A video of the lecture that MIT Prof. Emeritus Rodney Brooks gave at last week's EECS Joint Colloquium has made IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday,  a weekly selection of "awesome robot videos."  Brooks' talk,  titled "Steps Toward Super Intelligence and the Search for a New Path," examines what we might need to do over the next (few) hundred years  to give AI human level--or even super--intelligence.  He questions the assumptions on which the AI field has been built, and whether both AI and neuroscience will need a fundamental reboot in order to make real progress.  Brooks is known for giving "some of the best video talks ever."

5th Year CS Master's students Alvin Kao (B.S. '19)  and Titan Yuan (B.S. '19) have been named to the Siebel Scholars Foundation’s 2020 class.  Kao is working on problems in the autonomous vehicle setting, like predicting the behavior of other agents and trajectory planning.  Yuan is working with the Swarm Lab on embedded software for some of the world’s tiniest wireless devices, so that they can be used as miniature temperature sensors and Bluetooth beacons.

CS alumnus Srinivasan Keshav (Ph.D. '91, advisor: Domenico Ferrari) has won a 2019 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi Distinguished Alumni Award.  Keshav is a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is known for his cutting-edge research in the areas of computer networking and energy informatics and currently focuses on research on blockchains for transactive energy.  His work has been cited more than 16,000 times and he holds 73 patents worldwide. He has been the co-director of the Information Systems and Science for Energy (ISS4E) Laboratory at the University of Waterloo since 2010.

EE alumna Leslie Field (M.S. '88/Ph.D. '91, advisor: Richard White) gave an insightful and inspirational presentation on Ice911 Research at the inaugural Global Climate Restoration Forum held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York yesterday.  Field is the Founder and CEO of Ice911 Research, a non-profit focused on developing a technique to preserve and rebuild polar and glacial ice and polar habitat using a localized and ecologically respectful material, like floating sand, to reflect sunlight and stave off one of the effects of global warming.

A paper by alumnus Vasily Volkov (Ph.D. '16), now at Nvidia, and his advisor Prof. James Demmel has won the 2019 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC19) Test of Time Award.   The paper, "Benchmarking GPUs to Tune Dense Linear Algebra," which won the SC08 Best Student Paper Award when it was published, describes a first-of-its-kind vision of GPU architectures as a vector machine. The authors defined techniques to achieve greater efficiency and performance, detailing an optimization pattern that is found today in many high-performance GPU codes.  The paper has been cited almost a thousand times and has had a tremendous impact on the field.  The award, which recognizes an outstanding paper that has deeply influenced the HPC discipline, is one of the most prestigious in the SC conference series and will be presented at the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Colorado in November.

Two EECS faculty and one alumnus are the authors with the most number of papers accepted to the upcoming 2019 Thirty-third Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), one of the most popular and influential AI conferences in the world.  CS Prof. Sergey Levine took the top spot with 12 papers, alumnus Francis Bach (Ph.D. '05, advisor: Michael Jordan) was the second most prolific contributor with 10 papers, and Prof. Pieter Abbeel placed third with nine.  Only one in five of the 6,743 papers submitted to the conference this year were accepted.  Registration to be one of the 8,000 attendees at  last year's NeurIPS (formerly NIPS) conference sold out in 12 minutes.  A lottery has been implemented for this year's conference, which will take place in December.

CS alumna Sally Floyd (M.S. '87/Ph.D. '89, advisor: Richard Karp), best known as one of the inventors of Random Early Detection (RED), an active queue management scheme widely credited with saving the internet from collapse in the 1990s, has died at age 69.  Floyd graduated from Berkeley with a B.A. in Sociology in 1971 and, after taking a two-year course in electronics at Meritt College, spent the next decade working as a computer systems engineer at BART.  She returned to Berkeley as a graduate student in 1984 and was known as an outstanding advisor to members of the CS Reentry Program, a department project which prepared  "older" women and minorities, who had bachelor's degrees in non-technical fields, for competitive admission to graduate STEM programs.  The creation of the RED algorithm, which was built on work started by Van Jacobson in the 1980s,  founded the field of Active Queue Management (AQM).  Floyd and Jacobson's 1993 paper describing how RED could control congestion on the internet continues to play a vital role in its stability and has been cited in more than 9,100 articles. “That’s truly huge,” said Prof. Vern Paxson, who had been mentored by Floyd as a graduate student, “up there with the most fundamental papers in computer networking.”

Berkeley researchers, including EECS Prof. Ming Wu and his former postdoc Youming Wang,  have created the fastest silicon-based, programmable two-dimensional optical phased array, built on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).  They achieved a resonance frequency of 55 kilohertz that corresponded to a response time of 5.7 microseconds, almost 1,000 times faster than a traditional optical phased array built on liquid crystal. With a large array of 25,600 pixels packed onto a chip that is 3.1 by 3.2 millimeters, the device can also capture very high-resolution images of its surroundings and lead to cheaper and more efficient medical-imaging devices, optical communications and holographic televisions, as well as more robust LiDAR sensors for self-driving cars.  "Being able to program these chips allows us to go beyond scanning, we can program our arrays to be more like human eyes. This allows us to generate and perceive arbitrary patterns like our eyes do; we can track individual objects instead of just rotating scanning,” said Wu.

Berkeley Remix Podcast Season 4, Episode 2, explores the contributions of UC Berkeley Engineering to the rise of the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley in the 1960s and 70s.   “Berkeley Lightning: A Public University’s Role in the Rise of Silicon Valley”  focuses on the development of SPICE, the first widely used design program for prototyping microchips, which was originally designed by and for students.  The software spread "like lightning" in part because Berkeley, as a public institution, made it available free of charge. The world has not been the same since.  The podcast features audio from interviews with Prof. Emeritus  Paul Gray  and alumnus Laurence Nagel (B.S. '69/M.S. '70/Ph.D. '75, advisor: Donald Pederson), CEO of Omega Enterprises, and former senior manager at Bell Laboratories.