CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan and EECS alumna Yoky Matsuoka (B.S. '93) are among Interesting Engineering's "17 Awesome Women Engineers" who are revolutionizing the engineering field in 2017. Anca is described as "one of the rising stars of the robotics scene" as the head of the InterACT Lab at UC Berkeley which specializes in human/robotics interactions, algorithms and compatible artificial intelligence systems." Yoky is "a hot commodity among major tech companies" as the CTO of Alphabet Nest.
EE Profs. Ruzena Bajcsy and Stuart Russell appear in an article in the Berkeley Science Review titled "Automating Us," in which they are quoted discussing the impacts of recent technological developments on both robots and humans.
Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy and EECS alumus student (now post doc in the HART Lab) Robert Matthew (M.S. EE '15) are featured in a Berkeley Research article titled “Engineering to Restore Power to the People”. Supported by the Signature’s Innovation Fellows Program, Matthew and Prof. Bajcsy have developed mathematical models of the body allowing for measurement of upper and lower limb movement. This provides the foundation for wearable assistive devices to serve a range of physical limitations. With teams of undergraduate students, they fabricate lightweight exoskeletons and strap them onto volunteers to test their effectiveness. Their goal is to make assistive devices as lightweight and inexpensive as possible using commercially available parts and 3-D printing.
2016-17 Bakar Fellow Prof. Ali Javey is profiled in a Berkeley Research article titled "Physiological Changes Tracked Moment to Moment," in which he discusses his research into a network of sensors that can be embedded into a sweatband to monitor moment-by-moment changes in electrolytes and metabolites. Prof. Javey is refining the sensor fabrication process to make it more commercially practical for fitness training, athletics, health diagnostics and even large-scale population studies.
Prof. Avideh Zakhor is featured in a video interview by bigthink.com titled “Smart Tech: Phones, Drones and Interior Mapping”. Prof. Zakhor’s research interests include digital signal processing and its applications to 2D and 3D image and video processing, and communications. Applications of her research range from helping emergency rescue teams navigate in times of crisis, to boosting our comfort with Smart Homes.
UC Berkeley has joined Honeywell and GE as initial participants in the 5G Innovators Initiative (5GI2), an open industry initiative designed to create transformative experiences that change lives, businesses and society, launched by Ericsson and Intel Corporation. The first segment of 5GI2 will focus on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) and develop pilots for application of technologies including augmented and virtual reality for first responder drone surveillance of hazardous environments and other uses. CS Prof. Ion Stoica, Director of RISELab, says "We pride ourselves for interdisciplinary collaboration and believe we are in a unique position to explore new applications, use cases, and business models for 5G that will ultimately realize its potential."
Assistant Prof. Ren Ng has been selected to receive the 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in the category of Computer Science. 126 early-career scholars are chosen to receive this prestigious award and represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals, 69 National Medals of Science, 16 John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.
Prof. Marti Hearst has been elected into the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Academy. The SIGCHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction. Prof Hearst's HCI research includes user interfaces for search, information visualization of text, web site usability, and innovation in education. She wrote Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on this topic and her search projects include usability analysis of search results clustering, the TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for navigation and search. Faceted navigation became the standard search interface for e-commerce, digital libraries and image collections for at least a decade.
At the Spark Summit East 2017, CS Prof. Ion Stoica was interviewed by theCUBE about The challenges of securing data on the move. Prof. Stoica, who is the executive chairman at Databricks Inc, says that “Security is always a difficult topic. It means so many things to so many people." He describes some interesting research and new technologies for detecting and identifying a variety of security problems to better guard data in the cloud.
Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and Prof. Katherine Yelick have been elected to the National Academy of Engineers (NAE). Election to membership in the NAE is among the highest forms of recognition of notable accomplishments in engineering. Prof. King Liu was recognized for "contributions to the fin field effect transistor (FinFET) and its application to nanometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology," and Prof. Yelick was recognized for "software innovation and leadership in high-performance computing."
