News

Ming Lin elected to 2020 ACM SIGGRAPH Academy

EECS alumna Ming C. Lin (B.S./M.S./Ph.D. '93, advisor: John Canny) has been elected to the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) Academy.  She is one of six scholars selected for membership this year, an honor which is reserved for individuals who have made "substantial contributions to the field."  Lin was cited "for contributions in collision detection, physics simulation, natural phenomena, crowd animation, haptics, and sound rendering."  She became an ACM Fellow in 2011 and IEEE Fellow in 2012, and is currently chair of the Computer Science department at the University Maryland.  An expert in virtual reality, computer graphics and robotics, Lin's particular focus is on multimodal interaction, physically based animations and simulations, as well as algorithmic robotics and their use in physical and virtual environments.  Her research has applications in medical simulations, cancer screening, urban computing, as well as supporting city-scale planning, human-centric computing, intelligent transportation and traffic management.

Paper by Peter Mattis to be presented at ACM SIGMOD conference

A paper co-written by EECS alumnus Peter Mattis (B.S. '97) is being presented at the 2020 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) International Conference on Management of Data this month.  The paper, titled "CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database," describes a cloud-native, distributed SQL database called CockroachDB, that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver speedy access.  The database is being developed at Cockroach Labs, a company co-founded in 2015 by a team of former Google employees that included Mattis, who is also the current CTO, and fellow-alumnus Spencer Kimball (CS B.A. '97), currently the company CEO.  Cockroach Labs employs a number of Cal alumni including Ceilia La (CS B.A. '00) and Yahor Yuzefovich (CS B.A. '18).

Michael Athans, pioneer in control theory, has died

EECS alumnus Michael Athans (B.S. '58/M.S. '59/Ph.D. '61, adivsor: Otto J. M. Smith), a pioneer in the field of control theory, has died at the age of 83.   Athans, who was born in Greece and graduated under the surname Athanassiades, had been a professor of electrical engineering at MIT for 34 years before retiring in 1998.  He helped shape modern control theory by developing central methodologies geared toward large-scale systems, which broadened the scope of the field, and helped spearhead the area of multivariable control system design and the field of robust control.  He became the director of the MIT Electronic Systems Laboratory in 1974, and renamed it the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) four years later, reflecting the lab’s expansion into new domains like transportation, energy, and economics.  Athans was also an award-winning educator, supervising the theses of more than 100 graduate students, producing nearly 70 videotaped lessons for practicing engineers, developing coursework, and co-authoring three books, including the foundational text “Optimal Control" (with Peter Falb).

Gary May: "George Floyd could have been me"

EECS alumnus Gary S. May (M.S. '88/Ph.D. '91, advisor: Costas Spanos), the first Black chancellor of UC Davis, has penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle titled "UC Davis chancellor: George Floyd could have been me" in which he observes that "at a traffic stop, no one knows I am a chancellor. No one knows I have a doctorate."  He explains that building an inclusive society that recognizes and respects people of all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and a wide variety of political views, gender identities, and personal experiences, will increase our capacity to "make discoveries and solve problems."  "It requires collective effort," he writes.  "It requires each one of us, in our own way, working to make a difference, whether that’s through video recording, peaceful protest or working to change procedures that reflect bias."

Eden McEwen awarded SPIE 2020 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship

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.

Aditya Parameswaran Awarded Best Paper at SIGMOD/PODS 2020

CS Assistant Prof. Aditya Parameswaran has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD)/Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) for his joint paper: “ShapeSearch: A Flexible and Efficient System for Shape-based Exploration of Trendlines.”  The paper proposes the implementation of ShapeSearch, a tool that mitigates issues with existing visual analytics tools, such as limited flexibility, expressiveness, and scalability.  The paper was one of two that received the top award out of over 144 accepted research papers and 450 submissions to ACM SIGMOD/PODS, the premiere international conference on the theoretical aspects of database systems.

Olivia Hsu to give speech at national IEEE-HKN virtual graduation celebration

EECS alumna Olivia Hsu (B.S. '19) will be giving a speech at the national 2020 IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) virtual graduation celebration on Saturday, May 30, 2020.  Hsu is the winner of the 2019 IEEE-HKN Alton B. Zerby and Carl T. Koerner Outstanding Electrical or Computer Engineering Student of the Year Award, and is the representative for the Mu (Berkeley) Chapter, which has won the IEEE-HKN Outstanding Chapter Award every year since 2001.   While at Berkeley, Hsu co-founded the student group Space Technologies at Cal (STAC) and won the 2019 EECS Arthur M. Hopkin award, which recognizes outstanding EE undergraduates who "demonstrate seriousness of purpose and high academic achievement."  She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford with a focus on computer architecture, digital circuits, and computer systems.  IEEE-HKN will host the event for the first time this year in place of the campus commencement ceremonies which  have been cancelled nationwide. 

Meena Jagadeesan named 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

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.

11 EECS faculty among the top 100 most cited CS scholars in 2020

The EECS department has eleven faculty members who rank among the top 100 most cited computer science & electronics scholars in the world. UC Berkeley ranked #4  in the global list of universities with the highest number of influential scholars in 2020 (35, up from 24 in 2018).  Profs. Michael Jordan, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, Jitendra Malik, Trevor Darrell, David Culler, Shankar Sastry, Randy Katz, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Lotfi Zadeh and Dawn Song all ranked in the top 100 with an H-index score of 110 or higher, a measure that reflects the number of influential documents they have authored.   Jordan ranks fourth in the world, with an H-index of 166 and 177,961 citations.  The H-index is computed as the number h of papers receiving at least h citations among the top 6000 scientist profiles in the Google Scholars database. 

Michael McCoyd uses polio history to shed light on Coronavirus vaccine in NY Times Op-Ed

CS graduate student Michael McCoyd (advisor: David Wagner) has co-authored an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled "What to Expect When a Coronavirus Vaccine Finally Arrives," which offers sobering lessons from the history of the polio vaccine. It took over 60 years from the onset of the first polio epidemic for a safe and effective vaccine to be developed and attempts to hasten the process often led to tragedy. McCoyd, who is in the Secure Computing group, says the article arose from a class he took in the J-school to learn more about fighting disinformation titled "Science Denial: Role of the Media."  When the J-school shifted focus to COVID-19 coverage, Prof. Elena Conis, an historian of vaccination, suggested story ideas for the students to pitch.  With their pitch accepted by the New York Times, McCoyd and classmate Jessie Moravek, a graduate student in environmental science, wrote what became the op-ed with Prof. Conis.