"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."

EECS PhD student Justin Yim (with advisor EECS Prof. Ron Fearing and ME undergraduate co-author Eric Wang) has won the best student paper award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (May 20-24, Montreal) for his paper "Drift-free Roll and Pitch Estimation for High-acceleration Hopping."  The robot "Salto" (Saltatorial Agile Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles) was previously restricted to only indoor operation in a room equipped with a motion tracking system. In the newest paper, Salto can now estimate its own position by combining its onboard inertial sensor with a model of its takeoffs and landings. This improved estimate allows
Salto to hop outside with human steering.

A paper co-authored by freshly minted alumnus Tianshi Wang (Ph.D. '19, winner of the 2019 EECS David Sakrison Memorial Prize for "truly outstanding research") and Prof. Jaijeet Roychowdhury has won Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) 2019.  The paper, titled "OIM: Oscillator-based Ising Machines for Solving Combinatorial Optimisation Problems" will be presented at the conference in Japan next week.

CS Prof. Hany Farid was interviewed for an article in the Washington Post titled "Faked Pelosi videos, slowed to make her appear drunk, spread across social media."  A video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was slowed to about 75 percent of its original speed and altered to modify the pitch of her voice in an effort  to convince the public that she was intoxicated.  “It is striking that such a simple manipulation can be so effective and believable to some,” Farid said. “While I think that deepfake technology poses a real threat, this type of low-tech fake shows that there is a larger threat of misinformation campaigns — too many of us are willing to believe the worst in people that we disagree with.”

EECS Profs. Hany Farid and Alexei Efros will be working with Facebook to help develop new methods to improve detection of fake content, fake news and misinformation campaigns. Facebook has launched $7.5 million partnership with three universities, including UC Berkeley, to create the technology.  Farid is a long-time crusader for holding social media companies accountable for removing and preventing harmful content, and Efros specializes in artificial intelligence, graphics and computer vision.  Some immediate steps that can be taken include having the company hire more people to monitor the site, charging a nominal fee to use the service, redefining Facebook and other tech giants as publishers--rather than as platforms, and creating unambiguous rules.