CS graduate student Baiyu Chen (advisor: Alexei Efros) and Anthony Barrs were awarded top prize and $50,000 for their design at the Infrastructure Vision 2050 Challenge. Their idea, profiled in an article for Fortune, was to construct a "Hyperlane," or a single platform the size of four interstate lanes that would run parallel to pre-existing highways in order for self-driving cars to travel at high speeds with no chance of getting into a jam.
Prof. Eli Yablonovitch has been awarded the IEEE William R. Cherry Award, which is the highest IEEE Award for solar cells. This award recognizes an individual engineer or scientist who has devoted a part of their professional life to the advancement of the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion. The nominee must have made significant contributions to the science and/or technology of PV energy conversion, with dissemination by substantial publications and presentations. Prof. Yablonovitch is receiving this award for his contributions to research, engineering and entrepreneurship realizing photovoltaic technologies capturing the "ins and outs" of photons and application of these technologies in silicon and III-V solar cells.
Prof. Jan Rabaey will be receiving two honorary doctorates. The first one is for scientific merit from the University of Antwerp in Belgium on March 30, 2017. The second one will follow on May 20 from the Tampere University of Technology. The title of Honorary Doctor is the highest recognition that a university can award. In the early 1990s, Prof. Rabaey developed the ‘infopad’, the forerunner of the iPad and tablet computers. He is currently conducting research into the human intranet, which involves connecting the human body to sensors and devices that communicate with the human brain.
Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been named recipient of the 2017 IEEE TCCPS (Technical Committee on CyberPhysical Systems) Technical Achievement Award. This award recognizes significant and sustained contributions to the cyber-physical system (CPS) community based on the impact of high-quality research made by the awardee throughout their lifetime. Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli 's research interests are in design methodologies and tools for wireless sensor networks, embedded systems, hybrid systems, cyber physical systems (CPS), Systems of Systems (SoS) and electronic design automation.
EECS alumna Sarah Bergbreiter (M.S. '04/Ph.D. '07) is the subject of a profile by the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland celebrating female engineering faculty during women's history month. Sarah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Institute for Systems Research, and the Director of the Maryland Robotics Center in charge of both the Micro Robotics Lab and the multi-user Robot Realization Lab. She has received PECASE, NSF CAREER, and DARPA Young Faculty Awards, and has also been named one of 25 women in robotics you should know about.
CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan and EECS alumna Yoky Matsuoka (B.S. '93) are among Interesting Engineering's "17 Awesome Women Engineers" who are revolutionizing the engineering field in 2017. Anca is described as "one of the rising stars of the robotics scene" as the head of the InterACT Lab at UC Berkeley which specializes in human/robotics interactions, algorithms and compatible artificial intelligence systems." Yoky is "a hot commodity among major tech companies" as the CTO of Alphabet Nest.
Assistant Prof. Ren Ng has been selected to receive the 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in the category of Computer Science. 126 early-career scholars are chosen to receive this prestigious award and represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals, 69 National Medals of Science, 16 John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.
Prof. Marti Hearst has been elected into the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Academy. The SIGCHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction. Prof Hearst's HCI research includes user interfaces for search, information visualization of text, web site usability, and innovation in education. She wrote Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on this topic and her search projects include usability analysis of search results clustering, the TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for navigation and search. Faceted navigation became the standard search interface for e-commerce, digital libraries and image collections for at least a decade.
Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and Prof. Katherine Yelick have been elected to the National Academy of Engineers (NAE). Election to membership in the NAE is among the highest forms of recognition of notable accomplishments in engineering. Prof. King Liu was recognized for "contributions to the fin field effect transistor (FinFET) and its application to nanometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology," and Prof. Yelick was recognized for "software innovation and leadership in high-performance computing."
Prof. Michel Maharbiz, Prof. Yun Song, Associate Prof. Laura Waller, Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller, and Assistant Prof. Nir Yosef are among the thirteen UC Berkeley faculty chosen to receive up to $1.5 million each over the next five years by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The investigator awards are the first individual grants by the CZ Biohub as it seeks to foster unconventional scientific exploration and encourage researchers to invent new tools to accelerate the pace of discovery. “I am humbled and speechless,” said Prof. Maharbiz. “This is an ambitious endeavor and I can’t wait to get started and be part of it. I really do believe we, collectively, can make a big impact on diseases over the next decade, and I’m really excited to be a part of this.”
