of new applications. Her innovations are in use by companies like IBM.
CS Profs Dawn Song and Hany Farid are among Wired Magazine's list of 25 People Who Are Racing to Save Us (WIRED25 list of innovators for 2019). Song is the co-founder and CEO of Oasis Labs, a startup built around differential privacy—cryptographic techniques that allow companies to incorporate data into their algorithms without seeing the individual data points. Song believes blockchain technology can help offer a secure home for data that doesn’t require trusting any one company with the keys to it. Her system would enable you to copy your medical data to a location where researchers who are working to cure diseases could access it without compromising your privacy. Farid is a pioneer of image science, having been one of the first to develop methods to detect when digital photos have been manipulated. He is now one of the leading authorities on Deepfakes: images, videos, or audio files fabricated or altered by machine learning. Lately, Deepfakes have been used to mislead and manipulate the public during politicial elections. “This used to be a boutique little field, but now we’re defending democracy,” says Farid.
The paper "Oracle-Guided Component-Based Program Synthesis," co-authored by alumnus Susmit Jha (M.S./Ph.D. '11), Sumit Gulwani (Ph.D. '05, advisor: George Necula), EECS Prof. Sanjit A. Seshia, and Ashish Tiwari--and part of Susmit Jha's Ph.D. dissertation advised by Sanjit Seshia--will receive the 2020 Most Influential Paper Award by the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). ICSE is the premier conference on software engineering and this award recognizes the paper judged to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of software engineering during the 10 years since its original publication. The citation says, in part, that the paper: "...has made a significant impact in Software Engineering and beyond, inspiring subsequent work not only on program synthesis and learning, but also on automated program repair, controller synthesis, and interpretable artificial intelligence."
EECS Postdoctoral researcher Pragya Kushwaha, currently working with Prof. Chenming Hu and Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin in the Berkeley Short-channel IGFET Model (BSIM) group, has won a prestigious 2019 IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Early Career Award. This award is presented annually to an IEEE EDS member who has made early career contributions to the field. Kushwaha develops compact models for emerging electronic devices, now considered the industry standard. The models are used by circuit designers to predict device behavior (i.e., current, power, and noise) to simulate their circuits during design before fabrication. This honor was previously won by BSAC Postdoc Chen Yang in 2010.
EECS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan will be the keynote speaker at the 2019 Ada Lovelace Day Celebration of Women in Robotics on Tuesday, October 8, in Sutardja Dai Hall. The celebration is sponsored by the Women in Tech Initiative (WITI), a joint program of Berkeley Engineering, CITRIS & the Banatao Institute, and CITRIS People & Robotics (CPAR). It plans to offer "a deep dive into robotic applications for good " and will show participants how "to enter the robotics field with networking, mentoring opportunities, and demos from impressive student groups and supportive community organizations including Women in Robotics/SVR." Panels will feature leaders from robotics startups, like Tessa Lau (Dusty Robotics), Nicole Kernbaum (Seismic), Jasmine Lawrence (EDEN BodyWorks) and Mai Nguyen (Optoceutics). Robohub’s selection of the Top 25 Women in Robotics will also be revealed
5th Year CS Master's students Alvin Kao (B.S. '19) and Titan Yuan (B.S. '19) have been named to the Siebel Scholars Foundation’s 2020 class. Kao is working on problems in the autonomous vehicle setting, like predicting the behavior of other agents and trajectory planning. Yuan is working with the Swarm Lab on embedded software for some of the world’s tiniest wireless devices, so that they can be used as miniature temperature sensors and Bluetooth beacons.
CS alumnus Srinivasan Keshav (Ph.D. '91, advisor: Domenico Ferrari) has won a 2019 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi Distinguished Alumni Award. Keshav is a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is known for his cutting-edge research in the areas of computer networking and energy informatics and currently focuses on research on blockchains for transactive energy. His work has been cited more than 16,000 times and he holds 73 patents worldwide. He has been the co-director of the Information Systems and Science for Energy (ISS4E) Laboratory at the University of Waterloo since 2010.
Yamilée Toussaint Beach, founder and CEO of STEM From Dance (SFD), is the third recipient of the Educational Innovation Abie Award in Honor of A. Richard Newton, an award which honors the life and career of a beloved EECS professor and alumnus. A. Richard Newton (Ph.D. '78, advisor: Donald O. Pederson) led the founding of CITRIS in 1999, and served as EECS chair and Engineering dean before his early death from pancreatic cancer in 2007. Beach won for her efforts to harness the power of dance to inspire and support young women of color from low-income backgrounds to develop the confidence, skills, and awareness necessary to obtain STEM degrees. She launched SFD in 2012, using seed funding won from Teach For America’s Social Innovation Award. Since then, SFD has partnered with over 25 schools and community centers, serving over 400 girls.
A paper by alumnus Vasily Volkov (Ph.D. '16), now at Nvidia, and his advisor Prof. James Demmel has won the 2019 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC19) Test of Time Award. The paper, "Benchmarking GPUs to Tune Dense Linear Algebra," which won the SC08 Best Student Paper Award when it was published, describes a first-of-its-kind vision of GPU architectures as a vector machine. The authors defined techniques to achieve greater efficiency and performance, detailing an optimization pattern that is found today in many high-performance GPU codes. The paper has been cited almost a thousand times and has had a tremendous impact on the field. The award, which recognizes an outstanding paper that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline, is one of the most prestigious in the SC conference series and will be presented at the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Colorado in November.
