Three EECS faculty have been named associate deans for the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). CS Prof. Armando Fox is the associate dean of online programs; CS Prof. John DeNero is the associate dean of undergraduate studies; and EE Prof. Katherine Yelick is transitioning from her role as CDSS’s associate dean for research to the CDSS executive associate dean. Berkeley launched CDSS in 2018 to expand teaching and research in data science, and to bring together programs, schools, and departments across campus to tackle the technical, scientific, social, and human dimensions of urgent challenges in biomedicine and human health, climate and sustainability, and human welfare and social justice.
CS Prof. Pieter Abbeel has won the 2022 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, a prestigious Technical Field Award that recognizes "outstanding early to mid-career contributions to technologies holding the promise of innovative applications." Abbeel, who is the director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, co-director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and co-founder of covariant.ai and Gradescope, was cited “For contributions to deep learning for robotics." His research focuses on teaching robots reinforcement learning through their own trial and error, apprenticeship learning from people, and met-learning (learning-to-learn) to speed up skill acquisition.
EE Prof. Emeritus Nelson Morgan has won the 2022 James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, a prestigious IEEE Technical Field Award. Morgan and co-recipient Herve Bourlard, who are known for their seminal work in the 1990s on a hybrid system approach to speech recognition that uses neural networks probabilistically with Hidden Markov Models, were cited for "contributions to neural networks for statistical speech recognition."
CS Prof. Bin Yu has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland (UNIL). Honoris causa doctorates are often conferred as a way of recognizing individuals who are unaffiliated with an institution but who have contributed to a specific field or to society in general. Yu was cited as "one of the most influential researchers of her time" for her "international reputation," "her character and her openness to others and to the world," and "the breadth and importance of her contributions" which "are far from being confined to the scientific community" and "are part of collective efforts to build a better world." These include her recent work predicting the severity of COVID-19 in the United States. Yu has a shared appointment in the Department of Statistics, and is affiliated with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and the Berkeley Center for Computational Biology.
CS/IEOR/Art Practice Prof. Ken Goldberg, who is also affiliated with Radiation Oncology at UCSF, is the subject of an interview with Ron Latanision and Cameron Fletcher for the National Academy of Engineering. Goldberg discusses the relationship between art and science in Western culture, the dual nature of his career trajectory, his passion for robot-related art, and why he is optimistic about the future of technology. He also describes some of his projects, including the Telegarden installation, the African Robotics Network, and his Emmy-nominated film collaboration "Why We Love Robots."
CS Prof. Stuart Russell, has been named a 2021 Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE). The Officer rank is the second of the order, and is bestowed by the Sovereign of the United Kingdom twice a year to reward valuable "services rendered to the United Kingdom and its people." Russell, who co-authored the world's most popular AI textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, and founded the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI), was cited for "For services to artificial intelligence research." He is an innovator in probabilistic knowledge representation, reasoning, and learning, including its application to global seismic monitoring for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. He is also a powerful advocate for the creation of "safe AI" and is active in the movement to ban the manufacture and use of autonomous weapons. His official title is now: Professor Stuart Russell OBE.
EECS Assistant Prof. Jonathan Ragan-Kelley is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) 2021 Significant New Researcher Award. The award honors researchers who are new to the field of computer graphics and who have made "recent, significant contributions to the field." Ragan-Kelley, who was instrumental in the development of the language and compiler Halide, was cited for “outstanding contributions to systems and compilers in rendering and computational photography.” Halide is now the industry standard for providing fast, efficient and portable computation on images and tensors. Ragan-Kelley is also an Assistant EECS professor at MIT.
Five projects led by EECS faculty have won C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (DTI) AI for Energy and Climate Security Awards. The awards recognize projects that are using AI techniques and digital transformation to advance energy efficiency and lead the way to a lower-carbon, higher-efficiency economy that will ensure energy and climate security. "C3.ai DTI selects research proposals that inspire cooperative research and advance machine learning and other AI subdisciplines. Projects are peer-reviewed on the basis of scientific merit, prior accomplishments of the principal investigator and co-principal investigators, the use of AI, machine learning, data analytics, and cloud computing in the research project, and the suitability for testing the methods at scale." Each project was awarded $100,000 to $250,000, for an initial period of one year. The winning proposals were:
Offline Reinforcement Learning for Energy-Efficient Power Grids - Sergey Levine, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences We propose to develop offline RL algorithms to incorporate real-world data in training an RL agent to reduce emissions associated with running an electrical grid.
Sharing Mobile Energy Storage: Platforms and Learning Algorithms - Kameshwar Poolla, Cadence Design Systems Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering This proposal aims to design, validate, and test platforms and learning algorithms for mobile storage applications, which can simultaneously serve the role of generation (supplying energy) and distribution (reticulating energy).
Reinforcement Learning for a Resilient Electric Power System - Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Harnessing the potential of AI techniques to make the power system resilient against such extreme cases is crucial. We propose to develop AI-based methods, and corresponding testing strategies, to achieve this goal.
Affordable Gigaton-Scale Carbon Sequestration: Navigating Autonomous Seaweed Growth Platforms by Leveraging Complex Ocean Currents and Machine Learning - Claire Tomlin, Charles A. Desoer Chair in the College of Engineering A promising approach to carbon sequestration utilizes seaweed, which fixates dissolved CO2 into biomass. Floating platforms that autonomously grow and deposit seaweed could scale this natural process to the open ocean, where the carbon is confined for millennia.
Interpretable Machine Learning Models to Improve Forecasting of Extreme-Weather-Causing Tropical Monster Storms - Da Yang, Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Bin Yu, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor and Class of 1936 Second Chair Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences We propose to develop interpretable, machine-learning (ML) models to forecast the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) — the Storm King in Earth’s tropics.
CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, who is also the Associate Provost for the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), is the recipient of the 2020 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Service Award. She was selected for the award, which recognizes outstanding career-long "contributions to the computing community at large," for "her effective leadership, mentorship, and dedication to diversity during her distinguished career of computer science research, teaching, and institution building." Chayes' contributions include leadership at both Microsoft Research (where she founded and led the Theory Group, and Microsoft Research New England, New York City and Montreal) and UC Berkeley (where she is also the Dean of the School of Information); service to many computing and science organizations (including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, and the ACM A.M. Turing Award Committee); expanding the diversity of the computing field through mentorship of women, underrepresented racial minorities and other disadvantaged groups; and making important research contributions in machine learning.
CS Profs. Ion Stoica and Scott Shenker have each donated $25M toward the construction of The Gateway, the new building that will house the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS). The Gateway is conceived as "a planned nexus for collaborative, integrated data science and computing education and research to solve societal problems," and will be located on Hearst Avenue near the Scenic Avenue intersection. The combined gift of $75M, which includes an equal share from a third anonymous donor, will support the development and construction of the building, and the creation of two new full-time faculty positions. The project also received a windfall in February 2020 when another anonymous donor contributed $252M to the project. “These generous gifts are so inspiring and represent great momentum for the Gateway,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol T. Christ. “The gifts from faculty speak not only to the power of Berkeley’s vision of data science and computing but also to the unique impact of our faculty in driving innovation and change from the ground up.”
