CS alumnus Nikunj Oza (M.S. '98/Ph.D. '01), now a research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of the NASA Ames Research Center, talks about NASA's perspectives on Deep Learning for an HPC User Forum video.  He presents a broad overview of work at NASA in data sciences, data mining, and machine learning, and delineates the roles of NASA, academia, and industry in advancing machine learning to help solve NASA's problems.

CS Ph.D. student Pulkit Agrawal (advisers: Jitendra Malik and Jack Gallant) is the subject of a Quant Magazine article titled "Clever Machines Learn How to Be Curious."  Agrawal is working at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab with CS grad student Deepak Pathak, Pathak's adviser Prof. Trevor Darrell, and CS Prof. Alexei A. Efros,  to design experimental machine-learning algorithms which aim to "make a machine curious."  They equipped their learning agent with what they call an intrinsic curiosity module (ICM) designed to pull it forward through a video game without going haywire, despite having no prior understanding of the game. “You can think of curiosity as a kind of reward which the agent generates internally on its own, so that it can go explore more about its world,” Agrawal said.

Research co-authored by EE Prof. Ali Javey has demonstrated that the power of photosynthesis can be harnessed to convert carbon dioxide into fuels and alcohols at efficiencies far greater than plants. The achievement marks a significant milestone in the effort to move toward sustainable sources of fuel.  The study, titled "Efficient solar-driven electrochemical CO2 reduction to hydrocarbons and oxygenates," was led by Berkeley Lab postdoctoral fellow Gurudayal and co-authored by LBLpostdoctoral researcher James Bullock, who works in Javey's lab, among others.  “This is a big step forward in the design of devices for efficient CO2 reduction and testing of new materials, and it provides a clear framework for the future advancement of fully integrated solar-driven CO2-reduction devices,” said Berkeley Lab chemist Frances Houle,  who was not part of the study.

CS Prof. Katherine Yelick is the subject of an interview in HPCwire in which she discusses the promise and progress of exascale science.  The article follows on the heels of Yelick's keynote address on "Breakthrough Science at the Exascale" at the ACM Europe Conference in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this month.  The fastest supercomputers in the world today solve problems at the petascale—that is a quadrillion calculations each second.  Exascale computing refers to systems capable of at least  one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion calculations per second.  Yelick's research interestes include parallel programming languages, compilers, algorithms and automatic performance tuning.   She is the Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

EE Prof. Jan Rabaey has won the 2017 Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Aristotle Award.  The award recognizes SRC-supported faculty whose deep commitment to the educational experience of SRC students has had a profound and continuing impact on their professional performance and, consequently, a significant impact for members over a long period of time.   Rabaey was cited for having "made high-impact contributions to a number of fields, including advanced wireless systems, low power integrated circuits, sensor networks, and ubiquitous computing.  His current interests include the conception of the next-generation integrated wireless systems, as well as the exploration of the interaction between the cyber and the biological world."  The award was presented at  TECHCON 2017 on September 12th.

EECS undergraduates Raghav Anand (EECS 2020) and Rohan Sinha (ME & EECS 2019) were part of a team that placed among the finalists awarded the top three prizes in the NASA Aeronautics Design Challenge 2016-1017.  They received an Honorable Mention in the supersonic division for their design, named Goldeneye AB1, which features a novel variable geometry wing design that allows it to fly efficiently at both supersonic and subsonic speeds, all while maintaining high lift. They and fellow team members Alec English (ME & Physics 2019), Dante Gao (ME 2019), Saunon Malekshahi (ME 2019), and  Noah Stevenson (Physics 2019) were invited to present their paper during the winner's symposium at NASA's Langley Research Center from September 25th-26th.

CS alumnus Joey Davis (B.A. '03) has been hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).   Davis investigates how cells maintain a delicate internal balance of assembling and dismantling their own machinery, particularly macromolecules. He is also developing a series of new research techniques, some involving cryo-electron microscopy, a method to image large macromolecules at high resolution. Davis was a dual major in CS and biological engineering while at Berkeley.

The Edward A. Lee Festschrift Symposium will be held on October 13th at the Berkeley City Club to celebrate the scholarship and teaching of Edward A. Lee, the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor in EECS.  The theme of the symposium is "Principles of Modeling" and is dedicated to Lee's devotion to research that centers on the role of models and the  principled use of models in science and engineering.  Speakers include Hans Vangheluwe , Jie Liu , Radu Grosu , Thomas Henzinger, Janette Cardoso, and Richard Murray.

EECS Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy has won the 2017 John Scott Award which has been presented by the City of Philadelphia since 1822 to "the most deserving men and women whose inventions have contributed in some outstanding way to the comfort, welfare and happiness of mankind."  Bajcsy's award is for her contributions to robotics and engineering science, including the development of improved robotic perception and the creation of better methods to analyze medical images.  Many luminaries have received the award including Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Jonas Salk and Glenn Seaborg.  Bajcsy will share the award with Warren Ewens (theoretical population genetics) and Masatoshi Nei (evolutionary theory).