Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy and EECS alumus student (now post doc in the HART Lab)  Robert Matthew (M.S. EE '15) are featured in a Berkeley Research article titled “Engineering to Restore Power to the People”. Supported by the Signature’s Innovation Fellows Program, Matthew and Prof. Bajcsy have developed mathematical models of the body allowing for measurement of upper and lower limb movement. This provides the foundation for wearable assistive devices to serve a range of physical limitations. With teams of undergraduate students, they fabricate lightweight exoskeletons and strap them onto volunteers to test their effectiveness. Their goal is to make assistive devices as lightweight and inexpensive as possible using commercially available parts and 3-D printing.

2016-17 Bakar Fellow Prof. Ali Javey is profiled in a Berkeley Research article titled "Physiological Changes Tracked Moment to Moment," in which he discusses his research into a network of sensors that can be embedded into a sweatband to monitor moment-by-moment changes in electrolytes and metabolites.  Prof. Javey is refining the sensor fabrication process to make it more commercially practical for fitness training, athletics, health diagnostics and even large-scale population studies.

CS postdoctoral scholar Philip Isola (Associate Prof.  Alyosha Efros) is profiled in an an article in The Cornell Daily Sun titled "Computer Science Colloquium: Do Machines See What I See?" in which he discusses strategies that might allow systems to understand the visual world.  “My ultimate goal is to make systems that really have the kind of abilities that human babies have and I think this requires understanding the type of input that biological systems get, the structure of the environment and also the structure of our brains” he says.

Prof. Avideh Zakhor is featured in a video interview by bigthink.com titled “Smart Tech: Phones, Drones and Interior Mapping”. Prof. Zakhor’s research interests include digital signal processing and its applications to 2D and 3D image and video processing, and communications. Applications of her research range from helping emergency rescue teams navigate in times of crisis, to boosting our comfort with Smart Homes.

UC Berkeley has joined Honeywell and GE as initial participants in the 5G Innovators Initiative (5GI2), an open industry initiative designed to create transformative experiences that change lives, businesses and society, launched by Ericsson  and Intel Corporation.  The first segment of 5GI2 will focus on the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) and develop pilots for application of technologies including augmented and virtual reality for first responder drone surveillance of hazardous environments and other uses.  CS Prof. Ion Stoica, Director of RISELab, says "We pride ourselves for interdisciplinary collaboration and believe we are in a unique position to explore new applications, use cases, and business models for 5G that will ultimately realize its potential."

Dr. Gary May has been selected to become the 7th Chancellor of UC Davis. Dr. May is an alumnus of EECS (M.S. ’88 and Ph.D. ’92) and was one of the founding members of the Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students (BGESS) group. In 2010, he was named Outstanding Electrical Engineering Alumnus of UC Berkeley. Dr. May is currently the dean of the College of Engineering at Georgia Tech where he serves as the college’s chief academic officer, leading more than 400 faculty members and more than 13,000 students. The UC Board of Regents will vote on the terms of the proposed appointment during a special meeting at UCLA on Feb. 23. If the board approves the appointment, May will assume the chancellorship on August 1, 2017.

Assistant Prof. Ren Ng has been selected to receive the 2017 Sloan Research Fellowship in the category of Computer Science. 126 early-career scholars are chosen to receive this prestigious award and represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Since 1955, Sloan Research Fellows have gone on to win 43 Nobel Prizes, 16 Fields Medals, 69 National Medals of Science, 16 John Bates Clark Medals, and numerous other distinguished awards.

Prof. Marti Hearst has been elected into the Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) Academy. The SIGCHI Academy is an honorary group of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the field of human-computer interaction. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the disciplines and/or industry, and led the research and/or innovation in human-computer interaction. Prof Hearst's HCI research includes user interfaces for search, information visualization of text, web site usability, and innovation in education.  She wrote Search User Interfaces, the first academic book on this topic and her search projects include usability analysis of search results clustering, the TileBars query term visualization, BioText search over the bioscience literature, and the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for navigation and search.  Faceted navigation became the standard search interface for e-commerce, digital libraries and image collections for at least a decade.

At the Spark Summit East 2017, CS Prof. Ion Stoica was interviewed  by theCUBE about The challenges of securing data on the move.   Prof. Stoica, who is the executive chairman at Databricks Inc, says that “Security is always a difficult topic. It means so many things to so many people."  He describes some interesting research and new technologies for detecting and identifying a variety of security problems to better guard data in the cloud.

Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu and Prof. Katherine Yelick have been elected to the National Academy of Engineers (NAE).  Election to membership in the NAE is among the highest forms of recognition of notable accomplishments in engineering. Prof. King Liu was recognized for "contributions to the fin field effect transistor (FinFET) and its application to nanometer complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology," and Prof. Yelick was recognized for "software innovation and leadership in high-performance computing."