The California state legislature has allocated $6.87 million in its 2023-24 budget to UC Berkeley to develop a first-of-its-kind, statewide database of police misconduct and use-of-force records. The Police Records Access Project will be led by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the Graduate School of Journalism and will partner with other organizations like the EPIC Data Lab, to collect, curate, and make accessible records that were unlocked for the public by a 2019 state law. The project aims to help communities, journalists, public defenders, prosecutors, and police departments develop a deeper understanding of California policing.

An article produced by the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society highlighted the increasingly frought landscape of user privacy in the emerging world of Virtual Reality (VR) devices. The article cites two papers published by faculty, students, and visitors affiliated with the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence. Led by CS Ph.D student Vivek Nair and Professor Dawn Song, the research showed that users of such devices can be identified using just minutes of their head and hand movements. Movement data, which is collected and shared with companies and other players to fuel these worlds, can be used to infer dozens of details from age to disability status. One paper demonstrates that body movements are as singular and reliable an identifier as fingerprints, which was accepted for publication at the USENIX Security Symposium. Another found that use of headset data could accurately identify or infer more than 25 characteristics, including location, age and height, which will be published for the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. “We've done an extensive job of proving that there is a privacy risk here and that it is a different kind of privacy risk than what we have seen on the web,” Nair said. “These kinds of approaches for how to either transform the data or control who has access to it, that's going to be our main focus moving forward." Berkeley RDI is a multi-disciplinary initiative aimed at advancing the science, technology and education of decentralization and empowering a responsible digital economy. This work is part of the center’s Metaverse security and privacy research effort.

A team of researchers led by Professor Boubacar Kanté has demonstrated the first on-demand quantum light source using silicon, an advancement towards creating photons in ways that would reliably feed quantum networks, or a quantum internet. “The possibility to use silicon as a source of quantum light signifies that current large-scale Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) chip manufacturing processes at the core of today’s optoelectronics and artificial intelligence (AI) devices may be directly used for future quantum systems,” Kanté said. He elaborated further: "In this work, we successfully embedded for the first time an atomic defect in silicon the size of atoms (1 angstrom) in a silicon photonic cavity (1 micron) with the size of less than one-tenth of a human hair. The cavity forces the atom to be brighter, and it emits photons at a faster rate. Those are necessary ingredients for scalable quantum light sources for the future [quantum] internet." This research was published in Nature Communications on June 7th, 2023. The study was led by post-doctoral scholars Walid Redjem and Wayesh Qarony, and Yertay Zhiyenbayev, a third-year Ph.D. student in Kanté’s group. Other co-authors include Schenkel, Vsevolod Ivanov, Christos Papapanos, Wei Liu, Kaushalya Jhuria, Zakaria Al Balushi, Scott Dhuey, Adam Schwartzberg and Liang Tan. The National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy provided the primary support for the study. Additional funding came from the Office of Naval Research, the Moore Inventor Fellows program and UC Berkeley’s Bakar Fellowship.

Professors Ana Arias and Kristofer Pister were featured in the Spring 2023 issue of Berkeley Engineer, showcasing their recent development of a tracking system for agricultural land which uses a novel printed sensor array and a wireless communications platform. The technology, dubbed the SmartStake system, uses stake-mounted sensors to provide an inexpensive alternative to cavity ring-down spectroscopy, a state-of-the-art but far more costly method for measuring gases like nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that plays a role in climate change. They hope their system, co-developed with Whendee Silver, Professor of Ecosystem Ecology and Biogeochemistry, may someday transform biofuel agriculture by enabling farmers to fine-tune agricultural practices to lower nitrous oxide emissions, while also optimizing fertilizer and irrigation usage. Berkeley Engineer is published twice yearly by Berkeley Engineering’s Office of Marketing & Communications and distributed to more than 50,000 alumni, faculty, donors and friends, highlighting the excellence of faculty, alumni and students and bringing their work to life through news and research stories.

Professor Joseph Hellerstein was awarded the 2023 SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, citing innovative contributions in extensible query processing, interactive data analytics, and declarative approaches to networking and distributed computing. The award is given for innovative and highly significant contributions of enduring value to the development, understanding, or use of database systems and databases. Until 2003, this award was known as the “SIGMOD Innovations Award.” In 2004, SIGMOD, with the unanimous approval of ACM Council, decided to rename the award to honor Dr. E.F. (Ted) Codd (1923 – 2003) who invented the relational data model and was responsible for the significant development of the database field as a scientific discipline. SIGMOD, otherwise known as the the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data, is concerned with the principles, techniques and applications of database management systems and data management technology. Its members include software developers, academic and industrial researchers, practitioners, users, and students. SIGMOD sponsors the annual SIGMOD/PODS conference, one of the most important and selective in the field.

EECS Assistant Professor Alane Suhr has received an honorable mention for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Suhr’s dissertation, “Reasoning and Learning in Interactive Natural Language Systems,” was honored “for formulating and designing algorithms for continual language learning in collaborative interactions, and designing methods to reason about context-dependent language meaning.” Suhr’s research is focused on natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision. Suhr will be joining Berkeley EECS as an assistant professor in July 2023.

EECS Professor Michael (Miki) Lustig has won the Society for Pediatric Radiology Pioneer Award. Lustig and longtime collaborator Stanford Radiology Professor Shreyas Vasanawala were recognized “for their collaborative  work in ushering in a new era of cardiovascular & body MR innovations designed for the pediatric patient, bringing us closer to a dedicated pediatric MR scanner system.” Since 1990, the Society of Pediatric Radiology has honored certain physicians who have made special contributions to the early development of the pediatric radiology field. Lustig’s research focuses on computational MRI methods. Lustig and Vasanawala have been collaborating for over 15 years with the aim of eliminating the need for anesthesia in pediatric MRI.

The UC Board of Regents today voted to establish UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), the campus’s first new college in more than 50 years. The vote is the result of a three-year process to transform the Division of Computing, Data Science and Society into a college, which, in its new organizational structure, will be able to more effectively form new programs and partnerships, support instruction and research and foster identity and community among faculty, students and alumni. The college includes the Data Science Undergraduate Studies program, the Department of Statistics, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, the Center for Computational Biology and the Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet. CDSS shares the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences with the College of Engineering, the Social Science Data Lab (D-Lab) with the Social Sciences division, and the Computational Precision Health program with UC San Francisco (UCSF). “We are thrilled to announce a new college at Berkeley that connects our excellent research and education in computing, data science and statistics with the many data-intensive disciplines across our campus,” said Chancellor Christ. “Infusing the power of data science across multiple disciplines, from basic and applied sciences to the arts and humanities, will help us to fully realize its potential to benefit society, help address our world’s most intractable problems, and achieve our most visionary goals. At Berkeley, we have the opportunity and responsibility to educate data science students from diverse backgrounds to become the ethical leaders we need in private industry, the public service sector, and education.”

Three Berkeley EECS graduate students from the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC) were selected to receive Apple Ph.D. Fellowships in Integrated Systems for 2023-24. Hesham Beshary (Advisor: Niknejad), Liz Murray (Advisor: Rikky Muller) and Biqi (Rebekah) Zhao (Advisors: Alon/Muller/Lustig/Liu) will receive financial support covering the fees and stipend of their degree program at Berkeley, as well as continued professional interaction through Apple internships. The fellowship recognizes top students with expressed interest in IC engineering, SoC design, Verification, Test, and Computer Architecture.