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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.
Stuart Russell quote: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically, if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms."

Open letter on AI

11/01/15 — Computer science professor, Stuart Russell, has written a series of open letters calling on the global community of scientists, engineers, and technologists, to develop guidelines surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) research.
Image by Barrett Lyon/The Opte Project

EECS faculty members awarded NSF grants for cybersecurity research

10/08/15 National Science Foundation — Three EECS faculty members, David Wagner, Dawn Song and Sanjit Seshia, were awarded cybersecurity research grants from the National Science Foundation. The grants are part of NSF's $74.5 million Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program.
Vern Paxson

Cyber-defense and forensic tools turn 20

08/14/15 National Science Foundation — In 1995, when Vern Paxson (now an EECS professor) was a doctoral student at Berkeley, he began writing what eventually became Bro, the ground-breaking open source cybersecurity software that was used to build a network monitoring framework. Today Bro is used by many of the largest supercomputing centers, national labs, universities and Fortune 10 companies.
Memory chip and circuit diagram

Small tilt in magnets makes them viable memory chips

08/03/15 — EECS researchers at Berkeley have discovered a new way to switch the polarization of nanomagnets, paving the way for high-density storage to move from hard disks onto integrated circuits. The development could lead to computers that turn on in an instant, operate with far greater speed and use significantly less power.

Robots are really bad at folding towels

05/20/15 NPR — Seven years ago, Berkeley researcher Pieter Abbeel set out on a quest: to teach a robot how to fold laundry. This proved to be a remarkably difficult task - and the difficulty of the task illuminates some key things about the limits of machines. See story and hear four-minute podcast.

How smart is today’s artificial intelligence?

05/20/15 PBS News Hour — How far away are we from making intelligent machines that actually have minds of their own? Berkeley researchers Stuart Russell and Pieter Abbeel weigh in on this nine-minute PBS News Hour segment, along with Elon Musk and Google's Ray Kurzweil.
Claude Shannon, the creator of Information Theory, and Alan Turing, the creator of modern Computer Science

Through the computational lens

05/01/15 Simons Institute — EECS professor Umesh Vazirani discusses efforts at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing to foster a dialogue between the disciplines of information theory and computer science.
Michael Stonebraker

Michael Stonebraker wins $1 million Turing Award

03/25/15 MIT — MIT researcher Michael Stonebraker, who revolutionized the field of database management systems in his nearly three decades as a Berkeley EECS professor, has won the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing.”
Eric Brewer

Data and development: The Mezuri platform

02/25/15 Blum Center — Computer science professor Eric Brewer, leader of the Technology and Infrastructure for Emerging Regions (TIER) group, talks about his platform to better understand development projects through integrated data analysis.
The founders of Hooktheory

What makes pop, pop?

01/13/15 — Three engineers work by day at one of the nation's premier research labs; by night, they color-code transcriptions of pop songs. It could be the setup to a new prime-time sitcom. Or, perhaps, the wacky backstory of another successful startup.
David Patterson

Berkeley’s RISC-V wants to be free

12/10/14 EE Journal — EECS professor David Patterson and his graduate assistants are promoting their open-source RISC-V microprocessor instruction set as the go-to computer teaching tool, a CPU architecture for everything from SoC to IoT.

Young Berkeley engineers recognized as innovators, humanitarians

08/20/14 MIT Technology Review — An EECS post-doc and two Berkeley Engineering alumni are named to the 2014 MIT Technology Review “35 Innovators Under 35” list. All three are part of the humanitarian category. Post-doc Kurtis Heimerl, 30, developed the Village Base Station, which brings cellular telecommunications to remote places of the world. Heimerl is CEO of Endaga, a company founded […]
AMPlab: Algorithms, machines, people

What cars did for today’s world, data may do for tomorrow’s

08/12/14 New York Times — Berkeley's AMP Lab, created two years ago for research into new kinds of large-scale computing, has become a key part of the world-changing ecosystem of digital hardware and software, spinning out companies like Databricks and Mesosphere that make megacomputing systems available and affordable.
Manipulated 3D images of a paper crane

Photo editing tool enables object images to be manipulated in 3-D

08/06/14 R&D Magazine — A team including EECS professor Alexei Efros, formerly of Carnegie Mellon but now at Berkeley, created a photo editing tool that lets users manipulate images in 3-D so that objects can be turned or flipped and even originally hidden surfaces can be exposed.