EECS Announcements

EE alumnus Jonathan S. Maltz (Ph.D. EE '99) is serving as the lead researcher and Chief Scientific Advisor during the clinical trials of HeartSentry, a non-invasive diagnostic tool to measure and monitor cardiovascular health.   HeartSentry is being developed at Lexington Biosciences, a development-stage medical device company in Vancouver, Canada.  It is the product of 15-years of research at U.C. Berkeley.  Maltz has had over 16 years experience designing new devices for assessing vascular function and evaluating these on human subjects.

CS alumnus Yannis Ioannidis (Ph.D. '86) is featured in an article about Samsung's purchase of Greek text-to-speech company Innoetics for close to 50 million euros.  Ioannidis is president of the ATHENA Research & Innovation Center, which nurtured the startup and provided critical support during its evolution and the development of its technology. Innoetics' text-to-speech software learns languages by listening to native speakers, whose voices it can then mimic with great accuracy.  It is currently fluid in 19 languages. Samsung plans to use the technology across a wide range of its product ecosystem.  Ioannidis says that, as a result of the purchase, “any voice emanating from a Samsung device in the years to come will be ‘Greek,’ the product of Greek technology.”  Ioannidis is currently a professor of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens.

CS Prof. Stuart Russell will be speaking on the use of AI, its long-term future and its relation to humanity, at the 2017 IP EXPO Europe showcase.  IP EXPO Europe is an information technology trade show held annually in England which "brings together some of the biggest names, in their respective fields, to tackle the technological issues facing organisations right now."  Other speakers include Brad Anderson of Microsoft and chess champion Garry Kasparov.

CS Prof. Alexei Efros (also alumnus, Ph.D. '03) and his team have developed a new technique, leveraging deep neural networks and AI, to allow novices--even those with limited artistic ability--to quickly add realistic color to black and white images.  "The goal of our previous project was to just get a single, plausible colorization," says Richard Zhang, a coauthor and PhD candidate, advised by Efros. "If the user didn't like the result, or wanted to change something, they were out of luck. We realized that empowering the user and adding them in the loop was actually a necessary component for obtaining desirable results."  They will present their research into "Real-Time User Guided Colorization with Learned Deep Priors" at SIGGRAPH 2017 in August.

EE Profs Claire Tomlin,  Costas Spanos and Connie Chang-Hasnain, and CS Prof. David Culler, are featured in a Berkeley Engineer article titled "Smart moves: California's next-gen infrastructure," which describes current UC Berkeley research projects that promise to transform the way we live.  “What’s enabling these infrastructure changes is our ability to compute faster, to share information faster and to provide that information to users very quickly,” says Tomlin.   She envisions “rail-to-drone” expressways, converting railroad rights-of-way to aerial corridors where closely-spaced fleets of drones travel safely.  Spanos predicts self-monitoring buildings so smart they band together and form bargaining alliances, and Chang-Hasnain's team have been working on manufacturing highly efficient but low-cost solar cells by growing nanoscale “forests” of expensive photovoltaics on inexpensive silicon substrates. The Berkeley Institute for Data Science, co-founded by Culler, is “equipping students not just to consume data but to produce insight” which will help guide the changes to come.

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.

CS alumna Justine Sherry (M.S. '12/Ph.D. '16 advisor: Sylvia Ratnasamy) has won the ACM SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Networking and Data Communication.  Justine's thesis was on "Middleboxes as a Cloud Service," and brought the benefits of cloud computing to the networking domain.  Justine is now assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

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.

Laura Barghout, a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Initiative for Soft Computing (BISC), has been hired as Chief Vision Scientist of Last Studio Standing, the largest hand-drawn animation studio in the Western Hemisphere.  Barghout invented a Gestalt-based fuzzy inference system and labeling technique that is used commercially in image/video background removal, object recognition and image labeling systems. Her research has contributed to the understanding of context-dependent spatial vision, spatial masking, theoretical and computational psychophysics, and the application of fuzzy set theory to human and machine vision.  "Most animation relies solely on a direction and what's being created," she said . "This invention allows for a softer, more human-like understanding. It captures the flavor and nuance of a subject naturally -- and, again, it's softer. As such, it requires less manual clean up."

CS graduate student Aviad Rubinstein (advisor: Christos Papadimitriou)  is featured in a Quanta Magazine article titled "In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium," which describes the results of his paper on game theory proving that no method of adapting strategies in response to previous games will converge efficiently to even an approximate Nash equilibrium for every possible game. The paper, titled Communication complexity of approximate Nash equilibria, was co-authored by Yakov Babichenko and published last September.  Economists often use Nash equilibrium analyses to justify proposed economic reforms, but the new results suggest that economists can’t assume that game players will get to a Nash equilibrium, unless they can justify what is special about the particular game in question.

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.