Meet EE Prof. Joseph Gier (1910-1961), the first tenured black professor in the U. C. system and the first tenured black faculty member in a STEM field—and the second in any field—at a top-ranked, predominantly white university in the country. He was also a world expert in the field of thermal and luminous radiation, particularly infrared measurement, and was considered by many at the time to be the “best laboratory instructor ever to teach in electrical engineering at Berkeley.”
CS alumna Diane Greene (M.S. '88) has won a 2019 U. C. Berkeley Campanile Excellence in Achievement Award. This award "recognizes an alumnus/a whose remarkable professional achievements reflect the excellence of a UC Berkeley education" and is co-presented every year by the UC Berkeley Foundation and the Cal Alumni Association. Greene recently served as the CEO of Google's cloud business and was a founder and CEO of VMware. She will be formally presented with her award at the Berkeley Charter Gala on May 16, 2019.
EECS alumnus Yannis Tsividis (M.S. '73/Ph.D. '76, advisor: Paul Gray) has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Tsividis is a professor at Columbia University who has made contributions to Analog and Mixed Signal Integrated Circuit Technology, as well as to engineering training. He has worked at Motorola Semiconductor and AT&T Bell Labs, and has taught at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the National Technical University of Athens.
A research team from Lab11, led by Associate Prof. Prabal Dutta and PhD student Noah Klugman, have created a new suite of technologies called GridWatch that uses the sensors on smartphones to monitor an electrical grid and measure outages, grid frequency, and voltage sags and spikes. They launched an app in Ghana last year called DumsorWatch, that uses a variety of data from phone sensors (power charging, movement, WiFi signals, etc) to determine probabilistically whether a nearby electrical grid is working. The team also includes PhD student Joshua Adkins, research scientist Matt Podolsky, and Professor Jay Taneja from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Assistant Profs. Moritz Hardt and Sergey Levine have been awarded 2019 Alfred O. Sloan Research Fellowships. They are among 126 early-career scholars who represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada. Winners receive $70,000, which may be spent over a two-year term on any expense supportive of their research. Hardt and Levine were both selected in the Computer Science category. Hardt’s research aims to make the practice of machine learning more robust, reliable, and aligned with societal values. The goal of Levine’s research is to develop artificial intelligence systems that are flexible, general, and adaptable. “Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today,” said foundation president Adam Falk. “Sloan Fellows stand out for their creativity, for their hard work, for the importance of the issues they tackle, and the energy and innovation with which they tackle them.”
EE Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award for her project titled "Intelligent, Closed-Loop Neural Interfaces." The award, which is expected to total $500k, is a continuing grant which has been approved on scientific / technical merit for the period of February 15, 2019 to January 31, 2024. Muller will be a keynote speaker at the Berkeley Annual Research Symposium (BEARS) on Thursday.
The city of Berkeley took the #6 spot on Livability's ranking of "2019 10 Best Cities for Techies." Cities were judged on factors that included: the proximity to top engineering, technology, and computer science degree programs; state internet coverage; top startup accelerators, incubators, and growth; and top environments for entrepreneurs. "Prestigious University of California, Berkeley, ranks third among the best computer science programs worldwide, focusing on research to build the future of the tech industry. Almost 70 percent of the city’s population has a college degree, and its robust startup scene provides a myriad of opportunities for industry up-and-comers."
EE Prof. Eli Yablonovitch has won the prestigious Frederic Ives Medal / Jarus W. Quinn Prize from the Optical Society of America (OSA). It is the highest award presented by the OSA and recognizes overall distinction. Yablonitch, along with Sanjeev John, founded the field of photonic crystals in 1987. He and his team were the first to create a 3-dimensional structure that exhibited a full photonic bandgap, which has been named Yablonovite. His seminal paper reporting inhibited spontaneous emission in photonic crystals is said to be among the most highly cited papers in physics and engineering.
EE alumna and Prof. Claire Tomlin (Ph.D. '98, adviser: Shankar Sastry) has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." Tomlin was cited “For contributions to design tools for safety-focused control of cyberphysical systems.”
In an effort to catch sex traffickers, CS alumna Rebecca Sorla Portnoff (Ph.D. '17, adviser: David Wagner) creates computer codes that help identify similarities in traffickers’ online ads and find the Bitcoin accounts they use to buy the ads. She works for THORN: Digital Defenders of Children, an organization that builds technology to fight the sexual abuse of children. UC Berkeley News has created a video about her work.
