New EECS Assistant Profs. Sophia Shao and Alp Sipahigil have received Engineering faculty fellowships, which will help fund the first five years of their projects and labs at Berkeley. The fellowships are sponsored by Berkeley Engineering alumni and friends as part of a $1.25M program that will be shared among five new faculty. Shao, who began teaching at Berkeley in 2019, studies computer architecture with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture and agile VLSI design methodology. Sipahigil, who will arrive in spring 2021 from Caltech, has been focused on using nanoscale phononic and photonic structures to bring new functionalities to superconducting quantum circuits.
EECS Prof. Emeritus and control systems pioneer, Eliahu Ibrahim Jury, who was active in the department from 1954 to 1981, passed away on September 20th at the age of 97. Jury was born in Baghdad, Iraq, of Jewish parentage, and went to college first in Beirut, then in Palestine, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in 1947. He moved to the U.S. to attend graduate school, earning an M.S. from Harvard and an Sc.D. from Columbia in electrical engineering in 1953 (the first time this degree was conferred at Columbia). His dissertation, "Analysis and Synthesis of Sampled-Data Control Systems," was one of the first documents to deal with the synthesis of sampled-data feedback systems. He joined his friend Lotfi Zadeh at UC Berkeley the following year, and was made full professor in 1964. During his 28 years at Berkeley, Jury flourished, making a number of groundbreaking contributions to the field of discrete-time systems and control, including the Jury stability table, his authoritative book "Theory and Application of the z -Transform Method," and the theory of inners, which made of the cover of the July 1975 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE. He received the American Society of Engineers (ASME) Rufus Oldenburger Medal, for lifetime achievements in automatic control, in 1986. He retired from Berkeley in 1981, and moved to Florida where he joined the faculty at the University of Miami. The EECS Eliahu Jury Award, which is presented to graduate students or recent alumni "for outstanding achievement in the area of systems, communications, control, or signal processing," is named in his honor.
CS Assistant Prof. Alessandro Chiesa has been selected as a 2020 Okawa Foundation Research Grant recipient for his work on the "Foundations of Quantum and Non-Signaling Proofs (Post-Quantum Zero-Knowledge Proofs for Secure Distributed Systems)." Okawa Research Grants are awarded to Asian and American scholars for studies and analyses in the fields of information and telecommunications. Winners receive a $10K prize which is usually awarded in an autumn ceremony in San Francisco, but the event has been cancelled this year because of COVID-19.
EECS Associate Prof. Boubacar Kanté has been selected by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to be among its 2020 cohort of Moore Inventor Fellows. The fellowship supports "scientist-inventors who create new tools and technologies with a high potential" to accelerate progress in scientific discovery, environmental conservation and patient care. Kanté's pioneering work in quantum topological optics includes the invention of the world’s first topological light sources and lasers. The award will total $825,000 over three years to fund the invention of a new quantum platform that will develop compact sources for robust and energy efficient computing, sensing and imaging using light.
EECS Prof. Ana Claudia Arias has been selected to participate in a new food systems research institute funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). The award of $20M over five years will aim to improve US food systems to address issues such as pandemic-driven food system security and safety; improving crop yield, quality and nutrition; decreasing energy and water resource consumption; and increasing production and eliminating food waste. The objective of the new USDA-NIFA Institute for Artificial Intelligence for Next-Generation Food Systems (AIFS) will focus on the creation of digital replicas of complex food systems, so-called “digital twins,” which can be safely manipulated and optimized in a virtual world and deployed in the physical world afterwards, reducing costs of experiments and accelerating development of new technologies. A team of ten researchers from the UC Berkeley Next Generation Food Systems Center will combine forces with researchers from five other institutions including UC Davis, Cornell, UIUC, UC ANR, and the USDA, to staff the new center.
CS Prof. Michael I. Jordan is featured in This Week in Machine Learning & AI (TWIML AI) Podcast episode #407 titled "What are the Implications of Algorithmic Thinking? with Michael I. Jordan." He discusses his current exploration into the intersection of economics and AI, and how machine learning systems could be used to create value and empowerment across many industries through “markets.” The interview also touches on the potential of “interacting learning systems” at scale, the valuation of data, and the commoditization of human knowledge into computational systems. Jordan's career, and the ways it has been influenced by other fields like philosophy, is also explored. Jordan received the 2020 IEEE John von Neumann Medal for "outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology" earlier this year.
CS Teaching Prof. Dan Garcia is featured in NBC Bay Area for his innovative teaching style which keep his students engaged in online learning. He has "transformed his mancave into a studio," where he films and edits his creative virtual lessons, and then uploads them for students to watch. Known for rapping his own lyrics to songs from the musical Hamilton in giant lecture halls, Garcia has adapted to using a green screen to film and edit his one hour video lessons, incorporating a variety of voices. His extra efforts have been lauded by students stuck in their rooms during the fall semester.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences are partnering to award $10 million to fund research in the Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Deep Learning, led by CS Prof. Peter Bartlett and EECS Prof. Bin Yu. Both professors hold joint appointments in the Department of Statistics. The researchers hope to gain a better theoretical understanding of deep learning, which is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks that digest large amounts of raw data inputs and train AI systems with limited human supervision. Most of the research and education activities will be hosted by the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, in the form of structured programs of varying themes. Other participating institutions will include Stanford, MIT, UCI, UCSD, Toyota Tech in Chicago, EPFL in Switzerland, and the Hebrew University in Israel.
CS Teaching Prof. Emeritus Brian Harvey has been awarded the National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS) Education Technology Leadership Award, which recognizes individuals who made a significant impact on the field of educational technology over the course of a lifetime. The award is NTLS's highest honor. Harvey wrote the "Computer Science Logo Style" textbook trilogy in the 1980s, which uses the Logo programming language (a subdialect of Lisp which had been created for elementary school children) to teach computer science concepts to more advanced students. He designed UCBLogo in 1992, a free, open-source programming language that is now the de facto standard for Logo, and won the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award in 1995. He then collaborated with award co-recipient Jens Möenig to develop the block programming language Snap!, which makes advanced computational concepts accessible to nonprogrammers. It is used in the highly successful class "Beauty and Joy of Computing," which was developed at Berkeley to introduce more diverse audiences to CS. The class is approved for AP credit and, with support from the NSF, has been provided to more than one thousand high school CS teachers nationwide. Harvey says “Languages in the Logo family, including Scratch and Snap!, take the position that we’re not in the business of training professional computer programmers. Our mission is to bring programming to the masses.”
Prof. Richard M. White, age 90, passed away this week from complications after a fall. Born in Colorado and educated at Harvard, White joined the EECS department in 1962 after a stint doing research at General Electric. He was a prolific researcher, publisher and inventor, who authored or co‐authored more than 90 research papers and two books. His research on micro‐sensors and actuators making use of Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) effects, earned him the UFFC Rayleigh Ultrasonics Award in 2003. He founded the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC) with Richard Muller in 1986, which led the creation of the field of Micro-Electromechanical Systems (MEMS), one of the key innovations pioneered in the EECS department. BSAC currently hosts 12 faculty and more than 100 graduate students. White and Muller earned the James Clerk Maxwell Award for their contributions to MEMS in 2013. Full of energy and ideas, White was also a passionate instructor whose forte was introducing students to electronics (he created and taught the introductory course EE 1 for many years). He was also one of the founders of the Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education (SESAME), which was later absorbed into the School of Education. Just before his death, White was actively engaged in the creation of a new sensor to detect COVID-19. He leaves behind two sons, Rollie and Brendan.
