Research collaboration between Singapore–Berkeley Building Efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics (SinBerBEST 2 -- part of the Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore center) led by EE Prof. Costas Spanos, and UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) resulted in three 2018 Building and Environment Best Paper Awards.  The awards, which are presented annually by the Building and Environment journal, recognize originality, contributions to the field, quality of presentation, and soundness of science.   The honored papers were titled "Automated Mobile Sensing: Towards High-Granularity Agile Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) Monitoring," "Development of the ASHRAE Global Thermal Comfort Database II," and "Personal Comfort Models: Predicting Individuals’ Thermal Preference Using Occupant Heating and Cooling Behavior and Machine Learning."

A new neurostimulator, described in a paper co-authored by EE Prof. Jan Rabaey, Prof. Jose Carmena, Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller, grad students Andy Zhou, George Alexandrov and Ali Moin, and alumnus Fred Burghardt (B.S. '92/M.S. '94), in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, works like a “pacemaker for the brain" to both monitor electrical activity and therapeutically stimulate electric current to the brain at the same time.  The device, named the WAND, could potentially deliver fine-tuned treatments to patients with diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson’s.  Muller's research is part of the CZ Biohub, a division of the $5 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.   Rikky Muller and Jose Carmena are both scheduled to present their work at the 2019 BEARS symposium in February titled "The Future of Medicine: An EECS Perspective."

EE Prof. and alumna Constance Chang-Hasnain (M.S. '84/Ph.D. '87, adviser: John Whinnery) has been elected to the 2018 class of Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).  Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional distinction accorded to 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 life, economic development and the welfare of society.  Chang-Hasnain's research interests range from semiconductor optoelectronic devices to materials and physics, with current foci on nano-photonic materials and devices for chip-scale integrated optics.  She is presently serving as Associate Dean for Strategic Alliances in the College of Engineering as well as the Chair of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Group.

CS Prof. Bin Yu was interviewed by PBS Nova about AlphaZero, Google’s self-teaching artificial intelligence software.   The article probes whether there's more to human intelligence than can be mastered by learning how to win games--which AlphaZero can teach itself to do in a matter of hours.   The process requires a great deal of computing power and uses a lot more energy than the human brain.  Yu observes that absolute energy consumption must be considered when evaluating the software, although AlphZero is clearly very fast and flexible.   “It’s impressive that AlphaZero was able to use the same architecture for three different games,” she says.

EE Prof. Eli Yablonovitch has won the prestigious 2019 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.  The Franklin Institute Awards recognize outstanding achievements in science and invention.  Yablonovitch, who discovered light-trapping “photonic crystals” and developed “photonic bandgap structures” in the 1980s,  was cited "for widely-used scientific improvements to radio- and light-based technologies in wireless communications and solar energy applications."

CS Profs. Krste Asanović and Peter Bartlett have been named 2018 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  ACM Fellows are composed of an elite group that represents less than 1% of the Association’s global membership.  Asanović was named "For contributions to computer architecture, including the open RISC-V instruction set and Agile hardware."  Bartlett was named "For contributions to the theory of machine learning."

CS Prof. Stuart Russell has the won the 2019 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI )Feigenbaum Prize.  Named for AI pioneer Edward Feigenbaum, the prize is awarded biennially "to recognize and encourage outstanding Artificial Intelligence research advances that are made by using experimental methods of computer science."  Russell won in recognition of his "high-impact contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through innovation and achievement in probabilistic knowledge representation, reasoning, and learning, including its application to global seismic monitoring for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty."  The award will be presented in early 2019 at the Thirty-Third Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

CS Assistant Prof. Raluca Ada Popa is interviewed by TechTarget for an article titled "The future of data security threats and protection in the enterprise."  Popa is the co-founder of the RISElab as well as co-founder and CTO of PreVeil, a security startup providing enterprise end-to-end encryption for email and filing sharing.  In the Q&A, Popa discusses the future of data security and the challenges of ensuring adequate defense.

Berkeley Engineering has profiled EECS Prof. Emeritus Donald Pederson (1925-2005) for it's web series celebrating Berkeley's 150th anniversary.  Pederson created an integrated circuit computer simulation program called SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis), one of the first open-source computer programs.  It allowed computer engineers to analyze and design complex electronic circuitry quickly and accurately. Today, every electronic chip manufacturer uses SPICE or one of its derivatives during critical stages of design.

EE Adjunct Prof. David Tse has won the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal,  awarded "for exceptional contributions to information sciences, systems, and technology."  Tse, who is currently a professor at Stanford, won “for seminal contributions to wireless network information theory and wireless network systems.”