The paper "Control Improvisation with Probabilistic Temporal Specifications," co-authored by Ilge Akkaya, Daniel Fremont, Rafael Valle (graduate students), Alexandre Donze (postdoctoral researcher) and Professors Edward A. Lee and Sanjit A. Seshia, based on research conducted in the TerraSwarm Research Center, received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Internet-of-Things Design and Implementation, IoTDI 2016.

Prof. Michael Jordan has been selected to receive the 2016 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) Research Excellence Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. Professor Jordan is recognized for his groundbreaking and impactful research in both the theory and application of statistical machine learning.

Prof. Costas Spanos has been selected to receive the 2016 Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award and Assistant Prof. Laura Waller has been selected to receive the 2016 Graduate Student Mentoring Award Junior Faculty. Nominated by faculty colleagues and current and former graduate students, the award recipients have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to helping UC Berkeley graduates to succeed academically, professionally, and personally. The award ceremony will be held April 13, 2016 in the Anna Head Alumnae Hall.

Prof. Ken Goldberg’s “People and Robots” CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) initiative is in Part 2 of Rolling Stone’s “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report”. One of the projects Prof. Goldberg is working on is the development of surgical robots to do the tedious work, allowing surgeons to focus on the important tasks.

Courses related to ham radio taught by EE Associate Prof. Michael Lustig are featured in a National Association for Amateur Radioarticle titled “UC Berkeley Trains, Tests Hundreds of New Hams”. The entry-level course exposes newcomers to ham radio and the advanced course goes into the theoretical applications of digital signal processing, filter design, modulation/demodulation, decoding subcarriers, APRS audio interface techniques, and antenna design.

Prof. Pieter Abbeel is featured in a Rolling Stone article titled “Inside the Artificial Intelligence Revolution: A Special Report, Pt. 1.”  Algorithms are the basis for modern day computing – data goes in, the computer does its thing, and the algorithm spits out a result. What’s new is that scientists have developed algorithms that reverse this process, allowing computers to write their own algorithms. This is called machine learning and is the idea behind the science of artificial Intelligence.

Prof. Bernhard Boser has been selected to receive the 2016 NSF I/UCRC (National Science Foundation Industry & University Cooperative Research Program) Alex Schwarzkopf prize. This prize recognizes an individual or team whose research is judged to have made the greatest contribution to technological innovation.

It is with sadness to announce that Prof. Chitoor V. Ramamoorthy (“Ram”) passed away on Thursday, March 10 at UCSD’s Thornton Hospital. All extended family members and friends are being directed to a workshop which will be held on May 5th in La Jolla for a memorial: www.TransKS.org. Sympathy cards may be sent to Mrs. Ramamoorthy at 558 Blackhawk Club Drive, Danville, CA 94506. Donations may be directed to the C.V. Ramamoorthy Distinguished Research Award.

Prof. Dan Garcia has been selected to receive a National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) 2016 Undergraduate Research Mentoring (URM) Award. This award recognizes Academic Alliance representatives at non-profit U.S. Institutions for their outstanding mentorship, high-quality research opportunities, recruitment of women and minority students, and efforts to encourage and advance undergraduates in computing-related fields.

Prof. Jeff Bokor is featured in a Berkeley News article titled “Experiments show magnetic chips could dramatically increase computing’s energy efficiency”. As computing increasingly moves into “the cloud”, electricity demands of the giant cloud data centers are multiplying, collectively taking an increasing share of this country’s and the world’s electrical grid. Prof. Bokor and UC Berkeley researchers have shown for the first time that magnetic chips can actually operate at the lowest fundamental energy dissipation theoretically possible under the laws of thermodynamics.