Alumna Barbara Grosz (CS M.S. '71/Ph.D. '77), Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).  The award recognizes the work of a researcher who has made sustained and impactful contributions to the field of Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing. Grosz has spent her career working to make human-computer interactions as fluent as human-to-human interaction. Her recent research has focused on fundamental problems in modeling collaborative activity, developing systems ("agents") able to collaborate with each other and their users, and constructing collaborative, multi-modal systems for human-computer communication.  Her current research projects focus on using results of prior work to improve health care coordination and enhance K-12 science education.

EE alumnus Jonathan S. Maltz (Ph.D. EE '99) is serving as the lead researcher and Chief Scientific Advisor during the clinical trials of HeartSentry, a non-invasive diagnostic tool to measure and monitor cardiovascular health.   HeartSentry is being developed at Lexington Biosciences, a development-stage medical device company in Vancouver, Canada.  It is the product of 15-years of research at U.C. Berkeley.  Maltz has had over 16 years experience designing new devices for assessing vascular function and evaluating these on human subjects.

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.

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.

CS Prof. Alexei Efros (also alumnus, Ph.D. '03) and his team have developed a new technique, leveraging deep neural networks and AI, to allow novices--even those with limited artistic ability--to quickly add realistic color to black and white images.  "The goal of our previous project was to just get a single, plausible colorization," says Richard Zhang, a coauthor and PhD candidate, advised by Efros. "If the user didn't like the result, or wanted to change something, they were out of luck. We realized that empowering the user and adding them in the loop was actually a necessary component for obtaining desirable results."  They will present their research into "Real-Time User Guided Colorization with Learned Deep Priors" at SIGGRAPH 2017 in August.

EE Profs Claire Tomlin,  Costas Spanos and Connie Chang-Hasnain, and CS Prof. David Culler, are featured in a Berkeley Engineer article titled "Smart moves: California's next-gen infrastructure," which describes current UC Berkeley research projects that promise to transform the way we live.  “What’s enabling these infrastructure changes is our ability to compute faster, to share information faster and to provide that information to users very quickly,” says Tomlin.   She envisions “rail-to-drone” expressways, converting railroad rights-of-way to aerial corridors where closely-spaced fleets of drones travel safely.  Spanos predicts self-monitoring buildings so smart they band together and form bargaining alliances, and Chang-Hasnain's team have been working on manufacturing highly efficient but low-cost solar cells by growing nanoscale “forests” of expensive photovoltaics on inexpensive silicon substrates. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science, co-founded by Culler, is “equipping students not just to consume data but to produce insight” which will help guide the changes to come.

Bioinspired robot, Salto-1P, is featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled "Salto-1P Is the Most Amazing Jumping Robot We've Ever Seen."  Born in Prof. Ronald Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, Salto-1P is the most recent incarnation of the Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles (Salto) robot which was pronounced the most vertically agile robot ever created last December.  Salto-1P uses a small motor and a system of linkages and gears to jump.  It needs to do most of its control in the air because it spends so little time in contact with the ground, so it uses a rotating inertial tail and two little thrusters to stabilize and reorient itself in between jumps.

See Salto-1P in action as it bounces around and self-destructs.

CS alumna Justine Sherry (M.S. '12/Ph.D. '16 advisor: Sylvia Ratnasamy) has won the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Networking and Data Communication.  Justine's thesis was on "Middleboxes as a Cloud Service," and brought the benefits of cloud computing to the networking domain.  Justine is now assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

EE Prof. Ali Javey and his research into "Earables," are profiled in a Digital Trends article titled 3D printed ear-mounted wearable will Monitor your body's core temperature.  Earables represent a class of ‘structural electronics’ where sensors and electronics are embedded in the fabricated structure itself.  “Monitoring core body temperature in a continuous fashion could have important medical applications,” Javey continued. “Examples can include monitoring patients with severe conditions, or infants.”  Their goals include making the device smaller while expanding the range of sensors implemented.

EE Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller will make a presentation on the theme of Reverse-Engineering the Brain at this year's Global Grand Challenges Summit (GGCS).  Muller is co-founder of Cortera Neurotechnologies, a company which designs medical devices for the treatment of incurable neurological conditions. "We can use devices that record brain signals directly from the the motor cortex of the brain and interpret those signals as movements," she says, "and we can use those signals to control robotic arms, for example, or mouse cursors on a screen."  The GGCS,  sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), was created to help find solutions for 14 major engineering challenges critical to the future well-being of humanity and the planet.  Muller will also be awarded an NAE Gilbreth Lectureship, established to recognize outstanding young engineers.