News

Jan Rabaey to receive two honorary doctorates

Prof. Jan Rabaey will be receiving two honorary doctorates. The first one is for scientific merit from the University of Antwerp in Belgium on March 30, 2017.  The second one will follow on May 20 from the Tampere University of Technology. The title of Honorary Doctor is the highest recognition that a university can award. In the early 1990s, Prof. Rabaey developed the ‘infopad’, the forerunner of the iPad and tablet computers. He is currently conducting research into the human intranet, which involves connecting the human body to sensors and devices that communicate with the human brain.

Dan Garcia's research group GameCrafters featured in PBS Newshour article

Prof. Dan Garcia was interviewed in a PBS Newshour article titled “This Pi Day, use math to beat your friends at classic toy games”. To celebrate Pi Day, mathematicians and physicists explored three classic toys, hula hoops, yo-yo’s and Connect Four on ways to be the most successful with each toy. To count how many possible ways a real game of Connect Four could end, Prof. Garcia’s  research group called GamesCrafters created a program to simulate all the moves. GamesCrafters “strongly solved” the game and found 4,531,985,219,092, or 4.53 trillion combinations to Connect Four are possible.

Student startup culture is in The House

A number of EECS alumni and faculty have been invited to guest lecture for a DeCal course called "Build the Future" (CS 198), designed in collaboration with startup institute The House, to get undergraduate students engaged with the Berkeley entrepreneurial ecosystem and to use their time on campus creatively.  CS majors Jimmy Liu and Zuhayeer Musa (who run a company called Bash) helped develop the course, CS Prof. Scott Shenker is the faculty advisor, and Cameron Baradar (B.S.’15 EECS) is executive director of The House.  Speakers will include CS Prof. Joe Hellerstein, EE Prof. Kurt Keutzer, co-founder of Oculus Jack McCauley (B.S.’86, EECS), and founder of inDinero Jessica Mah (B.S.’10 EECS).

Björn Hartmann is countering extremism with technology

Designing Technology to Counter Violent Extremism,” a course co-taught by CS Associate Prof. Björn Hartmann at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, is designed to develop technology-based solutions to ideologically motivated violence in the United States.  In the class, students seek to understand the roots of violent extremism and conceive of technological antidotes. “The Internet — from viral videos to hijacked hashtags to bot networks — has emerged as a key arena in which violent extremists engage with the public,” the course description reads. “But technology is also a key tool in the fight against extremism.”

Jose Carmena wants to use brain implants to tune the mind

EE Prof.  and co-director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses Jose Carmena participated in a discussion with the Kavli Foundation about technologies that might be used to treat mental illness or enhance memory. Prof. Carmena, who has co-developed brain-machine interfaces and implantable microsensors, says "we have learned a lot about how to target different areas in the brain.  The aim of these devices is to help people who are paralyzed by injury or disease move again by creating an artificial pathway between the areas of the brain that control motion and the muscles. Essentially, they are devices that use electrodes implanted in the brain to translate thoughts into the action of prosthetics."

Startup Trifacta gives customers an intuitive, agile new way of working with data

Trifacta, a data wrangling startup co-founded by Prof. Joe Hellerstein (also company CSO and CS alumnus--M.S. '92), is one of the companies profiled by Computer Weekly in an article titled "Silicon Valley startups aim to make big data capture and prep slicker."  Customers of Trifacta, which specializes in sorting out data and getting it into shape for analysis, includes the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, PepsiCo, Walmart, and soon Google (Cloud Dataprep). Other CS alumni on the Trifacta team include co-founder and CXO Jeffrey Heer (B.S. '01/M.S. '04/Ph.D. '08) and Vice President of Products Wei Zheng (B.A. '99).  

Anca Dragan wants more human-centered AI4ALL

At the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Camp this year, Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan will lead AI4ALL, a Berkeley education program designed to introduce high potential, low income high schoolers to humanistic AI.  In an article titled "The future of AI needs to have more people in it" she discusses the importance of creating AI with humans in mind and the value of diverse approaches to the field.

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli selected to receive the 2017 IEEE TCCPS Award

Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has been named recipient of the 2017 IEEE TCCPS (Technical Committee on CyberPhysical Systems) Technical Achievement Award. This award recognizes significant and sustained contributions to the cyber-physical system (CPS) community based on the impact of high-quality research made by the awardee throughout their lifetime. Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli 's research interests are in design methodologies and tools for wireless sensor networks, embedded systems, hybrid systems, cyber physical systems (CPS), Systems of Systems (SoS) and electronic design automation.

Prof. Kenneth Mei has passed away

EECS Prof. Emeritus Kenneth K. Mei, innovator in computational electromagnetics, passed away on Feb 16, 2017 at the age of 84.  Prof. Mei was born in China, served as an interpreter during the Korean War, earned his degrees at the University of Wisconsin, and joined the EECS department in 1962.  Prof. Mei’s work on formulating Maxwell’s equations into integral equations, now known as the “method of moments,” is one of the most important and widely used numerical techniques for analyzing scattering, antenna and microstrip circuit problems. He invented the superabsorption method in 1989 and the measured equation of invariance (MEI) in 1992. The MEI method made it possible for personal computers to handle problems previously only resolvable by a supercomputer.  Prof. Mei retired in 1994.

A new understanding of the world through grassroots Data Science education

Vani Mandava, the Director of Data Science at Microsoft Research, has written an article about the innovative course Foundations of Data Science taught by CS Assistant Teaching Prof. John DeNero and Ani Adhikari, a Teaching Professor in the Department of Statistics.  Mandava examines the motives and experiences of the students, and describes the aim of Berkeley’s Data Science Education Program (supported in part by Microsoft) to make data science an integral feature of a liberal education and a core interdisciplinary capacity available to all Berkeley undergraduates.