EECS Ph.D. student Nick Carlini (advisor Prof. David Wagner) in collaboration with a team of researchers from Georgetown University are featured in a number of news articles. They have revealed how secret commands could use voice-control tools like Siri and Google Now to take over your smartphone without your knowledge. They ran a series of tests to see just how easily these assistants could be tricked.

EECS graduate student Peng Zheng (advisor Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu) has received the 2015 Chinese Government Scholarship for Outstanding Self-financed Students Studying Abroad. This scholarship program is set up to honor overseas Chinese students pursuing a Ph.D. with outstanding academic accomplishment across all academic disciplines. Developed in 2003, the awards are based on academic merit and encourage international Chinese students to achieve first-class results during their studies.

Microsoft Research brought together top-notch computer science PhD student researchers who are about to embark on their careers with researchers and engineers who have proven research and technology impact for the 2-day Student Summit on Mobility, Systems, and Networking. During the summit, students presented their work to an ideal audience--their academic peers and a small group of Corporate Vice President-nominated engineers and researchers from Microsoft’s worldwide labs. Out of the 4 students recognized in the “Best Of” competition, two are from Berkeley EECS: Matthias Vallentin won Best Poster and Colin Scott received Honorable Mention.

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 Mu Chapter of UC Berkeley has received the 2014-15 IEEE-HKN Outstanding Chapter Award.  This award is presented to IEEE-HKN chapters in recognition of excellence in their chapter administration and programs. Recipients are selected on the basis of improving professional development; raising instructional and institutional standards; encouraging scholarship and creativity; providing a public service, and generally further the established goals of IEEE-HKN.

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.

11 EECS graduate students have been awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships (NSF GRFP). In EE they are Sidney Douglas Buchbinder, Regina Eckert, Laura Hallock, Sang Min Han, Michael Kellman, Efthymios Papageorgiou and Margaret Payne. In CS they are Abhishek Gupta, Grant Ho, Ethan Jackson and Gregory Kahn. The NSF GRFP program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. Fellows benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees.

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”.

Kay Ousterhout recently won the Google Ph.d. Fellowship. This is one of the highest honors a CS grad student can win. It is extremely selective, with only a small number universities invited to submit two nominees each. Kay is a 5th year student of Prof. Sylvia Ratnasamy. The Google Phd Fellowship was created in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in Computer Science (CS) and related disciplines.

A special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, the most highly cited general-interest journal in electrical engineering and computer science, on the evolution of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and its future developments, features papers from a number of research groups in EECS. The issue, including Prof. Robert Brayton and Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli as guest editors, has brought together for the first time multiple perspectives on the future of EDA and the challenges ahead. The significant contributions from EECS professors, students, and alumni witness the groundbreaking, continuous role of Berkeley EECS faculty and students in shaping the field.