Don't miss our current news!
|
EECS graduate students Sean Arietta and Colorado Reed have been named winners of the inaugural UC Berkeley Startup Challenge created by the Palo-Alto based firm Pejman Mar Ventures. Arietta and Reed, along with technologist Joey Mucha founded DotDashPay, creating hardware and software that makes it easy for machine makers to facilitate financial transactions, via credit cards and other payment systems, into their devices. DotDashPay will receive a $250,000 investment from Pejman Mar, as well as mentoring and support as part of the venture firm’s portfolio and community. More>> Prof. Joseph Hellerstein is featured in a UC Berkeley Research article titled “ Seeing Through the Big Data Fog”. Working with the avalanche of data so that it can yield to meaningful analysis was a tedious and time consuming process. In 2012 Prof. Hellerstein, grad student Sean Kandel and Stanford computer scientist Jeffrey Heer devised a software program to refine and speed up this process and called it Data Wrangler. Data Wrangler became the core of Trifacta, a startup they founded in 2012 and has been used by dozens of companies, from Linkedin to Lockheed Martin. In 2014, CRN, a high-profile communications technology magazine, placed Trifacta on its short list of The 10 Coolest Big Data Products. Three EECS undergraduate students have been selected to receive the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) 2016 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for PhD-granting institutions. Rohan Chitnis was chosen Runner-up and Marvin Zhang received Honorable Mention in the Male category and Jingyi Li received Honorable Mention for the Female category. Nominees for this award are commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, authors or coauthors on multiple papers, have made presentations at major conferences, and some produced software artifacts that were in widespread use. Prof. Jitendra Malik and his students have been awarded two Helmholtz Prizes at the 2015 ICCV (International Conference on Computer Vision) sponsored by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). The Helmholtz Prize (previously known as the Test of Time Award) recognizes ICCV papers from ten or more years earlier that had a significant impact on computer vision research. Assistant Prof. Raluca Popa has been named an Intel Early Career Faculty Awardee. This program promotes the careers of faculty members who show great promise as future academic leaders in disruptive computing technologies. Prior to joining the EECS faculty this year, Prof. Popa was a post-doctoral fellow at ETH Zurich in the System Security group led by Prof. Srdjan Capkun. The Level Playing Field Institute (LPFI) honored Teaching Prof. Dan Garcia as a Tech Diversity Champion at their Annual Fairness Matters Forum 2015 held at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. LPFI is committed to eliminating the barriers faced by underrepresented people of color in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and fostering their untapped talent for the advancement of our nation. This event focused on the progress toward diversifying tech and celebrated those who are working to create a more inclusive tech ecosystem. EECS alumni Michael George Luby (CS Ph.D. ’83), VP of Technology at Qualcomm is among the class of 2015 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Fellows. In 1996-1997, while at ICSI (International Computer Science Institute) he led the team that invented Tornado codes. He is recognized for his contributions to coding theory, cryptography, parallel algorithms and derandomization. Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, Chair of EECS is featured in a Berkeley Engineering article titled “Roundtable tackles issues facing women in tech”. While many initiatives attempt to highlight issues facing women in technology, Prof. King Liu, with support from EECS and the dean’s office brought together successful women engineers and formed the Women in Technology Leadership Roundtable to identify factors that are contributing to the gender imbalance and begin to remedy the issue. In 2011 EECS partnered with the campus Division of Equity & Inclusion on a new strategic planning initiative to improve the numbers and create a more welcoming environment for women and underrepresented groups in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Today, thanks to the founding work of EECS Diversity Director Emerita Sheila Humphreys, the work of EECS Associate Director of Diversity & Achievement Tiffany Reardon's tireless efforts championing diversity and inclusion efforts, and the support and leadership of Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, the first woman Chair of EECS, over the past 4 years the percentage of undergraduate women in EECS has grown more than twice as fast as the growth of the overall student population, and the percentage of underrepresented minorities has been 3 to 5 times the overall rate. More>> Prof. Michael Franklin, Chair of the Computer Science Division was featured in a Berkeley Research article titled “AMP Lab Stands Up to Big Data”. The AMP (Algorithms, Machines and People) Lab was launched by Prof. Franklin and co-directors Profs. Michael Jordan and Ion Stoica in 2011 to develop open-source systems that tackle some of the biggest problems in the world of Big Data. Two EECS related papers have received the ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) Hall of Fame Award. Prof. Susan Graham co-authored the paper “Efficient software-based fault isolation” published in the Proceedings of the 14th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '93), December 1993, 203-216, and Prof. Ion Stoica co-authored the paper “Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for Internet applications” published in the Proceedings of the 2001 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications (SIGCOMM '01), 2001, 149-160. Prof. David Culler has received the ACM SENSYS (Embedded Networked Sensor Systems) Test of Time award for the paper “Versatile Low Power Media Access for Wireless Sensor Networks,” published in the Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, Baltimore, MD, November, 2004. A research breakthrough from the research group of Prof. Ali Javey has been published in the Nov. 27 issue of Science and is highlighted on the U.S. Department of Energy website. An emerging class of atomically thin materials known as monolayer semiconductors could be used in the development of transparent LED displays, ultra-high efficiency solar cells, photo detectors and nanoscale transistors, but are riddled with defects, killing their performance. Prof. Javey and his team have discovered a way to fix these defects and presents the first demonstration of an optoelectronically perfect monolayer. More>> The research work of EECS graduate student Shiry Ginosar (advisor Prof. Alexei Efros) was featured in a MIT Tech Review article titled “ Data Mining Reveals How Smiling Evolved During a Century of Yearbook Photos”. Shiry and fellow researchers have pioneered a machine-vision approach to mining the data in ordinary photographs. Prof. Christos Papadimitriou is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE John von Neumann Medal "for providing a deeper understanding of computational complexity and its implications for approximation algorithms, artificial intelligence, economics, database theory, and biology." He has made foundational contributions in complexity theory, database theory, and combinatorial optimization with a broad range of applications (including artificial intelligence, networks, game theory, and evolution), and has garnered multiple prizes for his work. Prof. Robert Brodersen is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Edison Medal "for contributions to integrated systems for wired and wireless communications, including wireless connectivity of personal devices." Prof. Brodersen led research in the area of low-power integrated circuit design and wireless communications, co-founding the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) in 1999. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Prof. Stuart Russell has received the World Technology Award in the Policy category for his work on the long-term future of Artificial Intelligence and on an autonomous weapons treaty. Other finalists for this award included Thomas Piketty and His Holiness Pope Francis. In August he received the Mitchell Prize, jointly awarded by the American Statistical Assoc. International Society for Bayesian Analysis for “an outstanding paper that describes how a Bayesian analysis has solved an important applied problem", specifically for work with former Ph.D. student Nimar Arora and former postdoc Erik Sudderth on automated monitoring for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. EECS postdoc Tae Joon Seok and grad student Sangyoon Han (advisor Prof. Ming Wu) have won the Bronze Medal at the graduate level in the 2015 Collegiate Inventors Competition. Their entry, “SWAPS” (Silicon Waveguide Array Photonic Switch) is co-advised by Prof. Richard Muller. More>> EECS alumna Diane Greene, MS Computer Science ’88, has been named to lead Google’s newly converged team of cloud businesses, including Google for Work, Google Cloud Platform, Chrome for Work, Android for Work, and Google Apps. She was a co-founder of VMware which was acquired by EMC Corp. and on the board of directors of Intuit. In 2012 she was named to Google’s board of directors. More>> EECS Professor Bin Yu is featured in a Berkeley Research article about using functional MRI to measure blood flow in precise areas of the brain’s visual processing region. More>> EECS Prof. James Demmel has been named a fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers in recognition of their achievements in advancing science or its applications. More>> BRETT the robot, who joined Prof. Pieter Abbeel's artificial intelligence program in 2010, discusses his educational progress in an interview with Berkeley Engineering. More>> Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has opened a new building dedicated to energy supercomputing and networking, and named it after the late Shyh Wang, a UC Berkeley EECS professor and pioneer in semiconductor lasers. More>> CS alumna Fang Yu (Ph.D. '06), CTO and co-founder of big data science security startup DataVisor, discusses her approach and experiences in an interview with Berkeley Innovators. The solutions at DataVisor combine patent-pending unsupervised learning algorithms and "in-memory" Big Data frameworks such as Spark to create a disruptive new technology that has an unprecedented ability to catch hidden crime rings hiding within online services before they have a chance to do any damage. Yu describes the genesis of her company and some of her challenges, strategies, and accomplishments as an entrepreneur. More>> EECS alumna Jessica Mah (B.S. '10) has been chosen to deliver a Newton Lecture discussing the experience of building a start-up business from a Berkeley dorm room into a multi-million-dollar company. Mah was named to inc.com's "30 Under 30" list in 2011. Founded in 2009, inDinero is a company dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and the fastest way for business owners to manage their money. More>> EECS alumni Jeffrey Forbes (Ph.D. ’00, advisor Prof. Stuart Russell) has been named Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Education Policy Committee. Created in 2007, the ACM Education Policy Committee is a high-level committee of acclaimed computer scientists and educators dedicated to improving opportunities for quality education in computer science and computing education around the world. Prof. Forbes is an Associate Dean of the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University and has served as Program Director for the Education and Workforce program in the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. More>> The EECS Department is deeply saddened by the loss of another member of our community: long-time Cory Hall receptionist Charles A. Brien. Chuck passed away on October 19, 2015 after a long battle with cancer. He was a kind and caring individual who will be remembered for his ready smile and helping hand, as well as a quick wit. His obituary is available online in the San Leandro Times. Donations can be made in his name to Leiomyosarcoma Research at www.lmsdr.org. We will greatly miss Chuck as a colleague and friend. The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today four awards totaling more than $5M to establish regional hubs for data science innovation, a Northeast Hub, a South Hub, a Midwest Hub and West Hub. UC Berkeley is co-leading the West Hub with UC San Diego and the University of Washington. Prof. Michael Franklin is one of the principal investigators of the West Hub, along with Prof. Michael Norman at UC San Diego and Prof. Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington. EECS alumnae Barbara Grosz, Ph.D. ’77 is the recipient of the 2015 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Award for Research Excellence. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. Professor Grosz is recognized for her pioneering research in Natural Language Processing and in theories and applications of Multiagent Collaboration. More>> EECS Prof. Emeritus and alumni (Ph.D. ’69) Charles Shank is one of two scientists to receive the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the federal government’s oldest and most prestigious awards for scientific achievement. He was also director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1989-2004. Prof. Shank is recognized for “the seminal development of ultrafast lasers and their application in many areas of scientific research, for visionary leadership of national scientific and engineering research communities, and for exemplary service supporting the National Laboratory complex.” More>> The paper titled "MultiSE: Multi-Path Symbolic Execution using Value Summaries," written by Profs. Koushik Sen and George Necula and graduate students Liang Gong and Wontae Choi received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) 2015. FSE (Foundations of Software Engineering) is the premier conference in software engineering along with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Prof. Ana Arias was one of four faculty from UC Berkeley who gave talks for the Ideas Lab at the 2015 World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting convenes global leaders from across business, government, international organizations, academia and civil society in Davos for strategic dialogues which map the key transformations reshaping the world. Prof. Arias’ talk is titled “ Accessing MRI via printed wearable electronics”. The paper titled, "Locality Exists in Graph Processing: Workload Characterization on an Ivy Bridge Server", co-authored by EECS graduate student Scott Beamer and Profs. Krste Asanovic and David Patterson received the Best Paper Award at the 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization. More>> EECS undergraduate students Leah Dickstein, Marsalis Gibson and Ena Hariyoshi, from the labs of Profs. Anant Sahai and Eric Brewer joined the nation’s top semiconductor scholars and industry leaders to share their research at the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s (SRC) 17th annual TECHCON conference. The conference, held Sept. 20-22 in Austin, Texas, showcased the forefront of semiconductor research and recognized professional and university participants for their contributions to the industry. The students from SRC’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities program provides hands-on research and mentorship to attract students to semiconductor industry careers. Profs. Dawn Song, Sanjit Seshia and David Wagner have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) grants for research into cybersecurity, part of $74.5M in funding NSF has awarded to support 257 interdisciplinary cybersecurity research projects in 27 states. Prof. Song’s work will examine the security challenges of cryptocurrencies and contracts in the newly emerging, billion-dollar industry. Prof. Seshia will look at computer hardware design with the goal of identifying potential security threats. Prof. Wagner will investigate some of the emerging security risks of wearable devices, particularly technologies that are capable of constant audio and video capture. Prof. Katherine Yelick has been chosen by ACM and IEEE to receive this year's Ken Kennedy Award. This is a major award that was established in 2009 to recognize combined contributions in both computing technology and service to the community. Prof. Yelick is being recognized advancing the programmability of HPC systems, strategic national leadership, and mentorship in academia and government labs. More>> Prof. Eli Yablonovitch has been selected to receive the 2016 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize, which is given by the American Physical Society to recognize and encourage outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics. The citation for Prof. Yablonovitch's award is "For seminal achievements in solar cells and strained quantum well lasers, and especially for creating the field of photonic crystals, spanning both fundamental science and practical applications of that science.” The paper " Robust Online Monitoring of Signal Temporal Logic" co-authored by Alexandre Donze (EECS postdoctoral researcher), Shromona Ghosh and Garvit Juniwal (both EECS grad students), and Prof. Sanjit Seshia, in collaboration with researchers at Toyota, received the Best Paper Award at the 15th International Conference on Runtime Verification, RV 2015." The paper " Sensing by Proxy: Occupancy Detection Based on Indoor CO2 Concentration" written by Ming Jin (EECS grad student), Nikolaos Bekiaris-Liberis (post-doc), Kevin Weekly (EECS grad student) and Profs. Costas Spanos and Alexandre Bayen has been selected as one of 3 “ Best Papers” at the Ninth International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies, UBICOMM 2015. A digital award will be issued in the name of the authors and are invited to submit an extended article version to one of the IARIA (International Academy, Research and Industry Association) Journals. Research on creating a color-changing chameleon-like synthetic skin led by Prof. Connie Chang-Hasnain is featured in a KQED video/article titled “ Nature’s Mood Rings: How Chameleons Really Change Color”. By etching a one-dimensional array into a thin silicon film and sticking it onto flexible plastic, when the plastic is stretched the design changes color. Applications for this color-changing array include biosensors, energy efficient displays and sensors that would change color to warn of structural failure on a bridge or airplane wing. A paper written by Prof. Doug Tygar and his student Alma Whitten has received the USENIX Security 2015 conference’s Test of Time award. The USENIX Test of Time Award recognizes papers that have had a lasting impact on their fields. To qualify, a paper must have been presented at its respective conference at least 10 years ago. The paper titled “ Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0” was published in the Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Security Symposium in August, 1999. EECS alumna Rikky Muller, Ph.D. ‘13 has been selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s Annual Innovators Under 35 2015 list. For over 10 years, MIT Technology Review has recognized a list of exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world. Dr. Muller is recognized for her work in the field of Engineering and Medicine. Dr. Muller co-founded Cortera Neurotechnologies, Inc. with Profs. Jan Rabaey and Michel Maharbiz. |
Newspage Archives Fall 2015Spring 2015 Fall 2014 Spring 2014 Fall 2013 Spring 2013 Fall 2012 Spring 2012 Fall 2011 Spring 2011 Fall 2010 Spring 2010 Fall 2009 Spring 2009 Fall 2008 Spring 2008 Fall 2007 Spring 2007 Fall 2006 Spring 2006 Fall 2005 Spring 2005 Fall 2004 Spring 2004 Fall 2003 Spring 2003 Fall 2002 Spring 2002 Fall 2001 Submit news to: |