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Roadway image showing bounding boxes over objects of note, like cars and traffic signals

Download the world’s largest self-driving dataset

06/07/18 Interesting Engineering — The Berkeley DeepDrive Industry Consortium has released an open-source dataset of 100,000 self-driving video sequences - largest of its kind - to the public in hopes of helping engineers develop autonomous vehicles.

Robot’s play

06/02/18 — Robots can manipulate objects they have never encountered before by building on previous play and observations.
Kiwi robot transporting food in downtown Berkeley

Those four-wheeled robots on campus, explained

05/31/18 — The presence of talented EECS student engineers, along with plenty of hungry students and a gourmet local food scene, goes a long way to explain the decision by Felipe Chavez to launch his robot-powered meal delivery startup Kiwi in Berkeley.
Stephanie Tena teaches middle schooler Bianca Castro coding and AI during an after- school club

The future of AI depends on high school girls

05/23/18 The Atlantic — From a coding summer camp for high schoolers at Stanford to a project showcase for teens and their mentors at Berkeley, AI4All is working to widen the pipeline of women entering the field of artificial intelligence.
Computer illustration of human-looking bot

Microsoft acquires Berkeley AI company to humanize its bots

05/21/18 The Verge — AI start-up Semantic Machines, co-founded and co-led by EECS professor Dan Klein, is being acquired by Microsoft, which hopes to make its Cortana digital assistant and other bots sound more naturally human by establishing "a conversational AI center of excellence in Berkeley."
Small drone flying in a lab

How to interact with robots

05/04/18 Wired — EECS professor Anca Dragan discusses one of the big challenges in her field of human-robot interaction: getting robots to anticipate human behavior. “It's not enough to know what people are currently doing. They need to know what's going to happen in the future.”
Michael Jordan

AI: The revolution hasn’t happened yet

04/25/18 Medium — EECS and statistics professor Michael Jordan writes about the opportunity and imperative of developing a "human-centric engineering discipline" to address the ethical concerns of artificial intelligence.
DexNet robot sorting objects

Nimble robot makes strides in dexterity

03/26/18 MIT Tech Review — The latest iteration of Dex-Net, from the lab of robotics professor Ken Goldberg, could sort through your junk drawer with unrivaled speed and skill, using machine learning to determine how to pick up even odd-looking objects with incredible efficiency.
Robotic surgical arm picking up grains of rice from a moving platform

How flight simulation tech can help turn robots into surgeons

03/02/18 Wired — Robotics researchers from Berkeley's AUTOLab, led by IEOR and EECS professor Ken Goldberg, have built a heaving robotic platform - mimicking the motion of a breathing, heart-beating human patient - to help develop algorithms that robotic surgical assistants can use to guide their cutting.
Warning flag with skull and crossbones

Why AI researchers should be more paranoid

02/23/18 Wired — A new report highlights risks of artificial intelligence, such as malicious self-driving cars or assassin robots. EECS professor Ion Stoica, who recently surveyed technical challenges in AI, said Berkeley is already trying to expose students flocking to the field to concerns over AI safety and security.
Anca Dragan

Teaching AI about human values

02/08/18 Forbes — Computer scientist and robotics engineer Anca Dragan has a cool name, an impressive CV and an important job: ensuring that our interactions with robots and other artificially intelligent agents are positive ones.
AI@TheHouse co-founders.

AI innovation at The House

01/17/18 — In collaboration with several Berkeley Engineering faculty, the Berkeley-based startup institute The House has formed a new AI-focused startup accelerator.
Presentating equations on a whiteboard at NIPS conference

All the buzz at AI’s big shindig

12/20/17 Economist — At the annual Neural Information Processing Systems conference this month, thousands of researchers flocked to Long Beach to devour algorithms, keynotes by famous speakers and all things artificial intelligence, prompting EECS associate professor Ben Recht to lament the event's growing corporatism.
The robot Vestri plays with objects to learn how to complete a task.

New robots can see into the future

12/06/17 — Berkeley researchers, led by EECS assistant professor Sergey Levine, have developed a learning technology that enables robots to imagine the future of their actions so they can figure out how to manipulate objects they have never encountered before.
Frame grab from Slaughterbots video showing drone promoter

Professor’s eerie lethal drone video goes viral

11/20/17 SF Chronicle — "Slaughterbots," a not-so-futuristic video warning against the development of autonomous weapons, has gone viral. Co-created by EECS professor Stuart Russell and the Future of Life Institute, it was released this week at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva.

Berkeley startup to train robots like puppets

11/07/17 — Robots today must be laboriously programmed by writing computer code, but imagine donning a VR headset and virtually guiding a robot through a task instead. That's the vision of EECS professor Pieter Abbeel and three of his students.
Chelsea Finn, Sergey levine and Pieter Abbeel working on a robot that uses deep learning software.

Building AI that can build AI

11/06/17 New York Times — As the tech industry hunts for new ways to quicken the development of artificially intelligent machines, Berkeley researchers are focusing on machine-learning algorithms that will help robots learn new tasks based on things they've learned before. "Computers are going to invent the algorithms for us, essentially," says EECS professor Pieter Abbeel.
Pieter Abbeel in front of robot image

Case studies in forward thinking

11/01/17 — Nine Berkeley Engineering faculty members share some of their forward-looking work and how it might impact what's to come.