Professor Alexei (Alyosha) Efros has won the 2016 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Prize in Computing, formerly known as the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award. This award recognizes early-to-mid-career contributions that have fundamental impact and broad implications. Prof. Efros was cited for groundbreaking data-driven approaches to computer graphics and computer vision and is a pioneer in combining the power of huge image datasets drawn from the Internet with machine learning algorithms to foster powerful image transformations and valuable research findings. He has also made fundamental contributions in texture synthesis, a technique that ushered in new horizons in computer graphics and is widely used in the film industry. ACM Prize recipients are invited to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an annual networking event that brings together young researchers from around the world with recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (computer science), the Abel Prize (mathematics), the Fields Medal (mathematics), and the Nevanlinna Prize (mathematics).

CS undergraduates Tomás Vega Gálvez and Corten Singer have been chosen the $10,000 Lemelson-MIT “Drive it!” Undergraduate Team Winner for an open-source smart add-on system for wheelchairs. Vega and Singer created WheelSense, a modular, customizable add-on system for wheelchairs that provides spatial awareness for visually impaired users to identify obstacles and ease their navigation. It has three features: frontal staircase detection through auditory feedback, backward obstacle-avoidance assistance through auditory feedback, and lateral ramp-edge detection through haptic feedback. They hope to disrupt the expensive market for assistive technologies for the disabled community by making their technology open source.  The “Drive it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize rewards students working on technology-based inventions that can improve transportation.

Prof. Ming Wu has been awarded the 2017 C.E.K. Mees Medal from the Optical Society of America (OSA). This medal is presented to a recipient who exemplifies the thought that "optics transcends all boundaries." This award recognizes an original use of optics across different fields. Prof. Wu is being recognized for the invention of “optoelectronic tweezers” that enable massively parallel manipulation of individual biological cells controlled by digital optical projectors.

Prof. Katherine Yelick has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This organization has been serving the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue and useful knowledge since 1780. The Academy convenes leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to address critical challenges facing our global society. Kathy joins a long list of distinguished members, going back to Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, and most recently our own Scott Shenker in 2016. For a complete list of EECS members elected to the academy, see EECS Faculty Awards/American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Josephine Williamson, the EECS Director of Administrative Services, has been selected to receive the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award (COSA), which is the highest honor bestowed upon staff by the Chancellor.  COSAs are presented to individuals and teams who, in addition to performing their normal job duties with excellence, also demonstrate exceptional initiative in contributing to the UC Berkeley campus community.

The paper “X-Trace: A Pervasive Network Tracing Framework”, authored by EECS alumi Rodrigo Fonseca (Ph.D. ’08) and George Porter (Ph.D. ’08) and Professors Randy Katz, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica, has received the 2017 Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) Test-of-Time Award. X-Trace was not the first tracing framework, but it was influential given that it was effectively the first framework for end-to-end tracing to focus on generality and pervasiveness. The researchers implemented X-Trace in protocols and software systems, and in their prize-winning paper, they set out to explain three different use scenarios: domain name system (DNS) resolution; a three-tiered photo-hosting website; and a service accessed through an overlay network.

Charles Bordenave, an EECS/Statistics postdoc (Sept. 06-07) has been awarded thePrix Marc Yor by the Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et Industrielles (SMAI) of France. Charles Bordenave was an EECS/Statistics postdoc co-supervised by Prof. Venkatachalam Anantharam (EECS) and Prof. David Aldous (Statistics) and is currently with the French National Center for Scientific Research, the largest governmental research organization in France. This award is given to people under the age of 40 who have practiced in France for at least 5 years. Bordenave is recognized for his works of great scope, creative and stimulating, whose contributions to the theories of random graphs and large random matrices are brilliant and profoundly original.

Graduate students Radhika Mittal (advisors: Sylvia Ratnasamy and Scott Shenker) and Sam Chiu-Wai Wong (advisor: Christos Papadimitriou) have won 2017 Google PhD Fellowships. This is one of the highest honors available for Computer Science graduate students.  Each selected university is permitted to nominate two students and Google awards approximately 15 named fellowships per year.  Radhika, whose area is Computer Networking, was awarded a Microsoft Research Graduate Women’s Scholarship in 2013.  Sam, who is interested in the area of Algorithms and Complexity, won Best Paper at the IEEE FOCS Symposium in 2015 and has been awarded an IBM Scholarship.

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.