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.
May 18

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. More>>
May 17

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