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 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. Sanjam Garg and Nir Yosef have been awarded Okawa Foundation Research Grants for 2016. This award recognizes promising young faculty members in the fields of information and telecommunications. Prof. Garg, whose research interests are in cryptography, security and more broadly theoretical computer science is awarded for his work on software obfuscation. Prof. Yosef, whose research interests are in utilizing high-throughput genomic data sets, and immune cells, covering various aspects of their biology, is awarded for his work on annotating the regulatory genome of mammalian cells.

Prof. David Tse has been named recipient of the 2017 IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award. This award is the highest honor in the field of information theory and was instituted to honor consistent and profound contributions to the field. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory.

EECS Ph.D. student Nick Carlini (advisor Prof. David Wagner) in collaboration with a team of researchers from Georgetown University are featured in a number of news articles. They have revealed how secret commands could use voice-control tools like Siri and Google Now to take over your smartphone without your knowledge. They ran a series of tests to see just how easily these assistants could be tricked.

Prof. Kannan Ramchandran has been selected to receive the 2017 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the integration of computers and communications. Prof. Ramchandran is recognized for his pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of distributed source and storage coding. He pioneered the use of now-popular rate-distortion methods for image and video compression, co-invented distributed source coding, and developed state-of-the-art distributed storage codes which have influenced large-scale storage systems.

Prof. Claire Tomlin has been selected to receive the 2017 IEEE Transportation Technologies Award, which recognizes advances in technologies applied in transportation systems. Prof. Tomlin is being recognized for contributions to air transportation systems, focusing on collision avoidance protocol design and avionics safety verification. She pioneered methods for computing the reachable set (encompassing all behaviors) of a hybrid system, which allow one to verify that the system stays within a desired (safe) range of operation and to design controllers to satisfy constraints.

Prof. Stuart Russell is featured in an article on the Tech Republic’s online forum titled “We can't prevent AI changing the world but we can stop robots cooking cats”. With the prospect that computers and robots will become as smart as humans and eventually surpass human intelligence, Prof. Russell says it’s time to begin working on how to get these intelligent machines to share our values.

The research work of Prof. Ken Goldberg is featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled “Would You Trust a Robot Surgeon to Operate on You?” Today’s surgical robots extend the surgeon’s capacities; they filter out hand tremors and allow maneuvers that even the best surgeon couldn’t pull off with laparoscopic surgery’s typical long-handled tools. Using a da Vinci robotic surgical system Prof. Goldberg is teaching it how to independently perform a surgical task.

Prof. Ming Wu has been named recipient of the IEEE Photonics Society 2016 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award. This award recognizes an exceptional scientific contribution that has had significant impact in the field of lasers and electro-optics. Prof. Wu is being recognized for his pioneering contributions in micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS). Prof. Wu invented "optoelectronic tweezers" (OETs), which use projected optical images to dynamically create conductive regions which in turn produce local dielectrophoretic forces that can trap biological cells. OET-based systems can be used to select, manipulate, and analyze thousands of individual cells in parallel. They are being used today for antibody discovery, cell-line development, and single-cell genomics.