Computer science

EECS team to lead $27.5 million TerraSwarm Research Center

01/17/13 TerraSwarm — A nine-university team led by researchers in Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences has been awarded $27.5 million over five years to spearhead the new TerraSwarm Research Center, which will address the huge potential - and risks - of the pervasive integration of smart, networked sensors connecting our world.

Charged up

11/01/12 — A team from the Algorithms, Machines and People (AMP) Laboratory developed an mobile phone app that provides individual energy recommendations.

Alumni and corporate partners say thank you to Berkeley

10/16/12 Graduate Division — VMware could have honored software architect Michael Nelson (B.A'83 CS, Ph.D'88 EECS) with a gold watch and a handshake for his groundbreaking contributions to cloud technology. Instead, the firm endowed an $800,000 fellowship at Berkeley. In all, the Graduate Fellowships Matching Program has set up more than 60 funds campuswide – 13 of them in the College of Engineering alone.

NSF awards $10 million to study cybercrime

09/24/12 International Computer Science Institute — Vern Paxson, EECS professor and researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), will help lead cybercrime research funded by a $10-million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation. Researchers from ICSI, UC San Diego and George Mason University will investigate the roles played by such human factors as social media and market incentives in providing opportunities for attacks and manipulation.

Rewiring Google from the inside out

09/05/12 Wired — Electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Eric Brewer is at it again. Known for his contributions to the early Internet architecture that make today's web apps possible, Brewer is now working with Google to develop tomorrow's Internet architecture. Little is revealed in this story about what that future might look like, but it is an interesting read.

Keen on big data: Why UC Berkeley might have an edge over Stanford

05/30/12 TechCrunch — Berkeley is hosting a conference this week entitled Data Edge which promises to explore many of the most interesting questions about defining, understanding and extracting value from big data. In this video interview, Professor Marti Hearst defines our "age of big data" and discusses what Berkeley is doing to encourage and incubate big data entrepreneurs, particularly in the areas of healthcare and privacy.

Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

05/01/12 The New York Times — The Simons Foundation, which specializes in science and math research, has chosen UC Berkeley as host for an ambitious new center for computer science. The foundation's $60 million grant to establish the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing underscores the growing influence of computer science on the physical and social sciences.

Big theory comes to campus

05/01/12 — The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing will be coming to Calvin Hall; funded by a $60 million Simons Foundation grant, the institute will create a hub for theoretical computer science.

Berkeley and Stanford launch networking research center

04/10/12 Stanford University — Berkeley Engineering professor Scott Shenker is co-director of the new Open Networking Research Center, which is exploring software-defined networking (SDN) as a paradigm for making networks simpler and less expensive while expanding their capacities. Industry sponsors include Cisco, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Berkeley group digs in to challenge of making sense of all that data

04/09/12 The New York Times — Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science and director of the AMP Lab, talks about the challenges of working with Big Data in the New York Times. Last month, the National Science Foundation awarded $10 million to Berkeley's AMP Expedition.

NSF grant funds computer-assisted programming project

04/05/12 Penn News — UC Berkeley engineers, led by computer scientist Ras Bodik, will join the University of Pennsylvania and seven other research institutions in a project to make computer programming faster, easier and more intuitive. Dubbed ExCAPE, the project is led by Penn and funded by a five-year, $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Expeditions in Computing program.

Computer scientists may have what it takes to help cure cancer

12/05/11 The New York Times — Berkeley Engineering professor David Patterson discusses how computer scientists will fight the war on cancer by taking on the Big Data challenges of information processing, genome sequencing, cloud computing, crowd-sourcing and other complex tasks. Patterson argues, "Given that millions of people do have and will get cancer, if there is a chance that computer scientists may have the best skill set to fight cancer today, as moral people aren't we obligated to try?"

Intel Labs opens latest Intel Science and Technology Centers

08/03/11 Intel — Aimed at shaping the future of cloud computing and how increasing numbers of everyday devices will add computing capabilities, Intel Labs announced the latest Intel Science and Technology Centers (ISTC) both headquartered at Carnegie Mellon University. The center combines top researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of California Berkeley, Princeton University, and Intel. The researchers will explore technology that will have has important future implications for the cloud.

Moving data at the speed of light

05/04/11 — Modern computing has a looming data traffic problem. Sometime in the next decade, experts say, processors will not be able to deliver better performance, because integrated circuits will have reached their capacity. Commonly described as interconnect bottleneck, this phenomenon means that computers, regardless of their processing speed, will be incapable of moving data any faster. But Berkeley engineers, led by Connie Chang-Hasnain, have recently developed a groundbreaking process that could solve the vexing problem of interconnect bottleneck and lead to a new class of faster, more efficient microprocessors.

Two labs, two high-impact missions

04/08/11 — Two new research ventures at Berkeley Engineering have boundary-shattering visions for the future of computing. Jointly unveiled at the recent Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS), these labs have distinct missions. The Swarm Lab will advance work in tiny wireless sensors capable of linking our homes, cities and bodies to the cyber world. The AMPLab will focus on solutions to the growing challenge of storing, accessing and analyzing a deluge of data that has begun overwhelming today's technology.

99.999% reliable? Don’t hold your breath

01/08/11 The New York Times — AT&T's dial tone was engineered so that 99.999 percent of the time, you could successfully make a phone call. Can we realistically expect that such availability will ever come to Internet services? "Google doesn't have the luxury of scheduled downtime for maintenance," says Armando Fox, an adjunct associate professor in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. Nor can it take down the service, he says, to install upgrades. "It is not uncommon for a place like Google to push out a major release every week," he said, adding that such frequency is "unprecedented" for the software industry.

Berkeley prof helped divvy up search to many servers

03/15/10 Wall Street Journal — A connection to the University of California at Berkeley - and a lengthy record for innovations - seem to be winning attributes in this year's big computing prizes. Eric Brewer and Charles Thacker have both.

Oh! The Beauty and Joy of Computing

12/15/09 — "Fun. Easy to learn. Can relate to it." That's what students were saying about a new introductory computing course at Berkeley, established by Dan Garcia, Brian Harvey, Colleen Lewis (B.S.'05 EECS) and George Wang, that will alter the way young people perceive the field. Called "The Beauty and Joy of Computing," the two-unit freshman/sophomore seminar teaches non-majors basic programming skills while exploring big picture topics such as abstraction, world-changing applications and the social implications of computing.

Genealogical Conclusions

05/02/08 — There are about six billion base pairs in the human genome, and our family tree includes about six billion living humans. So, although DNA sequencing begins in a laboratory, it requires research-level computer science and statistics to crunch the resulting mass of data and make sense of the results. As EECS and statistics professor Yun Song remarks, “Just 15 years ago, it was very difficult for population genetics researchers to run their computationally intensive analyses on desktop computers. It's thanks to relatively recent improvements in computers and algorithms that these problems have become tractable.”