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.  

The L&S CS Major in the EECS Department has won the second place 2019 NCWIT Extension Services Transformation (NEXT) Award for Excellence in Promoting Women in Undergraduate Computing.  The team includes Director of Undergraduate Instruction Christopher Hunn, Director of Diversity Audrey Sillers, and CS Scholars Program Associate Director Charlene Duncan. The award comes with a prize of $50K to be used for diversity efforts.  NEXT awards are given to ES client organizations (department, departments, or college) that demonstrate a strong commitment to and proven results in recruiting and retaining women into undergraduate computing programs.  Between 2013 and spring 2018, the number of female Berkeley CS majors grew from 103 to 452. L&S CS produces more female CS graduates than all but three other universities in the nation, and the L&S CS major ranks 15th in the nation in terms of proportion of women in the major.  The award will be presented at the NCWIT Summit in May.

Two papers by EECS faculty have been named 2018 IEEE Micro Top Picks by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH).  The papers were "A Hardware Accelerator for Tracing Garbage Collection," co-authored by Profs. Krste Asanović and John Kubiatowicz (along with Martin Maas), and "FireSim: FPGA-Accelerated Cycle-Exact Scale-Out System Simulation in the Public Cloud," co-authored by Profs. Borivoje Nikolić, Randy Katz, Jonathan Bachrach, and Krste Asanović (along with Karandikar, Mao, Kim, Biancolin, Amid, Lee, Pemberton, Amaro, Schmidt, Chopra, Huang and Kovacs).  Top Picks represent "the most significant research papers in computer architecture based on novelty and potential for long-term impact."  The papers will be published in IEEE Micro's annual “Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences” issue in May/June 2019.

CS Assistant Professors Raluca Popa and Moritz Hardt have won 2018 Okawa Research Foundation Grants. Okawa Research Grants are bestowed for "studies and analyses in the fields of information and telecommunications." Popa’s research interests are in secure collaborative learning. Hardt’s research interests are in machine learning in social dynamics. The award will be presented in San Francisco in the fall.

At the 2019  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), the Influential Paper Award was won by the 2009 paper "Predicting Multiple Metrics for Queries: Better Decisions Enabled by Machine Learning" by Archana Ganapathi, Harumi A. Kuno, Umeshwar Dayal, Janet L. Wiener, Armando Fox, Michael I. Jordan, and David A. Patterson.  This paper presented a data engineering methodology that has become the foundation for using machine learning to understand system behavior, espeicially in the vital areas of database optimization and data warehousing.  After receiving her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Berkeley, Archana Ganapathi has gone on to lead data strategy and analytics at Splunk.

In the U.S. News and World Report graduate rankings for 2020, Berkeley Computer Engineering was ranked #1 (beating out MIT and CMU) and Electrical/Electronic/Communications Engineering was ranked #2.    The College of Engineering maintained its #3 ranking from the last few years.  U.S. News rankings are based on  data from statistical surveys of more than 2,054 programs and from reputation surveys sent to more than 22,018 academics and professionals, conducted in fall 2018 and early 2019.

CS Adjunct Prof. Ali Ghodsi is on Solutions Review's list of "The 10 Coolest Data Science and Machine Learning CEOs."  Ghodsi is the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, and responsible for the growth and international​ ​expansion of the company.  He previously served as the VP of Engineering and Product​ ​Management before taking the role of CEO in January 2016.  Ghodsi is on the board of the RiseLab and  was one of the creators of the open source project Apache Spark.

CS Teaching Prof. and alumnus Dan Garcia (M.S. '95/Ph.D. '00) has authored more submissions in the 50 year history of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) than anyone else.  Garcia authored 61 SIGCSE submissions accepted between 2003 and 2016 (submissions were counted from 1969 to 2018).  This count is particularly impressive since he was precluded from submitting papers in 2017 and 2018 because he was serving as program co-chair and symposium co-chair, respectively.  It also  doesn't include his 5 accepted submissions in 2019.   Berkeley ranked #3 for the highest number of accepted papers (114) and #9 for the most citations (302) in SIGCSE's history .