Prof. Kannan Ramchandran has been selected to receive the 2017 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications. Prof. Ramchandran is recognized for his pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of distributed source and storage coding. He pioneered the use of now-popular rate-distortion methods for image and video compression, co-invented distributed source coding, and developed state-of-the-art distributed storage codes which have influenced large-scale storage systems.

Prof. Claire Tomlin has been selected to receive the 2017 IEEE Transportation Technologies Award, which recognizes advances in technologies applied in transportation systems. Prof. Tomlin is being recognized for contributions to air transportation systems, focusing on collision avoidance protocol design and avionics safety verification. She pioneered methods for computing the reachable set (encompassing all behaviors) of a hybrid system, which allow one to verify that the system stays within a desired (safe) range of operation and to design controllers to satisfy constraints.

Prof. Stuart Russell is featured in an article on the Tech Republic’s online forum titled “We can't prevent AI changing the world but we can stop robots cooking cats”. With the prospect that computers and robots will become as smart as humans and eventually surpass human intelligence, Prof. Russell says it’s time to begin working on how to get these intelligent machines to share our values.

The research work of Prof. Ken Goldberg is featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled “Would You Trust a Robot Surgeon to Operate on You?” Today’s surgical robots extend the surgeon’s capacities; they filter out hand tremors and allow maneuvers that even the best surgeon couldn’t pull off with laparoscopic surgery’s typical long-handled tools. Using a da Vinci robotic surgical system Prof. Goldberg is teaching it how to independently perform a surgical task.

Prof. Ming Wu has been named recipient of the IEEE Photonics Society 2016 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award. This award recognizes an exceptional scientific contribution that has had significant impact in the field of lasers and electro-optics. Prof. Wu is being recognized for his pioneering contributions in micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS). Prof. Wu invented "optoelectronic tweezers" (OETs), which use projected optical images to dynamically create conductive regions which in turn produce local dielectrophoretic forces that can trap biological cells. OET-based systems can be used to select, manipulate, and analyze thousands of individual cells in parallel. They are being used today for antibody discovery, cell-line development, and single-cell genomics.

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.

Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller, Prof. Ken Goldberg, and Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan are featured in a Berkeley Engineer article describing their research into how machines and humans come into physical contact, behave independently and interact with one another, with the common goal of creating machines with the intelligence to better serve and work with human beings.

EE Prof. Alex Bayen, profiled in a Berkeley news article, is leading a partnership between the Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) and the City of San Francisco to integrate innovative technologies to create a prototype for the future of urban transportation.

CS Professor Stuart Russell is featured in a Voice of America article in which he discusses how developments in artificial intelligence may impact global manufacturing, agriculture, business services, the financial industry, health care, and weaponry. "If we are going to make systems that are going to be more intelligent than us, it’s absolutely essential for us to understand how to absolutely guarantee that they only do things that we are happy with," he says.

CS post-doctoral researcher Julian Shun has won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation "Shared-Memory Parallelism Can Be Simple, Fast, and Scalable." This award is presented annually to the author of the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering.