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.

Alumnus Soumitra Dutta (CS M.S. '87/Business M.S. '89/CS Ph.D. '90), who is currently founding Dean of the Cornell College of Business, has been chosen Chairman of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International board of directors.  Dutta previously founded the eLab at the Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires (INSEAD--the European Institute of Business Administration) and subsequently served as dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University.  He is a noted authority on the impact of new technology on the business world.

Undergraduates Richard Li (CS), Veeral Patel, Yian Liou (EECS), and Roy Tu (EECS, graduated 2016) have qualified for the 2nd Annual Cambridge 2 Cambridge Cybersecurity Challenge (C2C), which will be held July 24-26, 2017 at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in England.  Conceived as a way to create a greater cybersecurity collaboration between the US (MIT CSAIL) and UK, the C2C gives students the opportunity to explore creative ways to combat global cyber attacks and acquire and hone crucial skills.  Along with gaining a sense of accomplishment, building friendships overseas, and receiving guidance from mentors in leading security organizations,  top students will earn glory, medals, and a share of $20K in cash prizes.  The competition will be a live three-day showdown with over 100 competitors from 25 universities in the US and UK.

Zephyr, the solar vehicle built by UC Berkeley's CalSol team (including sophomore Wen Rui Liau, one of Prof. James Demmel's research students), has won the 2017 Formula Sun Grand Prix (FSGP).  The FSGP is an annual nationwide solar vehicle race that takes place on closed-loop race tracks. From July 6-8, in Austin, Texas, competing teams tested the limits of their vehicles in handling curves, braking, and acceleration.  The winner, determined by the total number of laps completed--minus penalties--over three days of racing, was Zephyr with 228 laps completed and zero penalties.

In October 2006, Netflix announced "The Netflix Prize," a $1M competition where teams of programmers raced to make the Netflix recommendation engine 10% more accurate.  The nail-biting competition is profiled in an article for Thrilllist which prominently features participant and CS alumnus Lester Mackey (Ph.D. '12), then an undergraduate at Princeton.   "It was so much fun," he said. "The contest was structured so well. We had to learn so much to be competitive and I met so many people along the way."  The winners beat the second place team by only 20 minutes.   Mackey is now a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and an adjunct professor of Statistics at Stanford University.

EECS alumnus Paul E. Jacobs (B.S. '84/M.S. '86/Ph.D. '89) has been named U.C. Berkeley's 2017 Alumnus of the Year.  After graduating from Berkeley, Paul rose up the ranks at Qualcomm, which had been co-founded by his father, and is currently serving as Executive Chairman.  He won the IEEE Weber Managerial Leadershiip Award in 2014 and the Distinguished Industry Leader Award in 2015.  Paul has donated millions of dollars to the College of Engineering and CITRIS, endowed an engineering professorship, served on a number of important University boards, and funded the creation of the eponymous Jacob's Hall.

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.