UC San Diego Computer Scientist Honored as ACM Fellow

Article Content

UC San Diego computer science professor Rajesh Gupta is now an ACM Fellow. He is also an associate director of the Qualcomm Institute. Photo by Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s leading computing society, today named University of California San Diego professor Rajesh K. Gupta to be an ACM Fellow. The professor of Computer Science and Engineering is one of 53 ACM members elevated to fellow status in the class of 2016.

Gupta was cited by ACM for his “contributions in design of embedded systems and hardware-software codesign.” ACM will formally recognize its 2016 Fellows at its annual Awards Banquet, to be held in San Francisco on June 24, 2017.

ACM counts nearly 100,000 computing professionals as members of the association, and ACM Fellows represent the top one percent.

“This is a well-deserved and overdue honor for one of the most recognized leaders in embedded systems research, and Rajesh has had a large impact in industry, as a faculty member, and until recently as chair of the department,” said CSE professor Dean Tullsen, Gupta’s successor as chair of the department. “He is responsible for numerous innovations, but also has been an aggressive driver of research, as he has led any number of large multi-university efforts and academia-industry collaborations.”

Gupta is the only University of California faculty member in ACM’s class of 2016, and one of only five this year from California universities (three Stanford faculty made the list, and one from the University of Southern California).

The UC San Diego professor brings the number of active CSE faculty who are currently ACM Fellows to eight. The others include Victor Vianu (2006), Pavel Pevzner (2010), Stefan Savage (2010), Dean Tullsen (2011), Andrew Kahng (2012), Yuanyuan Zhou (2013), and Mihir Bellare (2013).

Gupta also becomes one of the few UC San Diego faculty who are simultaneously fellows of both ACM and IEEE (the latter since 2004); the others are Andrew Kahng, Dean Tullsen and Yuanyuan Zhou.

Current CSE Chair Dean Tullsen (right) with his predecessor and newly- elevated ACM Fellow, Rajesh Gupta, at  Dec. 3 CSE Holiday Party 2016.

An expert in embedded systems, cyber-physical systems and mobile computing, Rajesh Gupta leads CSE’s Microelectronic Embedded Systems Lab, a leader in making computers more portable and energy efficient through the codesign of hardware and software. He received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1986, then worked as a senior design engineer at Intel Corp. before returning to school at Stanford, where he completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1994. After Stanford, Gupta joined the Computer Science faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and later moved to UC Irvine, where he helped create in 2000 what became the UC Irvine division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

In 2002 Gupta joined the CSE faculty at UC San Diego, and a year later was named to the first endowed chair, in Microelectronic Embedded Systems, created with funding from Qualcomm, Inc. Continuing his involvement in Calit2 that began in its UC Irvine division, in 2009 Gupta became Associate Director of Calit2’s UC San Diego division – a role he continues to play in the Qualcomm Institute today.

From 2010 to 2016, Gupta chaired the CSE department. Under his proactive leadership, the department launched new graduate MAS programs in Wireless Embedded Systems and Data Science & Engineering, and approved a new Data Science major. Other achievements during Gupta’s tenure included significantly enhancing alumni interaction and contributions, creating new endowed chairs and world-class teaching labs, and launching a remodeling of the CSE building to enhance student interactions.

In 2010, Gupta was principal investigator and director of Variability Expedition, a six-university project supported by $10 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions Program. In 2014, he was a major partner in the launch of the $4 million NSF-funded Frontiers project, ROSELINE, led by UCLA. The same year, Gupta chaired the IEEE/NSF meeting on Data-Driven Energy Use as a part of NSF’s Mathematics of Planet Earth initiative. He currently directs the DARPA-supported CERTUS project. According to Gupta, CERTUS is racing to build an innovative system-on-chip containing large processing arrays and neural network accelerators for embedded machine learning applications using new synthesis algorithms and tools. Among other current projects, Gupta leads the MetroInsight project, which involves building a sensor-data analysis from urban living.

In addition to the eight current CSE professors who are now ACM Fellows, three emeritus faculty in the department remain ACM Fellows: Jeanne Ferrante, Ron Graham and Sid Karin. Other former CSE faculty who remain ACM Fellows include Fran Berman, Andrew Chien, Keith Marzullo, Venkat Rangan, Amin Vahdat and George Varghese.