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.
May 11

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. More>>
May 11

EECS graduate student Sarah Bird (faculty advisors are Krste Asanovic and Dave Patterson) is the recipient of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Dr. Anita Borg devoted her life to encouraging the presence of women in computing and founded the Institute for Women in Technology in 1997. She passed away in 2003, and the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship was created in 2004 to honor her memory.
May 10

EECS graduate students Kartik Ganapathi (faculty advisor is Sayeef Salahuddin)and Matthew Spencer (faculty advisor is Elad Alon) have been named recipients of the Intel Ph.D. Fellowship Program. The Intel Ph.D. Fellowship program focuses on research in Intel’s technical areas; Hardware Systems Technology and Design, Software Technology and Design, and Semiconductor Technology and Manufacturing. This is a very prestigious award, and winning students are recognized as being tops in their areas of research.
May 9

The Simons Foundation, which specializes in science and math research, has chosen UC Berkeley as host for an ambitious new center for computer science. The foundation’s $60 million grant to establish the center, to be called the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at U.C. Berkeley, underscores the growing influence of computer science on the physical and social sciences. Richard Karp is the new director.
NY Times article
UC Berkeley Newscenter article
May 1

Matthew Spencer has been awarded EEGSA's Someone Special Award for April 2012. This award recognizes students, staff, and faculty members who bring something special to the Berkeley electrical engineering community. Matt was nominated for his effectiveness and willingness to help as a GSI, in addition to his great sense of humor and positive attitude. Matt's research focus is circuits, specifically “making computing systems out of alternative device technology.” He seeks to “use tiny mechanical switches to replace CMOS transistors in hopes of demonstrating lower power computers.
April 20

Eli Yablonovitch has just been elected to the 2012 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading "thinkers and doers" from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. More>>
April 20

Charles Kennedy (“Ned”) Birdsall, Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and a pioneering inventor and educator in microwave tubes and plasma physics, died Tuesday, March 6 2012 at his home in Lafayette, California. He was 86. A memorial service will be held on Sunday, April 29 at 1pm at the Faculty Club, UC Berkeley. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be sent to: “The Charles K. (Ned) Birdsall Graduate Research Fund at University Relations, 2080 Addison St. Checks should be made out to the U.C. Berkeley Foundation. More>>
April 19

A consortium of eleven of the world’s foremost networking companies today became founding sponsors of the Open Networking Research Center (ONRC), a collaborative research effort to explore software-defined networking (SDN) as the new networking paradigm and provide open-source networking tools and platforms. The faculty directors of the ONRC are Scott Shenker (Berkeley) and Nick McKeown (Stanford) The founding sponsors include: CableLabs, Cisco, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, NEC, NTT DOCOMO, Texas Instruments and VMware. More>>
April 17

EECS graduate student Isabelle Stanton (advisor is Satish Rao) has been selected to receive Yahoo! 2012 Key Scientific Challenges Program Award in Web Information Management. This award was created to recognize outstanding graduate student researchers from universities around the globe who have the greatest potential to make significant contributions and become thought leaders in their research fields.
April 9

The paper, “A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID)”, by David A. Patterson, Garth Gibson, and Randy H. Katz has been selected as one of the winners of the 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing. This recently established award recognizes outstanding papers published at least 10 years ago that have significantly influenced the theory and/or practice of dependable computing. This groundbreaking paper introduced the concept of RAID which rapidly became the common configuration paradigm for disks at all but the very low end of the server market. Its impact is primarily to industry where RAID was a truly disruptive technology.
April 4

The paper "Webos: Operating System Services For Wide Area Applications," written by Amin Vahdat, Thomas Anderson, Michael Dahlin, Eshwar Belani, David Culler, Paul Eastham, Chad Yoshikawa has been selected as one of the top papers in the 20 years of High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) publications. A special proceedings issue containing this paper will be produced and distributed at HPDC 2012 in Delft, Netherlands.
April 2

The Algorithms, Machines and People(AMP) Lab has been selected to receive a five-year NSF Expedition award rarely given to individual universities. The director is Michael Franklin, first holder of the new Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science. Co-principal investigators are Michael Jordan, Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica. AMP Expedition scientists expect to develop powerful new tools to help extract key information from Big Data, a term coined for the dizzying array of measurements, images, audio, video, tweets, texts and more that has grown ever larger, faster and more diverse. The grant, part of NSF’s “Expeditions in Computing” program, was announced on March 29 at a White House-sponsored event unveiling the Obama Administration’s “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.”
NY Times article
SF Business Times article
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April 2