EECS Announcements

Eli Yablonovitch has been named recipient of the 2012 IEEE Photonics Award. This award is given in recognition of outstanding discovery, significant scientific or technological advancement, important invention and impact on the field of Photonics. Considered a “father of photonic bandgaps,” Prof. Yablonovitch’s pioneering contributions effectively created the new field of photonic band engineering for a variety of advanced technologies.

The project “EFRI BioFlex: Flexible Resorbable Organic and Nanomaterial Therapeutic Systems (FRONTS)” led by Michel Maharbiz, in collaboration with Ana Arias and Vivek Subramanian have been awarded a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop flexible bioelectronics systems to advance medical care. When implanting therapeutic electronics within the body, one concern is how to remove them after the therapy is complete. To advance wound healing, the investigators aim to design, develop, and characterize novel flexible systems – constructed with nanomaterials, devices, interconnects, electrodes, and batteries – that can be safely absorbed by the body.
UC Newscenter article

EECS graduate student Rashmi K. Vinayak (faculty advisor is Kannan Ramchandran) is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship 2012-13. This fellowship is given to outstanding Ph.D. students pursuing exciting and challenging research in the areas of distributed systems, computer security, machine learning, and more. Rashmi is currently researching new encoding mechanisms for distributed storage systems with a goal of significantly improving their reliability and elasticity.

EECS graduate student John C. Duchi (faculty advisor is Michael Jordan) is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship 2012-13. This fellowship is given to outstanding Ph.D. students pursuing exciting and challenging research in the areas of distributed systems, computer security, machine learning, and more. His research focuses on algorithms and techniques for scaling machine learning to the real world — problems with too much data to store on one computer.

EECS graduate student Mosharaf Chowdhury (faculty advisor is Ion Stoica) is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship 2012-13. This fellowship is given to outstanding Ph.D. students pursuing exciting and challenging research in the areas of distributed systems, computer security, machine learning, and more. Mosharaf, a student in the AMPLab, hopes to elevate the datacenter network to become a first-class resource in cloud computing environments.

The ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper Award has been given to Ali Ghodsi, Vyas Sekar, Matei Zaharia, and Ion Stoica for the paper titled "Multi-Resource Fair Queueing for Packet Processing". The paper provides a scheduling algorithm for routers/switches that enables efficient multiple resource sharing, while being robust to strategic manipulations and misbehavior. It builds on their previous DRF work on sharing resources in the cloud computing context.

Computer Science course CS 10, taught by Dan Garcia is featured in a Daily Cal article titled Lecture Lust: A list of famous courses at Cal”. Named “The Beauty and Joy of Computing,” the class was created in 2009 by the Computer Sciences department as an alternative for those who did not take AP Computer Science in high school.

Pieter Abbeel won the Dick Volz Award, which goes to the author of the best U.S. Ph.D. thesis in Robotics and Automation. The decision is made on quality and impact four years after graduation. This award was named after Dick Volz in honor of his research, and his community engagement. One of the main contributions of Pieter's Ph.D. work was a new line of machine learning algorithms that enable robots to learn from demonstrations.

Chenming Hu has been awarded the Honorary Doctorate Award by the National Chiao Tung University on April 24, 2012. The conferment of degree and the shifting of tassel were performed by the university president, Yan-Hwa Wu Lee. After the ceremony, Prof. Hu gave a speech titled “Microelectronics: Into an Extra Dimension” and shared his research experience with the faculty members and students.

Qualcomm Research has just announced the winners of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2012, two of the eight winning teams are from Berkeley EECS. This highly competitive fellowship awards teams of two Ph.D. students for their innovative research proposals. This year Qualcomm received 109 submissions from 12 participating US schools. The winning teams are Asif Khan & Chun Yeung (advised by Sayeef Salahuddin & Chenming Hu) and Sameer Agarwal & Aurojit Panda (advised by Ion Stoica). Each winning team receives a $100,000 fellowship to pursue their research ideas, in collaboration with a mentor from Qualcomm Research.

The paper “Worst-case Equilibira,” written by Elias Koutsoupias and Christos H. Papadimitriou has been selected to receive 2012 Gödel Prize, sponsored jointly by ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). This award recognizes outstanding papers in theoretical computer science. Three groups of researchers will receive this award for their contributions to understanding how selfish behavior by users and service providers impacts the behavior of the Internet and other complex computational systems.

Seth Cooper, EECS alumni and former student of Dan Garcia’s UCBUGG group was named recipient of the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation "A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games." Cooper, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, explores how the video game environment can be used for solving difficult scientific problems.

Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) announced a $2.2 million gift to support engineering education at UC Berkeley. The gift will be used to transform the traditional introductory Electronic Design Laboratory in EECS into a dynamic learning environment for undergraduate students. In addition to the monetary gift, TI is donating development kits that incorporate a range of devices from its extensive semiconductor portfolio, along with supporting software, to enhance the hands-on learning experience in the classroom. By engaging students early in their engineering education, TI is helping to ignite lifelong ingenuity and passion for tackling the world's challenges with analog and embedded processors.