August 5, 2019
A viral real-time AI art application, co-created by three current and former graduate students of CS Prof. Alexei Efros, has won two coveted awards–Best in Show and Audience Choice–at the SIGGRAPH 2019 Real-Time Live Competition. The interactive application, called GauGAN, was co-created by Ph.D. candidate Taesung Park during a summer…
August 2, 2019
CS alumnus Bill Kramer (Ph.D. 2008, advisors: David Culler and James Demmel) has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Kramer, currently project director and PI of the Blue Waters Project and the senior associate director for …
August 1, 2019
EECS alumna Valerie Taylor (M.S. ’86/Ph.D. ’91, advisor: David Messerschmitt), currently the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science division of Argonne National Laboratory, has been named a 2019 Argonne Distinguished Fellow. Distinguished Fellows hold the highest scientific and engineering rank at the laboratory. Taylor, whose research focuses in the areas…
July 17, 2019
Recent CS alumnus Shawn Magee (B.A. ’19) and Haas student Raja Riahi are developing an app called Wymbo to help UC Berkeley students navigate the campus’s many events and activities. They co-founded Wymbo inside Berkeley startup accelerator SkyDeck as a discovery platform: students choose what types of subjects they’re interested…
July 5, 2019
An untethered bee robot co-created by EE alumnus Robert J. Wood (PhD ’04, advisor: Ron Fearing) graces the cover the of the June 2019 issue of Nature magazine and is the subject of a Wired article titled “What Could Possibly Be Cooler Than RoboBee? RoboBee X-Wing.” Wood, now a professor…
July 1, 2019
CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson, his former graduate student Zhangxi Tan (PhD ’13), and Lin Zhang of the Tsinghua-UC Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), have been chosen to co-direct the new RISC-V International Open Source (RIOS) Laboratory, an non-profit research lab launched by the TBSI. RIOS aims to expand and elevate…
July 1, 2019
The Community Memory Project, a 1970’s era counterculture experiment co-founded by EECS alumnus Lee Felsenstein (B.S. ’72), is the subject of an article in California Magazine titled “’We’re Using a Computer’: Was Social Media Invented in Berkeley?” Members of the public were invited to interface with a carboard box “terminal”…
June 25, 2019
EECS alumna Gitanjali Swamy (Ph.D. ’97) testified in defense of a proposed bill (S939) she helped to draft which calls for sexual harassment and discrimination laws in Massachusetts to apply not only to employers but to investors and financiers as well–particularly private investors such as venture capitalists. The purpose of…
June 18, 2019
According to Crunchbase News, UC Berkeley graduated 108 startup founders–not including business school graduates –who raised $1M or more after May 1, 2018. This makes Berkeley the top-ranked public university, and the third-ranked university of any kind after Stanford and MIT, in founding graduates. In the Crunchbase tally of all…
June 17, 2019
A paper written by recent graduate Elizaveta Tremsina (B.S. ’19 CS/Physics/Applied Math) has taken third place in the undergraduate category of the 2019 ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) Grand Finals. The paper, titled “Your Story Recorded in a Magnet: Micromagnetic Simulations of Spin-Orbit Torque in Multi-layer Structures,” was a continuation…