Professor Emeritus David Hodges has been selected to receive the prestigious IEEE Richard M. Emberson Award. This award is given for exemplified loyal and dedicated service to IEEE, especially its Technical Activities. Prof. Hodges is receiving this award for effective leadership in advancing IEEE's goals for excellence in publications, conferences, and awards.

RISC-V, an open-source instruction set architecture created at UC Berkeley is featured in an electronic design article titled “RICS-V (Five) is Alive!” RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) was originally designed in 1982 by students with the direction of Professors David Patterson and Carlo Sequin. Since then, iterations of RISC have been developed. In 2010 Prof. Krste Asanovic, with the help of Prof. Patterson, decided to develop another version of RISC to help both academic and industrial users and RISC-V was published.

Effective January 1, 2017, Prof. Ken Goldberg will serve as Chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research (IEOR).  Ken is a professor of IEOR, with secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information and Radiation Oncology at UCSF’s Medical School. Ken is Director of CITRIS’s People and Robots Initiative and UC Berkeley’s AUTOLAB, where he and his students pursue research in geometric algorithms and machine learning for robotics and automation in surgery, manufacturing and service applications.

A companion to Tech Review’s annual 35 Innovators Under 35 list features a list of seven innovators over 70. The new list includes EECS Professor Ruzena Bajcsy and professor emeritus Michael Stonebraker.  The 7 Over 70 list acknowledges innovators who are continuing to have sustained impacts in their field well after most of their colleagues have decided to retire.

EE professor and Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, Alex Bayen, is interviewed by KRON4 News for an piece titled "Are the I-80 SMART corridors easing traffic congestion?"  Bayen says “It’s not going to be possible in the future to build more infrastructure to accommodate more traffic. So, in order to relieve that congestion, we need other solutions and the solutions have to do with operations and planning, and this is really where SMART corridor concept can make a huge difference.”

Prof. David Wagner has won the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) 2016 Outstanding Innovation Award. This award is given for outstanding and innovative technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory or development of secure systems. Prof. Wagner is recognized "For innovative research in systems security, software security, and cryptography that has inspired research in sandboxing, static analysis for security, and cryptanalysis."

After six years of delivering major technological advances like Apache Spark, Apache Mesos and Alluxio, the AMPLab (Algorithms, Machines and People Lab) directed by Adjunct Prof. Michael Franklin and Profs. Michael Jordan and Ion Stoica will be closing and the RISELab (Real-time Intelligent Secure Execution Lab) will take it’s place. The RISELab will continue the work of the AMPLab, tackleing the next phase in distributed computing. Prof. Ion Stoica will continue his role as director and will be joined by Prof. Joe Hellerstein and Assistant Profs. Joseph Gonzalez and Raluca Ada Popa. AMPLab End of Projects events will be held on Nov. 17 & 18, 2016 at the International House, UC Berkeley.

Computer Science Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine is the subject of an article in BGR about machine learning titled Meet the professor who will help robots learn common sense.  “One of the things I think we’ve seen with computer vision is the bottom-up approach tends to be very effective,” Levine says. “In other words, once you figure out a good way to acquire the low-level representations — in the case of vision, things like the fact that images consist of edges — then whatever technique you use that’s general that can acquire those low-level representations will also be able to deal with the higher level stuff”

“So for me, part of the hope is if we can find the right way to acquire the low-level behaviors, the higher behaviors will begin to emerge naturally. Using the same technique just applied at a larger scale.”

Prof. Chenming Hu has been elected to be inducted into the 2017 Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame by the Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC). Hall of Fame members are selected based on demonstration of significant engineering or technical achievements, provided significant guidance in new and developing fields of engineering-based technology, and/or has managed or directed an organization making noteworthy contributions in design, manufacturing, production or service through the uses of engineering principles and applications. Hall of fame members represent the cream of the crop of the Valley and, and counts among its membership people like Gordon Moore, William Hewlett and David Packard in addition to our esteemed colleagues Paul Gray, Dave Hodges, Lotfi Zadeh, David Paterson, and Ernie Kuh.

The Wisdom Café had the opportunity to sit down with UC Berkeley's new Vice Provost of Academic and Space Planning, EECS Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, and discuss her career path, her beliefs, and more.