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.

The research of Prof. Ron Fearing and Mechanical Engineering graduate student Carlos Casarez on cooperative step climbing is featured on the NSF Engineering Discoveries website in an article titled “Roach-like robots run, climb and communicate with people”. Since the 1990’s, Prof. Fearing has been developing biomimetic robots capable or remarkable feats of speed and maneuverability.

A paper titled "Security-Aware Design Methodology and Optimization for Automotive Systems," co-authored by alumnus Chung-Wei Lin and Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has received the 2016 ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) Best Paper Award. This paper was written in collaboration with researchers from UC Riverside and supported by the TerraSwarm research center. The award will be presented at the opening session of the Design Automation Conference (DAC).

EECS alumnus Scott Aaronson (Computer Science Ph.D. '04) "Answers Every Ridiculously Big Question (John Horgan) Throws at Him" in a Cross-Check interview for Scientific American.  Aaronson, an Associate Professor at MIT (soon UT Austin) and an authority on quantum computation, riffs on simulated universes, the Singularity, unified theories, P/NP, the mind-body problem, free will, why there’s something rather than nothing, and more.

The AMP (Algorithms, Machines and People) Lab was featured in the NEA Venture Capital Firm’s blog by Peter Sonsini, in a post titled "Veriflow: The next great startup with Cal connections”. Veriflow is the 3rd and latest EECS UC Berkeley startup to join the NEA portfolio. The successes surrounding Cal’s computer science program stem from the uniqueness of its “lab” model--the open and collaborative project-based approach that focuses on specific objectives over a specific period of time.

The paper by Prof. David Culler and former students Joseph Polastre and Jason Hill titled “Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks", in the Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems has been selected as a winner of the inaugural SIGMOBILE Test of Time award for 2016. The Berkeley MAC (B-MAC) was a pioneering contribution to media access control in TinyOS-based wireless sensor networks. B-MAC and its underlying low-power listening principle became a facto standard in sensor networks. It plays a lasting role in the development of new low power wireless technologies such as IoT.

A special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, the most highly cited general-interest journal in electrical engineering and computer science, on the evolution of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and its future developments, features papers from a number of research groups in EECS. The issue, including Prof. Robert Brayton and Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli as guest editors, has brought together for the first time multiple perspectives on the future of EDA and the challenges ahead. The significant contributions from EECS professors, students, and alumni witness the groundbreaking, continuous role of Berkeley EECS faculty and students in shaping the field.