Prof. Ming Wu has been awarded the 2017 C.E.K. Mees Medal from the Optical Society of America (OSA). This medal is presented to a recipient who exemplifies the thought that "optics transcends all boundaries." This award recognizes an original use of optics across different fields. Prof. Wu is being recognized for the invention of “optoelectronic tweezers” that enable massively parallel manipulation of individual biological cells controlled by digital optical projectors.

EECS Chair and CS Prof. Jitendra Malik will discuss Deep Visual Understanding from Deep Learning as one of the keynote speakers at the Embedded Vision Summit on May 2, 2017.  The summit is the only event focused exclusively on the technologies, hardware, and software that bring visual intelligence to products.  This year, "It's all about deployable computer vision and deep learning" and will feature more than 90 expert presenters in 4 conference tracks over three days.

Prof. Katherine Yelick has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This organization has been serving the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue and useful knowledge since 1780. The Academy convenes leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to address critical challenges facing our global society. Kathy joins a long list of distinguished members, going back to Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, and most recently our own Scott Shenker in 2016. For a complete list of EECS members elected to the academy, see EECS Faculty Awards/American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson co-authored and presented a report on Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) at a regional seminar of the National Academy of Engineering, held at the Computer History Museum in Menlo Park on April 5, 2017.   TPUs, which have been deployed in Google datacenters since 2015, are printed-circuit cards which are inserted into existing servers and act as co-processors tailored for neural-network calculations.  Prof. Patterson says that TPUs are "an order of magnitude faster than contemporary CPUs and GPUs" with an even larger relative performance per watt.  According to an article for the IEEE Spectrum, TPUs are "built for doing inference," having hardware that operates on 8-bit integers rather than the higher-precision floating-point numbers used in CPUs and GPUs.

Josephine Williamson, the EECS Director of Administrative Services, has been selected to receive the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award (COSA), which is the highest honor bestowed upon staff by the Chancellor.  COSAs are presented to individuals and teams who, in addition to performing their normal job duties with excellence, also demonstrate exceptional initiative in contributing to the UC Berkeley campus community.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing, an introductory computer science curriculum taught by Prof. Dan Garcia has received a $311,975 grant from InfoSys for a Professional Development week “BJCpalooza” for teachers to be held July 17-21, 2017 at UC Berkeley. Approximately 200 high school teachers from across the United States will be attending. Prof. Garcia will also be giving the keynote talk at the 2017 ACM TURC (SIGCSE) China, a new leading international forum at the intersection of computer science and the learning sciences, seeking to improve practice and theories of CS education.

Alumnus Denis Shing Fai Yip (B.S. '90/M.S. '91) has been named Chief Executive Officer of Digital China Holdings Limited.  He will focus on integrating big data and cloud computing technologies into the company's global industrial system.  Mr. Yip has been involved with information management, software, and global sales and services in industry worldwide for 26 years.  He has been Global Senior Vice President and the President of Greater China of EMC since 2006 and was in charge of the overall business operations in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The business grew more than 8 times over the tenure of his EMC career and he was a key figure in the integration of DELL and EMC in the Greater China region.

CS Prof. Michael Jordan, graduate students Philipp Moritz and Robert Nishihara, and research in the RISELab are featured in a Datanami article titled "Meet Ray, the Real-Time Machine-Learning Replacement for Spark."  Ray is one of the first technologies to emerge from RISELab, the successor to AMPLab and its host of influential distributed technologies including Spark, Mesos, and Tachyon. Ray is a new distributed framework designed to enable Python-based machine learning and deep learning workloads to execute in real-time with MPI-like power and granularity. This framework is ostensibly a replacement for Spark, which is seen as too slow for some real-world AI applications.

BiasBusters @ Cal EECS will make a presentation at this year's Community Grants Showcase:  Changing Social Norms on April 19, 2017.  BiasBusters @ Cal EECS focuses on engaging EECS faculty, staff, and students to shift culture and increase the inclusion of women and underrepresented minorities in our community.   The program, modeled on Google’s Bias Busting @ Work program, was initiated by Director of Diversity and Achievement Tiffany Reardon and is organized by graduate students Vasuki Swamy and Regina Eckert.  Regular workshops are led by volunteers in the EECS community who have been trained as program facilitators in an effort to promote self-awareness about unconscious bias and teach how to address it in our department and daily lives.  The grant was sponsored by the PATH to Care Center with support from the Violence Prevention Collaborative.

Dr. Daniel Garcia and his course "CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing" (BJC) are featured in a New York Times article about curricula designed to develop computational thinking in students.  The article, titled "Learning to Think Like a Computer," covers strategies at a number of top institutions and highlights BJC, a CS course for nonmajors which focuses on the abstract principles underpinning computing instead of just teaching students to code.  “The idea of abstraction,” Dan says, “is to hide the details.”  Concealing layers of information makes it possible to get at the intersections of things, improving aspects of a complicated system without understanding and grappling with each part.  The abstraction of computational thinking allows advances without having to redesign from scratch and offers a new language and orientation to tackle problems in many other areas of life.