The EECS Computer Science program is one of the inaugural recipients of the "Responsible Computer Science Challenge" award, an ambitious $3.5 million initiative designed to help integrate ethics into undergraduate computer science education.  The CS Division, which was the only leading CS program selected, will combine forces with the Division of Data Sciences to continue to develop and scale a curriculum that will "equip students to recognize and grapple with the complex, high-stakes questions" that arise in today's world.  Since technologies like facial recognition can help find missing children or perpetuate bias, and social media platforms can be used to both build human rights movements and hack elections, students need to learn how to reason clearly about what technology should and should not do.  Berkeley students will be active participants in developing and testing the new course material.  "We hope the toolkit we’re developing at Berkeley can help other colleges and universities integrate ethics into their classes at scale," said EECS chair James Demmel.

EE graduate student Jordan Edmunds (advisor: Michel Maharbiz), has been named a 2019 fellow by the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing groundbreaking applied science with real-world benefits for all humanity.   Edmunds, whose current work focuses on neural interfaces, has produced more than 120 instructional videos on electrical engineering topics, and regularly interacts with community middle school students via Berkeley’s Be a Scientist program. Hertz Foundation awards allow fellows "the freedom to pursue innovative research wherever it may lead."

Prof. Stuart Russell has been elected as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Also called the “Brainy Award,” the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship awards recipients with a grant of up to $200,000 in order to “devote significant time to research, writing, and publishing in the humanities and social sciences — work that will benefit all of us.”  The award’s objective “is to offer fresh perspectives on the humanities and solutions to the urgent issues of today.”

The paper titled "CUTE: a concolic unit testing engine for C", authored by Prof. Koushik Sen (EECS), Darko Marinov (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Gul Agha (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) has been chosen to receive an ACM SIGSOFT (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Software Engineering) Impact Paper Award. The award is given annually and “recognizes the breadth and vitality of the software engineering community."

CS graduate students Caroline Lemieux (adviser: Koushik Sen) and Daniel Fried (adviser: Daniel Klein) have won 2019 Google PhD Fellowships.  The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to recognize outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in computer science and related research areas.  Fellowships are awarded to students who "represent the future of research" in those fields. Lemieux, who won in the field of Programming Technology and Software Engineering, has interests which center around improving, or helping developers to improve, the correctness, reliability, and understanding of software systems.  Fried, who won in the Natural Language Processing category,  is interested in grounding language in perception and interaction, and in structured prediction.

CS alumnus Mendel Rosenblum (MS '89/PhD '92) has been honored with the inaugural ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award.  Rosenblum, who is currently a professor at Stanford, is being recognized "for reinventing the virtual machine for the modern era and thereby revolutionizing datacenters and enabling modern cloud computing."   He is a co-founder of VMware,  where helped design and build virtualization technology for commodity computing platforms.  The Breakthrough in Computing Award "recognizes individuals or groups who have made surprising, disruptive, or leapfrog contributions to computing ideas or technologies." Rosenblum will formally receive the award at ACM’s annual Awards Banquet in June.

The Electrical and Computer Engineering department (ECE) at UC Davis has awarded Prof. Constance Chang-Hasnain with the ECE Distinguished Alumni Award. The award recognizes outstanding alumni “whose professional and personal achievements bring special honor to the department.” In 2018, in addition to being elected as the Vice-President of Optical Society of America, Prof. “Connie” Chang-Hasnain was also inducted as a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) and was a recipient of the prestigious Okawa Prize, “for pioneering and outstanding research of VCSEL photonics through the development of their novel functions for optical communications and optical sensing.”

Professor Claire Tomlin (Ph.D. ‘98) has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States and serves the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue and useful knowledge. Members are nominated and elected by peers, and membership has been considered a high honor of scholarly and societal merit ever since the academy was founded in 1780. Professor Tomlin was also inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) earlier this year, “For contributions to design tools for safety-focused control of cyberphysical systems.” In 2017, she won the IEEE Transportation Technologies Award.

Third-year Computer Science undergraduate Nolan Pokpongkiat is the third place winner of the KIDS FIRST: David L. Kirp Prize, funded by the U.C. Berkeley Institute for the Study of Societal Issues.  The prize recognizes "students who have developed innovative strategies to increase opportunities for children and youth, as well as students who have demonstrated a commitment to improving the future of children and youth."  Pokpongkiat co-founded Helix, a non-profit organization with the goal of diversifying the healthcare field by empowering young people to pursue futures in medicine. As Managing Director, Nolan brought together a team to design a month-long summer program where high school students spend a week living at UC Berkeley training in basic clinical skills, getting CPR-certified, and learning about possible healthcare careers. Then, through partnerships with UCSF Health, John Muir Health, and Kaiser Permanente, along with a network of over 160 medical professionals, students rotate through shadowing placements in the hospital, on the ambulance, and in community clinics for the remainder of the month.

Professor Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been awarded the 2019 International Symposium on Physical Design Lifetime Achievement Award. The ISPD Lifetime Achievement Award is the highest distinction in the field of physical design automation and is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field over multiple decades. The purpose of the award is to recognize lifetime achievements and contributions in terms of research work, education, and professional service. Previous recipients of this award include former EECS Chair and COE Dean, Ernest S. Kuh.