Bioinspired robot, Salto-1P, is featured in an IEEE Spectrum article titled "Salto-1P Is the Most Amazing Jumping Robot We've Ever Seen."  Born in Prof. Ronald Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, Salto-1P is the most recent incarnation of the Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles (Salto) robot which was pronounced the most vertically agile robot ever created last December.  Salto-1P uses a small motor and a system of linkages and gears to jump.  It needs to do most of its control in the air because it spends so little time in contact with the ground, so it uses a rotating inertial tail and two little thrusters to stabilize and reorient itself in between jumps.

See Salto-1P in action as it bounces around and self-destructs.

Somayeh Sojoudi has been officially appointed as Assistant Professor in Residence in EECS (50%) and Mechanical Engineering (50%).  Prof. Sojoudi received her PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology in 2013, and she was most recently an Assistant Project Scientist in Berkeley’s Department of IEOR. She was an assistant research scientist at New York University for two years, and a postdoctoral scholar in EECS at Berkeley for one year. Her research is in the area of analysis, optimization, and control for large complex systems, with applications in health care, Internet  congestion control, and power systems.

EE Prof. Ali Javey and his research into "Earables," are profiled in a Digital Trends article titled 3D printed ear-mounted wearable will Monitor your body's core temperature.  Earables represent a class of ‘structural electronics’ where sensors and electronics are embedded in the fabricated structure itself.  “Monitoring core body temperature in a continuous fashion could have important medical applications,” Javey continued. “Examples can include monitoring patients with severe conditions, or infants.”  Their goals include making the device smaller while expanding the range of sensors implemented.

EE Assistant Prof. Rikky Muller will make a presentation on the theme of Reverse-Engineering the Brain at this year's Global Grand Challenges Summit (GGCS).  Muller is co-founder of Cortera Neurotechnologies, a company which designs medical devices for the treatment of incurable neurological conditions. "We can use devices that record brain signals directly from the the motor cortex of the brain and interpret those signals as movements," she says, "and we can use those signals to control robotic arms, for example, or mouse cursors on a screen."  The GGCS,  sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), was created to help find solutions for 14 major engineering challenges critical to the future well-being of humanity and the planet.  Muller will also be awarded an NAE Gilbreth Lectureship, established to recognize outstanding young engineers.

Corelight, a cybersecurity startup co-founded by CS Prof. Vern Paxson, has raised $9.2 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners, with participation from Osage University Partners and Riverbed Technology Co-founder (and former Berkeley CS professor) Dr. Steve McCanne.  Corelight provides powerful network visibility solutions for cybersecurity built on a widely-used open source framework called Bro, which was developed by Paxson while working at LBNL in 1995.   The Corelight Sensor, which enables wide-ranging real-time understanding of network traffic, is already being used by many of the world’s most capable security operations including Amazon and five other Fortune 100 companies.

Professors Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz have won a 2017 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award for "Neural Dust: an ultrasonic, low power, extreme miniature technology for completely wireless and untethered neural recordings in the brain."  These annual awards come with a $200K prize and are aimed at advancing the range of tools neuroscientists have to map, monitor, and model brain function.  The award will allow Carmena and Maharbiz to apply neural dust technology to the central nervous system, which has the potential to allow the brain to be trained or treated to restore normal functionality following injury or the onset of neuropsychological illness.

In a project funded by a $21.6M donation from DARPA,  a light field microscope developed by EE Associate Prof. Laura Waller, MCB Assistant Prof. Hillel Adesnik and their lab groups, is being used to create a window into the brain through which researchers — and eventually physicians — can monitor and activate thousands of individual neurons using light.   The microscope is based on CS Assistant Prof. Ren Ng's revolutionary light field camera which captures light through an array of lenses and reconstructs images computationally in any focus. The microscope is the first tier of a two-tier device referred to as a cortical modem:  it "reads" through the surface of the brain to visualize up to a million neurons; the second tier component "writes" by projecting light patterns onto these neurons using 3D holograms, stimulating them in a way that reflects normal brain activity. The goal of the project is to read from a million individual neurons and simultaneously stimulate 1,000 of them with single-cell accuracy.  “By encoding perceptions into the human cortex," MCB Prof. Ehud Isacoff says, "you could allow the blind to see or the paralyzed to feel touch.”

There are 10 faculty involved in this project, 4 of which are from EECS: Laura Waller, Ren Ng, Jose Carmena and Rikky Muller. The project is being led by Ehud Isacoff from the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.

CS Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan has been selected to receive a 2017 Okawa Foundation Research Grant.  This award recognizes promising young faculty members in the fields of information and telecommunications, and comes with a $10K prize.  The presentaton ceremony will be held on September 20th in San Francisco.

The paper titled "ESPIRiT—an eigenvalue approach to autocalibrating parallel MRI: Where SENSE meets GRAPPA" co-written by Associate Prof. Michael Lustig,  his graduate student Pat Virtue, and alumnus Mark J. Murphy (Ph.D. '11 advisor: Kurt Keutzer) has been named the most-cited Magnetic Resonance in Medicine article from 2014.    The article bridges the gap between the two main approaches for parallel imaging (SENSE and GRAPPA) allowing the reconstruction of images from undersampled multicoil data.  It presents a new autocalibration technique combining the extended reconstruction of SENSE with GRAPPA-like robustness to errors.

Authors of the paper are listed as Martin Uecker, Peng Lai, Mark J. Murphy, Patrick Virtue, Michael Elad, John M. Pauly, Shreyas S. Vasanawala, and Michael Lustig.

In an article for the Daily Cal, undergraduate Taylor Choe thanks CS Assistant Teaching Prof. Josh Hug for helping her overcome her negative first impression of Berkeley and discover what makes it so special.   "My mindset going into CS 61B was definitely not a positive one. I struggled with 61A and felt discouraged, making me really come to dislike computer science." she wrote.  But Dr. Hug made her fall in love with computer science and helped her find faith in the public school system.   "You could tell that he wanted to be at lecture and wasn’t thinking about being somewhere else. His projects, homeworks and labs were entertaining and engaging, displaying the time and thought that went into each of them. He constantly emphasized the importance of being an honest person in addition to being an honest programmer. He was somehow able to make a 1,400-person class feel a little smaller. And I don’t think there is anything more you can ask of a professor, especially at a school as large as UC Berkeley."