Computer science

Berkeley launches RISELab, enabling computers to make intelligent real-time decisions

01/23/17 — UC Berkeley has launched the RISELab, the successor of AMPLab, and the latest in its series of five-year intensive research labs in computer science, with the goal of improving how machines make intelligent decisions based on real-time input.

How a grad student found spyware that could control anybody’s iPhone

12/07/16 Vanity Fair — Last summer, computer science Ph.D. candidate Bill Marczak stumbled across a program that could spy on an iPhone's contact list and messages - and even record calls. Illuminating shadowy firms that sell spyware to corrupt governments across the globe, Marczak's story reveals the new arena of cyber-warfare.

Drone guidance assisted by augmented reality

Seeing is believing

11/01/16 — Emerging augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are opening up a new frontier of possibilities for researchers at Berkeley's new Center for Augmented Cognition.

Huawei puts $1M into AI research partnership with UC Berkeley

10/11/16 TechCrunch — China's Huawei on Tuesday announced a $1 million partnership between its Noah's Ark Laboratory and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab to perform basic research into machine learning, computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence.

Ali Javey and graduate student Sujay Desai with a vacuum probe station

Smallest. Transistor. Ever.

10/10/16 — For more than a decade, engineers have been racing to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. Now, a research team led by EECS professor Ali Javey has surpassed a theoretical limit of physics and created the smallest transistor reported to date.

Toward human-centric A.I.

09/20/16 — Twenty years ago, Stuart Russell co-wrote a book titled Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, destined to become the dominant text in its field. Near the end of the book, he posed a question: “What if A.I. does succeed?”

Spreadsheet tools to help everyone escape from the cell

08/04/16 Financial Times — Alumnus and Microsoft researcher Sumit Gulwani (Ph.D.'05 CS) is behind the development of user-friendly spreadsheet tools that can, in his view, “keep control of the digital divide.”

$1M Hopper-Dean Foundation gift for diversity in CS

04/29/16 — The Hopper-Dean Foundation has donated $1 million to the EECS Department to support diversity initiatives in computer science. This expanded outreach effort, led by CS professor Dan Garcia, will touch thousands of students at Cal and high schools nationwide over the next two years.

Who’s the Michael Jordan of computer science?

04/22/16 Science — Semantic Scholar, an AI-driven search engine from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has added a service that ranks researchers' influence. The top star among computer scientists, according to the new tool? Michael I. Jordan, an EECS professor at Berkeley and a pioneer of AI.

Bajcsy, Paxson honored as visionary faculty entrepreneurs

03/30/16 — EECS professors Ruzena Bajcsy and Vern Paxson have been selected as 2016-17 Signatures Innovation Fellows, receiving funding to pursue their commercially promising research to assess personal injury and recovery (Bajcsy) and network cyberattacks (Paxson).

Magnetic microscope image of three nanomagnetic computer bits

Experiments show magnetic chips could dramatically increase computing’s energy efficiency

03/14/16 — In a breakthrough for energy-efficient computing, Berkeley engineers have shown for the first time that magnetic chips can operate at the lowest fundamental energy dissipation theoretically possible under the laws of thermodynamics.

Adding ‘Beauty and Joy’ to Obama’s push for computer science teaching

01/15/16 NPR — President Obama wants hands-on computer science classes for every student. Computer science professor Dan Garcia, creator of "CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing," spends part of each day trying to figure out what that would look like.

Gradescope co-founders Pieter Abbeel, Arjun Singh and Sergey Karayev, left to right. (Marla Aufmuth photo)

Gradescope: Taking the pain out of grading

01/15/16 — Sergey Karayev and Arjun Singh bonded over an "extremely painful" experience well-known to GSI's everywhere: grading handwritten papers and exams.

Engineers demo first processor that uses light for ultrafast communications

12/23/15 — Engineers at Berkeley, MIT and Colorado have successfully married electrons and photons within a single-chip microprocessor, a landmark development that opens the door to ultrafast, low-power data crunching.

Tech titans create nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence

12/15/15 Bloomberg Business — A group of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has established a nonprofit organization to develop "digital intelligence" that will benefit humanity. “This collection of people is stunning,” said EECS professor and company adviser Pieter Abbeel, who said he expects the company's research and ideas to be “impressive and surprising.”

Cambridge launches new center to study AI and the future of intelligence

12/04/15 Phys.org — The University of Cambridge is establishing a new interdisciplinary research center to address technical, practical and philosophical questions related to artificial intelligence, thanks to a landmark grant of £10 million from the Leverhulme Trust. EECS professor Stuart Russell, a leading AI researcher at Berkeley Engineering, will collaborate on the project.

AMP Lab: Solving big data’s biggest problems

12/02/15 Berkeley Research — The AMP Lab, launched in 2011 by Michael Franklin and colleagues in computer science, has already had an outsized impact on industry, from battling cancer to getting an answer from Siri.

Seeking data wisdom

11/23/15 Berkeley Research — Science and engineering have a way of turning what seems like fantasy into reality - like "mind reading," or genetic organ formation, two promising research areas that rely on a powerful interlocking of science, computation and statistics that EECS and statistics professor Bin Yu calls "data wisdom."

Berkeley Lab dedicates new computing center to late EECS professor

11/17/15 — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has opened a new building dedicated to energy supercomputing and networking, and named it after the late Shyh Wang, an EECS professor and a pioneer in semiconductor lasers.

UC Berkeley to co-lead regional big data ‘brain trust’

11/02/15 — UC Berkeley is teaming up with UC San Diego and the University of Washington to lead one of four regional innovation hubs established by the National Science Foundation to facilitate multi-sector collaborations that can accelerate advances in data science.