Computing

Collision-free Cal Band

11/01/16 — Tina Chow, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, challenged her students to develop computer code to help the University of California Marching Band perform intricate routines while avoiding collisions.

Materials database speeds innovation

11/01/16 — Assistant professor of materials science and engineering Kristin Persson launched the Materials Project to provide a comprehensive materials database to speed up discovery and deployment of new technologies.

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.

Ali Javey and graduate student Sujay Desai with a vacuum probe station

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.”

Berkeley hosts high school students for cyber training

08/04/16 Campus Technology — A cyber security program sponsored by the National Security Agency has wooed 23 students to attend a six-week course at the Berkeley. The CYBEAR initiative is part of a nationwide effort to introduce K-12 students to safe online behavior and spark their interest in pursuing careers in the field.

simulation of ion channels in atomic detail

Head-Gordon leads Berkeley partnership to improve scientific software

08/04/16 — A nine-university partnership headed by Virginia Tech has launched the Molecular Sciences Software Institute, an NSF-funded program to improve software for the molecular sciences. Bioengineering's Teresa Head-Gordon is the institute's lead scientist at UC Berkeley.

Better marching through algorithms

07/15/16 — Using computer code and a little ingenuity, an introductory engineering course helped solve a confounding problem for the Cal Marching Band.

The backup generator

05/01/16 — Backblaze, a cloud backup company that offers unlimited storage for a fee of $5 per month, is accelerating its growth to find, encrypt and save all of a user's files of any size or type to an off-site location.

$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.

From left, Xiang Zhang, Yu Ye, Jun Xiao, and Yuan Wang are part of a team of scientists that made a big advance in valleytronics.

Scientists push valleytronics a step closer to reality

04/04/16 Berkeley Lab — Scientists led by Xiang Zhang, professor of mechanical engineering, have taken a big step toward the practical application of “valleytronics,” a new type of electronics that could lead to faster and more efficient computer logic systems and data storage chips.

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).

Magnetic microscope image of three nanomagnetic computer bits

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.

The backup generator

01/19/16 Berkeley Haas — When Gleb Budman (B.S.'95 ME) and his co-founders launched Backblaze, an online-backup service, in 2007, they were determined not to raise capital. The bootstrapping gamble paid off, leading to custom-built servers that have made Backblaze a standout in the field.

Adding ‘Beauty and Joy’ to Obama’s push for computer science teaching

01/15/16 NPR — President Obama wants hands-on computer science classes for every student. Computer science professor Dan Garcia, creator of "CS10: The Beauty and Joy of Computing," spends part of each day trying to figure out what that would look like.

Gradescope co-founders Pieter Abbeel, Arjun Singh and Sergey Karayev, left to right. (Marla Aufmuth photo)

Gradescope: Taking the pain out of grading

01/15/16 — Sergey Karayev and Arjun Singh bonded over an "extremely painful" experience well-known to GSI's everywhere: grading handwritten papers and exams.

Engineers demo first processor that uses light for ultrafast communications

12/23/15 — Engineers at Berkeley, MIT and Colorado have successfully married electrons and photons within a single-chip microprocessor, a landmark development that opens the door to ultrafast, low-power data crunching.

Tech titans create nonprofit to develop artificial intelligence

12/15/15 Bloomberg Business — A group of prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs has established a nonprofit organization to develop "digital intelligence" that will benefit humanity. “This collection of people is stunning,” said EECS professor and company adviser Pieter Abbeel, who said he expects the company's research and ideas to be “impressive and surprising.”