CS Prof. Katherine Yelick will give the HPC keynote on Exascale computing at the upcoming ACM Europe Conference. Yelick also serves as Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The event, which will take place on Sept. 7-8 in Barcelona, Spain, will focus on the themes of Cybersecurity and High Performance Computing.
CS graduate student Grant Ho, Aashish Sharma (LBNL), CS alumna Mobin Javed (Ph.D. 2016), and CS Profs. Vern Paxson and David Wagner have won the 2017 Internet Defense Prize, worth $100,000, for their paper "Detecting Credential Spearphishing in Enterprise Settings." CS graduate student Thurston Dang, Petros Maniatis (Google Brain), and Prof. David Wagner, were finalists for their paper "Oscar: A Practical Page-Permissions-Based Scheme for Thwarting Dangling Pointers." The award, which is funded by Facebook and offered in partnership with USENIX, recognizes research that meaningfully makes the internet more secure.
CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan has been named one of 2017's 35 Innovators Under 35 by MIT Technology Review. Each year, exceptionally talented young innovators are singled out for the honor because their work is thought to offer the greatest potential to transform the world. Dragan was nominated in the Visionary category for "Ensuring that robots and humans work and play well together" and is profiled in an MIT Technology Review article. She will also be recognized at a special ceremony at EmTech MIT.
Assistant Prof. Sergey Levine, Prof. Pieter Abbeel, and graduate student Chelsea Finn are featured in a CSO article highlighting research they presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). The research was done in partnership with the NVIDIA AI Labs (NVAIL) programme. Levine’s team wants to help intelligent agents learn faster and require less training by teaching deep neural networks to learn more like humans. “Look at how people do it,” said Levine. “We never learn things entirely from scratch. We draw on our past experience to help us learn new skills quickly. So we’re trying to get our learning algorithms to do the same.” Levine and his team have been using an NVIDIA DGX-1 system to train their algorithms how to coordinate movement and visual perception.
NVAIL helps keep AI pioneers ahead of the curve with support for students, assistance from researchers and engineers, and gives them access to the industry’s most advanced GPU computing power.
Alumna Barbara Grosz (CS M.S. '71/Ph.D. '77), Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has received the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). The award recognizes the work of a researcher who has made sustained and impactful contributions to the field of Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing. Grosz has spent her career working to make human-computer interactions as fluent as human-to-human interaction. Her recent research has focused on fundamental problems in modeling collaborative activity, developing systems ("agents") able to collaborate with each other and their users, and constructing collaborative, multi-modal systems for human-computer communication. Her current research projects focus on using results of prior work to improve health care coordination and enhance K-12 science education.
EE alumnus Jonathan S. Maltz (Ph.D. EE '99) is serving as the lead researcher and Chief Scientific Advisor during the clinical trials of HeartSentry, a non-invasive diagnostic tool to measure and monitor cardiovascular health. HeartSentry is being developed at Lexington Biosciences, a development-stage medical device company in Vancouver, Canada. It is the product of 15-years of research at U.C. Berkeley. Maltz has had over 16 years experience designing new devices for assessing vascular function and evaluating these on human subjects.
CS alumnus Yannis Ioannidis (Ph.D. '86) is featured in an article about Samsung's purchase of Greek text-to-speech company Innoetics for close to 50 million euros. Ioannidis is president of the ATHENA Research & Innovation Center, which nurtured the startup and provided critical support during its evolution and the development of its technology. Innoetics' text-to-speech software learns languages by listening to native speakers, whose voices it can then mimic with great accuracy. It is currently fluent in 19 languages. Samsung plans to use the technology across a wide range of its product ecosystem. Ioannidis says that, as a result of the purchase, “any voice emanating from a Samsung device in the years to come will be ‘Greek,’ the product of Greek technology.” Ioannidis is currently a professor of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens.
CS Prof. Stuart Russell will be speaking on the use of AI, its long-term future and its relation to humanity, at the 2017 IP EXPO Europe showcase. IP EXPO Europe is an information technology trade show held annually in England which "brings together some of the biggest names, in their respective fields, to tackle the technological issues facing organisations right now." Other speakers include Brad Anderson of Microsoft and chess champion Garry Kasparov.
CS Prof. Alexei Efros (also alumnus, Ph.D. '03) and his team have developed a new technique, leveraging deep neural networks and AI, to allow novices--even those with limited artistic ability--to quickly add realistic color to black and white images. "The goal of our previous project was to just get a single, plausible colorization," says Richard Zhang, a coauthor and PhD candidate, advised by Efros. "If the user didn't like the result, or wanted to change something, they were out of luck. We realized that empowering the user and adding them in the loop was actually a necessary component for obtaining desirable results." They will present their research into "Real-Time User Guided Colorization with Learned Deep Priors" at SIGGRAPH 2017 in August.
EE Profs Claire Tomlin, Costas Spanos and Connie Chang-Hasnain, and CS Prof. David Culler, are featured in a Berkeley Engineer article titled "Smart moves: California's next-gen infrastructure," which describes current UC Berkeley research projects that promise to transform the way we live. “What’s enabling these infrastructure changes is our ability to compute faster, to share information faster and to provide that information to users very quickly,” says Tomlin. She envisions “rail-to-drone” expressways, converting railroad rights-of-way to aerial corridors where closely-spaced fleets of drones travel safely. Spanos predicts self-monitoring buildings so smart they band together and form bargaining alliances, and Chang-Hasnain's team have been working on manufacturing highly efficient but low-cost solar cells by growing nanoscale “forests” of expensive photovoltaics on inexpensive silicon substrates. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science, co-founded by Culler, is “equipping students not just to consume data but to produce insight” which will help guide the changes to come.
