January 17, 2017
Computer Science graduate student Tobias Boelter has found a security loophole in the popular messaging app WhatsApp that could allow encrypted messages to be read and intercepted. Facebook, which acquired WhatsApp in 2014, had emphasized security and end-to-end encryption as a primary selling point. This flaw may be an inadvertent…
January 13, 2017
Although it is too early to know the candidates, interim Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Carol Christ has announced that a member of faculty will be appointed interim dean of the new Division of Data Science at UC Berkeley. Cathryn Carson, co-chair of the faculty advisory board, said the appointment…
January 12, 2017
Alumnus Silvio Micali (CS PhD ’82, CS Distinguished Alumni 2006) has published a paper called ALGORAND The Efficient and Democratic Ledger where he lays out a groundbreaking new vision of a decentralized and secure way to manage a shared ledger that provides a beautifully elegant solution to the Byzantine General’s problem. …
January 12, 2017
Alumnus Asad A. Abidi (EE MS ’78/PhD ’81, EE Distinguished Alumni 2015) will be the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair in the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. The Chair is named in honor of theoretical physicist…
January 3, 2017
Alumnus Kylan Nieh (CS BA/Business BS 2014) has made the 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30: Enterprise Technology list. While still a student, Kylan started his own public speaking and leadership course at the Haas School of Business and became the youngest recipient of the Business Teacher of the Year…
December 21, 2016
Alumnus Stephen W. Director (EE M.S. ’67/Ph.D. ’68) has been elected as a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors this year. The title recognizes “academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of…
December 21, 2016
Imperva has named alumnus Roger Sippl (CS BS ’77 ) to its board of directors. Sippl is a Silicon Valley software pioneer, entrepreneur and innovator. He founded Informix Software (now part of IBM) in 1980, when he was just 24, to develop and commercialize SQL relational database software. He subsequently…
December 21, 2016
Alumnus Peter Norvig (CS Ph.D. ’86), now Director of Research at Google, is profiled in a Forbes magazine article titled “Artificial Intelligence Pioneers: Peter Norvig, Google.” The article describes Norvig’s history and accomplishments, and outlines his thoughts on human-machine partnerships and the disparate goals of neuroscience and AI research.
December 20, 2016
Quartz explores an algorithm devised by CS Prof. Trevor Darrell, L&S CS undergraduate student Dong Huk Park, CS grad student Lisa Anne Hendricks, and postdoc Marcus Rohrbach, along with researchers in the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, in an article titled “We don’t understand how AI make most…
December 20, 2016
Prof. Clark Nguyen has been selected to receive the 2017 Robert Bosch Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems Award. This award was established by the IEEE Electron Devices Society in 2014 to recognize and honor advances in the invention, design, and/or fabrication of micro or nano- electromechanical systems and/or devices. The…