Effective January 1, 2017, Prof. Ken Goldberg will serve as Chair of the Department of Industrial Engineering & Operations Research (IEOR).  Ken is a professor of IEOR, with secondary appointments in EECS, Art Practice, the School of Information and Radiation Oncology at UCSF’s Medical School. Ken is Director of CITRIS’s People and Robots Initiative and UC Berkeley’s AUTOLAB, where he and his students pursue research in geometric algorithms and machine learning for robotics and automation in surgery, manufacturing and service applications.

A companion to Tech Review’s annual 35 Innovators Under 35 list features a list of seven innovators over 70. The new list includes EECS Professor Ruzena Bajcsy and professor emeritus Michael Stonebraker.  The 7 Over 70 list acknowledges innovators who are continuing to have sustained impacts in their field well after most of their colleagues have decided to retire.

EE professor and Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, Alex Bayen, is interviewed by KRON4 News for an piece titled "Are the I-80 SMART corridors easing traffic congestion?"  Bayen says “It’s not going to be possible in the future to build more infrastructure to accommodate more traffic. So, in order to relieve that congestion, we need other solutions and the solutions have to do with operations and planning, and this is really where SMART corridor concept can make a huge difference.”

Prof. David Wagner has won the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) 2016 Outstanding Innovation Award. This award is given for outstanding and innovative technical contributions to the field of computer and communication security that have had lasting impact in furthering or understanding the theory or development of secure systems. Prof. Wagner is recognized "For innovative research in systems security, software security, and cryptography that has inspired research in sandboxing, static analysis for security, and cryptanalysis."

After six years of delivering major technological advances like Apache Spark, Apache Mesos and Alluxio, the AMPLab (Algorithms, Machines and People Lab) directed by Adjunct Prof. Michael Franklin and Profs. Michael Jordan and Ion Stoica will be closing and the RISELab (Real-time Intelligent Secure Execution Lab) will take it’s place. The RISELab will continue the work of the AMPLab, tackleing the next phase in distributed computing. Prof. Ion Stoica will continue his role as director and will be joined by Prof. Joe Hellerstein and Assistant Profs. Joseph Gonzalez and Raluca Ada Popa. AMPLab End of Projects events will be held on Nov. 17 & 18, 2016 at the International House, UC Berkeley.

Computer Science Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine is the subject of an article in BGR about machine learning titled Meet the professor who will help robots learn common sense.  “One of the things I think we’ve seen with computer vision is the bottom-up approach tends to be very effective,” Levine says. “In other words, once you figure out a good way to acquire the low-level representations — in the case of vision, things like the fact that images consist of edges — then whatever technique you use that’s general that can acquire those low-level representations will also be able to deal with the higher level stuff”

“So for me, part of the hope is if we can find the right way to acquire the low-level behaviors, the higher behaviors will begin to emerge naturally. Using the same technique just applied at a larger scale.”

Prof. Chenming Hu has been elected to be inducted into the 2017 Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame by the Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC). Hall of Fame members are selected based on demonstration of significant engineering or technical achievements, provided significant guidance in new and developing fields of engineering-based technology, and/or has managed or directed an organization making noteworthy contributions in design, manufacturing, production or service through the uses of engineering principles and applications. Hall of fame members represent the cream of the crop of the Valley and, and counts among its membership people like Gordon Moore, William Hewlett and David Packard in addition to our esteemed colleagues Paul Gray, Dave Hodges, Lotfi Zadeh, David Paterson, and Ernie Kuh.

The Wisdom Café had the opportunity to sit down with UC Berkeley's new Vice Provost of Academic and Space Planning, EECS Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, and discuss her career path, her beliefs, and more.

Prof. Edward Lee has been selected to receive the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award. This award is given to recognize individuals for their outstanding technical achievement and leadership. Prof. Lee’s current research interests center on design, modeling, and analysis of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is the Director of the nine-university TerraSwarm Research Center, a director of the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (CHESS), and the Director of the Berkeley Ptolemy Project.

The research teams of Profs. Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz and Associate Prof. Laura Waller have been selected to receive grants from the federal governments Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative that started three years ago by President Barack Obama. Profs. Carmena and Maharbiz will receive $225K from the National Eye Institute to test newly developed wireless sensors, dubbed neural dust, to record activity in the central nervous system. Prof. Waller received $225K from the National Eye Institute and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to develop compressive light field microscopy to optogenetically track neural activity.