Late EE Prof. Charles Susskind, who passed away in 2004, is one of 10 children featured in an exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust titled “Childhood Left at the Station: A Tribute to the Children of the Kindertransport,” as well an accompanying L.A. Times article titled "Child separation during World War II: How an exhibition at L.A.'s Museum of the Holocaust resonates today."  Susskind caught one of the last Kindertransport trains out of Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1939--just a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday (at which time he would have been ineligible for the program) and the onset of the war.   Kindertransport was an international, non-denominational rescue effort that got Jewish children out of Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland between 1938-1939.  The suitcase he carried will be on display, bearing the green, hand-painted number that identified him as a child refugee.  “It’s tiny,” curator Jordana Gessler says. “Probably 18 by 14 inches. That suitcase is all he brought with him.”

A research study led by EE Prof. and Associate Chair Jeffrey Bokor and post-doctoral research associate Roberto Lo Conte, among others, on the influence of nonuniform micron-scale strain distributions on electrical reorientation of magnetic microstructures has been highlighted on the news site Advances in Engineering.  The work, which was conducted in the Center for Translational Applications of Nanoscale Multiferroic Systems (TANMS), is the first to thoroughly characterize the micron-scale strain and magnetic response, as a function of an applied electric field, in a composite multiferroic system. Their goal was to come up with a comprehensive behavior and understanding of these materials using direct imaging of both the electrically induced magnetic behavior and the piezo-strain.  These materials systems are of broad technological interest, since they offer a path toward the development of ultralow power magnetoelectric devices which can be useful for manipulation of micro and nano-scale objects such as biological cells. Their work is published in the research journal, Nano Letters.

Some of the achievements of members of the EECS department are highlighted in a Daily Cal article titled "From cyclotrons to wetsuits: A brief history of UC Berkeley’s scientific endeavors. The article covers  Unix, which was developed by EE alumnus Kenneth Thompson (B.S.‘65/M.S.‘66) in 1969, and RISC, a project directed by CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson in 1981.  Prof. Randy Katz, who is currently Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Research, says “The magic of Berkeley is that we are (a) public institution. Our research agenda is about how the work we do impacts society.”

CS Prof. Stuart Russell is one of four top experts asked by The Next Web (TNW) "which algorithms they think made the biggest contribution to artificial intelligence and science in general?"  Russell chose Lookahead and Backchaining, which he described as "fundamental modes of decision making.”  Other experts chose Gradient Descent, Convolutional Networks, and Forward-backward.

CS Prof. Joseph Hellerstein is the subject of a feature in InsideBigData titled "The Must-Haves of a Modern Data Prep Platform."  Hellerstein is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Trifacta, a company that develops data wrangling software for data exploration and self-service data preparation for analysis.  he discusses how the challenge of data preparation sits squarely between the growth of BI and visualization tools and the specific data needed to fuel them.  Efficient data preparation is key to alleviating new demand from business users. The article offers three key requirements that a data preparation platform should have.  Hellerstein's career in research and industry has focused on data-centric systems and the way they drive computing. Fortune Magazine included him in their list of 50 smartest people in technology , and MIT’s Technology Review magazine included his work on th eir TR10 list of the 10 technologies “most likely to change our world.”

CS alumnus Constantinos Daskalakis (Ph.D. '08, advisor: Christos Papadimitriou) has won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize at the International Congress of Mathematicians, one of the highest awards in theoretical computer science.  Daskalakis, who is currently a professor at MIT,  was cited for his work on game theory and machine learning.  He is profiled in a Quanta Magazine article titled "A Poet of Computation Who Uncovers Distant Truths," that describes his fruitful time at Berkeley with Papadimitriou.

The New York Times has published a front page article featuring research being done in the EECS department.  "How Robot Hands Are
Evolving to Do What Ours Can" details how robotic hands could once only do what vast teams of engineers programmed them to do but--thanks to research being done at places like Berkeley--can now learn more complex tasks on their own.  The article breaks tasks down into 5 categories, 4 of which are illustrated by work being done in Prof. Ken Goldberg's AUTOLAB:  gripping, picking, bed-making, and pushing.    Although these tasks are limited, the machine learning methods that drive these systems point to continued progress in the years to come.

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson, winner of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award, answers 5 questions posed by the Cal Alumni Association's California Magazine.   Topics include the unsurpassed number of Berkeley Turing laureates, the dangers of AI, the RISC revolution, Patterson's classic textbook on computer architecture, and how much weight he can bench press.  You can attend lectures by many of U.C. Berkeley's prominent Turing laureates, including Patterson,  this fall at the Berkeley ACM A.M. Turing Laureate Colloquium.

CS. Prof. Pieter Abbeel is the subject of a China Daily article titled "Professor stresses cooperation key to advancing AI application."  Abbeel attended the China-US Entrepreneur and Investment Summit  in Santa Clara where he discussed recent advances and trends in artificial intelligence (AI) and applications in robotic automation, calling for more collaboration worldwide in order to make robots ultimately serve the people.  "The articles of our research findings are in archives," he said.  "Anyone can read it. There are also three important global deep-learning conferences so you can present your work and meet people in the AI field worldwide."