Professor Majid Sarrafzadeh and students Foad Dabiri, Alireza Vahdatpour, Hyduke Noshadi and Hagop Hagopian have received a best-paper award for their paper, "Ubiquitous Personal Assistive System for Neuropathy". The paper was presented at the 2nd ACM International Workshop on Systems and Networking Support for Healthcare and Assisted Living Environments (HealthNet 2008).

Professor Jason Cong has just been named an ACM Fellow for his "contributions to electronic design automation" and Adjunct Professor Alan Kay has been named an ACM Fellow for his "fundamental contributions to personal computing and object-oriented programming." Both awards are for 2008.

More details on the ACM news release can be found at: http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/fellows-2008/

Professor Boris Kogan and coauthor Richard Samade received a Best Paper Award for their paper "Defibrillation Failure and Tachycardia-Induced Early Afterdepolarizations: A Simulation Study." This paper was presented at the International Conference on Computational Biology held in October 2008 and was selected for the Best Paper Award by the World Congress on Engineering and Computer Science.

Professor Deborah Estrin has received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. This honor was conferred on Deborah during the Institute's commencement day ceremony on 4 October 2008.

In November 2008, the IEEE Board of Directors voted to elevate Professor Alan Yuille to IEEE Fellow. His citation will read "for contributions to computer and biological vision, medical image processing and computational theories of cognition." Alan currently holds joint appointments with the Computer Science Department and the Statistics and Psychology departments.

Professor Lixia Zhang has been awarded the IEEE Internet Award for 2009. These awards are given annually for exceptional contributions to the advancement of Internet technology. Lixia's award will read: "For contributions toward an understanding of the complex interactions between Internet components and the development of the Internet architecture."

Professor Song-Chun Zhu is the recipient of the 2008 J. K. Aggarwal Prize for "fundamental and pioneering contributions to a unified foundation for visual pattern conceptualization, modeling, learning, and inference with applications in computer vision and pattern recognition." He will receive his prize at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in December 2008.

Professor Rafail Ostrovsky, with coauthors Steve Lu and industrial collaborabor, Daniel Manchala (Xerox), received a best-paper award for "Visual Cryptography on Graphs" at the 14th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON'2008) held in Dalian, China.

David Smallberg is the recipient of the 2008 Lockheed Martin Excellence in Teaching Award. Over the last five years, computer science faculty members have received more teaching awards than any other single department within the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

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

Professor 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.