November 13, 2017
CS alumnus Wu-Fu Chen (Ph.D. ’77) has been elected to the Board of Directors of Crown Bioscience Inc., a global drug discovery and development company. Chen is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Acorn Campus Ventures and Partner Emeritus at Mobility Ventures LLC. He started more than a dozen companies,…
November 13, 2017
UC Berkeley is ranked #3 overall in the U.S. and global computer science rankings (CSRankings) for 2017. CSRankings is designed as a more meaningful and transparent alternative to the US News and World Report computer science ranking system–which is entirely reputation-based and relies on surveys sent to department heads and directors of…
November 9, 2017
The Investiture of EECS alumnus Gary May (M.S. ’88 and Ph.D. ’92) as the seventh chancellor of UC Davis took place on Oct. 27 in the Mondavi Center, the first event in UC Davis’ annual Homecoming weekend. May was presented with the Chancellor’s Medal by UC President Janet Napolitano, officially…
November 9, 2017
Start-up Embodied Intelligence, founded by Prof. Pieter Abbeel and his grad students Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang, raised $7M in a seed round yesterday led by venture capital firm Amplify Partners. VC firms Lux Capital, SV Angels, FreeS, 11.2 Capital, and A. Capital also supplied capital. Embodied Intelligence…
November 8, 2017
CS alumnus David Sontag (B.A. ’05), now an assistant professor of EECS at MIT, has been appointed to the Strategic Advisory Board of GNS Healthcare, one of the world’s leading precision medicine companies. Sontag is also the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Career Development Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering…
November 8, 2017
EECS junior Rohan Phadte and fellow student Ash Bhat launched their Chrome browser extension, Botcheck.me, on Halloween and it is already proving invaluable. The app determines whether news posts on Twitter likely came from real people or were generated by a bot. When an armed gunman attacked the congregants…
November 8, 2017
CS alumna Barbara Simons (Ph.D. ’81) is the subject of an article in The Atlantic titled “The Computer Scientist Who Prefers Paper,” which explores her conviction that there is only one safe voting technology: paper ballots. Simons, a pioneer at IBM Research, spent years trying to warn the public…
November 7, 2017
CS students enrolled in CS 194, an experimental “cyberwar” course led by Prof. Doug Tygar, have joined forces with the white hat hackers at HackerOne, a vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platform. This is the first time that HackerOne–which connects hackers with tech companies, private businesses and federal agencies to…
November 7, 2017
The start-up Embodied Intelligence and its founders, Prof. Pieter Abbeel and grad students Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, and Tianhao Zhang, are the focus of two news articles: one from the New York Times titled “A.I. Researchers Leave Elon Musk Lab to Begin Robotics Start-Up,” and one from Berkeley News…
November 6, 2017
Six EECS faculty are profiled in a Berkeley Engineering article titled “Case studies in forward thinking.” Pieter Abbeel’s vision of the future is one of goal-oriented AI, where machines are learning responsibly. Claire Tomlin envisions a future of airspace management, where intelligent robots can quickly and safely react to…