Graduate student Tijana Zrnic (advisors:  Moritz Hardt and Michael Jordan) has won an Apple PhD fellowship in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML).  Scholars from invited institutions are selected for this program based on their "innovative research, record as thought leaders and collaborators in their fields, and unique commitment to take risks and push the envelope in machine learning and AI."  Zrnic, who is affiliated with BAIR, the Statistical AI Learning group, and RISELab, was selected for "Fundamentals of Machine Learning."  Winners receive financial support for their research and academic travel for two years, internship opportunities, and a two-year mentorship with an Apple researcher in their field.   Apple says these scholars are "advancing the field of machine learning and AI to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and Apple is committed to supporting the academic research community and their invaluable contributions to the world."

EECS grad student Payam Delgosha is a winner of the IEEE Jack Keil Wolf ISIT Student Paper Award at the 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), which was held as a Zoomference on June 21 -26, 2020. Payam won the award for his paper "A universal low complexity algorithm for sparse marked graphs" co-authored with his research advisor Venkat Anantharam.  This award recognizes outstanding papers on information theory for which a student is the principal author and presenter. Delgosha earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Sharif University of Technology, Iran.  He plans to join the  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a research assistant professor of computer science in Fall 2020.

EECS Assoc. Prof. Boubacar Kanté, his graduate students Liyi Hsu, Jeongho Ha and Jun-Hee Park, postdoctoral researcher Abdoulaye Ndao, and Prof. Connie Chang-Hasnain, have demonstrated a revolutionary, ultrathin and compact, flat optical lens that spans wavelengths from the visible to the infrared with record-breaking efficiencies.  Their paper, “Octave bandwidth photonic fishnet-achromatic-metalens,” published in Nature Communications, is the first time a photonic system with the entire rainbow has been proposed and demonstrated with efficiencies larger than 70% in the visible-infrared region of the spectrum.  Attempts to make traditional lenses flatter and thinner, so that they can be deployed in increasingly smaller applications, have been hampered by the way that lens curvature and thickness are used to direct light.  The Fishnet-Achromatic-Metalens (FAM) utilizes a complex “fishnet” of tiny, connected waveguides with a gradient in dimensions, which focuses light on a single point on the other side of the lens, regardless of the incident wavelength.  As the world’s thinnest, most efficient, and broadest band, flat lens, its use in applications like solar energy, medical imaging, and virtual reality, is just the beginning.  As Kanté explains, “We have overcome what was regarded as a fundamental roadblock.”  One idea for a possible implementation would be to integrate the miniature lens into microrobots being developed at the Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center (BSAC).

We invite all graduates, their families and friends, and the university community to join us remotely on Monday, June 15th, for a Celebration of the Computer Science 2020 Graduates. The online celebration is intended to acknowledge and celebrate our graduate’s accomplishments, but its format is not intended to replace a live commencement ceremony. The self-guided program will include recorded video remarks from the CS Division Chair, the Departmental Citation recipient, and faculty, as well as personalized slides for each graduate. The site will go live on June 15th and visitors will be allowed to engage with the content as they wish. This includes deciding which video greetings and slides they view at their convenience. If you have any questions regarding the postponed ceremony or the online celebration, please contact Antoine Davis (antoined@eecs.berkeley.edu).  We look forward to having you join us when the celebratory site debuts on June 15th. Congratulations to the Class of 2020! Go Bears!

Eden McEwen, a fourth year undergraduate double-majoring in Computer Science and Physics, has been awarded a 2020 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship by the international Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE), for her potential contributions to the field of optics and photonics.  McEwen's research interests focus on predictive control and hardware design of adaptive optics systems for ground based astronomical observing in the optical and near-infrared. She has worked with groups at Berkeley, Keck II Observatory, NASA JPL, Caltech, and the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy. McEwen is a 2020 Goldwater Scholar and hopes to continue her studies in optics with a graduate degree in astrophysics.

Incoming CS graduate student Meena Jagadeesan has won a 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.  The fellowship program honors the contributions of immigrants and children of immigrants to the United States by investing in the education of a select group of new Americans who are "poised to make significant contributions to US society, culture or their academic field." Jagadeesan, whose parents emigrated from India, is a senior in a joint B.A./M.A. program at Harvard University where she is studying algorithmic questions, especially those arising in machine learning and economics.  She has won a CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher award and one of her papers, which involved the study of a dimensionality reduction scheme, was selected as an oral presentation at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).  Each Fellow will receive up to $90K in financial support over two years.

A team of researchers led by EE Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin and his graduate student, Suraj Cheema, have managed to grow an ultra-thin material on silicon that can power tiny electronic devices at the atomic scale.  Prior to this fundamental breakthrough, the thinnest conventional material that could demonstrate stable ferroelectricity was 3 nanometers thick.  The new ultrathin material, made of doped hafnium oxide just 1 nanometer thick (equivalent to the size of two atomic building blocks), can demonstrate even stronger ferroelectricity than material several times thicker.  This means it can efficiently power increasingly smaller devices, including memory and logic chips, batteries and sensors, with lower amounts of energy.  The findings were published in the April 22 issue of Nature.

Freshly-graduate CS Ph.D. student Daniel J. Fremont (advisor: Sanjit Seshia) has won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED) Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award for his thesis on "Algorithmic Improvisation."  The award, which was established in 2013, recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems.  Fremont's thesis proposes a theory of algorithmic improvisation to enable the correct-by-construction synthesis of randomized systems, and explores its applications to safe autonomy.