News

Zichao Ye presents PELS Ph.D. Thesis Talk

EECS graduate student Zichao Ye (advisor: Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) is among five winners selected by the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) to showcase their Ph.D. projects to the global power electronics community.  Ye's thesis, titled "Hybrid Switched-Capacitor Power Converters: Fundamental Limits and Design Techniques," focuses on a topological effort to drastically improve the performance of existing power electronics using a hybrid approach, in which both inductors and capacitors are used in the voltage conversion and power transfer process.  During his presentation in April, Ye highlighted one of his hybrid converter designs:  a 48V-to-12V cascaded resonant converter for more efficient data center which demonstrated 99% peak system efficiency and 2500 W/in3 power density.  PELS Thesis (P3) Talk Award winners are chosen by the PELS Education Digital Media Committee during an annual competition.

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Boubacar Kanté publishes paper introducing additional control knob for optical phase engineering

EECS Associate Prof. Boubacar Kanté is among the authors of a paper published in the journal Science titled "Plasmonic topological metasurface by encircling an exceptional point."  The paper introduces "an additional degree of freedom to address optical phase engineering by exploiting the topological features of non-Hermitian matrices operating near [the] singular points".   The novel phase, which was shown to be topologically protected, enables the construction of novel polarization dependent and chiral phased arrays and holograms. The ease of implementation together with its compatibility with other phase-addressing mechanisms will enable information multiplexing with antenna arrays.

Hani Gomez, Ph.D.: Computing Pedagogy at the Nexus of Technology and Social Justice

EECS alumna Hani Gomez (Ph.D. '20, advisor: Kris Pister) is the subject of a Berkeley Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) profile titled "Hani Gomez, Ph.D.: Computing Pedagogy at the Nexus of Technology and Social Justice."  Gomez was born in Bolivia and earned her B.S. in EE at the University of South Carolina before coming to Berkeley for her graduate studies.  She has merged social justice and technology into a post-doc research position at Berkeley, split between EECS and the Human Contexts and Ethics (HCE) program in CDSS.  Gomez helped develop the course CS 194-100 EECS for All: Social Justice in EECS last spring, was one of three presenters in a June HCE workshop titled "Towards Social Justice in the Data Science Classroom," and serves on the EECS Anti-Racism Committee.  She says the preoccupation with perfectionism at Berkeley "doesn’t leave room [for you] to learn from your mistakes...You need to give yourself room to learn or unlearn, to grow and relearn.”

Yang You receives honorable mention for ACM SIGHPC Dissertation Award

EECS alumnus Yang You (Ph.D. '20, advisor: James Demmel)  was named as one of two honorable mentions for the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group in High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) Dissertation Award.  You was selected for developing LARS (Layer-wise Adaptive Rate Scaling) and LAMB (Layer-wise Adaptive Moments for Batch training) to accelerate machine learning on HPC platforms. His thesis, “Fast and Accurate Machine Learning on Distributed Systems and Supercomputers,” focuses on improving the speed and accuracy of Machine Learning training to optimize the use of parallel programming on supercomputers.  You made the Forbes 30 Under 30 2021 Asia list for Healthcare and Science in April and is now a Presidential Young Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore.

Sam Kumar

Sam Kumar wins OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award

CS graduate student Sam Kumar (advisors: David Culler and Raluca Ada Popa) has won the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at the 15th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) for "MAGE: Nearly Zero-Cost Virtual Memory for Secure Computation."   The OSDI, which brings together "professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in a premier forum for discussing the design, implementation, and implications of systems software," selects three best papers each year after a double-blind review.  Co-authored by Prof. David Culler and Associate Prof. Raluca Ada Popa, the paper introduces an execution engine for secure computation that efficiently runs computations that do not fit in memory.  It demonstrates that in many cases, one can run secure computations that do not fit in memory at nearly the same speed as if the underlying machines had unbounded physical memory to fit the entire computation.  Kumar works in the Buildings, Energy, and Transportation Systems (BETS) research group in the RISE Lab.

Deanna Gelosi wins Best Full Paper Award at ACM IDC 2021

"PlushPal: Storytelling with Interactive Plush Toys and Machine Learning," co-authored by CS Masters student Deanna Gelosi (advisor: Dan Garcia), has won the Best Full Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Interaction Design for Children (IDC) conference 2021.  IDC is "the premier international conference for researchers, educators and practitioners to share the latest research findings, innovative methodologies and new technologies in the areas of inclusive child-centered design, learning and interaction."  The paper, which was presented in the "Physical Computing for Learning" conference session, describes PlushPal, "a web-based design tool for children to make plush toys interactive with machine learning (ML). With PlushPal, children attach micro:bit hardware to stuffed animals, design custom gestures for their toy, and build gesture-recognition ML models to trigger their own sounds."  It creates "a novel design space for children to express their ideas using gesture, as well as a description of observed debugging practices, building on efforts to support children using ML to enhance creative play."  Gelosi's degree will be in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and New Media, and her research interests include creativity support tools, traditional craft and computing technologies, digital fabrication, and equity in STEAM.  She is a member of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), the Berkeley Institute of Design (BID), and the Tinkering Studio--an R&D lab in the San Francisco Exploratorium.

New AI system allows legged robots to navigate unfamiliar terrain in real time

A new AI system, Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA), enhances the ability of legged robots, without prior experience or calibration, to adapt to, and traverse, unfamiliar terrain in real time.  A test robot figured out how to walk on sand, mud, and tall grass, as well as piles of dirt, pebbles, and cement, in fractions of a second.  The project is part of an industry-academic collaboration with the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) group and the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) lab that includes CS Prof. Jitendra Malik as Principal Investigator, his grad student Ashish Kumar as lead author, and alumnus Deepak Pathak (Ph.D. 2019, advisors: Trevor Darrell and Alexei Efros), now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, among others.  RMA combines a base policy algorithm that uses reinforcement learning to teach the robot how to control its body, with an adaptation module that teaches the robot how to react based on how its body moves when it interacts with a new environment.  “Computer simulations are unlikely to capture everything,” said Kumar. “Our RMA-enabled robot shows strong adaptation performance to previously unseen environments and learns this adaptation entirely by interacting with its surroundings and learning from experience. That is new.”  RMA's base policy and adaptation module run asynchronously and at different frequencies so that it can operate reliably on a small onboard computer.  

Kevin Cheang and Federico Mora win 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship

EECS Ph.D. students Kevin Cheang and Federico Mora (advisor: Sanjit A. Seshia) have been awarded a 2021 Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QiF) for their proposed project on "Practical Lifting for Verification of Trusted Platform Software."  They are one of the sixteen winners of this year's QiF North America competition, which recognizes "innovative PhD students across a broad range of technical research areas, based on Qualcomm’s core values of innovation, execution and teamwork. QIF enables graduate students to be mentored by our engineers and supports them in their quest towards achieving their research goals."

Yang "Linda" Huang launches new novel: My Good Son

EECS Instructional Support Group (ISG) systems administrator Yang "Linda" Huang, has just published her third book, My Good Son (University of New Orleans Press, May 2021).  The novel, described as "layered, evocative and engaging" by Ms Magazine, had been selected for the University of New Orleans (UNO) Publishing Lab Prize "for the best unpublished novel or short story collection" by authors from around the world.  Like Huang's previous work, "My Good Son" focuses on the generational and cultural complexities of post-Tiananmen Chinese family life.  The story centers on a traditional Chinese father striving for the success of his son, and explores "the parallels and differences of American and Chinese cultures―father-son relationships, familial expectations, sexuality, social mobility, and privilege."  "My Good Son" was reviewed by both the  New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.  Huang, who was featured in the Chinese Literature Podcast on June 4th, will be participating in a Virtual Launch at Booksmith on June 9th, where she will engage in a conversation with author Kaitlin Solimine.

2-D semiconductor contact resistances approach the quantum limit

A paper co-authored by Berkeley EECS Prof. Jeffrey Bokor, his postdoc Yuxuan Lin, Berkeley Physics Prof. Alex Zettl, his postdoc Cong Su, and researchers at MIT, among others, describes a more efficient method of connecting atomically thin 2-D materials to other chip elements, making them a more promising alternative to 3-D silicon-based transistors.  The paper, which was published in Nature, is titled "Ultralow contact resistance between semimetal and monolayer semiconductors." It describes how using the element bismuth (in the place of ordinary metals) for connections in monolayer materials can create contact resistances that approach the quantum limit and make it possible to develop smaller devices.  “We resolved one of the biggest problems in miniaturizing semiconductor devices, the contact resistance between a metal electrode and a monolayer semiconductor material,” says Su. "Through this approach," the paper states, "we achieve zero Schottky barrier height, a contact resistance of 123 ohm micrometres and an on-state current density of 1,135 microamps per micrometre on monolayer MoS2; these two values are, to the best of our knowledge, the lowest and highest yet recorded, respectively."