Blockchain comes to campus
06/01/18 — Blockchain at Berkeley, a student group, is bringing together those interested in engineering, business and technology law.
Computing
Patterson wins Turing Award
06/01/18 — ECS professor David Patterson won the A.M. Turing Award for his work, with Stanford's John Hennessy, on RISC processor design.
Fighting human trafficking
06/01/18 — Algorithms can link online sex ads to bitcoin transactions, identifying human traffickers.
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.
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.
More female computing grads challenge tech’s bad bros
04/16/18 Mercury News — More and more women are getting computer science and electrical engineering degrees from Berkeley and Stanford, reversing a national trend. But the growing and heated debate over the technology industry's male-dominated culture hasn't escaped the attention of those female students, said EECS professor John DeNero.
Valleytronics discovery could extend limits of Moore’s Law
04/16/18 Berkeley Lab — New research from Berkeley Lab, co-led by materials science and engineering Ph.D. candidate Shuren Lin, finds useful new information-handling potential in tin sulfide, a candidate “valleytronics” transistor material that might one day enable chipmakers to pack more computing power onto microchips.
Making computer animation more agile, acrobatic — and realistic
04/10/18 — EECS grad student Xue Bin “Jason” Peng and his colleagues have made a major advance in realistic computer animation, using deep reinforcement learning to create a virtual stuntman that mimics natural motions.
Berkeley puts popular data science course online, for free
03/29/18 — The fastest-growing course in UC Berkeley's history - Foundations of Data Science - is being offered free online this spring for the first time through the campus's online education hub, edX.
John DeNero honored for distinguished teaching
03/19/18 — EECS professor John DeNero has been named a winner of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award, one of the university's highest honors. DeNero uses technology and teaching assistants to scale popular computer and data science courses without losing academic rigor. His work was recently featured in Berkeley Engineer magazine.
New machine learning method sees the forests and the trees
03/06/18 Berkeley Lab — In an effort to teach computers to guide science, researchers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have come up with a novel machine learning method, which they call "iterative Random Forests," that enables scientists to derive insights from systems of previously intractable complexity in record time.
$10 million award for RISELab’s AI research
02/27/18 — Berkeley's RISELab, led by EECS professor Ion Stoica, has received an Expeditions in Computing award from the National Science Foundation, providing $10 million in funding over five years to enable game-changing advances in real-time decision making technologies.
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.
Security for data analytics: Handling the two-edged sword
02/16/18 Berkeley Research — Data protocols meant to ensure privacy can end up blocking valuable, even life-saving analysis of that data. Now EECS researchers are trying a new approach that allows organizations to follow tight data security and privacy policies while enabling flexible data analysis.
Cryptocurrencies come to campus
02/09/18 New York Times — UC Berkeley is one of several institutions rushing to add courses about Bitcoin, blockchain and other elements of virtual currency to the curriculum. EECS professor Dawn Song is co-teaching one such course to a standing-room-only audience of engineering, business and law students.
Rotating ‘chiral phonons’ could enable new form of IT
02/02/18 Berkeley Lab — Researchers at Berkeley Lab, led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, have found the first evidence of naturally occurring circular rotation in an atomically thin material, a phenomenon that could enable exotic and microscopic forms of electronics.
New research centers to help usher in future of microelectronics
01/19/18 — The Semiconductor Research Corporation announced six new multi-university research centers, and Berkeley Engineering faculty are leading partners in three of them. The centers aim to jump-start future technologies for the microelectronics industry.
NAS honors Prasad Raghavendra for computer science work
01/17/18 — Prasad Raghavendra, an EECS associate professor, was honored by the National Academy of Sciences for his revolutionary research in computer science, sharing the inaugural $100,000 Michael and Sheila Held Prize with David Steurer of ETH Zurich.
Grad students win $100,000 in data science contest
12/04/17 — A team of UC Berkeley graduate students with serious data science and analysis skills, including EECS MS student Allen Tang and CEE Ph.D. candidate Eric Munsing beat teams from the likes of Harvard, MIT and Oxford to win the $100,000 top prize in an international data science competition staged by the hedge fund Citadel.
At Berkeley, ‘ethical hackers’ learn to wage cyberwar
11/29/17 New Yorker — EECS professor Doug Tygar is teaching a new generation of cyber security researchers to prevent cyberwar attacks by forensically examining them, and even sometimes mounting "ethical hacking" schemes of their own.