Two CS alumni, Soumen Chakrabarti (Ph.D. '96, advisor: Katherine Yelick) and Sunita Sarawagi (Ph.D. '96, advisor: Michael Stonebraker), both currently CSE professors at IIT Bombay, have made the 2018 list of Analytics India Magazine's Top 10 Machine Learning Researchers in India. Chakrabarti's research interests include better embedding representation for passages, entities, types and relation; searching the annotated Web with entities, types and relations; and Graph conductance search. He holds eight US patents, has produced 167 research papers, and authored one of the earliest books on web search and mining.  Sarawagi is interested in deep learning, web information extraction, data integration, graphical models and structured learning.  She has published more than 130 research papers and holds four patents.

EE/CS Prof. and alumna Bin Yu (M.S. '87/Ph.D. '90) has won the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) 2018 Elizabeth L. Scott Award.  This award is granted to an individual who has helped foster opportunities in statistics for women, exemplifying the spirit of mathematician and statistician Elizabeth L. Scott. Scott, who like Yu was a Cal alumna and professor, was a founding member of Berkeley's statistics department and fought hard for women's equal treatment on campus and beyond.  COPSS is comprised of the presidents, past presidents and presidents-elect of five Northern American statistical societies, and their awards are considered among the most prestigious in the field of statistics. Yu, who has a split appointment in EECS and Statistics, is interested in statistical inference, machine learning, and information theory. Her collaborations are highly interdisciplinary and include scientists from genomics, neuroscience, precision medicine, and political science.

CS Assistant Prof. Joey Gonzalez has won a 2018 Okawa Research Foundation Grant.  Okawa Research Grants are bestowed for "studies and analyses in the fields of information and telecommunications."  Gonzalez's research interests are at the intersection of machine learning and data systems. The award will be presented in San Francisco in the fall.

CS Division staffer Michael-David Sasson has been selected to serve on the Chancellor's Staff Advisory Committee (CSAC), which advises the Chancellor and her cabinet on a wide range of issues relating to staff.  Up to sixteen Berkeley staff members are appointed by the Chancellor to serve for a term of three years.  The CSAC provides input into campus decision-making processes including the development and modification of policies and procedures that directly affect staff.  In the 2000s, Sasson served as president of the Coalition of University Employees (CUE), Local #3, which is now part of IBT.

2016 EE Distinguished Alumnus Jyuo-Min Shyu (Ph.D. '88) has been named a non-Executive Director of United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), a "leading global semiconductor foundry that provides advanced IC production for applications spanning all major sectors of the electronics industry." Shyu, who is  currently a professor of computer science at National Tsing Hua University, was the 2015-16 Taiwan Minister of Science and Technology.  His research focuses on microelectronic system design and applications, optimization-based design, and multicore design automation.

Alumna Margaret Yau (B.S. EECS '04) has been named a 2017-18 Professor of the Year by Crafton Hills College, a community college in Yucaipa, California.  She was part of the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) from 2002-4, won a Jim and Donna Gray scholarship in 2003, and became a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award Finalist in 2004.  After graduating with high honors, Yau earned an M.S. from UCSD before taking a position at Crafton Hills in 2011.  “I really enjoy helping the students learn,” she said. “I especially like the ‘light bulb moment’ when they understand some concept or skill. That’s something I find rewarding.”

EECS undergraduate Tiffany Perumpail has won a Teaching Effectiveness Award (TEA) from the UC Berkeley Graduate Division.  This very competitive award is bestowed annually by the Graduate Council’s Faculty Advisory Committee for GSI Affairs.  Applicants submit essays in which they identify a problem they encountered in teaching, explain their strategy and rationale in devising a solution, and assess the effectiveness of the solution. Perumpail's essay, about her experience TAing CS61A, is titled "Improvement of Academic Intern Experience and Performance in Introductory Computer Science."  

Emerald Templeton, the Director of L&S CS Undergraduate Affairs, and Eric Fraser,  Assistant Dean and Director of Information Technology in the College of Engineering, have won  Berkeley Staff Assembly (BSA) Excellence in Management (EIM) Awards.   This year’s theme was “Building Pride & Trust In Our Changing Community,” recognizing managers and supervisors whose leadership encourages respect, dignity, confidence, inclusion, and empowerment amid changing times.  Templeton was cited for being "dynamic, trustworthy, and inclusive in her decision making" as well as being "a strong and outspoken manager," and Fraser was credited for being "generous with his time, providing excellent advice, and never failing to help in any matter." The EIM awards honor managers and supervisors exclusively.  Nominations must originate from staff directly supervised by the nominee and include supporting signatures from at least one-half of these staff.  The winners were honored at a ceremony on May 31st.

Susan Eggers (Ph.D. '89), the 2009 CS Distinguished Alumna, is the recipient of the 2018 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award--the first woman so honored in the award's 39 year history.  The award is administered jointly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and is given for contributions to computer and digital systems architecture where the field of computer architecture is considered at present to encompass the combined hardware-software design and analysis of computing and digital systems.  Eggers, who is a professor at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was cited for "outstanding contributions to simultaneous multithreaded processor architectures and multiprocessor sharing and coherency."  She made significant contributions to cache coherency protocols as well as other memory-related challenges in multiprocessor computers, and performed the first data-driven study of data sharing in shared-memory multiprocessors, which greatly enhanced the field’s understanding of both hardware and software coherency techniques.

Grad student Michael Chen (advisor:  Laura Waller) has been awarded a 2018 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, for his potential contributions to the field of optics, photonics or related field.  Chen works in the Computational Imaging Lab where he focuses on non-invasive multi-dimensional phase imaging. “Nowadays, computation enables us to truly utilize full capacity of existing imaging system and extract new information from decade-old optical designs. By jointly designing the optical hardware and post processing software, we deliver simple yet powerful computational imaging techniques,” he said.