EE Prof.  and co-director of the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses Jose Carmena participated in a discussion with the Kavli Foundation about technologies that might be used to treat mental illness or enhance memory. Prof. Carmena, who has co-developed brain-machine interfaces and implantable microsensors, says "we have learned a lot about how to target different areas in the brain.  The aim of these devices is to help people who are paralyzed by injury or disease move again by creating an artificial pathway between the areas of the brain that control motion and the muscles. Essentially, they are devices that use electrodes implanted in the brain to translate thoughts into the action of prosthetics."

Trifacta, a data wrangling startup co-founded by Prof. Joe Hellerstein (also company CSO and CS alumnus--M.S. '92), is one of the companies profiled by Computer Weekly in an article titled "Silicon Valley startups aim to make big data capture and prep slicker."  Customers of Trifacta, which specializes in sorting out data and getting it into shape for analysis, includes the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange, PepsiCo, Walmart, and soon Google (Cloud Dataprep). Other CS alumni on the Trifacta team include co-founder and CXO Jeffrey Heer (B.S. '01/M.S. '04/Ph.D. '08) and Vice President of Products Wei Zheng (B.A. '99).  

Thanks to a generous gift from the entertainment virtual reality company Immerex, a new lab is being outfitted for Berkeley’s accelerating work in AR/VR – augmented reality and virtual reality. The new lab, which will be located in Cory Hall, will be named the Immerex Virtual Reality Lab and provide collaboration space for Berkeley faculty and students affiliated with the Center for Augmented Cognition.

CS alumnus Andrew Ng (Ph.D. '02), Chief Scientist at Baidu, founder of Google Brain, co-founder of Coursera, and Stanford adjunct professor, describes in a video on Inside HPC how artificial intelligence is transforming the industrial landscape.  He compares the impact of AI to that of electricity, which radically transformed industry after industry when it was introduced.

EECS alumna Sarah Bergbreiter (M.S. '04/Ph.D. '07) is  the subject of a profile  by the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland celebrating female engineering faculty during women's history month.  Sarah is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Institute for Systems Research, and the Director of the Maryland Robotics Center in charge of both the Micro Robotics Lab and the multi-user Robot Realization Lab.  She has received  PECASE, NSF CAREER, and DARPA Young Faculty Awards, and has also been named one of 25 women in robotics you should know about.

CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan and EECS alumna Yoky Matsuoka (B.S. '93) are among Interesting Engineering's "17 Awesome Women Engineers" who are revolutionizing the engineering field in 2017.  Anca is described as "one of the rising stars of the robotics scene" as the head of the InterACT Lab at UC Berkeley which specializes in human/robotics interactions, algorithms and compatible artificial intelligence systems."  Yoky is "a hot commodity among major tech companies" as the CTO of Alphabet Nest.

EE Profs. Ruzena Bajcsy and Stuart Russell appear in an article in the Berkeley Science Review titled "Automating Us," in which they are quoted discussing the impacts of recent technological developments on both robots and humans.

Prof. Ruzena Bajcsy and EECS alumus student (now post doc in the HART Lab)  Robert Matthew (M.S. EE '15) are featured in a Berkeley Research article titled “Engineering to Restore Power to the People”. Supported by the Signature’s Innovation Fellows Program, Matthew and Prof. Bajcsy have developed mathematical models of the body allowing for measurement of upper and lower limb movement. This provides the foundation for wearable assistive devices to serve a range of physical limitations. With teams of undergraduate students, they fabricate lightweight exoskeletons and strap them onto volunteers to test their effectiveness. Their goal is to make assistive devices as lightweight and inexpensive as possible using commercially available parts and 3-D printing.

2016-17 Bakar Fellow Prof. Ali Javey is profiled in a Berkeley Research article titled "Physiological Changes Tracked Moment to Moment," in which he discusses his research into a network of sensors that can be embedded into a sweatband to monitor moment-by-moment changes in electrolytes and metabolites.  Prof. Javey is refining the sensor fabrication process to make it more commercially practical for fitness training, athletics, health diagnostics and even large-scale population studies.

CS postdoctoral scholar Philip Isola (Associate Prof.  Alyosha Efros) is profiled in an an article in The Cornell Daily Sun titled "Computer Science Colloquium: Do Machines See What I See?" in which he discusses strategies that might allow systems to understand the visual world.  “My ultimate goal is to make systems that really have the kind of abilities that human babies have and I think this requires understanding the type of input that biological systems get, the structure of the environment and also the structure of our brains” he says.