"Bidirectional thin-film repulsive-/attractive-force electrostatic actuators for a crawling milli-robot," written by recent EE alumnus Ethan Schaler (Ph.D. '18), his advisor Prof. Ron Fearing, and two undergraduates from other departments (Loren Jiang in BioE and Caitlyn  Lee in E3S), received the Best Student Paper Award  from the International Conference on Manipulation, Automation, and  Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS) 2018 in Nagoya, Japan in July. The authors demonstrated a new thin-film electrostatic actuator (RAFA)  capable of generating bidirectional repulsive- and attractive-forces:  156 Pa in repulsion and 352 Pa in attraction, when operating at up to  1.2 kV. They used this actuator to power RAFAR, a 132 mg milli-robot  that crawls at 0.32 mm/s with anisotropic friction feet.   Schaler will be joining NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) this summer.

EECS alumnus Tawfiq Mossadak (B.S. '97, member of HKN) has been named sales and marketing manager of Sensortech Systems, a manufacturer of measurement and control instruments.  Tawfiq, who has 15 years of experience at Avnet, Madell Technology, and Altera,  will be responsible for leadership of the business development team, driving revenue, marketing and business strategy.  This appointment is part of Sensortech Systems’ expansion, which includes a new larger building, higher capacity production line with state-of-the-art environmental product testing.

EECS alumnus Larry Nagel (B.S. '69/M.S. '70/Ph.D. '75) has won the 2019 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits, named for his graduate advisor EECS Prof. Donald O. Pederson.  The award recognizes outstanding contributions to solid-state circuits and has previously been presented to five EECS professors: Paul Gray, Robert Brodersen, Ping Ko, Chenming Hu and Robert Meyer.  Nagel was cited "for the development and demonstration of SPICE as a tool to design and optimize electronic circuits."  His Ph.D. dissertation was on SPICE2 and he founded Omega Enterprises in 1998 to consult on analog circuit design, circuit simulation, and semiconductor device modeling.

The House Fund has backed a $875,000 pre-seed round for Elph, a startup co-founded by two EECS alumni:  Ritik Malhotra (B.S. '15) and Tanooj Luthra (B.S. '13).  Elph operates a portal for accessing decentralized apps known as Ethereum dApps.  It provides a place to store digital assets (cryptocurrencies, tokens, collectibles), find dApps without having to scour the web, and use them natively.  Elph also plans to roll out a software development tool to simplify the process of building dApps.  The House Fund is a berkeley-based AI-focused startup accelerator.

Everlaw, a legal-tech startup founded by alumnus AJ Shankar (CS Ph.D. '09, advisor: Rastislav Bodik), has raised $25 million in a series B funding round.  Berkeley-based Everlaw was established in 2011 as a cloud-based e-discovery platform that lets lawyers easily organize and search through millions of documents, videos, emails, and pictures exchanged between legal teams before a trial.  Shankar, the company's CEO, said the money will be used to invest in AI which which they hope can be used to determine what documents will be a priority or what documents should be looked at next. The funding round was led by existing investors and Silicon Valley venture firm Andreeseen Horowitz.

2018 Distinguished Alumna Andrea Goldsmith (B.A. '86/M.S. '91/Ph.D. '94, advisor: Pravin Varaiya) has won the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award "for contributions to the fundamental understanding and innovation in adaptive and multiple antenna techniques for wireless communication networks."    The Sumner Award is sponsored by Nokia Bell Labs and recognizes outstanding contributions to communications technology. Goldsmith, who is the Stephen Harris Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering at Stanford University, is an expert in the design, analysis and fundamental performance limits of wireless systems and networks, and in the application of communication theory and signal processing to neuroscience.

CS alumnus John Schulman (Ph.D. '16, adviser: Pieter Abbeel) has been named to MIT Technology Review's 2018 list of "35 Innovators Under 35," an honor which recognizes "exceptionally talented young innovators whose work we believe has the greatest potential to transform the world."  Schulman, whose dissertation was on "Optimizing Expectations: From Deep Reinforcement Learning to Stochastic Computation Graphs," is cited in the Pioneer category for "training AI to be smarter and better, one game of Sonic the Hedgehog at a time."   He is the co-founder of OpenAI, where he has created some key algorithms in reinforcement learning: he trains AI agents in the same way you might train a dog, by offering a treat for a correct response--in this case, by racking up a high score in a video game.  These algorithms, once trained, might be applied in the real world, where they can be used to improve robot locomotion.

German conglomerate Siemens announced it will acquire Comfy, an Oakland-based startup co-founded in 2012 by two CS alumni, Andrew Krioukov (M.S. '13) and Stephen Dawson-Haggerty (Ph.D. '14).  Both students were advised by David Culler.  Comfy (formerly named Building Robotics) is an end-to-end solution utilizing sensors and smart technology to control all aspects of the workplace environment, allowing office workers to not just control temperature and lighting but determine whether a room is currently empty.  This comprehensive approach has helped Comfy land numerous tech giant clients, including Microsoft, Intel, Salesforce and Infosys.  "Our unique strength is that we have, from the beginning, focused on the end user experience," explained Krioukov. "The building of the future that we envision is one that from the moment you walk into work, it knows who you are and what you're doing that day."  The purchase is part of Siemens' expansion into smart building strategies.

Two CS alumni, Soumen Chakrabarti (Ph.D. '96, advisor: Katherine Yelick) and Sunita Sarawagi (Ph.D. '96, advisor: Michael Stonebraker), both currently CSE professors at IIT Bombay, have made the 2018 list of Analytics India Magazine's Top 10 Machine Learning Researchers in India. Chakrabarti's research interests include better embedding representation for passages, entities, types and relation; searching the annotated Web with entities, types and relations; and Graph conductance search. He holds eight US patents, has produced 167 research papers, and authored one of the earliest books on web search and mining.  Sarawagi is interested in deep learning, web information extraction, data integration, graphical models and structured learning.  She has published more than 130 research papers and holds four patents.

EE/CS Prof. and alumna Bin Yu (M.S. '87/Ph.D. '90) has won the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) 2018 Elizabeth L. Scott Award.  This award is granted to an individual who has helped foster opportunities in statistics for women, exemplifying the spirit of mathematician and statistician Elizabeth L. Scott. Scott, who like Yu was a Cal alumna and professor, was a founding member of Berkeley's statistics department and fought hard for women's equal treatment on campus and beyond.  COPSS is comprised of the presidents, past presidents and presidents-elect of five Northern American statistical societies, and their awards are considered among the most prestigious in the field of statistics. Yu, who has a split appointment in EECS and Statistics, is interested in statistical inference, machine learning, and information theory. Her collaborations are highly interdisciplinary and include scientists from genomics, neuroscience, precision medicine, and political science.