News

Prof. Jan Rabaey

Jan Rabaey wins 2017 SRC Aristotle Award

EE Prof. Jan Rabaey has won the 2017 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Aristotle Award.  The award recognizes SRC-supported faculty whose deep commitment to the educational experience of SRC students has had a profound and continuing impact on their professional performance and, consequently, a significant impact for members over a long period of time.   Rabaey was cited for having "made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including advanced wireless systems, low power integrated circuits, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing.  His current interests include the conception of the next-generation integrated wireless systems, as well as the exploration of the interaction between the cyber and the biological world."  The award was presented at  TECHCON 2017 on September 12th.

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson

David Patterson responds to former Google employee's memo about diversity

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson published an opinion piece in Wired in response to former Google employee James Damore’s memo, in which Damore stressed that women are biologically different and not suited to working in technology companies like Google.  Patterson, along with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College and John Hennessy of Stanford, highlighted four main points in rebuttal to Damore’s memo: 1) implicit bias exists, 2) members of underrepresented groups are discouraged by daily biases not experienced by others, 3) a shortage of software engineers will limit the growth of the industry, and 4) it's more effective to discuss these issues face-to-face than via electronic communication.

Charles Giancarlo, the new CEO of Pure Storage

Charles Giancarlo named CEO of Pure Storage

EE Alumnus Charles Giancarlo (M.S. '80) has been named Chief Executive Officer of Pure Storage, the market's leading independent all-flash data platform vendor for the cloud era.   Giancarlo previously served in senior executive roles at Silver Lake Partners and Cisco Systems, Inc.  "Charlie is an exceptionally talented leader with a three-decade track record of driving growth and innovation at leading global technology companies," said outgoing CEO Scott Dietzen.

Nima Jafarian, VP of Management & Marketing at PowerSphyr

Nima Jafarian appointed VP of Product Management & Marketing at PowerSphyr

EE alumnus Nima Jafarian (B.S. '04) has been appointed Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at PowerSphyr, one of the world’s most innovative providers of wireless power technology.   He is responsible for leading product management and marketing for SkyCurrent™, a ground-breaking wireless power system which combines near-field and far-field technology in a single system to deliver wireless power to electronic devices without cords or cable.  Jafarian began his career at National Semiconductor developing BiCMOS processes for power management ICs and subsequently held marketing and R&D roles with Analog Devices and Peregrine Semiconductor.  Prior to joining PowerSphyr, he spent five years at Lumileds in global product management and channel marketing.

Andrew Ng is one of the world's leading authorities on AI

Andrew Ng is one of 7 leaders shaping the AI revolution

CS alumnus Andrew Ng (Ph.D. '02, adviser: Michael Jordan) has been singled out by NewsCenter.io as one of 7 leaders shaping the AI revolution.  Ng founded the “Google Brain” project, which developed massive-scale deep learning algorithms.  He led the AI group at Baidu, China’s largest search engine company, which directed research into advertising, maps, take-out delivery, voice and internet searching, security, consumer finance, among others. Ng also co-founded Coursera, an online education company that has raised more than $200 million venture capital funding.  He is also currently an adjuct professor at Stanford.

Sergey Levine, Pieter Abbeel, and Chelsea Finn partner with NVAIL to take deep learning to the next level

Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine, Prof. Pieter Abbeel, and graduate student Chelsea Finn are featured in a CSO article highlighting research they presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).  The research was done in partnership with the NVIDIA AI Labs (NVAIL) programme.  Levine’s team wants to help intelligent agents learn faster and require less training by teaching deep neural networks to learn more like humans.  “Look at how people do it,” said Levine. “We never learn things entirely from scratch. We draw on our past experience to help us learn new skills quickly. So we’re trying to get our learning algorithms to do the same.”  Levine and his team have been using an NVIDIA DGX-1 system to train their algorithms how to coordinate movement and visual perception.

NVAIL helps keep AI pioneers ahead of the curve with support for students, assistance from researchers and engineers, and gives them access to the industry’s most advanced GPU computing power.

Ken Goldberg joins ROBO Global Board

CS Prof. Ken Goldberg has joined the Strategic Advisory Board of ROBO Global, creator of the first benchmark index to track the global robotics, automation and artificial intelligence market.  Goldberg leads research in geometric algorithms and machine learning for robotics and in applications from surgery to manufacturing.  “Ken is truly one of the brightest minds in robotics and automation,” said Travis Briggs, CEO of ROBO Global. “His insight and expertise is sought after all over the world. We’re honored to have him on our team helping ROBO bring innovative solutions to investors in the US, Europe and Asia. ”

Yannis Ioannidis and the Greek spin-off that will become the voice of Samsung

CS alumnus Yannis Ioannidis (Ph.D. '86) is featured in an article about Samsung's purchase of Greek text-to-speech company Innoetics for close to 50 million euros.  Ioannidis is president of the ATHENA Research & Innovation Center, which nurtured the startup and provided critical support during its evolution and the development of its technology. Innoetics' text-to-speech software learns languages by listening to native speakers, whose voices it can then mimic with great accuracy.  It is currently fluent in 19 languages. Samsung plans to use the technology across a wide range of its product ecosystem.  Ioannidis says that, as a result of the purchase, “any voice emanating from a Samsung device in the years to come will be ‘Greek,’ the product of Greek technology.”  Ioannidis is currently a professor of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens.

Stuart Russell is featured speaker at IP EXPO Europe

CS Prof. Stuart Russell will be speaking on the use of AI, its long-term future and its relation to humanity, at the 2017 IP EXPO Europe showcase.  IP EXPO Europe is an information technology trade show held annually in England which "brings together some of the biggest names, in their respective fields, to tackle the technological issues facing organisations right now."  Other speakers include Brad Anderson of Microsoft and chess champion Garry Kasparov.

Lauren Barghout Joins Last Studio Standing as Chief Vision Scientist

Laura Barghout, a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Initiative for Soft Computing (BISC), has been hired as Chief Vision Scientist of Last Studio Standing, the largest hand-drawn animation studio in the Western Hemisphere.  Barghout invented a Gestalt-based fuzzy inference system and labeling technique that is used commercially in image/video background removal, object recognition and image labeling systems. Her research has contributed to the understanding of context-dependent spatial vision, spatial masking, theoretical and computational psychophysics, and the application of fuzzy set theory to human and machine vision.  "Most animation relies solely on a direction and what's being created," she said . "This invention allows for a softer, more human-like understanding. It captures the flavor and nuance of a subject naturally -- and, again, it's softer. As such, it requires less manual clean up."