EECS Prof. Murat Arcak and his graduate student He Yin have won the second Systems & Control Letters (SCL) Brockett-Willems Outstanding Paper Award. Their paper, "Reachability analysis using dissipation inequalities for uncertain nonlinear systems," published in SCL Volume 142, on August 2020, was deemed the best of 295 papers submitted to the journal in the two-year period between January 2019 through December 2020.  Co-authors include former ME Prof. Andrew Packard, who died in 2019, and Packard's former graduate student, Peter Seiler.  SCL hopes to present the award at the 25th International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS) which will be held in Bayereuth, Germany, in September 2022.

EECS Prof. Emeritus Lotfi Zadeh (1921 - 2017) is being honored with a Google Doodle feature today.  In 1964, Zadeh conceived a new mathematical concept called fuzzy logic which offered an alternative to rigid yes-no logic in an effort to mimic how people see the world.  He proposed using imprecise data to solve problems that might have ambiguous or multiple solutions by creating sets where elements have a degree of membership. Considered controversial at the time, fuzzy logic has been hugely influential in both academia and industry, contributing to, among other things, "medicine, economic modelling and consumer products such as anti-lock braking, dishwashers and elevators."   Zadeh's seminal paper, "Fuzzy Sets -- Information and Control," was submitted for publication 57 years ago today.

CS Prof. Michael Jordan has co-written an article in Wired titled "The Turing Test Is Bad for Business" in which he argues that now that "computers are able to learn from data and...interact, infer, and intervene in real-world problems, side by side with humans," humans should not try to compete with them but "focus on how computers can use data and machine learning to create new kinds of markets, new services, and new ways of connecting humans to each other in economically rewarding ways."  Jordan wrote the article because many AI investors are focusing on technologies with the goal of exceeding human performance on specific tasks, such as natural language translation or game-playing. “From an economic point of view, the goal of exceeding human performance raises the specter of massive unemployment,” he said. “An alternative goal for AI is to discover and support new kinds of interactions among humans that increase job possibilities.”

EECS graduate student Rose A. Abramson (advisor:  Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) has won the European Power Electronics and Drives Association (EPE) 2021 Young Author Best Paper Award.   Her paper, “A High Performance 48-to-8 V Multi-Resonant Switched-Capacitor Converter for Data Center Applications,” co-authored by EECS alumnus Zichao Ye (Ph.D. '20) and Prof. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, was presented during the EPE 2020 ECCE Europe conference.  Abramson, whose research focuses on power electronics and energy, received her B.S. in 2015 and her M.Eng. in 2016, both from MIT, and worked as a project electronics engineer at both Nucleus Scientific and Lutron Electronics before coming to Berkeley.   EPE Awards honor outstanding achievements in power electronics and more generally in the field of EPE activities.

CS alumni Xiaoye Sherry Li (Ph.D. '96, advisor: James Demmel) and Richard Vuduc (Ph.D. '03, advisor: James Demmel) have, along with Piyush Sao of Georgia Tech, won the 2022 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Supercomputing (AG/SC) Best Paper Prize.  This prize recognizes "the author or authors of the most outstanding paper in the field of parallel scientific and engineering computing published in English in a peer-reviewed journal." Their paper, "A communication-avoiding 3D algorithm for sparse LU factorization on heterogeneous systems,” was published in 2018 in the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS).  Li is now a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) where she works on diverse problems in high performance scientific computations, including parallel computing, sparse matrix computations, high precision arithmetic, and combinatorial scientific computing.  Vuduc, now an Associate Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech, is interested in high-performance computing, with an emphasis on algorithms, performance analysis, and performance engineering.

CS alumna Medha Kothari (B.A. '20) is featured in an episode of California magazine's The Edge podcast titled "Blockchain for the People."  While still a student, Kothari, who is currently a Research Partner at Variant, founded she256, a non-profit that "aims to increase diversity and break down barriers to entry in the blockchain space."  She discusses what blockchain is and why it has the potential to be a fairer technology "that can change the world."  Produced by the Cal Alumni Association, The Edge podcast series explores "cutting-edge ideas in science, tech, and society coming out of UC Berkeley."

Berkeley EECS is happy to announce the launch of the Center for Energy Efficient Deep Learning (CEEDL), a new Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence (CoE) with Prof. Kurt Keutzer as Principal Investigator and Prof. Joey Gonzalez as co-PI. This center will focus on producing energy-efficient algorithms and implementations for deep learning’s most computationally-intensive workloads. As computing grows to become an increasingly significant portion of an organization’s energy budget, deep-learning workload compute demands are also becoming insatiable. The CEEDL’s charter includes developing energy-efficient algorithms for challenging workloads such as training recommendation systems and natural language understanding systems. The center will use the oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library (oneDNN) and the oneAPI Collective Communications Library (oneCCL) to optimize this work. While high-level algorithms are useful, these algorithms must be implemented on an ever-increasing variety of computational platforms to be impactful. oneAPI’s open, unified heterogeneous programming will significantly ease the development of portable implementations across multiple types of architectures: CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators.

EECS graduate student Zichao Ye (advisor: Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) is among five winners selected by the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) to showcase their Ph.D. projects to the global power electronics community.  Ye's thesis, titled "Hybrid Switched-Capacitor Power Converters: Fundamental Limits and Design Techniques," focuses on a topological effort to drastically improve the performance of existing power electronics using a hybrid approach, in which both inductors and capacitors are used in the voltage conversion and power transfer process.  During his presentation in April, Ye highlighted one of his hybrid converter designs:  a 48V-to-12V cascaded resonant converter for more efficient data center which demonstrated 99% peak system efficiency and 2500 W/in3 power density.  PELS Thesis (P3) Talk Award winners are chosen by the PELS Education Digital Media Committee during an annual competition.