Software bugs are pervasive in modern software. As software is integrated into increasingly many aspects of our lives, these bugs have increasingly severe consequences, both from a security (e.g. Cloudbleed, Heartbleed, Shellshock) and cost standpoint. Fuzzing refers to a set of techniques that automatically find bug-triggering inputs by sending many random-looking inputs to the program under...

Apple and Facebook are at the center of a highly consequential debate over the future of the ad-supported Internet, backdropped by Apple’s announcement that the latest version of its mobile operating system will require app developers to get permission to use certain data for ads. Much more than a normal spat over business models, competition, and privacy per se, how this debate plays out could...

Please join the Department of Mechanical Engineering for a special Zoom webinar, "Perspectives on Future Challenges in Commercial Aviation and Aerospace Engineering." The webinar will feature Naveed Hussain, chief technology officer, vice president and general manager at Boeing Research & Technology, and Howard McKenzie, vice president and chief engineer at Boeing Global Services, in conversation...

Founder and CEO Chris Urmson will explain how Aurora's custom-designed FirstLight lidar will play a critical role in bringing the Aurora Driver to market safely, quickly, and broadly. More specifically, we'll first discuss how self-driving technology will revolutionize the transportation of both people and goods. Then, we'll highlight the critical role that lidar plays in self-driving perception...

Featuring Dr. Alexandra von Meier Adjunct Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Director of Electric Grid Research, California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE), Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute More information coming soon!

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environments in order to learn optimal policies by trial and error. However, exploration is challenging when reward signals are sparse, or when safety is a critical concern and certain errors are unacceptable. In the first part of this talk, we investigate ways to approach sparse or absent rewards with intrinsic motivation; in the second...

The zoom location for this meeting is https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/99597287931?pwd=RjhQN1dEOTlrNG5PV20rbC93ejZ0Zz09 To mediate chromosome segregation during cell division, the microtubule-based spindle size adapts to changes in cell size and shape, which vary dramatically across species and within a multicellular organism. However, the nature of scaling events and their underlying mechanisms are...

The built-environment has a metadata problem. The buildings, cities and human-made aspects of our environment produce an incredible amount of data. However, a significant barrier to the development, deployment and wide-scale adoption of data-driven sustainable practices is the effort required to "wrangle" the heterogeneous and unstructured data typical of the built environment into a form that...

This spring, Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies is hosting a Zoom seminar series on "Applications of Data Science and AI to Equity, Race, and Inclusion in Mobility and Transportation" with the College of Engineering and The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute. This topic brings a unique and innovative perspective to existing...

In this thesis, we pursue the design of Bayesian models as well as large-scale approximate inference procedures for the analysis of single-cell transcriptomics data. First, we rely on Bayesian statistics to formalize several central algorithmic steps of single-cell transcriptomics data analysis. In particular, we introduce single-cell Variational Inference (scVI), a deep generative model that...