Two of EECS Prof. Ren Ng's former graduate students, Pratul Srinivasan and Benjamin Mildenhall, jointly received an honorable mention for the 2021 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation Award.  This award is presented annually to the "author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering."  Srinivasan and Mildenhall, who both currently work at Google Research,  were recognized "for their co-invention of the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) representation, associated algorithms and theory, and their successful application to the view synthesis problem."  Srinivasan’s dissertation, "Scene Representations for View Synthesis with Deep Learning," and Mildenhall’s dissertation, “Neural Scene Representations for View Synthesis,” addressed a long-standing open problem in computer vision and computer graphics called the "view synthesis" problem:  If you provide a computer with just a few of photographs of a scene, how can you get it to predict new images from any intermediate viewpoint?  "NeRF has already inspired a remarkable volume of follow-on research, and the associated publications have received some of the fastest rates of citation in computer graphics literature—hundreds in the first year of post-publication."

CS Prof. Stuart Russell has won the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence  (IJCAI) 2022 Award for Research Excellence.  This award is one of the IJCAI's highest honors and recognizes "a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results."   Russell was cited for "fundamental contributions to the development of Bayesian logic to unify logic and probability, the theory of bounded rationality and optimization, and learning and inference strategies for operations in uncertain environments."  Stuart is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UCSF and founder and vice-president of Bayesian Logic, Inc.  He founded and leads the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) and is the co-author of one the most popular AI textbooks in the world, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, the Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science (CDSS) and the Dean of the School of Information, will be awarded an honorary doctorate from Bard College in New York on May 28th.   Chayes is known for her work on phase transitions in discrete mathematics and computer science, structural and dynamical properties of self-engineered networks, and algorithmic game theory, and is a world expert in the modeling and analysis of dynamically growing graphs.  Her recent work focuses on machine learning, including both theory and applications in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision making, and climate change.  Chayes earned her B.A. in Biology and Physics from Wesleyan in 1979  and her Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from Princeton in 1983.  She served as a professor of Mathematics at UCLA for over ten years before leaving to co-found the Theory Group at Microsoft Research Redmond in 1997.  She opened Microsoft Research New England in 2008, where she served as Managing Director until she left for Berkeley in 2020.

Sky Computing Lab, the latest 5-year collaborative research lab launched out of Berkeley EECS, aims to build a new backbone for interconnected cloud computing, a milestone that would revolutionize the industry. The lab will leverage distributed systems, programming languages, security, and machine learning to decouple the services that companies want to implement from the choice of a specific cloud, with the goal of transforming the cloud into an undifferentiated commodity, much like the Internet. Google, IBM, Intel, Samsung SDS, and VMware are among the founding sponsors of the lab. The lab's team is comprised of over 60 members, including students, staff, and EECS faculty like Alvin Cheung, Natacha Crooks, Ken Goldberg, Joseph Gonzalez, Joe Hellerstein, Mike Jordan,  Anthony Joseph, Raluca Ada Popa, Koushik Sen, Scott Shenker, and Dawn Song. CS Prof. Ion Stoica, who will lead the lab, says “Sky will knock out current barriers and accelerate the transition to the cloud, which will accelerate the progress across different fields.”

EECS Assistant Prof. Nika Haghtalab and CS Assistant Prof. and Associate Prof. in the School of Information, David Bamman, are quoted in a Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) article about the resiliency and determination of the 2022 graduating class, particularly during the pandemic. “This generation of students has persevered, despite these global challenges, to forge a real community with their peers,” said Bamman. They also anticipated the ways the graduates will use their new skills to shape our collective future. “We need graduates who understand the technical methods of data science, their limitations and sources of bias, and the broader context in which information is used to drive policy, inform decision-making, and shape opinion,” Bamman said.  Haghtalab noted that “this is a great time to enter the workforce and contribute to the shaping of data science and computing for the advancement and betterment of the world.”

EECS graduate student Shiekh Zia Uddin (advisor: Ali Javey) has won a Materials Research Society (MRS) 2022 Graduate Student Gold Award.  These awards recognize "students of exceptional ability who show promise for significant future achievement in materials research."  Uddin works in the areas of photophysics and optoelectronics of low dimensional semiconductors, with a focus on the photophysics of low-dimensional excitonic materials.  He was honored for research which demonstrated that two-dimensional monolayer semiconductors can be defective yet perfectly bright.   The award, which comes with comes with a $400 prize, will be presented at the 2022 MRS Fall Meeting in November.

CS Assistant Prof. Angjoo Kanazawa has won the Society of Hellman Fellows Evergreen Fellowship.  The Society of Hellman Fellows is an endowed UC program administered by the Vice Provost for the Faculty that provides research funding "to promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their chosen fields."  Kanazawa's research lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. She is focused on building a system that can capture, perceive, and understand the complex ways that people and animals interact dynamically with the 3-D world--and can use that information to correctly identify the content of 2-D photos and video portraying scenes from everyday life.

EECS Associate Prof. Raluca Ada Popa is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award.  This award recognizes an outstanding young computer professional who has made a single recent major technical or service contribution to the field of computer science before the age of 35.  Popa was recognized for her work in the area of design of secure distributed systems, specifically systems that "protect confidentiality against attackers with full access to servers while maintaining full functionality."  Her approach focuses on protecting the confidentiality of data stored on remote servers by providing confidentiality guarantees for areas where servers need to store encrypted data, thus allowing data to be processed without decrypting.  Although computing on encrypted data is still only theoretical, Popa's solution involves building systems for a broad set of applications with common traits, and then utilizing encryption schemes on just these traits so that they can perform most computations on encrypted data.  Some of her systems have been adopted into or inspired systems such as SEEED of SAP AG, Microsoft SQL Server’s Always Encrypted Service, and others.  The award comes with a prize of $35,000.

EECS Prof. Emeritus Kam Lau, has won the 2022 California Institute of Technology Distinguished Alumni Award, the highest honor presented by Caltech to its alumni.  He was cited "for extraordinary contributions to society as an engineer, entrepreneur, and artist." Lau is known for his pioneering developments and commercialization of RF over fiber devices, systems and applications, which helped launch the microwave photonics industry.  He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D degrees from Caltech in 1978, 1978 and 1981, respectively.  Before coming to Berkeley in 1990, he was founding chief scientist of Ortel Corporation, and a professor at Columbia University.  He subsequently  co-founded LGC Wireless with some of his Berkeley colleagues.  Lau is also an accomplished ink painting artist.  At age 16, his work was accepted into the 1972 Hong Kong Contemporary Art Exhibition, a venue for professional artists, and one of his pieces was acquired by the Hong Kong Museum of Art for its permanent collection.

Finsen Chiu, the EECS Instructional Support Group Manager, has won a Berkeley Staff Assembly (BSA) 2022 Excellence in Management (EIM) Award.  This award "honors exemplary non-academic managers and supervisors who have led their teams and team members to meaningful accomplishments this past year."  The 2022 theme, building and maintaining community, highlights leaders "who demonstrate and encourage flexibility, adaptiveness, supportiveness, compassion, understanding, work-life balance, and well-being."  Chiu was presented with his award at the 34th annual EIM Award Ceremony on May 3rd.