EE Prof. Bernhard Boser is profiled in an article in the Cal Aggie titled "Fingerprint recognition on smartphones unsafe and hackable" in which he discusses a new ultrasonic imaging process developed at UC Berkeley and UC Davis to more securely protect personal information than current finger recognition technologies.  This new technology, which combines an ultrasonic sensor in air and an ultrasonic sensor in tissue, captures a fingerprint in 3D to uniquely identify a person.  It images both the ridges and valleys of a fingerprint surface as well as the subsurface structure of the skin,  distinguishing between layers of tissue by analyzing the densities of live and dead skin cells.  "This imaging process can look at the surface of fingerprints and inside the finger,” Boser said. “There are more patterns inside the finger that can’t be put onto glass screen of a phone.”

A Computational Imaging research proposal submitted by EE Associate Prof. Laura Waller, EE Associate Prof. Michael Lustig, CS Assistant Prof. Ren Ng, CS Assistant Prof. Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and CS Associate Prof. Benjamin Rechts has been accepted as part of a set of cross-disciplinary activities planned for development by Berkeley Research.  Berkeley Research ran eight faculty forums on a wide range of topics and received 30 proposals which were reviewed by a faculty panel and discussed with the Deans.  The selected projects "hold great promise for Berkeley to be at the forefront of developing a positive vision for the future."

Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu has been selected to receive the Aldert van der Ziel award by the International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium- ISDRS 2016 van der Ziel Committee. This award is given for distinguished educational and research contributions to the field of electronic devices and materials. Past recipients of this prestigious award include Arthur Milnes, Lester Eastman, Herbert Kroemer (Nobel Laureate Physics 2000), Michael Shur, Marvin White, Jim Plummer, Ben Streetman, Dieter Schroder and Mark S. Lundstrom, Chenming Hu, and Robert Dutton.

Prof. Ali Javey and his team's presentation at the 2016 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is profiled in an EE Times article titled "Sweating Big Human-Body Data Challenge." This year, IEDM papers  explored a number of technologies to make flexible and printable electronics,  and Prof. Javey's team's paper stood out. Unlike conventional wearable devices, the team has zeroed in on the idea of attaching sweat biosensors — like a patch — on the body to collect sweat as it appears, for “real-time perspiration analysis.”

Center for Advancing Women in Technology (CAWIT) in collaboration with  U.C. Berkeley, San Francisco State University and San José State University, through $3M in investment from Intel Corporation, KLA-Tencor Foundation, and Salesforce, will launch the Technology Pathways Initiative (TPI), to increase participation of women in CS fields through the development of new interdisciplinary CS degree programs at three pilot campuses in 2017. Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu has been developing the Women In Technology workshop at UC Berkeley.

Earlier this year NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered a NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer in a box to the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR). BAIR’s research is at the cutting edge of multi-modal deep learning, human-compatible AI and connecting AI with other scientific disciplines and the humanities. According to Prof. Pieter Abbeel, “More compute power directly translates into more ideas being investigated, tried out, tuned to actually get them to work.”

EECS Prof. Ronald Fearing, EECS PhD student Justin Yim, post doc Dr. Mark Plecnik, and ME PhD student Duncan Haldane have created Salto, the most vertically agile jumping robot.  Salto can repeatedly jump 1 meter vertically at almost two times per second.  Salto is featured in the premier issue of Science Robotics (Dec. 6).

Associate Professor Ana Claudia Arias and Assistant Professor Rikky Muller have been selected as Gilbreth Lecturers at the upcoming National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) National Meeting on Thursday, February 9, 2017. Encouraging an interest in engineering careers among middle and high school students is a high priority for the president of NAE so the meeting audience typically includes 100-200 students from local schools.

Prof. Claire Tomlin has been chosen to receive an honorary doctorate from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. KTH is one of Europe’s leading technical and engineering universities and a key center of intellectual talent and innovation. Prof. Tomlin is recognized as an exceptional, inspiring teacher with strong international commitment and drive as a research leader and visionary. As an internationally renowned instructor, researcher and leader, Prof. Tomlin has furthered KTH’s activities through various collaborations in hybrid regulation systems, cyberphysical systems, and neighboring areas of information and communications technology and software engineering.

Professors Jose Carmena and Borivoje Nikolic have been elected as IEEE Fellows Class 2017. An IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation. Prof. Carmena is recognized for contributions to the neural basis of motor skill learning and neuroprosthetic systems. Prof. Nikolic is recognized for contributions to energy-efficient design of digital and mixed-signal circuits.