Prof. Marti Hearst and a team in the I School are featured in a Berkeley School of Information article titled “Teaching a Computer to Write Poetry”. The discipline of Natural Language Processing aims to analyze and understand human language.  Computers are learning to respond using human language, but poetry presents unique challenges. Poetry evokes feelings and emotion more than just the written word, and sonnets follow a strict scheme of rhyme, meter and metaphor.  Computer-generated sonnets from this team placed second in the 2016 “PoetiX”, a competition of only computer-generated traditional sonnets: fourteen line poems, in iambic pentameter, in either “Shakespearean” or “Petrarchan” form.

Our Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Divisions both ranked third in the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities.  UC Berkeley was once again named the top public university worldwide.  The ARWU annually ranks more than 1,200 universities on the quality of both faculty and research.

EECS came in third after Stanford and MIT in both fields.  The CS top five was rounded out by Harvard and Princeton,  while Nanyang University and Georgia Tech followed Berkeley in the EE top five.

Incoming CS Assistant Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, alumnus Shoaib Kamil (Ph.D. CS 2012 under Profs. Armando Fox and Kathy Yelick) and alumnus Wojciech Matusik (B.S. EECS 1997), along with other researchers at MIT CSAIL, Adobe, U. of Toronto, Texas A&M, and U. of Texas have developed Simit,  a programming language that can speed up computer simulations 200-fold or reduce the code they require by 90 percent.

The language has applications outside simulations, and there are even plans for it to augment machine learning, data analytics, optimization and robotics in addition to a version of Google's PageRank algorithm.

Prof. Michel Maharbiz and Jose Carmena's paper on Neural Dust is featured by the online journal Neuron (Vol. 91, Issue 3, August 2016) in an article titled "Wireless Recording in the Peripheral Nervous System with Ultrasonic Neural Dust". They, with Profs. Elad Alon and Jan Rabaey and a team of engineers,  have built the first dust-sized, wireless sensors that can be implanted in the body that could monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time. And because they are batteryless, they could also be used to stimulate nerves and muscles, opening the door to “electroceuticals’ to treat disorders such as epilepsy , to stimulate the immune system or bring down inflammation. Articles have also appeared in:

Scientific American -  "Neural Dust" Could Enable a Fitbit for the Nervous System

UC Berkeley News - Sprinkling of neural dust opens door to electroceuticals

C|NET - Beyond Fitbit: 'Neural dust' puts invisible cyborg tech deep inside you

Popular Science - Wireless 'Neural Dust' Could Monitor Your Brain

The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation was spotlighted in an article in the California Council on Science & Technology (CCST) website titled “UC Berkeley and UC San Diego Explore Engineering Education of the Future through Making”. The Jacobs Institute is UC Berkeley’s interdisciplinary hub for students, teachers and practitioners who work at the intersection of design and technology to turn insights into prototypes and through testing and iteration design solutions that benefit people and society.  Prof. Björn Hartmann is the interim faculty director.

The Women in Technology (WIT) Leadership Round Table, started by Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu, EECS grad student Virginia Smith, EECS alumna Gitanjali Swamy and Sheila Humphreys is featured in Medium, an online community of writers, in an article titled “Women in Technology: How a Handful of Leaders in Tech are Taking Matters into Their Own Hands”, written by Virginia Smith.  Aimed at developing sustainable solutions to increase the presence of women in technology, WIT is bringing together technology leaders in academia, industry, and non-profits to spark solutions-oriented discussion among women who can go back to their organizations and immediately make change.

Alumnus Billy Klüver (EE MS 1955/ Ph.D. 1957), who then became an assistant professor in EECS from 1957-58 is featured in a Little Atoms online article titled “How AT&T shaped modern art”. Born in Monaco in 1927, Klüver installed a television antenna on top of the Eiffel tower and developed underwater filming equipment for Jacques Cousteau before coming to Cal.   He eventually joined Bell Telephone Laboratories where he began collaborating with artists  on works incorporating new technology and was co-founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).   Klüver felt artists "helped make technology more human."

The research of Prof. Alexandra von Meier is featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled “Detecting Cybersecurity Threats by Taking the Grid’s Pulse”. In 2013 Prof. von Meier and collaborator Alex McEachern built a “micro-PMU (phaser measurement units)” that could take snapshots of distribution grids, whose power flows have become increasingly complex. While developing this advanced power sensor they produced a promising tool to protect power grids from cyber attack and will compete in a $77M power grid cyber security R&D contest that DARPA is kicking off next month.

Prof. Seth Sanders is featured in a Yahoo Finance article about his participation in a panel discussion on Advancements in Storage Technology at the STUDIO Conference in San Francisco on August 3. Prof. Sanders is the chief scientist and co-founder of Amber Kinetics, Inc., developer of the world’s first commercially ready four-hour flywheel energy storage system.

Prof. Tsu-Jae King Liu has been selected to receive the 2016 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Aristotle Award. The Aristotle Award was created by the SRC Board of Directors in March 1995 to recognize supported faculty whose deep commitment to the educational experience of SRC students has had a profound and continuing impact on their professional performance and consequently a significant impact for members over a long period of time. It is a tribute to the unwavering commitment of Prof. King Liu to all aspects of education. Past winners of this award include Profs. Andrew Neureuther, Chenming Hu, David Allstot and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli.