EECS graduate student Shruti Agarwal (advisor: Hany Farid) will participate in the November 19th meeting of the Hollywood Section of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) on the topic of "Digital Humans and Deepfakes: Creative Promise and Peril."  Agarwal, whose research is in the field of multimedia forensics, will be part of a panel that will describe the history of digital humans and deepfakes, the challenges involved in creating them convincingly, and if/how news and entertainment professionals can spot them.  The meeting will be held in tandem with the Radio, Television, Digital Newsroom Association (RTDNA).

Two papers co-authored by Berkeley EECS authors won ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Awards at the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) 2019.  "Duet: An Expressive Higher-Order Language and Linear Type System for Statically Enforcing Differential Privacy" co-authored by Prof. Dawn Song (Ph.D. '02, advisor: Doug Tygar), graduate student Lun Wang, undergraduate researcher Pranav Gaddamadugu, and alumni Neel Somani (CS B.A.  '19), Nikhil Sharma (EECS B.S. '18/M.S. '19),  and Alex Shan (CS B.A. '18), along with researchers in Vermont and Utah, and "Aroma: Code Recommendation via Structural Code Search" co-authored by Prof. Koushik Sen (along with authors at Facebook and UC Irvine), won two of the five honors awarded at the top programming language conference, part of the ACG SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) in October.  

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 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.

5th Year CS Master's students Alvin Kao (B.S. '19)  and Titan Yuan (B.S. '19) have been named to the Siebel Scholars Foundation’s 2020 class.  Kao is working on problems in the autonomous vehicle setting, like predicting the behavior of other agents and trajectory planning.  Yuan is working with the Swarm Lab on embedded software for some of the world’s tiniest wireless devices, so that they can be used as miniature temperature sensors and Bluetooth beacons.

The Berkeley Campus Memorial, which will be held on Tuesday, September 10, from 12 noon to 1 pm, will honor 6 members of the EECS community who died this year:  alumna and ICSI member Sally Floyd (M.S. '87/Ph.D. '89, advisor: Richard Karp),  alumnus and EECS faculty-in-residence/advisor to CITRIS Jean Paul Jacob (MS '65/PhD '66, advisor: Elijah Polak),  EECS and Mathematics Prof. Emeritus Elwyn Berlekamp, EECS and Biophysics Prof. Emeritus Jerome Singer, BWRC staff Tom Boot, and CS undergraduate student Daniel Leahy.  The memorial gathering will be held at the flagpole west of California Hall.

EECS graduate student Carlos Biaou (M.S. '18, advisor: Vivek Subramanian) has won a UC Berkeley Sather Gate Young Volunteer Award.  Berkeley volunteer awards are given to "people who give generously of their time and expertise to serve the Berkeley community."   Biaou was the president of the Black Graduate Engineering and Science Students association (BGESS) from 2017 to 2019.  He won the Pillar of the Community Award from the Latino/a Association for Graduate Students in Engineering and Science at Berkeley (LAGSES) earlier this year "For his commitment to building community across organizations on campus."  Biaou is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow studying various degradation processes in perovskite solar cells. 

EECS sophomore Arth Vidyarthi has been selected to participate in the 2019 Forbes Under 30 Summit scholarship program.  The summit, which brings together "the best minds across industries, venture capitalism, public policy and more to learn, network, collaborate, recruit and exchange ideas," will be held in Detroit at the end of October. The scholarship program grants students the chance to participate in networking opportunities and provides free access to the summit.  “Philanthropy is one of the areas being focused on at this year’s summit," said Vidyarthi, "and I’d love to find out more about the way technology is being used to revolutionize the way it’s being carried out.”