Woody Hoburg receives assignment for NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission
EECS alumnus Warren "Woody" Hoburg (M.S. '11/Ph.D. '13, advisor: Pieter Abbeel), one of the first graduates of NASA's Artemis astronaut basic training program in 2020, has been assigned to launch on the agency's SpaceX Crew-6 mission – the sixth crew rotation flight aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Hoburg will pilot the spacecraft when it is expected to launch from a Falcon 9 rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in 2023. This will be his first mission into space. At the time of his selection as an astronaut, Hoburg was a commercial pilot and an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. His research focused on efficient methods for design of engineering systems.
NASA: Two Astronauts Receive Assignments for NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 Mission
Deborah Estrin wins 2022 IEEE John von Neumann Medal
2008 Distinguished CS Alumna Deborah Estrin (B.S. EECS '80) has won the prestigious Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) John von Neumann Medal. The award recognizes "outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology." Estrin, whose research interests include technologies for caregiving, immersive health, small data, participatory sensing and public interest technology, was cited for "her leadership in mobile and wireless sensing systems technologies and applications, including personal health management." Now a professor at Cornell, Estrin was the founding director of the National Science Foundation Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA, where she pioneered the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real-time data about the physical world. She also co-founded the nonprofit startup Open mHealth, which creates open data sharing standards and tools that allow developers of health applications to store, process, and visualize data.
Cornell Chronicle: Estrin, health tech pioneer, wins von Neumann medal
The First Women of EECS: Deborah Estrin
Pravin Varaiya wins 2022 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal
EECS Prof. Emeritus and alumnus Pravin Varaiya (Ph.D. 1966, advisor: Lotfi Zadeh), who is currently a Professor in the Graduate School, has won the 2022 IEEE Simon Ramo Medal. This major IEEE Corporate Award recognizes "exceptional achievement in systems engineering and systems science." Varaiya, who is known for his contributions to stochastic control, hybrid systems and the unification of theories of control and computation, was cited "for seminal contributions to the engineering, analysis, and design of complex energy, transportation, and communication systems."
Xiaoye Li and Richard Vuduc win 2022 SIAG/SC Best Paper Prize
CS alumni Xiaoye Sherry Li (Ph.D. '96, advisor: James Demmel) and Richard Vuduc (Ph.D. '03, advisor: James Demmel) have, along with Piyush Sao of Georgia Tech, won the 2022 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Supercomputing (AG/SC) Best Paper Prize. This prize recognizes "the author or authors of the most outstanding paper in the field of parallel scientific and engineering computing published in English in a peer-reviewed journal." Their paper, "A communication-avoiding 3D algorithm for sparse LU factorization on heterogeneous systems," was published in 2018 in the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). Li is now a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) where she works on diverse problems in high performance scientific computations, including parallel computing, sparse matrix computations, high precision arithmetic, and combinatorial scientific computing. Vuduc, now an Associate Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech, is interested in high-performance computing, with an emphasis on algorithms, performance analysis, and performance engineering.
SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing Best Paper Prize
Yang You wins IEEE CS TCHPC Early Career Researcher Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing
EECS alumnus Yang You (Ph.D. '20, advisor: James Demmel) has won the IEEE Computer Society Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researcher Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing. The focus of his research is efficient deep learning on distributed systems. He is known for developing the industry benchmark LARS (Layer-wise Adaptive Rate Scaling) and LAMB (Layer-wise Adaptive Moments for Batch training) optimizers to accelerate machine learning on HPC platforms. His team broke the world record of ImageNet training speed in 2017 and the world record of BERT training speed in 2019, and his training techniques have been used by many tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. You made the Forbes 30 Under 30 2021 Asia list for Healthcare and Science in April and is now a Presidential Young Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore.
IEEE CS TCHPC Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing – 2021