EECS alumna Nadia Heninger (B.S. '04) has won the 2019 Borg Early Career Award (BECA).  The BECA  is given to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions and who has contributed to her profession, especially in the outreach to women.  After graduation, Heninger earned a Ph.D. from Princeton and is currently an associate professor in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.  She is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack, for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routers and other embedded devices, and for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the NSA to decrypt large amounts of internet traffic via the Logjam vulnerability.

"Improved Subthreshold Swing and Short Channel Effect in FDSOI n-Channel Negative Capacitance Field Effect Transistors," has won the 2018 IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) George E. Smith Award.  The paper was co-authored by current postdoc Korok Chatterjee, graduate student Ava J. Tan, former postdocs Daewoong Kwon,  Angada B. Sachid, Ajay K. Yadav and Hong Zhou, EE Profs. Chenming Hu and Sayeef Salahuddin, and LBNL's Roberto dos Reis. The award recognizes the best paper appearing in a fast turn around archival publication of the IEEE Electron Devices Society, targeted to IEEE Electron Device Letters.

The College of Engineering Marketing & Communications team have won a Berkeley Communications Conference (BC2) Collateral Award for their "Berkeley Engineering bear (BEBear)" campaign.  To celebrate the holiday season of Berkeley Engineering’s sesquicentennial in 2018, the team created a template for an origami bear that could be printed out, folded, posed, photographed, and shared with the campus community on social media.  The winning team included Adam Lau, Linda Vu, Sarah Yang, Julianna Fleming and Steve McConnell.  BC2 is an annual event for campus communications professionals.

The winners of the 2019 EECS teaching awards have been announced:  Alexei Efros has won the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching Computer Science "for captivating lectures and engaging teaching in computer vision courses;"  Ren Ng has won the Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Undergraduate Teaching "for exceptionally inspiring and engaging teaching in computer graphics courses;" and Kameshwar Poolla has won the Electrical Engineering Award for Outstanding Teaching "for outstanding lectures and inspiring mentorship of undergraduates and graduate students."  We are fortunate to have such dedicated and talented faculty to define the character of the EECS department and guide the future of their fields.

CS alumnus Mark D. Hill (Ph.D. '87, advisers: David Patterson and Alan J. Smith) has won the ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award, considered the most prestigious award in the computer architecture community.  Hill, who is currently a professor at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, was cited "for contributions to memory consistency models and memory system design."  Widely regarded as the leading memory systems researcher in the world today, Hill made seminal contributions to the fields of cache memories, memory consistency models, transactional memory, and simulation.   His thesis advisor, David Patterson, won the Eckert-Mauchly award in 2008.  It will be presented at the 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in June.

Assistant Profs. Rikky Muller (EE) and Ren Ng (CS) have been selected to receive awards from the Hellman Faculty Fellows Fund.  The fund supports "substantially the research of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research."   Muller won for "Networks of Neural Dust" and Ng won for "Oz Vision:  New Principles for Color Display, and An Experimental Platform for Neuroscience."

Assistant Prof. Alvin Cheung has won an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).  The paper, titled "View-Centric Performance Optimization for Database-Backed Web Applications," was co-authored by his student at the University of Washington, Cong Yan, and colleagues at the University of Chicago: Junwen Yang, Chengcheng Wan, and Shan Lu.

EECS PhD student Justin Yim (with advisor EECS Prof. Ron Fearing and ME undergraduate co-author Eric Wang) has won the best student paper award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (May 20-24, Montreal) for his paper "Drift-free Roll and Pitch Estimation for High-acceleration Hopping."  The robot "Salto" (Saltatorial Agile Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles) was previously restricted to only indoor operation in a room equipped with a motion tracking system. In the newest paper, Salto can now estimate its own position by combining its onboard inertial sensor with a model of its takeoffs and landings. This improved estimate allows
Salto to hop outside with human steering.

A paper co-authored by freshly minted alumnus Tianshi Wang (Ph.D. '19, winner of the 2019 EECS David Sakrison Memorial Prize for "truly outstanding research") and Prof. Jaijeet Roychowdhury has won Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) 2019.  The paper, titled "OIM: Oscillator-based Ising Machines for Solving Combinatorial Optimisation Problems" will be presented at the conference in Japan next week.

Moses Surumen, who graduated with a degree in EECS this week, has been sharing his knowledge with peers in Kenya for the past two years, helping them develop the skills to solve challenges back home.  Surumen, who has 10 siblings, grew up in Kajiado, a Masai area south of Nairobi.  In 2017, he implemented a program called M-Soma, running a six-week summer course for Kenyan high school graduates in computer science.  “We were building skills the way Berkeley does, providing the best skeletal code for setting up the platform and building onto that several features they wanted to use,” he explains.  Surumen has accepted a position at Qualcomm but plans to continue to explore how to scale his project to work in different African countries.