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Spark, born in Berkeley’s AMPLab, ‘rewrites future of big data’

06/21/13 Wired — Teaming with a particularly ambitious group of computer scientists from UC Berkeley, Yahoo is installing a new data crunching platform called Spark, which is about 100 times faster than the mighty Hadoop - an open source software creation that underpins a Who's Who of the internet, including Facebook and Twitter - and could very well replace Hadoop as the stuff that fuels the modern web.

Computer memory can be read with a flash of light

06/11/13 Nature — Modern computer memory technologies come with a trade-off between speed and retention time. But a prototype memory device, co-developed by Berkeley Engineering materials scientist Ramamoorthy Ramesh, combines speed, endurance and low power consumption by uniting electronic storage with a readout based on the physics that powers solar panels.

Computers that can identify you by your thoughts

04/05/13 I-School — Instead of typing your password, in the future you may only have to think it, according to a study by School of Information researchers and an EECS undergrad that explores the feasibility of brainwave-based computer authentication.

Return of the Borg: How Twitter rebuilt Google’s secret weapon

03/05/13 Wired — Borg is a Google software system that coordinates tasks across the search giant's vast fleet of servers. At Twitter, a small team of engineers has built a similar system using Mesos, an open-source software platform developed by UC Berkeley researchers. Ben Hindman, who founded the Mesos project as an EECS Ph.D. student, now oversees its use at Twitter.

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.

UC Berkeley wins $60 million for computer center

05/01/12 San Francisco Chronicle — UC Berkeley has won a $60 million grant to establish a worldwide center for theoretical computer science to explore high-level mathematical algorithms that could help a variety of scientific fields, including health care, climate modeling and economics. The award from the Simons Foundation of New York will be used to start the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, which is expected start operations in July.

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.