EECS presents annual awards for outstanding PhD and SM theses

Anne Stuart | EECS

The faculty and leadership of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) recently presented 13 awards for outstanding student work on recent master’s and PhD theses. Awards and recipients included:

Jin-Au Kong Award for Best PhD Theses in Electrical Engineering

• Yu-Hsin Chen, now Research Scientist, NVIDIA Research, for “Architecture Design for Highly Flexible and Energy-Efficient Deep Neural Network Accelerators.” Professors Vivienne Sze and Joel Emer, supervisors.
• Chiraag Juvekar, now Research Scientist, Analog Garage, Analog Devices, for “Hardware and Protocols for Authentication and Secure Computation.” Professor Anantha Chandrakasan, supervisor.

George M. Sprowls Awards for Best PhD Theses in Computer Science

• Arturs Backurs, now Research Assistant Professor, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), for “Below P vs NP: Fine-Grained Hardness for Big Data Problems.” Professor Piotr Indyk, supervisor.
• Gregory Bodwin, now Postdoctoral Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology, for Sketching Distances in Graphs.” Professor Virginia Williams, supervisor.
• Zoya Bylinskii, now Research Scientist, Adobe Research, for “Computational Perception for Multi-Modal Document Understanding.” Professor Fredo Durand and Dr. Aude Oliva, supervisors.
• David Harwath, now Research Scientist, Spoken Languages Systems Group, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), for “Learning Spoken Language Through Vision.” Dr. James R. Glass, supervisor.
• Jerry Li, now VM Research Fellow, Simons Institute, University of California Berkeley, for “Principled Approaches to Robust Machine Learning Beyond.” Professor Ankur Moitra, supervisor.
• Ludwig Schmidt, now Postdoctoral Researcher in Computer Science, University of California Berkeley, for “Algorithms Above the Noise Floor.” Professor Piotr Indyk, supervisor.
• Adriana Schulz, now Assistant Professor, University of Washington, for “Computational Design for the Next Manufacturing Revolution.” Professor Wojciech Matusik, supervisor.

Ernst A. Guillemin Award for Best SM Thesis in Electrical Engineering

• Matthew Brennan, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “Reducibility and Computational Lower Bounds for Problems with Planted Sparce Structure.” Professor Guy Bresler, supervisor.
• Syed Muhammad Imaduddin, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “A Pseudo-Bayesian Model-Based Approach for Noninvasive Intracranial Pressure Estimation.” Professor Thomas Heldt, supervisor.

William A. Martin Award for Best SM Thesis in Computer Science

• Favyen Bastani, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “Robust Road Topology Extraction from Aerial Imagery.” Professors Sam Madden, Hari Balakrishnan, and Mohammad Alizadeh.
• Wengong Jin, now a PhD student in EECS at MIT, for “Neural Graph Representation Learning with Application to Chemistry.” Professor Regina Barzilay, supervisor.

EECS Professor Martin Rinard and Professor Asu Ozdaglar, EECS department head, presented the awards during a luncheon ceremony. The PhD award winners were selected by Professor Dirk Englund (for electrical engineering) and Professor Vinod Vaikuntanathan (for computer science). The Sprowls Awards Committee, consisting of Professors Mohammad Alizadeh, Michael Carbin, and Julian Shun, assisted with selection of the PhD awards in computer science.

The SM awards were selected by Professor Elfar Adalsteinsson (for electrical engineering) and Professor Antonio Torralba (for computer science).