CS graduate student Xin Lyu (advisors: Jelani Nelson and Avishay Tal) has won the Best Student Paper Award at the Computational Complexity Conference (CCC) 2022. The solo-authored paper titled “Improve Pseudorandom Generators for AC^0 Circuits” was one of two co-winners of the Best Student Paper Award at CCC, which is an annual conference on the inherent difficulty of computational problems in terms of the resources they require. Organized by the Computational Complexity Foundation, CCC is the premier specialized publication venue for research in complexity theory.

A paper co-authored by CS Prof. Alvin Cheung has won the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper at the 43rd Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) 2022. The paper titled, “Synthesizing Analytical SQL queries from Computation Demonstration,” introduces a tool called Sickle, a new end-user specification, programming by computation demonstration, for greater efficiency in analytical SQL queries. PLDI is the premier forum in the field of programming languages and programming systems research, covering the areas of design, implementation, theory, applications, and performance.

CS Prof. Ion Stoica has won the 2023 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award. Presented annually, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1986 for outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications. The award is named in honor of Dr. Koji Kobayashi, who has been a leading force in advancing the integrated use of computers and communications. Stoica was cited “for contributions to the design of cloud and computer network services.” Stoica’s research is focused on cloud computing and networked computer systems. He is the Executive Chairman and co-founder of Databricks and an ACM Fellow. Previous winners of this award include Profs. Kannan Ramchandran and Jean Walrand, and the late Prof. Emeritus Elwyn Berlekamp.

CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, the Associate Provost of the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), and the Dean of the School of Information has been elected to become an Honorary Member of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). Each year, the Council of the LMS considers the election of Honorary Members of the Society amongst distinguished mathematicians who are not normally resident within the United Kingdom. Chayes was cited for “fundamental contributions to many of the most prominent topics in the mathematics, computation, and application of network science, data science, and allied areas,” and credited for co-inventing “the field of graphons.”

A CS Prof.-led proposal has been selected to receive a California Education Learning Lab award of up to $650,000. The proposal, “A’s-for-All (A4A): Scaling Mastery Learning Through Technology, Advocacy, Policy, and Partnerships” was led by CS Profs. Armando Fox and Dan Garcia in partnership with California State University, Long Beach, and El Camino College. The grant is designed to scale successful Learning Lab projects, expanding the positive impacts of STEM in public higher education. A4A proposes to build upon an open-source technology platform from UIUC to reorient formative and summative assessment toward mastery learning, ultimately providing students every opportunity to learn and demonstrate proficiency in various areas of introductory computer science courses. The scaling proposal will develop concept mapping tools so that faculty and students can track progress in student learning, and implement automated approaches to provide more flexibility for the ways in which students are able to demonstrate proficiency/mastery of the course.

Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao has won the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Young Computer Architect Award, which recognizes outstanding research contributions by an individual in the field of Computer Architecture, and who received their Ph.D. within the last six years. Shao's work focuses on specialized accelerators, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. The award was presented last week at the 49th edition of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA '22) in New York City, New York. 

EECS Prof. Emerita Ruzena Bajcsy and her daughter, Klara Nahrstedt, are the first mother-daughter pair to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).  Bajcsy has been a member of the NAE since 1997 and Nahrstedt, the Chair of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, was elected in February.  The two sat down for a Fireside Chat at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications last month to discuss the accomplishment.  “I’m a proud mother,” Bajcsy said. “And I’m thrilled to have been in this profession we have both shared.”  Bajcsy is known for her work in human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, image processing, and artificial vision, as well as her cross-disciplinary leadership.  Nahrstedt researches security across shared systems, including multimedia distributed systems, wired and wireless networks, mobile systems, power grids, and edge-cloud systems.  Both women faced daunting challenges during  their careers. “We were ridiculed, and we were doubted. But you have to be strong,” Bajcsy said.  They emphasized that building a strong support network was critical to success.  “I learned that because of my mother,” said Nahrsted, "and through it I quickly believed I could do whatever I put my mind to.”  Following in their footsteps, Bajcsy's granddaughter and Nahrstedt's niece, Andrea Bajcsy, is currently a doctoral candidate at Berkeley EECS, in her final term.  She is slated to start as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon in Fall 2023.

EECS Prof. Emeritus Kam Lau has received the 2022 California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA).  Caltech's highest honor, the DAA is presented each year "to a small number of alumni in recognition of personal and professional accomplishments that have made a noteworthy impact in a field, on the community, or in society more broadly."  Lau was cited for "his innovations in and commercialization of laser diode and radio-over-fiber technologies that broadly enable today's wireline and wireless high-speed internet access as well as enabling progress in interplanetary exploration, radio astronomy, and particle physics research, and for his remarkable artistic contributions to the Chinese ink painting movement." While still in high school, Lau joined the first wave of the New Ink Painting Movement in Hong Kong, blending traditional Chinese ink and wash painting with a modern sensibility.   He earned three degrees from Caltech: a B.S. and M.S. in 1978,  and a Ph.D. in 1981.  He joined Ortel Corporation as a founding staff member and taught at Columbia University for two years before coming to Berkeley. His development of the ultra-stable radio frequency (RF) over fiber system made ultra-precise, long-distance synchronization of antennas possible, and enabled both ground-based communication networks and spaceborne planetary radar imaging systems.

CS Prof. Jelani Nelson has won the Best Paper Award at the 2022 ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) on June 13th.  The symposium is a collaboration between three ACM Special Interest Groups: Management of Data (SIGMOD), Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), and Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI).  Nelson's award is for a paper he co-wrote with Huacheng Yu titled "Optimal Bounds for Approximate Counting," in which they describe research on the asymptotic space complexity of maintaining an approximate counter as it is dynamically incremented, proving both new upper and lower bounds that for the first time match up to a constant factor, completely resolving a problem that was first studied in the late 1970s.

CS Prof. Emeritus Christos Papadimitriou has won the 2022 IEEE Computer Society Women of ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award.  This award was created "to recognize and honor the vision of those people whose efforts resulted in the creation or expansion and continued vitality of the computer industry. The award is presented to outstanding individuals whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least fifteen years earlier."  Papadimitriou was cited "for fundamental contributions to Computer Science, via the development of the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its application to the natural and social sciences."  He has written five textbooks and many articles on algorithms and complexity, and their applications to optimization, databases, control, AI, robotics, economics and game theory, the Internet, evolution, and the brain.  He has also published three novels: “Turing,” “Logicomix” and “Independence.”  Papadimitriou is currently teaching at Columbia University.