EECS alumni Aaron Wagner has been selected as the winner of the 2017 James L. Massey Research and Teaching award for young scholars of the IEEE Information Theory Society. This award recognizes outstanding achievement in research and teaching by Society members under 40 years of age in the Information Theory community. Currently he is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 2005 (advisor was Prof. Venkatachalam Anantharam). His current research interests are at the intersection of information theory and other fields including networking, statistics, queueing theory, security, computational linguistics, and learning. He is particularly interested in network information theory, distributed compression and its application to peer-to-peer networks, secure communication over timing and photonic channels, and communication and classification in learning-limited environments.

EECS graduate student Wenting Zheng (advised by Ion Stoica and Raluca Ada Popa)  has won the prestigious 2017-18 IBM PhD Fellowship.   Wenting works in the RISELab and her research involves system security and distributed systems. The IBM Ph.D. fellowship is an "intensely competitive worldwide program that honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study." Only 50 fellowships are awarded worldwide annually.

Prof. Richard Karp and coauthors Jacob Scott, Trey Ideker and Roded Sharan have received the 2017 RECOMB (International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology) Test of Time Award for their paper "Efficient Algorithms for Detecting Signaling Pathways in Protein Interaction Networks". Prof. Karp also won awards at RECOMB 14 and RECOMB 16.

Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller has been awarded the 2017 Keysight Early Career Professor Award. The Keysight Early Career Professor Award is established to recognize and encourage excellent research enabling design, test or measurement of electronic systems. The program seeks to establish strong collaborative relationships between Keysight researchers and leading professors early in their careers and to highlight Keysight's role as a sponsor of university research. Prof. Muller's expertise is in the research and commercialization of implantable medical devices and in developing microelectronic and integrated systems for neurological applications. She is also the Co-founder of Cortera Neurotechnologies, Inc. a medical device company founded in 2013 that is commercializing a neural implant device and has released a family of products for the animal neuroscience research market. At Cortera, she held positions as CEO and CTO.

EECS major Sam Kumar is a runner up for the 2017 University Medal.  Candidates for the University Medal must have overcome significant challenges, made a difference in the lives of others and carry a GPA of 3.96 or higher.  Sam is involved in research related to software-defined buildings, has spent each semester volunteering time as a tutor, allowing him to give back to a community that he said has been instrumental to his time as a student. One of his favorite memories from Cal involves a class in Sanskrit.  "Before we got to the literature, we had to learn the basics. We started were reading simple passages and doing vocabulary exercises to get the basics, but eventually I was able to read authentic texts from thousands of years ago. Being able to read an ancient language – after only two semesters of studying – was a breathtaking moment for me.”    Sam will receive a $500 award as a tribute to his academic efforts and, after graduation, he plans to work on a Ph.D. in computer science.

Professors Jan Rabaey and Pieter Abbeel were named in the top 5 of the 2017 top 50 pioneers by the “De Tijd” (translation buttons provided above the article), the Belgian equivalent of the Financial Times. Prof. Rabaey is currently the scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) as well as the director of the FCRP Multiscale Systems Research Center (MuSyC), and is involved with the Donald O. Pederson Center for Design Automation (DOP), SWARM Lab,  CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR), TerraSwarm Research Center, and the  Center for Neural Engineering & Prostheses (CNEP). His research interests include ultra-low energy wireless exploring the boundaries of ultra-low energy design and the design of microscopic systems, including all components from energy sources, conversion and storage, interfaces, digital and mixed signal. Prof. Abbeel is currently a member of the steering committee of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Center (BAIR) and is involved with the Center for Human Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHCAI), Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC), Center for Automation and Learning for Medical Robotics (Cal-MR) and CITRIS People and Robots (CPAR). His current research area is primarily studying deep learning for robotics, where learning could be from demonstrations (apprenticeship learning) or through the robot's own trial and error (reinforcement learning). Targeted application domains include autonomous manipulation, flight, locomotion and driving.

Prof. Jitendra Malik has been named recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Allen Newell Award. The Allen Newell award is presented to an individual for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. Prof. Malik's research has addressed several important problems in computer vision: how to characterize contours in images, how to segment images, and how to represent shape for feature matching.  He also was a leader in evaluation methods through the creation of the Berkeley segmentation dataset, using human segmentations to evaluate the correctness of the algorithmic segmentations.  He pioneered the use of normalized cuts, anisotropic diffusion, high dynamic range imaging, shape context and the use of graph theory for low-level to mid-level computer vision problems.  In computer graphics, his research showed how digital photographs and user-guided photogrammetry can be used to synthesize highly photorealistic computer-generated architectural scenes.  He also has made important contributions to computational models of human texture perception including segmentation, shape from texture, and intrinsic image computation.

U.C. Berkeley has the top ten most AMiner Most Influential Scholar Award winners across all fields of computer science in 2016 and the top five most award winners in the fields of Computer Vision, Database, Machine Learning, Multimedia, Security, Computer Networking, and System.  The 28 CS faculty members included in the rankings were among the 100 most-cited authors in 12 of the 15 research areas evaluated. Two were among the 100 most-cited authors in 3 different areas each: Scott Shenker ranked #1 in Computer Networking, #51 in System, and #99 in Theory; and Trevor Darrell ranked #8 in Mulitmedia, #18 in Computer Vision, and #100 in Machine Learning.  Out of the 700,000 researchers indexed, only 16 appeared on three or more area top 100 lists.  See a more detailed breakdown of our influential faculty scholars.

Professor Alexei (Alyosha) Efros has won the 2016 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Prize in Computing, formerly known as the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award. This award recognizes early-to-mid-career contributions that have fundamental impact and broad implications. Prof. Efros was cited for groundbreaking data-driven approaches to computer graphics and computer vision and is a pioneer in combining the power of huge image datasets drawn from the Internet with machine learning algorithms to foster powerful image transformations and valuable research findings. He has also made fundamental contributions in texture synthesis, a technique that ushered in new horizons in computer graphics and is widely used in the film industry. ACM Prize recipients are invited to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an annual networking event that brings together young researchers from around the world with recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (computer science), the Abel Prize (mathematics), the Fields Medal (mathematics), and the Nevanlinna Prize (mathematics).

CS undergraduates Tomás Vega Gálvez and Corten Singer have been chosen the $10,000 Lemelson-MIT “Drive it!” Undergraduate Team Winner for an open-source smart add-on system for wheelchairs. Vega and Singer created WheelSense, a modular, customizable add-on system for wheelchairs that provides spatial awareness for visually impaired users to identify obstacles and ease their navigation. It has three features: frontal staircase detection through auditory feedback, backward obstacle-avoidance assistance through auditory feedback, and lateral ramp-edge detection through haptic feedback. They hope to disrupt the expensive market for assistive technologies for the disabled community by making their technology open source.  The “Drive it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize rewards students working on technology-based inventions that can improve transportation.