EECS News Fall 2010

Armando Fox was quoted in a New York Times article titled “99.999% Reliable? Don’t Hold Your Breath”.  AT&T’s telephone service was engineered to have a 99.999% success rate in making telephone calls called “Five9s.  Engineers of the internet don’t foresee attaining  the  same success rate, but Google’s goal is “Four9s”.
January 10
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Pulkit Grover won the best student paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2010 held at Atlanta, GA, for his paper titled "Is Witsenhausen's counterexample a relevant toy?" The paper is coauthored by Prof. Anant Sahai.
January 3
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The research work of Ken Goldberg and Pieter Abbeel in the development of medical robots is featured in a US News Science article titled “Teaching Medical Robots”. Right now medical robots have no intelligence and perform minimally invasive surgery controlled by the surgeon. The research team is developing approaches and algorithms to teach robots to perform additional tasks making surgical procedures run faster and more efficiently.
December 7
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Claire Tomlin has been named Fellow of the IEEE. IEEE Fellow is a prestigious distinction reserved for select IEEE members recognized for extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Prof. Tomlin is named "for contributions to hybrid control systems with applications to Air Traffic Management, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and Systems Biology".
November 29
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Professor Ali Javey’s group research on indium-arsenide transistors was featured in a MIT’s Technology Review article titled “Silicon’s Long Good-bye”. The transistors perform as well as compound-semiconductor transistors made using more complex techniques, and are much faster than their silicon equivalents while requiring less power. Their most recent paper was also published in the online journal Nature.
November 19
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EECS grad students Tobias Welp and Baruch Sterin, advised by Professors Andreas Kuehlmann and Robert Brayton won second place in the ACM SIGDA’s 2010 CADathlon. The CADathlon challenges students in their CAD knowledge, problem solving, programming, and teamwork skills. It serves as an innovative initiative to assist in the development of top students in the EDA field. This team also won second place in the 2009 CADathlon.
November 17
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New Berkeley Engineering Professional Master's Program: The new Berkeley Engineering Professional Master's Program offers students strong technical depth in a chosen engineering discipline integrated with leadership principles and core management concepts. Pending regental approval, the program begins Fall 2011. Read more at Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership.
November 9
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Michael Jordan has been selected as a Fellow of the ACM. ACM Fellows are recognized and honored for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership as the world of information technology evolves.
November 8
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Tsu-Jae King Liu has won the prestigious Thomas Callinan Award given by the Dielectric Science and Technology Division of the Electrochemical Society. Dielectric science and technology is defined as that area of knowledge which deals with the physics and chemistry of dielectric materials, as well as the mechanisms and operation of devices in which electrical energy can be stored or insulated in electrical or electronic equipment. This award was established in 1967 to encourage excellence in dielectric investigations and to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of dielectric science and technology.
November 8
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The Association of Women in Engineering (AWE) is a student organization that supports fellow undergraduate women engineers to succeed in all aspects. AWE hosts various academic, social, and outreach events throughout the academic year. Their office is located in 286 Cory.
November 5
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Professor emeritus Charles A. Desoer, an exceptionally gifted teacher and whose research led to advances in the aerospace and transportation industries passed away on Monday, Nov. 1st of complications from a stroke. Professor Desoer's work contributed to substantial progress in the analysis, design and control of linear and nonlinear circuits and systems. These advances led to the burgeoning growth of control applications that benefited the aerospace, transportation, process control and other essential sectors of industry. More>>
November 5
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Kathy Yelick has been named Associate Lab Director for Computing Science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and has been the director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) since 2008, which she will continue to hold. Professor Yelick is an expert on parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture, and storage. She has worked with interdisciplinary teams on application scaling, and her own applications work includes parallelization of a model for blood flow in the heart. She is the co-inventor of the UPC and Titanium languages and co-developed automatic performance tuning techniques for sparse matrix computations.
November 3
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Michael Jordan has been named a 2010 Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society (CSS), one of 11 named this year. The CSS is the major scientific society in the field of Cognitive Science. CSS Fellows are recognized for their research that has exhibited sustained excellence and impact on the Cognitive Science community.
October 6
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Eli Yablonovitch has been awarded the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) 2010 Mountbatten Medal for outstanding contributions to electronics, whether in respect of industry, technology or education in the United Kingdom. The IET is one of the world’s leading professional societies for the engineering and technology community, with more than 150,000 members in 127 countries and offices in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific. The IET provides a global knowledge network to facilitate the exchange of ideas and promote the positive role of science, engineering and technology in the world.
October 6
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Jose Carmena has been awarded the New York Academy of Sciences first Aspen Brain Forum Prize in Neurotechnology. Recipients of this prize are recognized for their work that has broad application and impact in translating basic research into effective therapeutics within the area of neural prosthetics. Professor Carmena’s research interests span across systems neuroscience and neural engineering. He studies the neural basis of sensorimotor learning and control; neural ensemble computation as well as brain-machine interfaces, neuroprosthetics, and biomimetic robotics.
September 30
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ICSI Director and EECS professor Nelson Morgan has been named as a Fellow by the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). The ISCA Fellow Program recognizes and honors outstanding members who have made significant contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. Professor Morgan is honored for his "significant contributions to robust feature extraction and novel acoustic models for automatic speech recognition". He is the second ICSI Speech Group member to be recognized with the distinction, Elizabeth Shriberg was named in 2009.
September 29
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Dawn Song has been named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow, an award given annually from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. The MacArthur Fellows Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Professor Song is a computer security specialist who applies rigorous theoretical methods to understand the deep interactions of software, hardware, and networks that make computer systems vulnerable to attack or interference. More>>
September 28
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James Demmel is the recipient of the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Fernbach Award. This award is one of the Computer Society's highest awards and recognizes outstanding contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches. Professor Demmel is honored for his computational science leadership in creating adaptive, innovative, high performance linear algebra software.
September 21
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Jose Carmena is the principle investigator of a project researching how neuron groups in widely dispersed regions of the brain first get linked together so they can work in concert for complex tasks. The outcome of these findings are featured in the UC Berkeley News press release titled, “For neurons to work as a team, it helps to have a beat“ and will be published in the Sept. 20 “Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences”. When it comes to conducting complex tasks, it turns out that the brain needs rhythm, specifically, cortical rhythms, or oscillations that can effectively rally groups of neurons in these widely dispersed regions to engage in a coordinated activity, much like a conductor will summon up various sections of an orchestra in a symphony.
September 20
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Computer Science graduate students David Wong and Jerry Zhang are recipients of the Siebel Scholarship for the Class of 2011. Both are enrolled in the 5th Year Master's Degree program. The Siebel Scholars Program was established by the Siebel Foundation to recognize the most talented students at the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, and bioengineering. Each year, 80 exceptional students receive a $35,000 award for their final year of master's degree studies.
September 16
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Professor Ali Javey, head of the research team developing a pressure-sensitive electronic material made from semiconductor nanowires is featured in a UC Bekeley News Center article titled, “Engineers make artificial skin out of nanowires”. A touch-sensitive artificial skin, dubbed “e-skin”, would help overcome a key challenge in robotics: adapting the amount of force needed to hold and manipulate a wide range of objects.
September 13
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Michael Jordan has been invited to deliver the 2011 Neyman Lecture by the Institute for Mathematical Statistics(IMS). The Neyman Lecture emphasizes the interactions between statistical theory and scientific research. The speaker is chosen every three years and is one of the highest academic honors bestowed by the IMS.
September 2
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CS 10 : The Beauty and Joy of Computing" is the novel new non-majors computing course designed and launched this Fall by SOE Lecturers Brian Harvey and Dan Garcia. This course has been chosen as one of 5 National pilots by the CollegeBoard for a proposed new AP course called "AP Computer Science : Principles", which seeks to broaden participation in computing and computer science.
August 31
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The work of Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been featured in the summer 2010 issue of IEEE Solid-State Circuits magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3. The magazine also has an article written by Prof. Robert Brayton titled, “Summer of ‘81”, recollecting the collaboration of industrial engineers and university researchers to develop the earliest successful method of logic synthesis for ICs, and an article titled “Remembering Richard”, a tribute to Prof. A. Richard Newton.
August 26
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Pieter Abbeel has been selected to receive a 2010 Okawa Foundation Research Grant from the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. This award is based on his leading research in reinforcement and apprenticeship learning and his advances in personal robotics.
August 25