Prof. Jitendra Malik is featured in a NY Times article titled “A Lesson of Tesla Crashes? Computer Vision Can’t Do It All Yet”. Prof. Malik, a researcher in computer vision for three decades, responded to a fatal crash in May of a man in Ohio driving a Tesla electric car equipped with an Autopilot driver-assistance system. While using this system, the man crashed into a tractor-trailer. Prof. Malik advised, “Knowing what I know about computer vision, I wouldn’t take my hands off the steering wheel.” Tesla and Ford are listening. (Picture: Prof. Jitendra Malik and Fei-Fei Li of Stanford)

ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) has awarded CS  Prof. Christos Papadimitriou the ABZ Gold Platinum Medal at a ceremony in Switzerland. This Medal is awarded to individuals who have fundamentally contributed to the development of computer science and the practice of computer science education.  Previous recipients include Niklaus Wirth, Donald Knuth, David Harel, and Ronald Rivest.

The CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) Invention Lab and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation are launching a new joint Maker Pass enabling UC Berkeley students, faculty and staff access to both facilities seamlessly. The CITRIS Invention Lab (Prof. Eric Paulos, co-founder and current director) was designed to support innovation by providing the knowledge and tools to rapidly design and prototype novel interactive products, embedded sensing systems and integrated mobile devices. The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (Prof. Björn Hartmann, Interim Faculty Director) is an interdisciplinary hub for learning and making at the intersection of design and technology with design studios and access to tools for prototyping, iteration and fabrication. Prof. Costas Spanos is the Director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.

AMPLab researchers Sanjay Krishnan, Prof. Michael Franklin, Prof. Ken Goldberg, Eugene Wu, and Jiannan Wang have developed ActiveClean, a system that uses machine learning to improve the process of removing dirty data by analyzing a user's prediction model to decide which mistakes to edit first, while updating the model as it works.  The demonstration paper titled "ActiveClean: An Interactive Data Cleaning Framework For Modern Machine Learning" received the Best Demo Award at SIGMOD 2016.

ActiveClean is profiled in an I Programmer article and the development team led byEugene Wu (now at Columbia) will present its research on Sept. 7 in New Delhi, at the 2016 conference on Very Large Data Bases.

Profs. Sanjit Seshia, Ruzena Bajcsy, Shankar Sastry, Björn Hartmann, Claire Tomlin and Tom Griffiths are the principal investigators of a new large National Science Foundation project that will tackle the problem of designing “human Cyber-Physical Systems (h-CPS)”, cyber-physical systems that work in concert with humans. The research outcome of the project, called Verified Human Interfaces, Control, and Learning for Semi-Autonomous Systems, or VeHICaL, will have applications in emerging technologies such as semi-autonomous cars and autonomous aerial vehicles (drones). NSF has awarded $4.6M for this project.

Profs. Shankar Sastry and Pravin Varaiya have been elected as International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Fellows. The IFAC Fellow Award is given to persons who have made outstanding and extraordinary contributions in the field of interest of IFAC, in the role as an Engineer/Scientist. Prof. Sastry is recognized for contributions to research and education in the areas of robotic manipulation, adaptive control, nonlinear feedback, and hybrid systems, and Prof. Varaiya is recognized for contributions to control theory, with applications to transportation, power, communications and economic systems.

The research of postdoctoral scholar Oscar Beijbom (supervised by Prof. Trevor Darrell at the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center) is being used to help coral researchers speed up the under-sea mapping of reefs around the world.  Beijbom's neural-networking algorithm is part of a software project,  featured in a Nature article, that can zip through and classify over a million photographs in a matter of months.

The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, which will focus on ensuring that AI systems are beneficial to humans, is being lead by  Prof. Stuart Russell, a long-time advocate of incorporating human values in the design of AI.  Associate Prof. Pieter Abbeel and Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan will serve as co-principal investigators along with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths and faculty from Cornell and the University of Michigan.  The center was made possible by a grant of $5.5 million from the Open Philanthropy Project, as well as grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Future of Life Institute.

Prof. Sergey Levine, EECS alumni Oriol Vinyals and EECS postdoc Wei Gao (working with Ali Javey) have been named on MIT Technology Review’s 2016 TR35 (Innovators Under 35) who push the edge of science, creating new approaches to tackling technology challenges. In the “Pioneers” category Prof. Levine teaches robots to watch and learn from their own successes, supervising it’s own learning, and Oriol Vinyals is working to create computers that can teach themselves how to play and win complex games by enabling them to learn from experience. In the “Inventors” category, Wei Gao is building sweatbands that monitor your health on a molecular level.

Prof. Sylvia Ratnasamy has been selected by Networking Women for their inaugural list of “10 women in networking/communications that you should WATCH”. Over 100 people around the world submitted nominations for this list and the women nominated have all had impact on the networking field, early in their careers. Prof. Ratnasamy’s research focuses on the design and implementation of networked systems. She co-lead the SPAN Center for networking research. She is a recipient of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award, the ACM SIGCOMM Test-of-Time award, the ACM SIGCOMM Rising Star award, and the Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship.