Fighting human trafficking
06/01/18 — Algorithms can link online sex ads to bitcoin transactions, identifying human traffickers.
News
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.
A.M. Turing Award lecture to be livestreamed
05/29/18 HPC Wire — EECS professor emeritus David A. Patterson and former Stanford president John L. Hennessy, who received the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures, will jointly present the Turing Award Lecture on June 4 at the International Symposium of Computer Architecture in Los Angeles. The Turing Award lecture is open to the public and will be livestreamed.
Breaking new ground for TBSI
05/23/18 — The Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute reached a major milestone this month as ground was broken on a new campus in Shenzhen, China.
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.
Women in blockchain
05/21/18 — Blockchain at Berkeley hosted she(256), the university's first women in blockchain conference, last month at Memorial Stadium.
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."
Now and forever Berkeley Engineers
05/16/18 — The 2018 Berkeley Engineering commencement ceremonies were filled with celebration, words of inspiration, and a Berkeley Citation for departing Dean Shankar Sastry. Relive the ceremonies in video and photos.
Alexa and Siri can hear this hidden command. You can’t
05/10/18 New York Times — EECS Ph.D. candidate Nicholas Carlini and other Berkeley cybersecurity researchers have been embedding commands into music and spoken text that human listeners can't hear but smart devices can. Carlini hopes to secure AI systems against attacks that he assumes "malicious people" are already working on.
Why some cities have had enough of Waze
05/07/18 US News & World Report — Start-up-turned-tech-giant Waze solves traffic problems for some users, but creates challenges for others by overwhelming local streets. "There's nothing inherently wrong with routing apps, but the problem is overuse," says Alexandre Bayen, director of Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies.
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.”
Berkeley water engineer lands 2018 ‘Slammy’
05/04/18 Graduate Division — At the UC-wide Grad Slam competition on May 3, environmental engineering doctoral student Joseph Charbonnet brought home the first-place ‘Slammy' - and $9,000 in prize money - for his three-minute talk on using manganese-coated sand to capture, clean and re-use stormwater.
Vazirani elected to National Academy of Sciences
05/01/18 — Umesh Vazirani, the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is one of five Berkeley faculty members newly named to the National Academy of Sciences.
The HAB project: A platform for space research
04/30/18 — The student group Space Technologies at Cal is developing a balloon-based platform for near-space research. They recently launched a high-altitude balloon from Memorial Glade.
When geneticists talk sloppily about race
04/30/18 The Atlantic — Bioengineering professor Ian Holmes writes about how a geneticist's recent op-ed in The New York Times caused controversy when it used sloppy language to talk about the tricky relationship between race and genetics research.
Scarred by attack, student entrepreneurs fight global terror
04/30/18 — In the wake of the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice, France, that claimed the life of a classmate, Berkeley students in the European Innovation Academy technology entrepreneurship program have embarked on a new mission - fighting global terrorism through startups that are gaining traction far beyond campus.
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.
New esports space coming to Foothill
04/20/18 — Campus leaders are planning to convert a community room in the Foothill Residence Hall into a new facility dedicated to competitive student video game teams, ESPN reports.
Berkeley engineers among new faculty elected to AAAS
04/18/18 — Berkeley Engineering faculty members Eric Brewer and James Demmel are among nine UC Berkeley researchers elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a society founded in 1780 to honor exceptional scholars, scientists, artists and innovators from around the world.
Berkeley engineers squeeze cells through microtubes to detect cancer
04/17/18 — Research led by Lydia Sohn, professor of mechanical engineering, could greatly improve the speed and accuracy of cancer diagnosis by exploiting the different speeds with which cancerous and healthy cells move through micropores.