Awards

Professors Elizabeth Belding and Arpit Gupta published their paper The Efficacy of the Connect America Fund in Addressing US Internet Access Inequities at ACM SIGCOMM'24, and the paper has now been honored with the prestigious Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) from the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). ANRP is a prestigious and competitive award that selects the top 5-6 papers published across all the popular networking conferences (SIGCOMM, NSDI, CCS, IMC, etc.) in a year.  The papers are selected based on a diverse set of criteria, including scientific merit, relevance to IETF and/or IRTF activities, and the potential of the nominee to have an impact on the community.

Congratulations to Daniel Rose, Gabriel Pizarro, and Tianle Yu for their honorable mentions in the 2025 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award program. This program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding potential in an area of computing research. The CRA Outstanding Researcher Award is made possible through the support of Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Michael Beyeler, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and the Department of Psychology & Brain Sciences, has received the 2024-’25 Harold J. Plous Memorial Award, one of the university’s most prestigious faculty honors. A selection committee selected Beyeler in recognition of his “outstanding contributions in research, teaching, and service,” adding in their announcement, “His dedication to innovation, excellence, and student success makes him an exemplary recipient of this distinguished award.”

Congratulations to Vaishnavi Himakunthala on receiving the Outstanding Collegiate Member Award from the Society of Women Engineers. This prestigious award is presented to an undergraduate SWE collegiate member who has made an outstanding contribution to SWE, other engineering organizations, the community, and the campus. Himakunthala is one of only 17 students nationally to receive the award this year.

“SWE-UCSB has played a big role in providing me with a supportive community and enabling me to get involved with outreach and volunteering,” she says, “all of which has been integral to my college journey and to who I am as a person. I'm definitely very fortunate to have been able to be a part of the club and receive this award from the SWE national chapter. I encourage all UCSB students, especially underclassmen, to get involved with clubs like SWE and WiCS on campus, and make use of all the resources and the community they offer. It can be very beneficial! As I finish my last year at UCSB, I hope that this award will encourage me to get more involved with the national chapter.”

For more than seven decades, the Society of Women Engineers has been empowering women to achieve full potential in their careers. SWE’s goals include creating a lasting network among the various types of engineering students and providing the resources and connections to help younger generations of aspiring engineers.

To learn more about SWE at UCSB, see their Instagram @ucsb_swe or their website.

Richert Wang, associate teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science and the College of Creative Studies, is one of six recipients of UCSB's Distinguished Teaching Award for 2023-24. The award recognizes senate and non-senate faculty who demonstrate outstanding achievements in research and the teaching mission of the university.

Professors Divyakant Agrawal and Amr El Abbadi along with UCSB Computer Science alum Mohammad Javad Amiri (assistant professor at Stony Brooke University) have received the Outsanding Paper Award at NSDI 2024 for their paper "The Bedrock of Byzantine Fault Tolerance: A Unified Platform for BFT Protocols Analysis, Implementation, and Experimentation."

Congratulations to Haarika Manda and Joyce Passananti, who have been selected to receive 2024 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships, which provide three years of financial support toward completion of their degrees. Being selected as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow is a significant national accomplishment, placing them among an elite group of fellows who have gone on to distinguished careers in STEM or STEM education.

UCSB Natural Language Processing postdoc Liangming Pan has won the Area Chair’s Award at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing & Asian Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Left to right: CS Chair Tevfik Bultan, Dean Tresa Pollock, Emeritus Wim van Dam, Emeritus Ömer Eğecioğlu, Emeritus John Gilbert, Chancellor Henry T. Yang

Congratulations to our CS Emeriti Wim van Dam, Ömer Eğecioğlu, and John Gilbert, (left to right) who were honored for their prestigious careers at our Emeriti Reception. 

Congratulations to CS Alumnus Justin Tjoa, who was a recipient of the NSF CSGrad4US Fellowship. The program offers a $138,000 scholarship, in order to allow graduates working in industry to pursue a doctorate degree. 

Congratulations to PhD student Ishtiyaque Ahmad, who was awarded the highly prestigious IBM PhD Fellowship.

Congratulations to CS Assistant Professor Jonathan Balkind, who was selected for the new OSHWA Open Hardware Trailblazers Fellowship. This grant is awarded to individuals who are paving the way for open source hardware in academia. 

A paper titled "Visualization Question Answering Using Introspective Program Synthesis" by PhD candidate Yanju Chen, Prof. Xifeng Yan and Prof. Yu Feng was selected to receive a distinguished paper award at the PLDI'22.

from left to right; top to bottom row: Surya Pugal, Aesha Parekh,Yuval Steinhart, Samhita Honnavalli, CS Capstone Smartgrid team, Chaofan Shou, Alex Mei, Ishana Narayanan, Sophie Groenwold

Congratulations to our CS Undergraduate awardees, who were honored at the 2022 CS Award Ceremony this past Friday, June 10th, 2022. 

from left to right: Laura Devendorf, George Runcie, Lin Qiao

Congratulations to our Alumnus awardees, who were recognized this past Friday, June 10th, at the 2022 CS Award Ceremony. 

(left to right; top row to bottom row): George Tzimpragos, Ashley Bruce, April Sanchez, Rhys Tracy, Yi Ding, Fuheng Zhao, Dheeraj Baby, Yijun Xiao, Liu Kurafeeva, Rohan Bhatia, Sujaya Maiyya, Shlomi Steinburg, Yuke Wang, Ishtiyaque Ahmad, Sanjay Chandrasekaran, Sharon Levy

Congratulations to our CS Graduate Students, who were honored this past Friday at the 2022 Computer Science Award Ceremony.  

from top left and clockwise: Diba Mirza, Aesha Parekh, Sierra Wang, Alex Mei, Henry Zhang, Eric Yuan, and Siddharth Deshpande. Not pictured is Chaofan Shou.

Congratulations to CS faculty and senior students for their end-of-the-year awards, nominated and awarded by the graduating class of 2022.