CS Assistant Prof. Alvin Cheung has won a VMware Early Career Faculty Award.  The award recognizes recently appointed faculty "whose research interests and accomplishments seem poised to have significant impact within the industry and academia."  Cheung's research interests include program analysis, program synthesis, improving database application performance, and building large-scale data systems in general. The award comes with a $50K grant and opportunities to collaborate with VMware.

Pieter Abbeel, the co-founder, president and chief scientist of the start-up Covariant, is featured in a number of articles appearing in major publications this week.  The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired Magazine, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, and the IEEE Spectrum all feature articles about robots trained using Covariant's AI technologies that will be deployed  to perform complex tasks in live warehouse environments in the next few years.  Covariant uses deep reinforcement learning techniques to train robots to distinguish between materials that are particularly difficult to discern through a lens, like highly reflective metallic surfaces, transparent plastics, and easily deformable surfaces like cloth and polypropylene, with an unparalleled 99% accuracy.

Prof. Doug Tygar (CS B.A. '82) unexpectedly passed away on January 16th.   As a Professor of Computer Science and a Professor of Information Management and Systems, he made unique and significant contributions to the fields of usable computer security, cryptography, privacy, and digital rights management.  He co-founded the Secure Machine Learning research group in 2004, which focused on defining how machine learning algorithms can be dishonestly manipulated, and how to make them more robust, culminating in a recently published book, Adversarial Machine Learning, with a colleague and two former students.  He also helped to create and co-teach the first offering of the undergraduate Computer Security class at Berkeley (CS 161), and most recently helped to craft and launch the School of Information’s Master of Information and Cybersecurity in 2018.  He will be sorely missed.  Memorial information will be provided at a later date.

In celebration of the anniversary of 150 Years of Women at Berkeley (150W) in 2020, the EECS department will profile a number of remarkable women who have studied or worked here.  This month, Berkeley EECS is highlighting ten trailblazing women who were the first to reach important milestones over the past 50 years.  Learn how professors Susan Graham, Avideh Zakhor, Shafi Goldwasser and Tsu-Jae King Liu, and alumnae Kawthar Zaki, Carol Shaw, Paula Hawthorn, Barbara Simons, Deborah Estrin, and Susan Eggers, broke through glass ceilings on campus, in their fields, in industry, and in the world.

EECS Profs. Trevor Darrell, Anca Dragan, Ken Goldberg, Randy Katz and Stuart Russell are slated to participate in "TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020" on March 3rd.  The single-day event will focus on "Minds and Machines: The Future of Robotics," and will feature "on-stage, live interviews and demos with the world's leading technologists, founders and investors, as well as workshops, audience Q&A with speakers, and highly curated networking."  The event is sponsored by online publishing company TechCrunch in partnership with UC Berkeley, Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), CITRIS, the Sutardja Center, and the Fung Institute.

RISC-V, a royalty-free microprocessor architecture first developed at Berkeley, is emerging as a rival to Arm, the most successful microchip architecture in the world.   The first RISC-V chip was built in 2011 as part of the open source Peer Lab Project by CS Prof. and alumnus Krste Asanović (Ph.D. '98, advisor: John Wawrzynek), CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson, and CS alumni Andrew Waterman (M.S. 11/Ph.D. '16, advisors: David Patterson/Krste Asanović) and Yunsup Lee (M.S. '11/Ph.D. '16, advisor: Krste Asanović).  Asanović, Waterman and Lee went on to found SiFive, "the first fabless semiconductor company to build customized silicon on RISC-V."   Asanović explains that the architecture has gained momentum "not because it's 10% faster. It's because it's a new business model."  Chip designers traditionally have to find a seller to make their microprocessors, but now designers can select RISC-V and "all suppliers compete for your business.  You can add your own extensions without obtaining permission" or paying license fees.

An affordable, human-friendly robot developed by EECS Prof. Pieter Abbeel and Project Blue is among Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New” innovations for 2019.  BLUE (Berkeley robot for Learning in Unstructured Environments) uses artificial intelligence and deep reinforcement learning algorithms to adapt to and operate safely in unpredictable settings, including the common household.  The list is  Popular Science's ranking of the year’s top 100 technologies and products, which highlight feats of engineering, breakthrough software and other acclaim-worthy discoveries from the past year.  BLUE is projected to ship to consumers in the next few years,

EECS Prof. and alumna Dawn Song (Ph.D. '02, advisor: Doug Tygar) has been  selected as a 2019 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).    Song was cited "For contributions to security and privacy" and is now part of an elite group that represents less than 1% of the Association’s global membership.  As one of the world’s foremost experts in computer security and trustworthy artificial intelligence, Song founded a startup to build a new platform based on a paradigm in which people control their data and are compensated for its use by corporations. She was named to both the 2019 WIRED25 list of innovators and Inc.com's list of the 100 most innovative businesswomen in 2019.   Fellows will be honored at an awards banquet in June.

EECS Prof. Trevor Darrell has been appointed chief scientist at Grabango, a provider of checkout-free technology for brick-and-mortar stores.  Darrell is an expert in computer vision, machine learning and perception-based human computer interfaces, and leads the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (BAIR).  He helped develop Convolutional Architecture for Fast Feature Embedding (Caffe), a deep-learning framework used by computer vision researchers around the world.  Grabango announced earlier this year that it had signed four separate agreements with multibillion-dollar retail partners, presiding over a combined 29-million square feet of shopping space.

EECS Prof. Chenming Hu has been awarded the 2020 IEEE Medal of Honor, the highest honor awarded by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  The medal is presented when "a candidate is identified as having made a particular contribution that forms a clearly exceptional addition to the science and technology of concern to IEEE."  Hu, whose seminal work on metal-oxide semiconductor MOS reliability and device modeling has had enormous impact on the continued scaling of electronic devices, was cited for “For a distinguished career of developing and putting into practice semiconductor models, particularly 3-D device structures, that have helped keep Moore’s Law going over many decades.”  He won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2016 and was named to the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame in 2017.