2005 CS Distinguished Alumna Barbara Simons (Ph.D. '81) will be receiving the Athena Lifetime Achievement Award at the CITRIS Women in Tech Symposium on Friday, 11/16.  Simons, who is a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), is board chair of Verified Voting, a non-partisan organization that advocates for reliable and secure voting practices.  She is the author of “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?” and is a long-time champion for programs to increase diversity in computer science and engineering.  She will not be able to attend the conference but will make an appearance in a short video.

A paper written by CS Prof. David Culler and alumnus Jonathan Hui (M.S. '05/Ph.D. '08) in 2008 titled "IP is Dead, Long Live IP for Wireless Sensor Networks" has won the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) 2018 Test of Time Award.  The paper dispelled the notion that IP cannot run on wireless embedded sensors and made a long term impact  on standards like 6LoWPAN and platforms like Thread.  The award recognizes papers that are at least 10 years old and have had long lasting impact on networked embedded sensing system science and engineering.  Culler previously won this award in both 2014 and 2015.

A paper titled “Graphical Lasso and Thresholding: Equivalence and Closed-form Solutions” by IEOR PhD candidate Salar Fattahi and EE Assistant Prof. Somayeh Sojoudi has won the 2018 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Data Mining (DM) Best Paper Award.   The paper compares the computationally-heavy Graphical Lasso (GL) technique, a popular method for learning the structure of an undirected graphical model, with a numerically-cheap heuristic method that is based on simply thresholding the sample covariance matrix.  By analyzing the properties of this conic optimization problem, the paper shows that its true complexity is indeed linear (both in time and in memory) for sparse graphical models and solves instance as large as 80,000×80,000 (more than 3.2 billion variables) in less than 30 minutes on a standard laptop computer, while other state-of-the-art methods do not converge within 4 hours.  The award recognizes excellence among DM members, particularly its student members, and was announced at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, on November 5th.

EE Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has won the 2018 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Design Automation (SIGDA)  Pioneering Achievement Award.   This award honors a person for a lifetime of outstanding contributions within the scope of electronic design automation, as evidenced by ideas pioneered in publications, industrial products, or other relevant contributions. The award is based on the impact of the contributions throughout the nominee’s lifetime.  Sangiovanni-Vincentelli is known for his contributions to cyber-physical systems and design automation.  He co-founded  two companies in the field: Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys, Inc.

EECS alumna Theresa H. Meng (M.S. '85/Ph.D. '88 advisor: David Messerschmitt) has won the 2018 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM ) SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award.  This award is given for significant and lasting contributions to the research on mobile computing and communications and wireless networking.  Meng, who is a Professor Emerita at Stanford University and founder of Atheros Communications Inc., was cited "for groundbreaking research, engineering and entrepreneurial leadership to make Wi-Fi faster, lower power, and lower cost."

EE Associate Prof. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski is the 2018 recipient of the IEEE Education Society Mac E. Van Valkenburg Award.  This award is given annually to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to teaching unusually early in their professional careers as evidenced by teaching performance, development of new teaching methods, and curricular innovation in fields of interest to the IEEE Education Society. The citation was "for his demonstrated passion for teaching and commitment to individual student growth, and his curriculum innovations in hands-on learning in the area of electric power and energy systems".

Prof. Stuart Russell has been elected as an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College at Oxford University, his alma mater.  Warden of Wadham College, Ken Macdonald QC praised Russell for his scholarship in the field of Artificial Intelligence, his work with the United Nations and with former US President, Barack Obama.  Russell has devoted his career to the study of AI, including such topics as the interaction of knowledge and machine learning, the unification of logic and probability, and metareasoning (reasoning about reasoning).   Other Wadham Fellows include the late Jeremy Knowles, chemist and former Dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Anglican communion.

EE Prof. Ming Wu and Associate Prof. Laura Waller have been named Fellows of the Optical Society of America (OSA) class of 2019. OSA Fellows are members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. No more than 10 percent of the total OSA membership may be Fellows at any given time, making each year’s honorees a highly selective group.

EECS alumnus Adnan Shihab-Eldin (B.S. '65) has won the 2017 Elise and Walter A. Haas International Award, which honors a Berkeley alumnus/a who is a native, citizen, and resident of another country and who has a distinguished record of service to that country in any field.  Shihab-Eldin is "a visionary leader in the field of energy globally, well respected by energy ministries and heads of state throughout the energy-producing world. He is also widely recognized as a pre-eminent world expert on energy technology, economics, and the environment."  His "contributions have not only helped to facilitate and advance Kuwait’s scientific and innovation ecosystem, but has also strengthened solid foundations for research and development in the wider Middle East region. He has used his expertise to further socioeconomic growth in Kuwait and the Arab Region through scientific and economic research, inspiring a culture of development and innovation."

CS postdoctoral researcher Urmila Mahadev (advisor: Umesh Vazirani) has come up with an interactive protocol by which users with no quantum powers of their own can employ cryptography to put a harness on a quantum computer and drive it wherever they want, with the certainty that the quantum computer is following their orders.  Her work, which addressed the question "How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all?" was awarded the “best paper” and “best student paper” prizes when it was presented at the Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science this month.  CIT computer scientistThomas Vidick calls her result “one of the most outstanding ideas to have emerged at the interface of quantum computing and theoretical computer science in recent years.”