Computer pioneer Harry Huskey, who designed the G15--which might be called the first "personal computer"--at Berkeley in 1954, has died.  He taught and conducted research into computer language in the EE department from 1954 to 1967, when he left to found and direct the computer center at U.C. Santa Cruz.  Starting in the 1940s, he worked on the Eniac (the country’s first general-purpose programmable electronic computer), the Automatic Computing Engine, and the SWAC, before designing the G-15.  It was manufactured and sold by Bendix Aviation Corporation as the first computer designed to be used by a single person without the intervention of other operators.  At 950 lbs and the size of a refrigerator, it was much smaller than the other room-sized computers at the time, and cost just under $50,000 (or could be rented for about $1,500 a month),  a fraction of the millions of dollars that other systems cost.  At 101 years old, he was one of the last surviving scientists in the vanguard of the computer revolution.

Professor Alexei (Alyosha) Efros has won the 2016 Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Prize in Computing, formerly known as the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award. This award recognizes early-to-mid-career contributions that have fundamental impact and broad implications. Prof. Efros was cited for groundbreaking data-driven approaches to computer graphics and computer vision and is a pioneer in combining the power of huge image datasets drawn from the Internet with machine learning algorithms to foster powerful image transformations and valuable research findings. He has also made fundamental contributions in texture synthesis, a technique that ushered in new horizons in computer graphics and is widely used in the film industry. ACM Prize recipients are invited to participate in the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, an annual networking event that brings together young researchers from around the world with recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (computer science), the Abel Prize (mathematics), the Fields Medal (mathematics), and the Nevanlinna Prize (mathematics).

CS undergraduates Tomás Vega Gálvez and Corten Singer have been chosen the $10,000 Lemelson-MIT “Drive it!” Undergraduate Team Winner for an open-source smart add-on system for wheelchairs. Vega and Singer created WheelSense, a modular, customizable add-on system for wheelchairs that provides spatial awareness for visually impaired users to identify obstacles and ease their navigation. It has three features: frontal staircase detection through auditory feedback, backward obstacle-avoidance assistance through auditory feedback, and lateral ramp-edge detection through haptic feedback. They hope to disrupt the expensive market for assistive technologies for the disabled community by making their technology open source.  The “Drive it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize rewards students working on technology-based inventions that can improve transportation.

A new certificate program, the Berkeley Certificate in Design Innovation (BCDI),  is the result of a cross-disciplinary, cross-departmental partnership between the College of Environmental Design, the College of Engineering, the Haas School of Business and the College of Letters and Science’s Arts and Humanities Division.  It offers all undergraduates at Cal an opportunity to foster a critical mindset, collaboratively define problems, and develop the technical proficiency to innovate broadly outside of their major.  CS Associate Professor and BCDI advisor Eric Paulos says “I can’t wait to see what this cross pollination of design methods, materials, tools and most of all people will bring to not just UC Berkeley but to our communities – from the local to the global.”  BCDI will be hosting an open house event on Friday, April 21 at noon at Jacobs Hall for prospective students to learn more about the Certificate, meet faculty members involved, and hear from guest speakers and UC Berkeley alumni.

Prof. Ming Wu has been awarded the 2017 C.E.K. Mees Medal from the Optical Society of America (OSA). This medal is presented to a recipient who exemplifies the thought that "optics transcends all boundaries." This award recognizes an original use of optics across different fields. Prof. Wu is being recognized for the invention of “optoelectronic tweezers” that enable massively parallel manipulation of individual biological cells controlled by digital optical projectors.

EECS Chair and CS Prof. Jitendra Malik will discuss Deep Visual Understanding from Deep Learning as one of the keynote speakers at the Embedded Vision Summit on May 2, 2017.  The summit is the only event focused exclusively on the technologies, hardware, and software that bring visual intelligence to products.  This year, "It's all about deployable computer vision and deep learning" and will feature more than 90 expert presenters in 4 conference tracks over three days.

Prof. Katherine Yelick has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This organization has been serving the nation as a champion of scholarship, civil dialogue and useful knowledge since 1780. The Academy convenes leaders from the academic, business, and government sectors to address critical challenges facing our global society. Kathy joins a long list of distinguished members, going back to Ben Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, and most recently our own Scott Shenker in 2016. For a complete list of EECS members elected to the academy, see EECS Faculty Awards/American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson co-authored and presented a report on Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) at a regional seminar of the National Academy of Engineering, held at the Computer History Museum in Menlo Park on April 5, 2017.   TPUs, which have been deployed in Google datacenters since 2015, are printed-circuit cards which are inserted into existing servers and act as co-processors tailored for neural-network calculations.  Prof. Patterson says that TPUs are "an order of magnitude faster than contemporary CPUs and GPUs" with an even larger relative performance per watt.  According to an article for the IEEE Spectrum, TPUs are "built for doing inference," having hardware that operates on 8-bit integers rather than the higher-precision floating-point numbers used in CPUs and GPUs.

Josephine Williamson, the EECS Director of Administrative Services, has been selected to receive the U.C. Berkeley Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Award (COSA), which is the highest honor bestowed upon staff by the Chancellor.  COSAs are presented to individuals and teams who, in addition to performing their normal job duties with excellence, also demonstrate exceptional initiative in contributing to the UC Berkeley campus community.

The Beauty and Joy of Computing, an introductory computer science curriculum taught by Prof. Dan Garcia has received a $311,975 grant from InfoSys for a Professional Development week “BJCpalooza” for teachers to be held July 17-21, 2017 at UC Berkeley. Approximately 200 high school teachers from across the United States will be attending. Prof. Garcia will also be giving the keynote talk at the 2017 ACM TURC (SIGCSE) China, a new leading international forum at the intersection of computer science and the learning sciences, seeking to improve practice and theories of CS education.