CS Prof. Alexei "Alyosha" Efros has teamed up with student researcher Sheng-Yu Wang and postdoc Andrew Owens, as well as Adobe researchers Richard Zhang and Oliver Wang, to develop a method for detecting and reversing edits to images made using Adobe Photoshop’s Face Aware Liquify feature--a popular tool for adjusting facial features, including making adjustments to facial expressions.  While still in its early stages, this collaboration to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) is part of a broader effort across Adobe to better detect image, video, audio and document manipulations, as well as a step toward democratizing image forensics.

EE Prof. Michael Lieberman has won the 2020 IEEE Marie Sklodowska-Curie Award for outstanding contributions to the field of nuclear and plasma sciences and engineering.  This IEEE-level Technical Field Award is the highest honor administered by the Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society.  Lieberman was cited “For groundbreaking research and sustained intellectual leadership in the physics of low-temperature plasmas and their application.”  Prof. Ned Birdsall (1925-2012) won the inaugural award in 2011, making Berkeley EECS the only institution to have won two of these awards.

Today, the MIT Technology Review announced Raluca Ada Popa has been named to MIT Technology Review’s prestigious annual list of Innovators Under 35 as a Visionary. Every year, the world-renowned media company has recognized a list of exceptionally talented technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world.

Prof. Popa is a co-founder of the RISELab where she is developing a learning and analytics framework that can run on encrypted data.

Gideon Lichfield, editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review, said: “MIT Technology Review’s annual Innovators Under 35 list is a chance for us to honor the outstanding people behind the breakthrough technologies of the year that have the potential to disrupt our lives. These profiles offer a glimpse into what the face of technology looks like today as well as in the future.”

EECS Assistant Prof. Joseph Gonzalez is the focus of a profile for the Association for Computing Machinery's "People of ACM" series.  Gonzalez, who works at the intersection of machine learning and data systems, desribes how and why his field has grown over time, where it might be heading, and what challenges might need to be addressed in the future.  "Today progress is largely limited by creativity and our budget for compute resources and data," he says. "Machine learning frameworks...provide the necessary abstractions to hide the complexity of differentiation, optimization, and parallel computation, freeing the modern data scientist to focus on the learning problem. These frameworks build on advances in data systems and scientific computing to unlock new parallel hardware."

"Improved Subthreshold Swing and Short Channel Effect in FDSOI n-Channel Negative Capacitance Field Effect Transistors," has won the 2018 IEEE Electron Devices Society (EDS) George E. Smith Award.  The paper was co-authored by current postdoc Korok Chatterjee, graduate student Ava J. Tan, former postdocs Daewoong Kwon,  Angada B. Sachid, Ajay K. Yadav and Hong Zhou, EE Profs. Chenming Hu and Sayeef Salahuddin, and LBNL's Roberto dos Reis. The award recognizes the best paper appearing in a fast turn around archival publication of the IEEE Electron Devices Society, targeted to IEEE Electron Device Letters.

The winners of the 2019 EECS teaching awards have been announced:  Alexei Efros has won the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching Computer Science "for captivating lectures and engaging teaching in computer vision courses;"  Ren Ng has won the Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Undergraduate Teaching "for exceptionally inspiring and engaging teaching in computer graphics courses;" and Kameshwar Poolla has won the Electrical Engineering Award for Outstanding Teaching "for outstanding lectures and inspiring mentorship of undergraduates and graduate students."  We are fortunate to have such dedicated and talented faculty to define the character of the EECS department and guide the future of their fields.

Two new Electrical Engineering faculty are joining the EECS department in 2019:   Associate Prof. Boubacar Kanté joined the department in January.  His multidisciplinary research interests are in the areas of wave-matter interaction, from microwave to optics and related fields such as nanophotonics, nanoscale photon management, and biophysics.  Assistant Prof. Sophia Shao will be joining the EECS department in July.  Her research interests are in the area of computer architecture, with a special focus on specialized accelerator, heterogeneous architecture, and agile VLSI design methodology.

Assistant Profs. Rikky Muller (EE) and Ren Ng (CS) have been selected to receive awards from the Hellman Faculty Fellows Fund.  The fund supports "substantially the research of promising assistant professors who show capacity for great distinction in their research."   Muller won for "Networks of Neural Dust" and Ng won for "Oz Vision:  New Principles for Color Display, and An Experimental Platform for Neuroscience."

Assistant Prof. Alvin Cheung has won an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) Distinguished Paper Award at the 2019 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).  The paper, titled "View-Centric Performance Optimization for Database-Backed Web Applications," was co-authored by his student at the University of Washington, Cong Yan, and colleagues at the University of Chicago: Junwen Yang, Chengcheng Wan, and Shan Lu.

Prof. Ken Goldberg is the subject of an interview in Robotics Business Review (RBR) Insider with the tag line "Working at the intersection of art, robotics, and social media, Dr. Ken Goldberg shares his thoughts on making robots less clumsy when grabbing objects."  Goldberg has a joint appointment in IEOR and is the Director of the CITRIS People and Robots Initiative as well as the AUTOLAB.  He says "my proudest moment was when I was hired at UC Berkeley in 1995. Since I was a kid in the 1960’s I’ve always idolized Berkeley including the Free Speech Movement – and social justice movements during a time when its students questioned authority. Berkeley is a public university and has this amazing reputation in terms of innovation and rigor, not only in the sciences and engineering, but also in the arts, humanities and social sciences."