EE alumnus Jonathan S. Maltz (Ph.D. EE '99) is serving as the lead researcher and Chief Scientific Advisor during the clinical trials of HeartSentry, a non-invasive diagnostic tool to measure and monitor cardiovascular health. HeartSentry is being developed at Lexington Biosciences, a development-stage medical device company in Vancouver, Canada. It is the product of 15-years of research at U.C. Berkeley. Maltz has had over 16 years experience designing new devices for assessing vascular function and evaluating these on human subjects.
CS alumnus Yannis Ioannidis (Ph.D. '86) is featured in an article about Samsung's purchase of Greek text-to-speech company Innoetics for close to 50 million euros. Ioannidis is president of the ATHENA Research & Innovation Center, which nurtured the startup and provided critical support during its evolution and the development of its technology. Innoetics' text-to-speech software learns languages by listening to native speakers, whose voices it can then mimic with great accuracy. It is currently fluent in 19 languages. Samsung plans to use the technology across a wide range of its product ecosystem. Ioannidis says that, as a result of the purchase, “any voice emanating from a Samsung device in the years to come will be ‘Greek,’ the product of Greek technology.” Ioannidis is currently a professor of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens.
CS Prof. Alexei Efros (also alumnus, Ph.D. '03) and his team have developed a new technique, leveraging deep neural networks and AI, to allow novices--even those with limited artistic ability--to quickly add realistic color to black and white images. "The goal of our previous project was to just get a single, plausible colorization," says Richard Zhang, a coauthor and PhD candidate, advised by Efros. "If the user didn't like the result, or wanted to change something, they were out of luck. We realized that empowering the user and adding them in the loop was actually a necessary component for obtaining desirable results." They will present their research into "Real-Time User Guided Colorization with Learned Deep Priors" at SIGGRAPH 2017 in August.
CS alumna Justine Sherry (M.S. '12/Ph.D. '16 advisor: Sylvia Ratnasamy) has won the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Networking and Data Communication. Justine's thesis was on "Middleboxes as a Cloud Service," and brought the benefits of cloud computing to the networking domain. Justine is now assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.
Alumnus Soumitra Dutta (CS M.S. '87/Business M.S. '89/CS Ph.D. '90), who is currently founding Dean of the Cornell College of Business, has been chosen Chairman of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International board of directors. Dutta previously founded the eLab at the Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires (INSEAD--the European Institute of Business Administration) and subsequently served as dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. He is a noted authority on the impact of new technology on the business world.
In October 2006, Netflix announced "The Netflix Prize," a $1M competition where teams of programmers raced to make the Netflix recommendation engine 10% more accurate. The nail-biting competition is profiled in an article for Thrilllist which prominently features participant and CS alumnus Lester Mackey (Ph.D. '12), then an undergraduate at Princeton. "It was so much fun," he said. "The contest was structured so well. We had to learn so much to be competitive and I met so many people along the way." The winners beat the second place team by only 20 minutes. Mackey is now a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and an adjunct professor of Statistics at Stanford University.
EECS alumnus Paul E. Jacobs (B.S. '84/M.S. '86/Ph.D. '89) has been named U.C. Berkeley's 2017 Alumnus of the Year. After graduating from Berkeley, Paul rose up the ranks at Qualcomm, which had been co-founded by his father, and is currently serving as Executive Chairman. He won the IEEE Weber Managerial Leadershiip Award in 2014 and the Distinguished Industry Leader Award in 2015. Paul has donated millions of dollars to the College of Engineering and CITRIS, endowed an engineering professorship, served on a number of important University boards, and funded the creation of the eponymous Jacob's Hall.
The paper titled "ESPIRiT—an eigenvalue approach to autocalibrating parallel MRI: Where SENSE meets GRAPPA" co-written by Associate Prof. Michael Lustig, his graduate student Pat Virtue, and alumnus Mark J. Murphy (Ph.D. '11 advisor: Kurt Keutzer) has been named the most-cited Magnetic Resonance in Medicine article from 2014. The article bridges the gap between the two main approaches for parallel imaging (SENSE and GRAPPA) allowing the reconstruction of images from undersampled multicoil data. It presents a new autocalibration technique combining the extended reconstruction of SENSE with GRAPPA-like robustness to errors.
Authors of the paper are listed as Martin Uecker, Peng Lai, Mark J. Murphy, Patrick Virtue, Michael Elad, John M. Pauly, Shreyas S. Vasanawala, and Michael Lustig.
The Turing Award 50th Anniversary celebration was held at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco on June 23-24, 2017. CS Professors Stuart Russell and Michael Jordan participated on a panel discussion about advances in deep neural networks, Prof. Umesh Vazirani moderated a panel on quantum computing. Prof. Emeritus and Turing winner Michael Stonebraker discussed the legal ramifications of collecting data from a growing number of devices with different encoding formats, and alumnus and Turing winner Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) participated on a panel about the end of Moore's Law.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is considered the "Nobel prize of computing," and comes with a $1 million prize for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field. EECS faculty have won four: Richard Karp for theory and efficiency of algorithms (NP-completeness) in 1985, William Kahan for numerical analysis (floating-point) in 1989, Manuel Blum for computational complexity theory and cryptography in 1995, and Michael Stonebraker for modern database systems in 2014. EECS alumni have won seven: Ken Thompson (B.S. '65/M.S. '66) for operating systems theory (UNIX) in 1983, Niklaus Wirth (Ph.D. '63) for computer languages (EULER/Pascal, etc.) in 1984, Butler Lampson (Ph.D. '67) for distributed, personal computing (workstations, networks, etc.) in 1992, Douglas Englebart (MS. '53/Ph.D. '55) for interactive computing in 1997, Leonard Adleman (Ph.D. '76) for public-key cryptography in 2002, and Shafi Goldwasser (M.S. '81/Ph.D. '84) with Silvio Micali (Ph.D. '82) for cryptography and complexity theory in 2012.
Alumnus Edgar Solomonik (CS Ph.D. '14, adviser: James Demmel) has won the Alston S. Householder Prize XX (2017) for the best dissertation in numerical linear algebra. The Householder prize, which is presented once every three years at a Symposium held in cooperation with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the SIAM Activity Group on Linear Algebra, has two winners this year. Edgar's dissertation, titled "Provably Efficient Algorithms for Numerical Tensor Algebra," also won the EECS Department's David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for truly outstanding research. Edgar is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
