CS Prof. Stuart Russell gave an engaging TED talk in April describing some of the problems in, and possible solutions for, creating a species that is smarter than humans. He argues that building provably altruistic, humble, and humanitarian machines might help us avoid some of the pitfalls inevitable in a future with superintelligent AI.
Computer vision pioneer Prof. Avideh Zakhor is the subject of a Mercury News profile titled "Avideh Zakhor: the brains behind Google Earth and Street View," which touches on her emigration from Iran, the creation of the 3-D city modeling technology for a Defense Department-funded start-up which she ultimately sold to Google, and her current research on indoor mapping. She also discusses the value of encouraging skilled immigrant workers to come to the U.S and the importance of getting more women into STEM fields. "Maybe then we wouldn’t in Silicon Valley have a shortage of STEM workers — it makes it very hard for tech companies to operate; the labor market is very tight." she says.
Prof. Emeritus David Patterson is profiled in a CNBC article which describes how he postponed retirement to conduct research at Google into the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), an ambitious new chip that's designed to run at least 10 times faster than today's processors and is sophisticated enough to handle the intensive computations required for artificial intelligence. Without it, it is estimated that Google would have to double its data centers to support even a limited amount of voice processing. Prof. Patterson described his work on the TPU when he returned to Berkeley as a Colloquium speaker on May 3rd.
Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller has been awarded the 2017 Keysight Early Career Professor Award. The Keysight Early Career Professor Award is established to recognize and encourage excellent research enabling design, test or measurement of electronic systems. The program seeks to establish strong collaborative relationships between Keysight researchers and leading professors early in their careers and to highlight Keysight's role as a sponsor of university research. Prof. Muller's expertise is in the research and commercialization of implantable medical devices and in developing microelectronic and integrated systems for neurological applications. She is also the Co-founder of Cortera Neurotechnologies, Inc. a medical device company founded in 2013 that is commercializing a neural implant device and has released a family of products for the animal neuroscience research market. At Cortera, she held positions as CEO and CTO.
Prof. Jitendra Malik has been named recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Allen Newell Award. The Allen Newell award is presented to an individual for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. Prof. Malik's research has addressed several important problems in computer vision: how to characterize contours in images, how to segment images, and how to represent shape for feature matching. He also was a leader in evaluation methods through the creation of the Berkeley segmentation dataset, using human segmentations to evaluate the correctness of the algorithmic segmentations. He pioneered the use of normalized cuts, anisotropic diffusion, high dynamic range imaging, shape context and the use of graph theory for low-level to mid-level computer vision problems. In computer graphics, his research showed how digital photographs and user-guided photogrammetry can be used to synthesize highly photorealistic computer-generated architectural scenes. He also has made important contributions to computational models of human texture perception including segmentation, shape from texture, and intrinsic image computation.
U.C. Berkeley has the top ten most AMiner Most Influential Scholar Award winners across all fields of computer science in 2016 and the top five most award winners in the fields of Computer Vision, Database, Machine Learning, Multimedia, Security, Computer Networking, and System. The 28 CS faculty members included in the rankings were among the 100 most-cited authors in 12 of the 15 research areas evaluated. Two were among the 100 most-cited authors in 3 different areas each: Scott Shenker ranked #1 in Computer Networking, #51 in System, and #99 in Theory; and Trevor Darrell ranked #8 in Mulitmedia, #18 in Computer Vision, and #100 in Machine Learning. Out of the 700,000 researchers indexed, only 16 appeared on three or more area top 100 lists. See a more detailed breakdown of our influential faculty scholars.
Computer pioneer Harry Huskey, who designed the G15--which might be called the first "personal computer"--at Berkeley in 1954, has died. He taught and conducted research into computer language in the EE department from 1954 to 1967, when he left to found and direct the computer center at U.C. Santa Cruz. Starting in the 1940s, he worked on the Eniac (the country’s first general-purpose programmable electronic computer), the Automatic Computing Engine, and the SWAC, before designing the G-15. It was manufactured and sold by Bendix Aviation Corporation as the first computer designed to be used by a single person without the intervention of other operators. At 950 lbs and the size of a refrigerator, it was much smaller than the other room-sized computers at the time, and cost just under $50,000 (or could be rented for about $1,500 a month), a fraction of the millions of dollars that other systems cost. At 101 years old, he was one of the last surviving scientists in the vanguard of the computer revolution.
Professor Alexei (Alyosha) Efros has won the 2016 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Prize in Computing, formerly known as the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award. This award recognizes early-to-mid-career contributions that have fundamental impact and broad implications. Prof. Efros was cited for groundbreaking data-driven approaches to computer graphics and computer vision and is a pioneer in combining the power of huge image datasets drawn from the Internet with machine learning algorithms to foster powerful image transformations and valuable research findings. He has also made fundamental contributions in texture synthesis, a technique that ushered in new horizons in computer graphics and is widely used in the film industry. ACM Prize recipients are invited to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an annual networking event that brings together young researchers from around the world with recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (computer science), the Abel Prize (mathematics), the Fields Medal (mathematics), and the Nevanlinna Prize (mathematics).
