CS Associate Professor Ren Ng has been elected as an Optica Fellow. Optica (formerly OSA) has inducted 129 members from 26 countries to the Society’s class of 2024 Fellows. Founded in 1916, Optica is a global society that works to advance the science and technology of light. Ng was honored “for pioneering work developing light field cameras, as well as seminal contributions in 3D view synthesis and human visual perception.” Ng was named a Sloan Fellow in 2017 and a Hellman Fellow in 2019, the same year that he received the Jim and Donna Gray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Computer Science.

Professor Emeritus Chenming Hu, former chief technology officer at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), has been awarded the Taiwan Presidential Science Prize "for advancing Taiwan's Semiconductor Industry." The award, established in 2001, is presented every two years to the most distinguished scientists in Taiwan and is given to innovative researchers who have made monumental contributions to international research in the fields of mathematics, physical sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and applied sciences. Particular emphasis is given to scholars whose work has had a major impact on these fields in Taiwan. The award was presented to Hu by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen. Hu, alongside Berkeley EECS colleagues, pioneered the FinFET transistor, which is widely used in high-performance processors around the world.

A team led by CS Assistant Professor Anjoo Kanazawa has created Nerfstudio, an open-source platform to help speed up the development of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). NeRFs are a type of 3D imaging technology that can be used to create photorealistic 3D models of objects and scenes from a series of images. The plug-and-play framework, called Nerfstudio, makes it easier for researchers to create and train NeRFs, allowing users to run NeRFs on real-world data. “Advancements in NeRF have contributed to its growing popularity and use in applications such as computer vision, robotics, visual effects and gaming. But support for development has been lagging,” said Kanazawa. “The Nerfstudio framework is intended to simplify the development of custom NeRF methods, the processing of real-world data and interacting with reconstructions.”

NASA astronaut and EECS alumnus Warren “Woody” Hoburg (M.S.’11, Ph.D.’13 EECS) was interviewed by The Robot Brains Podcast while aboard the International Space Station (ISS). CS Professor Pieter Abbeel, who is the brains behind the podcast as well as Woody’s Ph.D. advisor, interviewed Woody about life on the ISS, the scientific experiments being conducted in the low-orbit space station, living in a weightless environment, and the promising impact ISS research could have on humanity. “As a young kid, I thought being an astronaut would be the coolest job. I had no idea how to achieve that goal. It seemed far too improbable of a goal to set my heart on. But I could pursue things I found interesting and challenging and pursue passions. You enabled one of those… I can’t thank you enough for your open-mindedness. I’m so lucky and blessed to have this opportunity.”

CS Teaching Professor Dan Garcia has joined the board of directors of The Computing Research Association’s Committee on Widening Participation in Computing Research (CRA-WP). The CRA-WP was established in 1991 with the goal of increasing the participation of women in computing research, though its current mission broadly supports underrepresented populations to improve access, opportunities, and experiences of those in computing research and higher education.

CS Assistant Professors Sophia Shao and Nika Haghtalab have won Google Research Scholar Awards. The Google Research Scholar Program provides financial support for world-class research conducted by professors in the early stage of their academic careers. Shao’s research interests include computer architecture, focusing on specialized accelerators, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology. Haghtalab’s research interests include machine learning, algorithms, economics, and society, contributing to an emerging mathematical foundation for learning and decision-making systems in the presence of economic and societal forces.

Professors Ana Arias and Kristofer Pister were featured in the Spring 2023 issue of Berkeley Engineer, showcasing their recent development of a tracking system for agricultural land which uses a novel printed sensor array and a wireless communications platform. The technology, dubbed the SmartStake system, uses stake-mounted sensors to provide an inexpensive alternative to cavity ring-down spectroscopy, a state-of-the-art but far more costly method for measuring gases like nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that plays a role in climate change. They hope their system, co-developed with Whendee Silver, Professor of Ecosystem Ecology and Biogeochemistry, may someday transform biofuel agriculture by enabling farmers to fine-tune agricultural practices to lower nitrous oxide emissions, while also optimizing fertilizer and irrigation usage. Berkeley Engineer is published twice yearly by Berkeley Engineering’s Office of Marketing & Communications and distributed to more than 50,000 alumni, faculty, donors and friends, highlighting the excellence of faculty, alumni and students and bringing their work to life through news and research stories.

Professor Joseph Hellerstein was awarded the 2023 SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, citing innovative contributions in extensible query processing, interactive data analytics, and declarative approaches to networking and distributed computing. The award is given for innovative and highly significant contributions of enduring value to the development, understanding, or use of database systems and databases. Until 2003, this award was known as the “SIGMOD Innovations Award.” In 2004, SIGMOD, with the unanimous approval of ACM Council, decided to rename the award to honor Dr. E.F. (Ted) Codd (1923 – 2003) who invented the relational data model and was responsible for the significant development of the database field as a scientific discipline. SIGMOD, otherwise known as the the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data, is concerned with the principles, techniques and applications of database management systems and data management technology. Its members include software developers, academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, users, and students. SIGMOD sponsors the annual SIGMOD/PODS conference, one of the most important and selective in the field.

The UC Board of Regents today voted to establish UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), the campus’s first new college in more than 50 years. The vote is the result of a three-year process to transform the Division of Computing, Data Science and Society into a college, which, in its new organizational structure, will be able to more effectively form new programs and partnerships, support instruction and research and foster identity and community among faculty, students and alumni. The college includes the Data Science Undergraduate Studies program, the Department of Statistics, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, the Center for Computational Biology and the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet. CDSS shares the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences with the College of Engineering, the Social Science Data Lab (D-Lab) with the Social Sciences division, and the Computational Precision Health program with UC San Francisco (UCSF). “We are thrilled to announce a new college at Berkeley that connects our excellent research and education in computing, data science and statistics with the many data-intensive disciplines across our campus,” said Chancellor Christ. “Infusing the power of data science across multiple disciplines, from basic and applied sciences to the arts and humanities, will help us to fully realize its potential to benefit society, help address our world’s most intractable problems, and achieve our most visionary goals. At Berkeley, we have the opportunity and responsibility to educate data science students from diverse backgrounds to become the ethical leaders we need in private industry, the public service sector, and education.”