Professors Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz have won a 2017 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award for "Neural Dust: an ultrasonic, low power, extreme miniature technology for completely wireless and untethered neural recordings in the brain." These annual awards come with a $200K prize and are aimed at advancing the range of tools neuroscientists have to map, monitor, and model brain function. The award will allow Carmena and Maharbiz to apply neural dust technology to the central nervous system, which has the potential to allow the brain to be trained or treated to restore normal functionality following injury or the onset of neuropsychological illness.
In a project funded by a $21.6M donation from DARPA, a light field microscope developed by EE Associate Prof. Laura Waller, MCB Assistant Prof. Hillel Adesnik and their lab groups, is being used to create a window into the brain through which researchers — and eventually physicians — can monitor and activate thousands of individual neurons using light. The microscope is based on CS Assistant Prof. Ren Ng's revolutionary light field camera which captures light through an array of lenses and reconstructs images computationally in any focus. The microscope is the first tier of a two-tier device referred to as a cortical modem: it "reads" through the surface of the brain to visualize up to a million neurons; the second tier component "writes" by projecting light patterns onto these neurons using 3D holograms, stimulating them in a way that reflects normal brain activity. The goal of the project is to read from a million individual neurons and simultaneously stimulate 1,000 of them with single-cell accuracy. “By encoding perceptions into the human cortex," MCB Prof. Ehud Isacoff says, "you could allow the blind to see or the paralyzed to feel touch.”
There are 10 faculty involved in this project, 4 of which are from EECS: Laura Waller, Ren Ng, Jose Carmena and Rikky Muller. The project is being led by Ehud Isacoff from the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.
CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan has been selected to receive a 2017 Okawa Foundation Research Grant. This award recognizes promising young faculty members in the fields of information and telecommunications, and comes with a $10K prize. The presentaton ceremony will be held on September 20th in San Francisco.
The paper titled "ESPIRiT—an eigenvalue approach to autocalibrating parallel MRI: Where SENSE meets GRAPPA" co-written by Associate Prof. Michael Lustig, his graduate student Pat Virtue, and alumnus Mark J. Murphy (Ph.D. '11 advisor: Kurt Keutzer) has been named the most-cited Magnetic Resonance in Medicine article from 2014. The article bridges the gap between the two main approaches for parallel imaging (SENSE and GRAPPA) allowing the reconstruction of images from undersampled multicoil data. It presents a new autocalibration technique combining the extended reconstruction of SENSE with GRAPPA-like robustness to errors.
Authors of the paper are listed as Martin Uecker, Peng Lai, Mark J. Murphy, Patrick Virtue, Michael Elad, John M. Pauly, Shreyas S. Vasanawala, and Michael Lustig.
In an article for the Daily Cal, undergraduate Taylor Choe thanks CS Assistant Teaching Prof. Josh Hug for helping her overcome her negative first impression of Berkeley and discover what makes it so special. "My mindset going into CS 61B was definitely not a positive one. I struggled with 61A and felt discouraged, making me really come to dislike computer science." she wrote. But Dr. Hug made her fall in love with computer science and helped her find faith in the public school system. "You could tell that he wanted to be at lecture and wasn’t thinking about being somewhere else. His projects, homeworks and labs were entertaining and engaging, displaying the time and thought that went into each of them. He constantly emphasized the importance of being an honest person in addition to being an honest programmer. He was somehow able to make a 1,400-person class feel a little smaller. And I don’t think there is anything more you can ask of a professor, especially at a school as large as UC Berkeley."
The Turing Award 50th Anniversary celebration was held at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco on June 23-24, 2017. CS Professors Stuart Russell and Michael Jordan participated on a panel discussion about advances in deep neural networks, Prof. Umesh Vazirani moderated a panel on quantum computing. Prof. Emeritus and Turing winner Michael Stonebraker discussed the legal ramifications of collecting data from a growing number of devices with different encoding formats, and alumnus and Turing winner Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) participated on a panel about the end of Moore's Law.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is considered the "Nobel prize of computing," and comes with a $1 million prize for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field. EECS faculty have won four: Richard Karp for theory and efficiency of algorithms (NP-completeness) in 1985, William Kahan for numerical analysis (floating-point) in 1989, Manuel Blum for computational complexity theory and cryptography in 1995, and Michael Stonebraker for modern database systems in 2014. EECS alumni have won seven: Ken Thompson (B.S. '65/M.S. '66) for operating systems theory (UNIX) in 1983, Niklaus Wirth (Ph.D. '63) for computer languages (EULER/Pascal, etc.) in 1984, Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) for distributed, personal computing (workstations, networks, etc.) in 1992, Douglas Englebart (MS. '53/Ph.D. '55) for interactive computing in 1997, Leonard Adleman (Ph.D. '76) for public-key cryptography in 2002, and Shafi Goldwasser (M.S. '81/Ph.D. '84) with Silvio Micali (Ph.D. '82) for cryptography and complexity theory in 2012.
Ana Arias has been selected for the 2017 Research and Development Award from the Flexible and Printed Electronics Conference, organized by FlexTech, a consortium that supports the development of flexible electronics. The FLEXIs recognizes outstanding work and achievements of organizations and individuals active in flexible hybrid electronics (FHE). The four categories include Research & Development, Innovation & Commercialization, Industry Leadership, and Education Leadership. Associate Professor Arias is recognized for the development of flexible medical sensors and printed flexible devices. Her breakthrough research has led to the creation of flexible receiving coils for magnetic resonance imaging devices and devices for impedance sensing for the detection of early pressure ulcers in vivo.
Alistair Sinclair has been awarded the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Service Award. This award is presented on the basis of value and degree of services to the computing community including activities on behalf of the ACM, other computer organizations, and/or other entities. Prof. Sinclair is recognized for his role in the spectacular success of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in taking collaboration in the field to an entirely new level.
Jose Carmena is mentioned in IEEE’s publication The Institute in an article titled “Timeline: The Evolution of Assistive Technologies” (see timeline at the bottom of the article, year 2017). In celebration of The Institute's 40th anniversary this article highlights topics and technologies over the past four decades that have applied electronics to significantly help people overcome disabilities. Professor Carmena is recognized for contributions to the neural basis of motor-skill learning and neuroprosthetic systems. His research program in neural engineering and systems neuroscience is aimed at understanding the neural basis of sensorimotor learning and control, and at building the science and engineering base that will allow the creation of reliable neuroprosthetic systems for the severely disabled. He is also co-chair of the IEEE Brain Initiative and Co-Director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses at UC Berkeley and UCSF.
