EECS Prof. Murat Arcak and his graduate student He Yin have won the second Systems & Control Letters (SCL) Brockett-Willems Outstanding Paper Award. Their paper, "Reachability analysis using dissipation inequalities for uncertain nonlinear systems," published in SCL Volume 142, on August 2020, was deemed the best of 295 papers submitted to the journal in the two-year period between January 2019 through December 2020.  Co-authors include former ME Prof. Andrew Packard, who died in 2019, and Packard's former graduate student, Peter Seiler.  SCL hopes to present the award at the 25th International Symposium on Mathematical Theory of Networks and Systems (MTNS) which will be held in Bayereuth, Germany, in September 2022.

EECS Prof. and dean of Engineering Tsu-Jae King Liu has written an opinion piece for the Mercury News in which she explains why "the country urgently needs to reinvest in semiconductor design and manufacturing, including the development of a highly trained workforce."  She argues that America's lack of a skilled semiconductor manufacturing workforce, in the face of a global semiconductor chip shortage, is a matter of national security because it leaves the country vulnerable to geopolitical instability. "Systems that we rely upon for communications, commerce, defense and more are in jeopardy because the United States has lost its leadership in semiconductor manufacturing over the past three decades."  She appeals to Congress to address the issue and says "we need to double the number of students trained in microelectronics graduating today from all U.S. colleges and universities."  This will require "universities across the nation to collaborate with each other and to partner with industry" to create a geographically-distributed American Semiconductor Academy "with participating schools sharing curricula, facilitating access to industry-leading software tools and coordinating hands-on training for students."

EECS Prof. Emeritus Lotfi Zadeh (1921 - 2017) is being honored with a Google Doodle feature today.  In 1964, Zadeh conceived a new mathematical concept called fuzzy logic which offered an alternative to rigid yes-no logic in an effort to mimic how people see the world.  He proposed using imprecise data to solve problems that might have ambiguous or multiple solutions by creating sets where elements have a degree of membership. Considered controversial at the time, fuzzy logic has been hugely influential in both academia and industry, contributing to, among other things, "medicine, economic modelling and consumer products such as anti-lock braking, dishwashers and elevators."   Zadeh's seminal paper, "Fuzzy Sets -- Information and Control," was submitted for publication 57 years ago today.

CS Prof. Michael Jordan has co-written an article in Wired titled "The Turing Test Is Bad for Business" in which he argues that now that "computers are able to learn from data and...interact, infer, and intervene in real-world problems, side by side with humans," humans should not try to compete with them but "focus on how computers can use data and machine learning to create new kinds of markets, new services, and new ways of connecting humans to each other in economically rewarding ways."  Jordan wrote the article because many AI investors are focusing on technologies with the goal of exceeding human performance on specific tasks, such as natural language translation or game-playing. “From an economic point of view, the goal of exceeding human performance raises the specter of massive unemployment,” he said. “An alternative goal for AI is to discover and support new kinds of interactions among humans that increase job possibilities.”

EECS graduate student Rose A. Abramson (advisor:  Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) has won the European Power Electronics and Drives Association (EPE) 2021 Young Author Best Paper Award.   Her paper, “A High Performance 48-to-8 V Multi-Resonant Switched-Capacitor Converter for Data Center Applications,” co-authored by EECS alumnus Zichao Ye (Ph.D. '20) and Prof. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, was presented during the EPE 2020 ECCE Europe conference.  Abramson, whose research focuses on power electronics and energy, received her B.S. in 2015 and her M.Eng. in 2016, both from MIT, and worked as a project electronics engineer at both Nucleus Scientific and Lutron Electronics before coming to Berkeley.   EPE Awards honor outstanding achievements in power electronics and more generally in the field of EPE activities.

Berkeley EECS is happy to announce the launch of the Center for Energy Efficient Deep Learning (CEEDL), a new Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence (CoE) with Prof. Kurt Keutzer as Principal Investigator and Prof. Joey Gonzalez as co-PI. This center will focus on producing energy-efficient algorithms and implementations for deep learning’s most computationally-intensive workloads. As computing grows to become an increasingly significant portion of an organization’s energy budget, deep-learning workload compute demands are also becoming insatiable. The CEEDL’s charter includes developing energy-efficient algorithms for challenging workloads such as training recommendation systems and natural language understanding systems. The center will use the oneAPI Deep Neural Network Library (oneDNN) and the oneAPI Collective Communications Library (oneCCL) to optimize this work. While high-level algorithms are useful, these algorithms must be implemented on an ever-increasing variety of computational platforms to be impactful. oneAPI’s open, unified heterogeneous programming will significantly ease the development of portable implementations across multiple types of architectures: CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators.

EECS Prof. Emerita Ruzena Bajcsy has won the PAMI Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Achievement Award.  This award is presented biennially by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee for Pattern Analysis and Machine Learning (TCPAMI) to honor outstanding "researchers in Computer Vision who have made major contributions to the field over their career and who have influenced the field in an extraordinary way."  Bajcsy founded the pioneering General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Lab in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978.  The GRASP Lab was one of the first groups to foster interdisciplinary research between computer and cognitive scientists, electrical and mechanical engineers, and psychologists.  Her robotics research focused on computer vision, tactile perception, and the problem of system identification. Her work in medical imaging involved coupling a digital anatomy atlas with elastic matching algorithms in order to automatically identify anatomic structures of the brain.  This now standard technology was first used in X-ray tomography and later with MRI and positron image tomography.  At Berkeley, Bajcsy was the founding director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) in 2001, a collaboration between four University of California campuses.   Before coming to Berkeley, she headed the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.  EECS Prof. Jitendra Malik, one of the speakers at ICCV 2021 where the award was announced, said "Ruzena has been a pioneer in so many ways, with her work on active perception, medical image analysis, robotics and her mentorship of generations of researchers in whom she has inculcated the highest of values. Her career is full of many, many 'firsts.'"

CS Prof. Stewart Russell has been selected as the 2021 BBC Reith Lecturer.  Considered among the most prestigious lecture series across all fields, Reith Lectures are delivered annually by leading authorites invited by the BBC "to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest."   Russell will deliver four lectures this fall, held in four locations across the UK, on the subject of "Living With Artificial Intelligence." The series, which will be and broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service as well as made available on BBC Sounds, will "explore the impact of AI on our lives and discuss how we can retain power over machines more powerful than ourselves."  The first lecture, titled "The Biggest Event in Human History," will be held in London and will cover the birth of AI; the second lecture, in Manchester, will cover "AI in Warfare;" the third, in Ediburgh, will cover "AI in the Economy;" and the final lecture, in Newcastle, is titled "AI: A Future for Humans?"  Russell, who is the Director of the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.  His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries.