Department Awards

Graduate student, Ka Cheung (Richard) Sia (advisor Professor John Cho), is the winner of the first-place graduate student award in this year's UCSD data mining competition (held March 25th to June 15th). This competition offers individuals a chance to test their data mining skills on a real-world data set. The competition, held annually, is open to all students, post-docs, and "interested parties." This year, over 100 teams participated in the competition.

Foad Dabiri (advisor Majid Sarrafzadeh) has been selected to receive the 2008 Edward K. Rice Outstanding Doctoral Student Award. This award honors the achievements of a distinguished doctoral student in the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Recipients are selected on the basis of their academic excellence, research contributions and service to the school, university or community.

Professor Todd Millstein, with coauthors Nupur Kothari and Ramesh Govindan (both USC), received a best paper award for ³Deriving State Machines from TinyOS Programs Using Symbolic Execution² at the 2008 International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IP track), St. Louis, MO.

On May 17, 2008, Professor Judea Pearl received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Chapman University, and also served as the keynote speaker at Chapman's undergraduate commencement ceremony.

Professor Eleazar Eskin has been selected as a 2008 Okawa Foundation Research Grant recipient. Awards are based on the merits of an individual's research efforts in the fields of information and telecommunications. An award ceremony and reception will be held on October 8th at The Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco.

Rafael Laufer, CS Department PhD student (advisor Leonard Kleinrock), is one of four students nationwide to receive the Marconi Society's 2008 Young Scholars Award. Rafael was selected for his outstanding research on Internet security. Recipients of the Young Scholars Award receive financial stipends and are invited to attend the annual Marconi award dinner held this year at the Royal Society in London.

Vinton Cerf, alumnus of the Computer Science Department, has been awarded the 2008 Japan Prize, along with colleague Robert Kahn, for "creation of network architecture and communication protocol for the Internet." The Japan Prize is awarded by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan and recognizes scientists whose original and outstanding achievements in science and technology have advanced the frontiers of knowledge and been of great
service to mankind. Cerf and Kahn created the TCP/IP protocol used in today's Internet that allows computers on different networks to communicate with each other.

Professor Todd Millstein is the recipient of the 2008 IBM Faculty Award. IBM Faculty Awards are a competitive worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organizations; and to promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM.

Professor Judea Pearl will bepresented in April with the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer & Cognitive Science by the Franklin Institute, one of the oldest premier centers of science education and development in the country. Judea is being honored for creating the first general algorithms for computing and reasoning with uncertain evidence, allowing computers to uncover associations and causal connections hidden within millions of observations. (The Franklin Institute)


Majid Sarrafzadeh and co-authors of "The SmartCane System: An Assistive Device for Geriatrics" received a best-paper award from the 3rd International Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets 2008), Tempe AZ, March 2008. This was a joint submission by EE, CS, VA Hospital and School of Medicine. Authors: W.H. Wu, L.K. Au, B. Jordan, T. Stathopoulos, M.A. Batalin, W.J. Kaiser, A. Vahdatpour, M. Sarrafzadeh, M. Fang and J. Chodosh.

A joint CS/EE paper authored by Frank Chang, Jason Cong, Adam Kaplan, Mishali Naik, Glenn Reinman, Eran Socher, and Rocco Tam has received the best paper award from the 14th International Symposium on High Performance
Computer Architecture (HPCA) held February 16-20, 2008. This year's symposium received 161 papers, accepted 31, and gave only one best paper award.

This paper, "CMP Network-on-Chip Overlaid With Multi-Band RF-Interconnect," explores the use of multi-band RF interconnect with signal propagation at the speed of light to provide shortcuts in a many-core network-on-chip (NOC)
mesh topology.


Professor Amit Sahai's paper "Predicate Encryption Supporting Disjunctions, Polynomial Equations, and Inner Products" (co-authored with Brent Waters and Jonathan Katz) has been selected as one of the top four papers at Eurocrypt 2008. It will be included in a special issue of the Journal of Cryptology dedicated to the best papers from this conference (to be held in Istanbul, Turkey, April 13-17). Eurocrypt is one of the two top conferences in cryptology, and accepts papers related to cryptography, cryptanalysis, and computer security (the acceptance ratio for papers submitted to Eurocrypt 2008).

In recognition of his achievements, 3rd-year graduate student Vipul Goyal has been awarded the highly prestigious Microsoft Graduate Fellowship. In addition to the financial support offered by the fellowship, Vipul will have the opportunity to participate in a 12-week paid research internship for each of the next two years. The fellowship award ceremony will be held at Microsoft Research on March 3, 2008.

Alumnus and adjunct faculty member Leon Alkalai was recently named a member of the International Academy of Astronautics. Founded in 1960 by Theodore von Karman, the Academy's goals include fostering the development of astronautics for peaceful purposes, encouraging cooperation in the advancement of aerospace science, and recognizing individuals who have distinguished themselves in a related branch of science or technology. Dr. Alkalai has been with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 18 years and is the manager of JPL's Robotic Lunar Exploration Office.

Professor Demetri Terzopoulos has been inducted as a 2007 ACM Fellow for "contributions to computer graphics and vision." This year the Association for Computing Machinery is recognizing 38 individuals from academia, industry, and research labs for their innovations in a range of computing disciplines that affect theory and practice, education and entertainment, industry and commerce. Inductees are honored for expanding the impact of technology and advancing the quality of life for people everywhere.

On November 1, 2007, the White House announced this year's Presidential EarlyCareer Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Professor Eddie Kohler is one of the two young faculty members from UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering to receive this award and one of the 20 young researchers to be recognized with this award by the National Science Foundation (other federal agencies also make awards). The PECASE award is considered the country's highest honor for engineers and scientists who are in the early part of their careers. It recognizes the recipient's potential for leadership across the frontiers of scientific knowledge during the 21st century.

Professor Demetri Terzopoulos is the inaugural recipient of the "IEEE PAMI-TC Computer Vision Significant Researcher Award." This award was presented at the October 2007 International Conference on Computer Vision (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) for "pioneering and sustained research on Deformable Models and their applications." Demetri's acceptance speech was addressed to over 750 conference attendees.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has ranked UCLA within the top 10 on its 2007 "Top Research Universities Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index" for the field of computer science. The productivity of faculty members is measured and judged on as many as five factors, depending on the most important variables in the given discipline: e.g., books published, journal publications, citations of journal articles, federal grant dollars awarded, and honors and awards.

Professor Tony Chan (joint appointments in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Bioengineering) has been elected to AAAS Fellow (American Association for the Advancement of Science). The AAAS recognizes individuals for their contributions to science and technology. Tony was one of five newly elected Fellows from the field of mathematics.

Professor Song-Chun Zhu (joint appointments in the Computer Science and Statistics departments) received a Marr Prize honorable mention for his paper "Deformable Template as Active Basis." The paper (with co-authors Ying Nian Wu, Zhangzhang Si, and Chuck Fleming) was presented at the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), and was selected as one of the top four papers at this conference.

Graduate students Christopher Frost and Mike Mammarella's paper (advisor Professor Eddie Kohler) presented an award-winning paper at the 2007 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), 15-17 Oct 07. Conference attendees voted "Generalized File System Dependencies," (with co-authors E. Kohler, A. de los Reyes, S. Hovsepian, A. Matsuoka. and L. Zhang) one of the three top conference papers.

Professor Amit Sahai has been awarded the 2007 Okawa Research Award for "Cryptographic Techniques for Encrypted Data." Ten awards were made this year: two each to researchers at UCLA, UCB, Stanford and USC, and one each to researchers at CalTech and Carnegie Mellon.

Professor Judea Pearl was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Toronto at a convocation ceremony that took place on 21 June 2007 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The degree was offered in recognition of Professor Pearl's groundbreaking contributions to the field of computer science, as well as his efforts, in the face of personal tragedy, to promote cross-cultural dialogue and reconciliation.

Professor Pearl delivered a commencement address to the graduating class of 2007. A transcript of the commencement address can be found here.


Professor Jason Cong is the recipient of a 2007 IBM Faculty Award. These awards are highly competitive, and are made in recognition of an individual's achievements and the quality of his or her research programs.

Professor Deborah Estrin has been selected to receive the Anita Borg Institute's "Women of Vision" award for "Innovation." The award ceremony will take place on May 3, 2007, with an expected 800 people in attendance. The mission of the Anita Borg Institute is to increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology and to increase the positive impact of technology on the world's women. Each year, the "Women of Vision" award honors three women who have made significant contributions to technology in one of three categories: innovation, leadership and social impact. One winner is selected for each category. The innovation category recognizes women who have contributed significantly to technology innovation.

On 20 February 2007, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced this year's recipients of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship. Professor Eddie Kohler was one of five recipients from the UCLA campus. The fellowships, awarded for a two-year period, are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. They are designed to identify those who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge.

Professor Alan Kay has received an Honoris Causa Degree in Informatica from the University of Pisa, Italy. He will be honored in a 15 June 2007 ceremony for his contributions to the development of the personal computer and object-oriented programming.

Professor Adnan Darwiche and graduate student Knot Pipatsrisawat report that their satisfiability solver, Rsat, has won the gold medal (first place) in the 2007 international SAT competition (industrial benchmark category). The SAT competition takes place every two years, and this was UCLA's very first participation. Additionally, the Rsat solver won two additional medals in specialized categories: a gold medal for the UNSAT category and a silver medal for the SAT category.

The following students received the Computer Science Department's
"Outstanding Student" award for 2006-2007:

Zhiru Zhang -- Ph.D. (advisor Jason Cong)
Hyduke Noshadi -- M.S. (advisor Majid Sarrafzadeh)
Yi Hu -- B.S. (Computer Science)
Andre Encarnacao -- B.S. (Computer Sci & Engineering)


Professor Deborah Estrin has been selected as a 2007 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business and public affairs. This year's 227 honorees include a former vice president of the U.S., a former Supreme Court justice, the mayor of N.Y., winners of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, etc.

Professor Adnan Darwiche has been elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for "significant contributions to the development and application of both probabilistic and logical methods in automated reasoning." He is one of seven newly elected AAAI Fellows who will be honored at a banquet held on 24 July 2007 in Vancouver BC.

Professor Boris Kogan and graduate student Ray Huffacker received a 2nd place Poster of Excellence award for their poster, "Effects of Early Afterdepolarizations on Reentry in Cardiac Tissue: A Simulation Study." The award was presented at the Gordon Research Conference on Tissue-Level Arrhythmia Mechanisms (held 8-23 March 07 in Ventura Beach, CA).

Professor Mario Gerla and graduate students Sewook Jung, Uichin Lee, Alexander Chang, and Dae-Ki Cho have received a Best Paper Award for their paper, "Cooperative Content Sharing for Bluetooth Users.”  The paper was presented at the Fifth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (White Plains, NY, USA, 19 - 23 March 2007).

Alumnus Jun Li is a 2007 recipient of the esteemed CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for his work entitled "A Behavior-Based Framework for Detecting Internet Worms." Li, now an assistant professor at the University of Oregon, is a former member of the LASR Lab (advisor Peter Reiher) here in the Computer Science Department

Jens Groth, a postdoctoral scholar with the Computer Science Department, has received a 2007 "Chancellor's Award for Postdoctoral Research." Groth received this award based on his work with Rafail Ostrovsky and Amit Sahai in the area of new non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. The Chancellor's Award was established in 1998 to acknowledge, each year, the remarkable contributions and integral role of postdoctoral scholars in the research
mission of the university.

Professor Leonard Kleinrock has been honored with an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. He will speak at the University's commencement exercise on May 20, 2007.

Professor Lixia Zhang has been elected as an ACM 2006 Fellow. The ACM officially honored Professor Zhang in January 2007 "for contributions to protocol designs for packet switched networks."

Professor Emeritus Gerald Estrin has received the 2006 Lifetime Contribution Award from the Henry Samueli School of Engineering.  Professor Estrin was recognized for his long commitment to the School (recruited in 1956) and to the fields of engineering and computer science.  During his many years of academic leadership, Professor Estrin nurtured generations of researchers, engineers and academics.

Assistant Professor John Cho has received the 2006 Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award.  This award honors junior faculty who demonstrate a commitment to high teaching standards.  This award recognized Professor Cho for introducing up-to-date topics to assist students in bridging their understanding from theory to real-world applications, for introducing a new graduate class on Web information systems, and for developing an undergraduate course addressing Internet applications.

Professor Joe DiStefano has been elected a Senior Fellow (2005) by the board of directors of the Biomedical Engineering Society.  Inductions took place at the Society's Fall 2006 annual meeting.  Recipients of this honor are selected based upon their record of exceptional achievement and accomplishment in a specific field of interest within biomedical engineering.

Professor Adnan Darwiche’s  paper, "A Knowledge Compilation Map," has received the annual IJCAII-JAIR Best Paper Prize for 2006.  This prize is awarded to an outstanding paper published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) within the past five calendar years and presented formally at a IJCAI conference.  The award citation reads:  ". . . for an outstanding contribution to the foundations of knowledge representation with long-term significance in the field, but also with high potential for practical applications within different areas of artificial intelligence and beyond."  (A. Darwiche and P. Marquis (2002), "A Knowledge Compilation Map," Vol 17, pp. 229-264.)

Professor Leonard Kleinrock's 1974 paper, "Research Areas in Computer Communication," republished in the 25th anniversary issue of Computer Communication Review (January 1995), has been selected to receive one of the 2006 "Test of Time" awards from ACM SIGCOMM. This award was created to recognize papers roughly a decade old that are deemed notable and worthy of a second look today. SIGCOMM also felt that it was important to recognize older papers that were republished in that 25th anniversary issue of CCR.

Professors Richard Korf and Judea Pearl have received AAAI Classic Paper Awards (Honorable Mention) for "Real-Time Heuristic Search: First Results” (Korf) and "The Logic of Representing Dependencies by Directed Graphs" (Pearl and T. Verma). This award honors authors of papers deemed most influential, chosen from specific conference years. The 2006 award was given to the most influential papers from the 1987 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle, Washington.

Professor Judea Pearl (jointly with American University's Akbar Ahmed) has been awarded the inaugural Purpose Prize by Civic Ventures, a San Francisco think tank that sponsors this prize as a reward to American individuals or teams who have worked to solve society's problems.  This prize acknowledges people, not only for their work, but also for using their midlife experience in creative and innovative ways.  Professors Pearl and Ahmed were honored in 2006 for their work in promoting Muslim-Jewish understanding and encouraging peace between Israelis and Palestinians.


Professor Adnan Darwiche and his Automated Reasoning Group participated in two international reasoning competitions during the summer of 2006.  These competitions were organized by the Conference on Uncertainty in AI (UCLA was the only team to solve all problem instances) and the Conference on Theory & Applications of Satisfiability Testing (UCLA took second place).

Professor Alan C. Kay has received an Honorary Doctorate from Georga Tech (2006). This was awarded in recognition of his work as the “father of the personal computer.” He is the first computationalist to be awarded an honorary degree from Georgia Tech.

Professor Demetri Terzopoulos has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2006). This is analogous to an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Established nearly 125 years ago, the Royal Society of Canada is modeled after the Royal Society of London. It is dedicated to the promotion of exceptional learning, research and
accomplishments in the arts, humanities and sciences. Fellowship in the Society is the highest academic accolade available to scientists and scholars in Canada.

Professors Jason Cong and Rafail Ostrovsky, and Jens Palsberg have each
received the IBM Faculty Award for 2006. The award is highly competitive and
recognizes individuals for the quality of their work and its importance to
industry.

Professor Judea Pearl and student Ilya Shpitser are joint recipients of the 2006 Best Student Paper Award for their paper, “Identification of Conditional Interventional Distributions." This award was presented by the Association of Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence for an outstanding technical contribution made by a student.

Professor Richard Muntz has received the ACM SIGMETRICS Achievement Award for 2006.  This award is being presented at the SIGMETRICS/ Performance 2006 conference held 26 to 30 June 2006 in Saint-Malo, France. The award is given each year to an individual who has made long-lasting and highly influential contributions to the theory or practice of computer/communication system performance evaluation.

Assistant professor Eddie Kohler has received the New Faculty Fellowship Award for 2006 from Microsoft Research. The New Faculty Fellowship program at Microsoft identifies, recognizes, and supports exceptional new faculty members who are engaged in innovative computing research. The objective is to stimulate and support the creative work of these promising researchers who have the potential for making a profound impact on state-of-the-art technology in their research discipline.

Assistant professors Eddie Kohler, Rupak Majumdar, and Todd Millstein have been recognized with NSF CAREER Awards for 2006. This is NSF's most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of faculty who effectively integrate research and education into their work.

Academy Award to Professor Terzopoulos. New faculty member, Professor Demetri Terzopoulos, received a 2005 Scientific and Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The award was presented to Professor Terzopoulos and his former colleague John Platt on February 18, 2006, ". . . for their pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures."
(The Academy's press release)


Professor Deborah Estrin has received the first ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award. SIGMOBILE selected Deborah for nomination from a list of 14 top women in the field of computer science. Each year the ACM honors one preeminent woman computer scientist as the Athena Lecturer, and invites the honoree to give a one-hour talk at an ACM conference. Professor Estrin's talk will be given at MobiCom 2006.

Assistant Professor Eddie Kohler and eight co-authors have received an award from the 2005 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) for their joint paper "Labels and Event Processes in the Asbestos Operating System."

UCLA computer science alumnus Vinton Cerf receives Presidential Medal of Freedom.  In a White House ceremony on November 9, 2005, Internet pioneers Vinton Cerf (Ph.D. 1972) and Robert Kahn (Ph.D. Princeton 1964) were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civil award.  The award cited their design of the software code used to transmit data over the Internet, and noted that they have been at the forefront of the digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment.  Dr. Cerf is currently a vice president and “chief Internet evangelist” for Google, and Dr. Kahn is founder and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Professor Leonard Kleinrock, along with Dr. Robert Kahn and Dr. Lawrence Roberts, has been awarded the 2005 Computer and Communications Prize from the Foundation for C&C Promotion. The prize will be awarded at a ceremony held on December 12, 2005, in Tokyo. The accompanying citation will read as follows: "For contributions to establishing the foundation of today's Internet technology through the concept of packet switching, which underlies the backbone of modern telecommunications networks, through the invention of the related TCP/IP communications protocols, and through the design and development of ARPANET and other early computer networks that were part of the initial Internet." (more)


Professor Gerald Estrin has received the Israeli Software Industry Pioneer Award, presented by the Israeli High-Tech Industry “in recognition of the entrepreneurship, leadership, hard work and outstanding achievements put forth in creating the first computer in Israel.” This award also recognizes Professor Estrin for his integral role in the establishment of the Israeli high-tech industry and the strengthening of Israel’s economy, security, and scientific capabilities.  Fall 2005.

Richard Korf. 2005: Receives the Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching award.

Majid Sarrafzadeh and Songwu Lu. 2005: Recipients of 2005 Okawa Foundation Award.

David Smallberg. 2005: Voted Professor of the Year by the Engineering Society of the University of California.

Jason Cong. 2005: Receives Distinguished Lecturer Award from IEEE Circuit and Systems Society (2001-2005).

Congratulations to Professor Lixia Zhang for election to IEEE Fellow this year. Her citation reads "for contributions to the architecture and signaling protocols in packet switched networks."


Stefano Soatto. 2005: Receives Keck foundation endowment to establish interdisciplinary Laboratory for Vision and Image Science.

Leonard Kleinrock. October 2005: Receives Honorary Laurea Doctorate in
Ingegneria Telematica from Turin Polytechnic "for contributions to queuing
theory and creation of the ARPANET."

Computer Science PhD student Claudio Enrico Palazzi, Dr. Giovanni Pau, and Professor Mario Gerla have recently won the Best Full Paper Award at the 3rd ACM International Conference in Computer Game Design and Technology.  The paper is coauthored with Dr. Stefano Ferretti and Professor Marco Roccetti from University of Bologna (Italy) and is titled “FILA, a Holistic Approach to Massive Online Gaming: Algorithm Comparison and Performance Analysis”.  The paper reflects the active collaboration that exists between the UCLA and Bologna research groups. Claudio Palazzi is currently enrolled in a joint UCLA and University of Bologna PhD Program.
Read the award-winning paper.

Professor Junghoo "John" Cho has been selected to receive IBM Faculty Award for year 2005. This award is a highly competitive and recognizes the quality and the importance of the recipient's research to the general technology industry.

UCLA CSD student winners in the UC Data Mining Contest:
The results of the 2005 UC Data Mining contest have recently been posted.

A group from the UCLA Computer Science Department
ShowMeTheMoney --
Yong Kwon, Kung-Hua Chang, Laurie O'Connor, Teresa Breyer won three awards:
The top score for the Classification problem -- $500 prize
The top score from UCLA for the Classification problem -- $100 prize
The top score from UCLA for the Time Series problem -- $100 prize

The group's result for the Time Series problem was also 3rd best overall.
Congratulations for this outstanding performance to Yong, Kung-Hua,
Laurie, and Teresa.


UCLA Grad Student Wins 2005 AAAI General Game-Playing Competition

At AAAI the first "general game-playing" competition was held. Students had to write programs that would play any single-player, two-player, or multi-player game. During the competition, programs received a game in a game-description language, had a few minutes to "think" about the game, and then had to start playing against other programs, all without any human intervention or input. One of our graduate students, Jim Clune, won the entire competition, which consisted of different games in different rounds, and took home the prize of $10,000.

J. Cong, H. Huang, and X. Yuan, received the 2005 Best Paper Award of the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) entitled "Technology Mapping and Architecture Evaluation for k/m-Macrocell-based FPGAs,"; ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), Vol. 10, pp. 3 - 23, January 2005. TODAES selects one paper each year for the best paper award, and this award was presented at the openning session at the opening session of the 2005 Design Automation Conference (DAC'2005) on June 14, 2005.
 
The paper presents a novel FPGA architecture based on k/m-macrocells, with in-depth quantitative architecture design and evaluation against widely used LUT-based FPGAs. It also presents efficient mapping algorithms for such architectures.

Beichuan Zhang, Dan Pei, Daniel Massey and Lixia Zhang won the Best Paper Award in The 25th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), June 2005, by the paper titled "Timer Interaction in Route Flap Damping."

Rajive Bagrodia. May 2005: Receives DARPA special commendation for "outstanding achievement in the development of network modeling and simulation technology."

The paper by T.Chan, J. Cong, and K. Sze  entitled "Multilevel Generalized Force-directed Method for Circuit Placement" received the Best Paper Award at the 2005 International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD'2005), held during April 4-6, 2005 in San Francisco, CA.  ISPD is sponsored by ACM/SIGDA and with technical cosponsorship from IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and is the premier forum for exchanging research results and ideas on VLSI physical design automation .  Each year, ISPD selects a single paper for the best paper award.  The technical program of ISPD'2005 is available at www.ispd.cc.

Lixia Zhang. March 2005: Elected to the Internet Architecture Board.

The best paper award from the IEEE ICDE conference went to:
Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis, Alexandros Ntoulas, Junghoo Cho, Luis Gravano "Modeling and Managing Content Changes in Text Databases." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), March 2005.


ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn the winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols. (more)

Jason Cong and Rafail Ostrovsky. 2004: Recipients of 2004 Okawa Foundation Award.

Computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock will receive an honorary Laureate degree from the University of Bologna in Italy, the oldest university in the Western world.  Kleinrock will become a Doctor of Internet Science at the graduation ceremonies on Tuesday, May 24, 2005. (more)

Alok Nandan, PhD student and Shirshanka Das, PhD student received the Best Paper Award in 2nd Conference on Wireless On Demand Networks and Services
on Jan 19-21, 2005 held at St. Moritz, Switzerland for the paper co-authored by Dr. Mario Gerla: " Cooperative Downloading in Vehicular Ad Hoc Wireless Networks" .


Professor Wesley Chu has been selected as a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society 2003 Technical Achievement Award "For contributions to Intelligent Information Systems". This award is presented to individuals whose professional work has been outstanding and innovative in the fields of computer and information science and engineering within the past fifteen years.

At the IEEE 15th International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures, and Processors (ASAP 2004) the best paper award is presented to Milos D. Ercegovac and Jean-Michel Muller for their paper entitled "Complex Square Root with Operand Prescaling".

IFIP WG 10.4 honors Al Avizienis at the 18th World Computer Congress, Toulouse, France, August 22-27, 2004. (more)

Alan C. Kay, an adjunct professor of computer science at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, has been awarded the 2004 Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology.

The Kyoto Prize is an international award given by the Inamori Foundation to people who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind. Now in its 20th year, the Kyoto Prize is considered one of the world's leading awards for lifetime achievement. Kay was chosen for "creating the concept of personal computing and contributing to its realization."

Professor Glenn Reinman received the 2004 Northrop Grumman Award for teaching effort and excellence.

Professor Joe DiStefano received the 2004 Lockheed Martin Award for teaching affort and excellence.

A team of four UCLA CS students beat teams from about 300 other schools to win the 2004 Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Design Invitational. In addition to winning the $8,000 prize, they advance to the International competition to be held in Sao Paulo July 4-6.
(more)

The ACM will honor Dr. Alan C. Kay with a 2003 Turing Award for his development
of Smalltalk, the first complete dynamic object-oriented programming
language and the template for Java and C++.

http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3342511

Congratulations to Alan on this extraordinary recognition.

Congratulations to Professor Judea Pearl on being selected as a recipient, along with David Haussler, of the 2003 ACM-AAAi Allen Newell Award.
"For contributions to artificial intelligence and its applications, building a firm mathematical and theoretical foundation through ground-breaking work in heuristic search, reasoning under uncertainty, constraint processing, non-monotonic reasoning, and causal modeling."

Professor Deborah Estrin has been elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Professor Estrin was honored for her innovations in scalable network protocols and sensor network research. She was recently named to Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" list of top researchers.

Dr. Vinton G. Cerf, MS '70, PhD '72, received the Alumnus of the Year Award, UCLA Engineering, November 2003.

Dr. Jeremy Elson, PhD '03, received Edward K. Rice Award - Outstanding Doctoral Student, UCLA Engineering, November 2003.

Professor Milos Ercegovac has been elected to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Belgrade, October 2003, as foreign member.

Professor Joe DiStefano received  the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and the Harvey Eby Award for the Art of Teaching  for 2003.

Professor Judea Pearl was selected to deliver the Prof. Chaim Leib Pekeris Memorial Lecture at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Professor Leonard Kleinrock has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.