EECS News Spring 2008
Three of our computer science graduate students, Chetan Nandakumar, advisor Jitendra Malik, Arlo Faria, advisor Nelson Morgan, and AJ Shankar, advisor Rastilav Bodik tied for first place at the 10th annual UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition at the Haas School of Business. Their entry, called Implicit Interfaces, is a revolutionary new search technology that leverages computer vision and machine learning techniques. More>> Leon Chua's theory on memory resistors, nicknamed "memristor" is featured in a Nature.com news article titled, "Found: the missing circuit element". In 1971 Prof. Chua postulated the existence of memristors, essentially resistors with memory. Now, 37 years later, researchers at HP Labs in Palo Alto have created a memristor circuit that could revolutionize computing. Ruzena Bajcsy has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious honorary societies and independent policy research centers. The Academy honors excellence by electing to membership remarkable men and women who have made preeminent contributions to their fields, and to the world. More>> EECS alumna Valerie Taylor, Ph.D. '91 has been elected to the board of the Computing Research Association. Currently she is Professor and head of the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. Her research interests are in high performance computing, with particular emphasis on the performance analysis and modeling of parallel and distributed applications. More>> Kam Lau has been selected to receive the 2008 Nick Holonyak Award from the Optical Society of America "for seminal contributions to high-speed direct modulation of semiconductor lasers through enhanced differential optical gain." More>> Christos Papadimitriou has been awarded the 2008 Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence (formerly known as the Katayanagi Senior Prize in Computer Science). The prize is "awarded annually to an established researcher with a record of outstanding and sustained achievement". The prize carries a $20,000 honorarium. More>> Pravin Variaya has been selected to receive the prestigious 2008 AACC (American Automatic Control Council) Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award. The Bellman Award is given for distinguished career contributions to the theory or application of automatic control. It is the highest recognition of professional achievement for U.S. control systems engineers and scientists. More>> Allen Yang, postdoc researcher in Prof. Shankar Sastry's Heterogeneous Sensor Network (HSN) group is featured in a Wired.com article titled "Engineers Test Highly Accurate Face Recognition". This new facial-recognition algorithm is able to recognize faces with 90-95 percent accuracy, even if the eyes, nose and mouth are obscured and could mark a quantum leap in face-recognition technology. More>> The Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI) project of EECS Prof. Ronald Fearing is featured in an article titled "Biomimetics: Design by Nature", in the April 2008 issue of National Geographic. The key to making his micromechanical flying insect work, Fearing said, isn't to attempt to copy the fly, but to isolate the structures crucial to its feats of flying, while keeping a sharp eye out for simpler "and perhaps better" ways to perform its highly complex operations. More>> Dave Patterson has won the 2007 ACM Distinguished Service Award for his leadership in the computing field, extending from his tenure on several federal policy boards to his multiple awards for teaching excellence. More>> Intel and Microsoft are partnering with the new Parallel Computing Lab to accelerate developments in parallel computing and advance the powerful benefits of multi-core processing to mainstream consumer and business computers. David Patterson is the director, and principal investigators include Krste Asanovic, Ras Bodik, James Demmel, Kurt Keutzer, John Kubiatowicz, Koushik Sen, and Katherine Yelick. Berkeley was ranked #1 in a competition with 25 other computer science departments. Intel and Microsoft expect to invest a combined $10 million over the next five years to the UC Berkeley Parallel Computing Lab. More>> David Wagner was featured in an Innovations article titled "Debugging Election Codes". Prof. Wagner was the principal investigator of a joint UCB-UC Davis "top-to-bottom review" of voting machine systems code, commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. The team found major vulnerabilities. More>> The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has established a Collaborative Technology Alliance in the area of Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST). The Berkeley MAST team includes EECS Profs. Michel Maharbiz, Clark Nguyen, Kris Pister, Ronald Fearing, Claire Tomlin, and Shankar Sastry, and includes 8 other universities and NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. The goal of the MAST project is to enable the autonomous operation of a collaborative ensemble of multifunctional, mobile microsystems. The MAST project, including options, provides funding of up to $89 million over the next 10 years. More>> EECS grad student Juliet Rubinstein won the SPIE Optical Microlithography conference's Best Student Paper Award for her paper with Prof. Andy Neureuther titled "Post Decomposition Assessment of Double Patterning Layout". Vern Paxson has won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, "Awarded to the outstanding young computer professional of the year". He was selected for his work in measuring and characterizing the Internet. This award is accompanied by a prize of $35,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made. More>> John Canny has been chosen by the Digital Media and Learning Competition for a project using cell phones to teach English to children in India. "Cell phones are the PCs of the developing world," said Canny. "It's the fastest growing technology platform in the region". This project will receive the top allocation of $238,000 and is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. More>> The RAD (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems) Lab project was featured in a Wall Street Journal article titled Trying to Figure Out How to Put a Google In Every Data Center. Armando Fox is the director and other faculty include Michael Jordan, Anthony Joseph, Randy Katz, David Patterson, Scott Shenker and Ion Stoica. Through this project the RAD Lab team is trying to take the mystery out of Google's data centers with the goal of building and running data centers as easy an engineering feat as putting up a new building and turning on the lights. Sanjit A. Seshia and Yun. S. Song have been selected to receive the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant awarded to researchers across the nation who have shown excellence early in their career, giving each a two-year, $50,000 grant to spend for their respective academic interests. More>> Ernest S. Kuh has been selected to win the European Design and Automation Association (EDAA) Lifetime Achievement Award. The Lifetime Achievement Award is given to individuals who made outstanding contributions to the state of the art in electronic design, automation and testing of electronic systems in their life. More>> The IEEE has named Alan Jay Smith as the recipient of its 2008 Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award. This award, sponsored by the IBM Almaden Research Center, recognizes Smith's contributions to the performance analysis of computer storage systems, including improvements to disk caches, data prefetching, file migration, device interconnect, workload analysis, data placement and performance analysis methodology which has led to improvements in the efficiency of information storage technology. Ken Goldberg and EECS student Tavi Nathanson's research project called “Jester 4.0: Jokes for Your Sense of Humor” was featured in a UC Newscenter article titled “So an EECS prof and an undergrad walk into a computer lab…”. Jester matches your taste in humor to that of other users via a process known as collaborative filtering, which also drives the recommendations of sites like Amazon and Netflix. Jester is built on a complex algorithm called Eigentaste, which the campus patented in 2003. The IMPACT (Integrated Modeling, Process, and Computation for Technology) research project has just been funded for an $8.8M budget over the next four years. IMPACT's objective is to bring together world-class researchers dedicated to the creation of knowledge and tools that will enable IC design and IC manufacturing to cooperate smoothly as IC technologies move past the 45nm node. The PI is Kameshwar Poolla. Other EECS professors involved are Elad Alon, Nathan Cheung, Chenming Hu, Michael Lieberman, Andy Neureuther, Tsu-Jae King Liu, and Costas Spanos. The sponsors are UC Discovery and the following companies: AMD, Applied Materials, ASML, Cadence, Canon, Ebara, Hitachi Global Storage, IBM, Intel , KLA-Tencor, Magma Design, Marvell, Mentor Graphics, Novellus, Panoramic, Sandisk, Spansion, Synopsys, Tokyo TEL, and Xilinx. David Wagner was quoted in a NPR article titled, 20 Calif. Counties Scrap Electronic Vote Machines. A study led by Prof. Wagner revealed that e-voting is not as secure and reliable as it should be. As a result, electronic voting machines were decertified across California. He is also listed on the UC Berkeley NewsCenter Faculty Experts webpage. More>> Craigslist has established the first endowed faculty chair in New Media at the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) with a donation of $1.6 million. Prof. Ken Goldberg is the Director and BCNM Executive Committee members include EECS professors Maneesh Agrawala and Shankar Sastry. The donation, which will support research, symposia and lectures, will be matched with $1.5 million from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for a total of $3.1 million. More>> An article about the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab's (Prof. Ron Fearing, Director) research on developing a directional adhesive inspired by the gecko appeared in Science Daily titled, "Climbing The Walls? New Adhesive Mimics Gecko Toe Hairs". Prof. Fearing and his colleagues are part of a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team supported by the National Science Foundation and specifically tasked in 2003 with developing synthetic adhesives that perform like gecko hairs. The article is also featured in the UC Berkeley NewsCenter. More>> The Mu Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu (Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society) is a recipient of the Outstanding Chapter Award for 2006-2007. This coveted award is a mark of great distinction for a college chapter. The Berkeley (Mu) chapter is among the most active engineering societies at Cal, providing academic services to fellow undergraduates. Ernest Kuh is to be inducted to the Silicon Valley Hall of Fame for 2008. The Silicon Valley Engineering Council Award Committee selects inductees for their outstanding professional achievement and significant contributions to the Silicon Valley community. |
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The latest rankings from U.S. News & World Report, "America's Best Graduate Schools 2009" have placed our Computer Science program at #1, tied with Stanford and MIT. Our Electrical Engineering program was #2, tied with Stanford. MIT came in first in this category. In Subareas (Theory and Systems), we came in first and our Programming Languages ranked #2 (behind CMU). Our undergraduate Electrical Engineering program has been ranked #2. UC Berkeley's graduate and undergraduate Engineering program overall ranked #3 (behind MIT and Stanford).