The paper by Prof. David Culler and former students Joseph Polastre and Jason Hill titled “Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks", in the Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems has been selected as a winner of the inaugural SIGMOBILE Test of Time award for 2016. The Berkeley MAC (B-MAC) was a pioneering contribution to media access control in TinyOS-based wireless sensor networks. B-MAC and its underlying low-power listening principle became a facto standard in sensor networks. It plays a lasting role in the development of new low power wireless technologies such as IoT.

EECS graduate students Zack Phillips and Michael Chen, who work with Prof. Laura Waller in the Computational Imaging Lab, have been selected to receive a 2016 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship. They will receive $100k over one year to build a novel new computational illumination microscope attachment for cheap and easy biological microscopy in a portable device.

The paper "SMT-Based Observer Design for Cyber Physical Systems Under Sensor Attacks," co-authored by EECS postdoctoral researchers Yasser Shoukry and Pierluigi Nuzzo with professors Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Sanjit A. Seshia, in collaboration with researchers from UCLA and UCSB, received the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, ICCPS 2016. Research for the paper was supported by the TerraSwarm and ExCAPE projects.

The paper "Control Improvisation with Probabilistic Temporal Specifications," co-authored by Ilge Akkaya, Daniel Fremont, Rafael Valle (graduate students), Alexandre Donze (postdoctoral researcher) and Professors Edward A. Lee and Sanjit A. Seshia, based on research conducted in the TerraSwarm Research Center, received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation, IoTDI 2016.

Prof. Michael Jordan has been selected to receive the 2016 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) Research Excellence Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. Professor Jordan is recognized for his groundbreaking and impactful research in both the theory and application of statistical machine learning.

EECS graduate student Cameron Rose is featured in a National Geographic article titled “Dreams of the World: Flight Simulation of Robotic Birds with Cameron Rose, UC Berkeley”. Cameron, who is Prof. Ron Fearing’sBiomimetic Millisystems Laboratory has helped design and build the mechanical bird called the H2 Bird. His research focuses on modeling and control of flapping-winged robots in flight away from equilibrium. He is also featured in a Berkeley Graduate News article titled“Graduate Student Mimics Flight of Birds with Robots”.

Prof. Ken Goldberg’s “People and Robots” CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) initiative is in Part 2 of Rolling Stone’s “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report”. One of the projects Prof. Goldberg is working on is the development of surgical robots to do the tedious work, allowing surgeons to focus on the important tasks.

Courses related to ham radio taught by EE Associate Prof. Michael Lustig are featured in a National Association for Amateur Radioarticle titled “UC Berkeley Trains, Tests Hundreds of New Hams”. The entry-level course exposes newcomers to ham radio and the advanced course goes into the theoretical applications of digital signal processing, filter design, modulation/demodulation, decoding subcarriers, APRS audio interface techniques, and antenna design.

Prof. Pieter Abbeel is featured in a Rolling Stone article titled “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1.”  Algorithms are the basis for modern day computing – data goes in, the computer does its thing, and the algorithm spits out a result. What’s new is that scientists have developed algorithms that reverse this process, allowing computers to write their own algorithms. This is called machine learning and is the idea behind the science of artificial Intelligence.

Prof. Jeff Bokor is featured in a Berkeley News article titled “Experiments show magnetic chips could dramatically increase computing’s energy efficiency”. As computing increasingly moves into “the cloud”, electricity demands of the giant cloud data centers are multiplying, collectively taking an increasing share of this country’s and the world’s electrical grid. Prof. Bokor and UC Berkeley researchers have shown for the first time that magnetic chips can actually operate at the lowest fundamental energy dissipation theoretically possible under the laws of thermodynamics.