The Distinguished Alumni Award is the highest honor given to CSE alumni for their contributions to society. This year at the Winter 2020 Research Open House, the department honored Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96 and Tim Sherwood ’03.
Early in his career, Halıcıoğlu worked at Loudcloud, Ebay and Facebook, where he was the company’s first full-time employee. He now shares his vast knowledge and experience as a CSE lecturer and angel investor. The Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute was named in his honor.
Sherwood is a professor of computer science and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Santa Barbara. His contributions to novel program analysis, particularly his work on basic block vectors, fundamentally changed the research landscape. In 2016, he was awarded a SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for his outstanding contributions to computer architecture.