Prof. Ming Wu, post-doc Kyungmok Kwon, and grad students Johannes Henriksson and Jianheng Luo (along with co-lead author Tae Joon Seok of the Gwangju Institute) have built a new photonic switch that can control the direction of light passing through optical fibers faster and more efficiently than ever.  The photonic switch is built with more than 50,000 microscopic “light switches” etched into a silicon wafer. Each light switch directs one of 240 tiny beams of light to either make a right turn when the switch is on, or to pass straight through when the switch is off. This optical “traffic cop” could one day revolutionize how information travels through data centers and high-performance supercomputers that are used for artificial intelligence and other data-intensive applications.

Two papers by EECS faculty have been named 2018 IEEE Micro Top Picks by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH).  The papers were "A Hardware Accelerator for Tracing Garbage Collection," co-authored by Profs. Krste Asanović and John Kubiatowicz (along with Martin Maas), and "FireSim: FPGA-Accelerated Cycle-Exact Scale-Out System Simulation in the Public Cloud," co-authored by Profs. Borivoje Nikolić, Randy Katz, Jonathan Bachrach, and Krste Asanović (along with Karandikar, Mao, Kim, Biancolin, Amid, Lee, Pemberton, Amaro, Schmidt, Chopra, Huang and Kovacs).  Top Picks represent "the most significant research papers in computer architecture based on novelty and potential for long-term impact."  The papers will be published in IEEE Micro's annual “Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences” issue in May/June 2019.

CS Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, CS Profs. Emeriti Richard Karp,  Manuel Blum and Christos Papadimitriou, and alumni Michael Sipser (2016 CS Distinguished Alumnus, PhD '80, advisor: Manuel Blum), Scott Aaronson (CS PhD '04, advisor: Umesh Vazirani), and James Cook (CS PhD '14, advisor: Satish Rao) will all be speaking at The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences Symposium on 50 Years of Complexity Theory: A Celebration of the Work of Stephen Cook.  The symposium, which will be held May 6-9, 2019 in Toronto, Canada, celebrates 50 years of NP-Completeness and the outstanding achievements of Stephen Cook and his remarkable influence on the field of computing.

CS Assistant Professors Raluca Popa and Moritz Hardt have won 2018 Okawa Research Foundation Grants. Okawa Research Grants are bestowed for "studies and analyses in the fields of information and telecommunications." Popa’s research interests are in secure collaborative learning. Hardt’s research interests are in machine learning in social dynamics. The award will be presented in San Francisco in the fall.

At the 2019  IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), the Influential Paper Award was won by the 2009 paper "Predicting Multiple Metrics for Queries: Better Decisions Enabled by Machine Learning" by Archana Ganapathi, Harumi A. Kuno, Umeshwar Dayal, Janet L. Wiener, Armando Fox, Michael I. Jordan, and David A. Patterson.  This paper presented a data engineering methodology that has become the foundation for using machine learning to understand system behavior, espeicially in the vital areas of database optimization and data warehousing.  After receiving her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Berkeley, Archana Ganapathi has gone on to lead data strategy and analytics at Splunk.

CS Profs. Alexei Efros, Ken Goldberg and Michael Jordan, and Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan, will be participating in the TechCrunch (TC) Sessions: Robotics + AI 2019 event on April 18 .  The day-long event includes "on-stage, live interviews and demos with the world's leading technologists, founders and investors on robotics and AI, workshops on key topics, and focused networking."  Efros (Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research--BAIR--Lab)and Dragan (InterACT Lab, BAIR Lab, and Center for Human-Compatible AI) are featured speakers.  Goldberg and Jordan will be part of a panel exploring "Artificial Intelligence: Minds, Economies and Systems that Learn."

CS Adjunct Prof. Ali Ghodsi is on Solutions Review's list of "The 10 Coolest Data Science and Machine Learning CEOs."  Ghodsi is the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, and responsible for the growth and international​ ​expansion of the company.  He previously served as the VP of Engineering and Product​ ​Management before taking the role of CEO in January 2016.  Ghodsi is on the board of the RiseLab and  was one of the creators of the open source project Apache Spark.

A research paper by EECS Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin's group that shows direct measurement of Negative Capacitance was highlighted in an article in Nature Electronics titled "Negative capacitance found."   Negative Capacitance is a new state of ferroelectric material that was discovered by Salahuddin in 2008 and promises to significantly improve energy efficiency in electronics.

CS Teaching Prof. and alumnus Dan Garcia (M.S. '95/Ph.D. '00) has authored more submissions in the 50 year history of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) than anyone else.  Garcia authored 61 SIGCSE submissions accepted between 2003 and 2016 (submissions were counted from 1969 to 2018).  This count is particularly impressive since he was precluded from submitting papers in 2017 and 2018 because he was serving as program co-chair and symposium co-chair, respectively.  It also  doesn't include his 5 accepted submissions in 2019.   Berkeley ranked #3 for the highest number of accepted papers (114) and #9 for the most citations (302) in SIGCSE's history .

9 papers co-authored by 6 EECS faculty, 13 students,  3 post docs, and 3 alumni have made it into the Top 10 research papers ranked by TOPBOTS in four categories of AI Research. TOPBOTS is the largest publication, community, and educational resource for business leaders applying AI to their enterprises.  3 papers co-authored by Sergey Levine made the #1, #3, and #9 spots in "What Are Major Reinforcement Learning Achievements & Papers From 2018?"  A paper co-authored by Moritz Hardt ranked #5 in "Top 2018 AI research papers" and #3 in  "Recent Breakthrough Research Papers In AI Ethics." A paper co-authored by Jitendra Malik ranked #7 in the Top 2018 papers and #5 in "10 Cutting Edge Research Papers In Computer Vision & Image Generation."  The #2 Top 2018 paper was co-authored by David Wagner, and a paper co-authored by Alexei Efros ranked #9 in the Computer Vision category.