Raluca Ada Popa has been named a Visionary in the MIT Technology Review's list of 35 Innovators Under 35.  Popa found a way to make computation on encrypted data practical.  Her systems secure computers by making data indecipherable to intruders instead of just relying on firewalls to keep them out.  She says her encryption techniques allow systems to operate as if they’ve been blindfolded. They’re able to compute on data without actually seeing it—which is opening the cybersecurity field to a host of new applications.  Her innovations are in use by companies like IBM.

CS Profs Dawn Song and Hany Farid are among Wired Magazine's list of 25 People Who Are Racing to Save Us (WIRED25 list of innovators for 2019). Song is the co-founder and CEO of Oasis Labs, a startup built around differential privacy—cryptographic techniques that allow companies to incorporate data into their algorithms without seeing the individual data points.   Song believes blockchain technology can help offer a secure home for data that doesn’t require trusting any one company with the keys to it.   Her system would enable you to copy your medical data to a location where researchers who are working to cure diseases could access it without compromising your privacy.  Farid is a pioneer of image science, having been one of the first to develop methods to detect when digital photos have been manipulated. He is now one of the leading authorities on Deepfakes: images, videos, or audio files fabricated or altered by machine learning.  Lately, Deepfakes have been used to mislead and manipulate the public during politicial elections.  “This used to be a boutique little field, but now we’re defending democracy,” says Farid.

A computer algorithm co-developed by Vision Group alumnus Weicheng Kuo (Ph.D. '19), post doc Christian Hӓne, their advisor Prof. Jitendra Malik, and researchers at UCSF, bested two out of four expert radiologists at finding tiny brain hemorrhages in head scans, an advance that one day may help doctors treat patients with traumatic brain injuries, strokes and aneurysms.  The algorithm found some small abnormalities that the experts missed, noted their location within the brain, and classified them according to subtype.  The researchers used of a type of deep learning known as a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) to train the algorithm on a relatively small number of images that were packed with data.  Each small abnormality was manually delineated at the pixel level. The richness of this data — along with other steps that prevented the model from misinterpreting random variations, or “noise,” as meaningful — created an extremely accurate algorithm.

EE Adjunct Prof. Alexandra von Meier, who is the director of the CITRIS California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE)’s Electric Grid program, is the subject of a Berkeley News interview titled "Our energy grid is vulnerable. Locally sourced power may be the answer."   In light of last week's massive PG&E power outage, Von Meier discusses why the current power grid is a fire hazard, why solar power is not a practical alternative during a power outage, and ways to make the grid safer.  She also explains how one of CIEE's research projects, EcoBlock, which is looking into stand-alone microgrids of electrical generation and storage that could be shared among multiple households on a city block, might offer a possible solution.

CS Prof. Ren Ng is quoted in a New York Times article titled "The Reason Your Photos Are About to Get a Lot Better."  The article describes how computational photography is driving the future of phone cameras.  “Most photos you take these days are not a photo where you click the photo and get one shot,” said Ng. “These days it takes a burst of images and computes all of that data into a final photograph.”  He and his students are researching new techniques in computational photography, like applying portrait-mode effects to videos.  One type of effect could be to set the recorded footage to automatically focus on whomever is speaking.  “These are examples of capabilities that are completely new and emerging in research that could completely change what we think of that’s possible,” said Ng.

EECS Prof. Stuart Russell has penned a New York Times Op-Ed titled "How to Stop Superhuman A.I. Before It Stops Us," in which he explains why we need to design artificial intelligence that is beneficial, not just smart.  "Instead of building machines that exist to achieve their objectives," he writes, we need to build "machines that have our objectives as their only guiding principle..."   This will make them "necessarily uncertain about what these objectives are, because they are in us — all eight billion of us, in all our glorious variety, and in generations yet unborn — not in the machines."  Russell has just published a book titled "Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control" (Viking , October 8, 2019).

EECS Postdoctoral researcher Pragya Kushwaha, currently working with Prof. Chenming Hu and Prof. Sayeef Salahuddin in the Berkeley Short-channel IGFET Model (BSIM) group, has won a prestigious 2019 IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) Early Career Award.  This award is presented annually to an IEEE EDS member who has made early career contributions to the field.  Kushwaha develops compact models for emerging electronic devices, now considered the industry standard.  The models are used by circuit designers to predict device behavior (i.e., current, power, and noise) to simulate their circuits during design before fabrication. This honor was previously won by BSAC Postdoc Chen Yang in 2010.

A video of the lecture that MIT Prof. Emeritus Rodney Brooks gave at last week's EECS Joint Colloquium has made IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday,  a weekly selection of "awesome robot videos."  Brooks' talk,  titled "Steps Toward Super Intelligence and the Search for a New Path," examines what we might need to do over the next (few) hundred years  to give AI human level--or even super--intelligence.  He questions the assumptions on which the AI field has been built, and whether both AI and neuroscience will need a fundamental reboot in order to make real progress.  Brooks is known for giving "some of the best video talks ever."