Computer Science Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine is the subject of an article in BGR about machine learning titled Meet the professor who will help robots learn common sense.  “One of the things I think we’ve seen with computer vision is the bottom-up approach tends to be very effective,” Levine says. “In other words, once you figure out a good way to acquire the low-level representations — in the case of vision, things like the fact that images consist of edges — then whatever technique you use that’s general that can acquire those low-level representations will also be able to deal with the higher level stuff”

“So for me, part of the hope is if we can find the right way to acquire the low-level behaviors, the higher behaviors will begin to emerge naturally. Using the same technique just applied at a larger scale.”

Prof. Edward Lee has been selected to receive the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award. This award is given to recognize individuals for their outstanding technical achievement and leadership. Prof. Lee’s current research interests center on design, modeling, and analysis of embedded, real-time computational systems. He is the Director of the nine-university TerraSwarm Research Center, a director of the Berkeley Center for Hybrid and Embedded Software Systems (CHESS), and the Director of the Berkeley Ptolemy Project.

The research teams of Profs. Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz and Associate Prof. Laura Waller have been selected to receive grants from the federal governments Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative that started three years ago by President Barack Obama. Profs. Carmena and Maharbiz will receive $225K from the National Eye Institute to test newly developed wireless sensors, dubbed neural dust, to record activity in the central nervous system. Prof. Waller received $225K from the National Eye Institute and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to develop compressive light field microscopy to optogenetically track neural activity.

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy has been awarded the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Simon Ramo Founders Award. This award acknowledges outstanding professional, educational, and personal achievements to the benefit of society. Prof. Bajcsy has led pioneering research in electrical and computing engineering for nearly 50 years, and is honored for two groundbreaking contributions: active perception, the basic principle and methodology that combines sensing and perception with the control of sensors to build intelligent robots; and computational anatomy, the discipline that has enabled many exciting developments in medical imaging that have clinical and research applications. The impact of her work has spread far beyond the lab, spanning scientific, engineering, and health fields. Bajcsy has also been responsible for the establishment of significant institutions that promote STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education. She is the second woman to receive the Simon Ramo Founders Award.

Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan has been named in Robohub’s list of “25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About”, a list compiled in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day. Addressing the lack of visibility of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering or math), Suw Charman-Anderson started Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) on October 11, 2009, a day internationally celebrating the achievements of women in these fields. Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer chiefly know for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer called the “Analytical Engine”. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine, and as a result is often regarded as the first computer programmer.

Prof. Ali Javey was featured in an AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) EurekAlert! news article titled “Smallest. Transistor. Ever. ”. The research team led by Prof. Javey at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has created a transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate. A strand of human hair is about 50,000 nanometers thick.

Software engineer Adrienne Porter Felt (CS Ph.D. 2012), now the tech lead manager for Google Chrome's usable security team, is the subject of a woprogrammer article at Medium.  Adrienne wrote her dissertation on permissions systems as part of the Security Research Group (under Prof. David Wagner),  and taught introductory computer classes at the Self-Paced Center.  In the article, she describes how she got into computer science, her research into using permissions to restrict the damage that rogue apps can do, and her latest efforts on HTTPS adoption. 

Prof. Eric Paulos is featured in an East Bay Express article titled “Living Room Light Exchange Salon Series: Where Tech and Art Converge”. At the intersection of technology and art, the “Living Room Light Exchange” is a 2 year old salon series in which some 40 intellectual tech workers and artists gather in various living rooms for discussions in which art and tech are not assumed to be inherently opposed. Prof. Paulos gave a presentation about possibilities of technologies that function like works of art, such as "Energy Parasites:" toylike devices that stick onto busses, escalators, and public fountains, harvesting their energy for later uses, such as charging one's phone.

Prof. Björn Hartmann, whose research in Human-Computer Interaction focuses on the creation and evaluation of user interface design tools, end-user programming environments, and crowdsourcing systems, has been appointed Director of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (JIDI). JIDI is UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary hub for learning and making at the intersection of design and technology, extending broadly across campus, serving as a hub where engineers, artists, and makers of all kinds can gather and collaborate.

Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine (former postdoc of Associate Prof. Pieter Abbeel), Wei Gao (postdoc with Prof. Ali Javey), and alumni Alex Hegyi (EECS M.S. ' 12/Ph.D.  '13) and Oriol Vinayls (Ph.D. EECS '13) made the MIT Technology Review's 2016 list of 35 Top Innovators Under 35. One of Prof. Levine’s projects is to improve motor control of robotic hands, allowing the robot to observe its own tasks and engineer its behavior to perform the tasks correctly. He is also interested in using deep learning to train autonomous drones and vehicles. Wei Gao published a major paper with Javey on the wearable sweat sensor in January that received global attention. Alex Hegyi, now at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto has developed a camera that records parts of the spectrum of light that you can’t see. Oriol Vinyals, now at Google DeepMind in London is working to create computers that can teach themselves how to play and win complex games—not by hard-coding the rules but by enabling them to learn from experience.