Shafi Goldwasser appointed director of Simons Institute
10/18/17 — Turing Award-winning computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser will become the new director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing on January 1, 2018.
Computer science
Berkeley experts on how to build more secure, faster AI systems
10/16/17 — In a new report from Berkeley's Real-Time Intelligent Secure Execution Lab (RISELab), leading researchers outline challenges in systems, security and architecture that may impede the progress of artificial intelligence, and propose new research directions to address them.
EECS professor David Culler named interim dean for data sciences
05/26/17 — Chancellor-designate Carol Christ has appointed EECS professor David Culler as interim dean for the newly created Division of Data Sciences, effective July 1.
Researchers teach computers to be curious
05/25/17 Engadget — When you first played Super Mario Bros, you probably started by exploring, not by racing through the game. Berkeley computer scientists have imparted that same sense of curiosity into their algorithm in a move that could drastically advance the field of artificial intelligence.
Next big thing for David Patterson: New chip for Google Brain
05/08/17 CNBC — Less than a year after retiring from 40 years at Berkeley Engineering, legendary EECS professor David Paterson is now a key part of the team behind a critical chip that Google uses for artificial intelligence processing.
Malik honored for pioneering computer vision work
05/03/17 ACM — EECS chair and professor Jitendra Malik has won the 2016 ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award "for seminal contributions to computer vision that have led the field in image segmentation and object category recognition."
Learning to think like a computer
04/04/17 New York Times — Computer science professor Daniel Garcia explains an all-important concept in computer science - abstraction - in terms of milkshakes. It's part of a hot trend in education: Demystifying the "magic" of computers and computational thinking.
A “VAST” step forward in cybersecurity
03/15/17 Berkeley Research — Working closely with cybersecurity experts at Berkeley Lab, CS professor Vern Paxson and postdoc researcher Matthias Vallentin are developing VAST, a system to help forensic analysts pinpoint how much of an organization's computer network has been compromised - and where.
WikiLeaks says it has obtained trove of CIA hacking tools
03/08/17 Washington Post — Nicholas Weaver (Ph.D.'03 CS), a senior researcher at the Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute, says the massive collection of CIA hacking data being released by WikiLeaks "is probably legitimate or contains a lot of legitimate stuff."
Berkeley launches RISELab, enabling computers to make intelligent real-time decisions
01/23/17 — UC Berkeley has launched the RISELab, the successor of AMPLab, and the latest in its series of five-year intensive research labs in computer science, with the goal of improving how machines make intelligent decisions based on real-time input.
How a grad student found spyware that could control anybody’s iPhone
12/07/16 Vanity Fair — Last summer, computer science Ph.D. candidate Bill Marczak stumbled across a program that could spy on an iPhone's contact list and messages - and even record calls. Illuminating shadowy firms that sell spyware to corrupt governments across the globe, Marczak's story reveals the new arena of cyber-warfare.
Seeing is believing
11/01/16 — Emerging augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are opening up a new frontier of possibilities for researchers at Berkeley's new Center for Augmented Cognition.
Huawei puts $1M into AI research partnership with UC Berkeley
10/11/16 TechCrunch — China's Huawei on Tuesday announced a $1 million partnership between its Noah's Ark Laboratory and the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab to perform basic research into machine learning, computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence.
Smallest. Transistor. Ever.
10/10/16 — For more than a decade, engineers have been racing to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. Now, a research team led by EECS professor Ali Javey has surpassed a theoretical limit of physics and created the smallest transistor reported to date.
Toward human-centric A.I.
09/20/16 — Twenty years ago, Stuart Russell co-wrote a book titled Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, destined to become the dominant text in its field. Near the end of the book, he posed a question: “What if A.I. does succeed?”
Spreadsheet tools to help everyone escape from the cell
08/04/16 Financial Times — Alumnus and Microsoft researcher Sumit Gulwani (Ph.D.'05 CS) is behind the development of user-friendly spreadsheet tools that can, in his view, “keep control of the digital divide.”
$1M Hopper-Dean Foundation gift for diversity in CS
04/29/16 — The Hopper-Dean Foundation has donated $1 million to the EECS Department to support diversity initiatives in computer science. This expanded outreach effort, led by CS professor Dan Garcia, will touch thousands of students at Cal and high schools nationwide over the next two years.
Who’s the Michael Jordan of computer science?
04/22/16 Science — Semantic Scholar, an AI-driven search engine from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has added a service that ranks researchers' influence. The top star among computer scientists, according to the new tool? Michael I. Jordan, an EECS professor at Berkeley and a pioneer of AI.
Bajcsy, Paxson honored as visionary faculty entrepreneurs
03/30/16 — EECS professors Ruzena Bajcsy and Vern Paxson have been selected as 2016-17 Signatures Innovation Fellows, receiving funding to pursue their commercially promising research to assess personal injury and recovery (Bajcsy) and network cyberattacks (Paxson).
Experiments show magnetic chips could dramatically increase computing’s energy efficiency
03/14/16 — In a breakthrough for energy-efficient computing, Berkeley engineers have shown for the first time that magnetic chips can operate at the lowest fundamental energy dissipation theoretically possible under the laws of thermodynamics.