Full Announcement

The annual end of year awards event--the SpringFling--was held Sunday, May 17, 2009 at the MIT Museum for a large group of EECS students, faculty and staff and their friends and families. The unique and interactive surroundings of the museum provided a festive atmosphere.

The presentations were initiated by Dept. Head Eric Grimson who introduced Associate Dept. Head Duane Boning to make the first round of award presentations. The awardees were:

• the Carlton Tucker Teaching Award - to Natasa Blitvic for 6.041, 6.262;
• the Harold Hazen Teaching Award - to Jay Fucetola for many terms of 6.042;
• the Frederick C. Hennie Teaching Award to - Shay Maymon for 6.003, 6.011 and to Max Goldman for 6.005, 6.831;

UROP and Project prizes included:
• the Northern Telecom/BNR 6.111 project gave two equal awards to Donald Goldin and Mark Sullivan for 'Vertex' and to Nicholas Harrington and Tao Benjamin Schardl for 'Voice recognition softward';
• the George C. Newton Project Prize in 6.111 went to Tony Kim (Hyun) and Nevada Sanchez for 'Video acquisition multi-touch controller';
• the Chanen writing prize in 6.033 went to Syed Raza for 'Parallel execution of dataflow programs using heuristic greedy scheduling';
• the Nylander AUP prize went to Tao Benjamin Schardl for 'A work efficient parallel breadth-first search algorithm' (Charles Leiserson, supervisor);
• the Morais and Rosenblum UROP prize to Sabrina Neuman for 'Energy power systems monitoring' (Steve Leeb, supervisor);
• the Pogosyants UROP prize to Raluca Pop for 'Protecting privacy in location-based vehicular services' (Hari Balakrishnan, supervisor, and presented by Prof. Nancy Lynch);
• the Robert M. Fano UROP prize went to Tao Benjamin Schardl for 'A work-efficient parallel breadth-first search algorithm' (Charles Leiserson, supervisor);
• the Licklider UROP prize went to Kyle Miller (not able to attend) for 'Unmanned aerial vehicle simulations (Missy Cummings, supervisor) and to David Koh for 'A handheld multimodal music browser' (Jim Glass, supervisor);
• the Frank Reintjes VI-A Award
was presented by VI-A M.Eng. Thesis Program Director, Prof. Mark Zahn, to Michael Price and Zhen Li.

Specials awards were presented by student organization members to selected faculty including:
• the IEEE/ACM prize presented by EECS graduate student David Reshef to Prof. John Tsitsiklis, who was unable to attend;
• the HKN Best Instructor award presented by EECS undergrad Jessica Yuan to Prof. Alan Oppenheim;
and
• the GSA Academic Counselor Award presented by David He and John Sun to prof. Randy Davis.

Associate Department Head Srini Devadas presented the following thesis awards:
• the Levin - best masterWorks Oral presentation to Irene Fan for 'A collaborative video-conferencing system for improving care during neonatal transfer' (John Guttag, advisor); to Elena Glassman for 'LQR-based heuristics for rapidly exploring state space' (Russ Tedrake, advisor); to Walker Chan for 'Modeling low bandgap thermovoltaic diodes for portable power generation' (John Kassakian, advisor); to Jennifer Barry for 'Fast apptoximate hierarchical solution of MDPs' (Leslie Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez, advisors)
• the Johnson CS M.Eng Prize was awarded to Lydia Chilton for 'Seaweed: A web application for designing economic games (Rob Miller, advisor); to Philip Pohong Sung for 'Risk stratification by analysis of electrocardiographic morphology following acute coronary syndromes' (John Guttag, advisor);
• the Adler EE M.Eng Prize first place was made to Michael Price for 'Asynchronous data-dependent jitter compensation' (Vladimir Stojanovic, advisor); second place was made to Spyridon Zoumpoulis for 'Decentralized detection in sensor network architectures with feedback' (John Tsitsiklis, advisor);
• the Martin Computer Science SM prize was made to Ankur Moitra (who was unable to attend) for 'A solution to the Papadimitriou-Ratajczak conjecture' (Tom Leighton, advisor);
• the Guillemin Electrical Engineering SM first place prize was made to Srikanth Jagabathula for 'Scheduling algorithms for arbitrary commmunication networks' (Devavrat Shah, advisor); second place prize was made to David Da He for 'An organic thin-film transistor circuit for large-area temperature sensing' (Charlie Sodini, advisor).

Eric Grimson presented the last set of awards including:
• the Sprowls best CS PhD thesis awards (one year out of synch, therefor reflecting the theses from 2008) to Jacob Eisenstein (unable to attend) for 'Gesture in automatic discourse processing' (Randy Davis, Regina Barzilay, advisors); to Rui Fan for 'Lower bounds in distributed computing' (Nancy Lynch, advisor); to David Huynh (unable to attend) for 'User interface supporting casual data-centric interactions on the Web' (David Karger, Rob Miller, advisors); and Sachin Katti (unable to attend) for 'Network coded wireless architectures' (Dina Katabi, advisor)

Faculty teaching awards were presented by Eric Grimson and included:
• the Saltzer Award - for outstanding recitation teaching and named in honor of Jerry Saltzer, a phenomenal recitation instructor in 6.033, 6.001, 6.004 and other courses was presented to Jing Kong for her teaching of 6.002;
• the Louis D. Smullin Award for outstanding teaching was presented to Jay Han and to Joel Voldman (unable to attend) for revamping of 6.021;
• the Joel and Ruth Spira Award for a junior faculty member for excellence in teaching was presented to Elfar Adalsteinsson;
and
• the Burgess and Libby Jamieson Award - to honor great teaching over an extended period of time was made to Leslie Kaelbling and to Rajeev Ram (unable to attend);

Finally staff awards were presented by Dept. Head Grimson:
• the Caologgero Award was made to Maria Nargi;
• the Special Recognition Awards included: Lydia Chilton for web programming contest during IAP; to the 6.007 TA team for significan contributions to curriculum development Michael Bradley, Yu Gu, and Yashuhiro Shirasaki; and to Art C. Smith for decades of service to EECS.

Congratulations to all! See the photos of the event.