Rising Stars 2020: Committee

Prof. Jeff Bokor is the Paul R. Gray Distinguished Professor of Engineering in EECS and has been the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering since 2012. He currently holds a joint appointment with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as Senior Scientist in the Materials Science Division, and formerly held a joint appointment as Deputy Director for Science at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscale science research center at LBNL. His current research activities include nanomagnetics/spintronics, carbon nanotube and graphene electronics, nanophotonics, and nano-electromechanical systems.

Prof. John Canny has made significant contributions to various areas of computer science and mathematics, including artificial intelligence, robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer security, computational algebra, and computational geometry. As the author of “A Variational Approach to Edge Detection” and the creator of the widely used Canny edge detector, he was honored for seminal contributions in the areas of robotics and machine perception. He joined the EECS department in 1987 and currently works on several applications of data mining for human learning (MOOCs and early language learning), health and well-being, and applications in the sciences.

Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan‘s goal is to enable robots to work with, around, and in support of people. She runs the InterACT Lab, where she focuses on algorithms for human-robot interaction — algorithms that move beyond the robot’s function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that coordinates well with people, and is aligned with what we actually want the robot to do. She works across different applications, from assistive arms, to quadrotors, to autonomous cars, and draws from optimal control, game theory, reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, and cognitive science. Anca earned her B.S. from Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany, and her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon.

Assistant Prof. Angjoo Kanazawa‘s research lies at the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. She is focused on figuring out how to build a system that can perceive and understand the dynamic, complex, interactive, 3D world in which we live, from everyday photographs and videos. Angjoo has a B.A. in Mathematics from NYU and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, and worked as a Postdoc in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab.

Associate Prof. Chunlei Liu‘s main research interest is developing engineering approaches to study the brain.  His current work focuses on developing non-invasive MRI techniques for visualizing human brain structure and function, and developing non-invasive remote cell modulation techniques to modulate neuronal activity.  He is affiliated with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI).  Chunlei earned his B.S. in Physics from Peking University, an M.S. in Physics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Assistant Prof. Raluca Popa finds cybersecurity a uniquely beautiful and rewarding discipline.  She enjoys playing with powerful theoretical tools to build systems that address real world problems. Her current research focuses on creating systems that can compute on data without actually seeing it: if a hacker breaks in, they have no way to decipher the data.  She co-founded and co-directs the RISELab, a group focused on building systems that are secure and intelligent. She is also the co-founder and CTO of security startup PreVeil.  Raluca attended MIT where she earned two Bachelor’s, one in Computer Science and one in Mathematics, a Masters of Engineering, and a Doctorate in Computer Science. She was a postdoc in the System Security group at ETH Zürich.

Associate Prof. Ben Recht studies how to make machine learning systems more robust to interactions with a dynamic and uncertain world. His is particularly interested in busting machine learning myths and establishing baselines for data analysis. He actively collaborates with researchers from applied fields including computational imaging and robotics. Ben received his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory. After completing his doctoral work, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Mathematics of Information at Caltech and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao‘s research interests are in the area of computer architecture, with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology.  She received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, China, and her S.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Architecture, Circuits, and Compilers Group at Harvard.   Before coming to Berkeley, she worked as a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research.