We need your help!  An effort is underway to restore the legacy of Berkeley EE Prof. Joseph Gier to the campus community. Gier, who was the first African American professor to earn tenure at the University of California, taught and ran a lab in Cory Hall between 1939 and 1958.  He held eight patents, ran a company that produced a variety of instruments to measure and harness solar radiation, and presented a paper at the first-ever international conference on solar energy. Raised in Oakland by a single mother who worked as a domestic, Gier earned two degrees at Berkeley before becoming a lecturer.  He remained at Berkeley for almost his entire career and was honored for his work as a civil rights activist. Yet despite being the first tenured Black professor to teach in a STEM field at a top tier, primarily white university in America, Joseph Gier disappeared from our record books until four years ago. We are asking the EECS community to come together to help us give this extraordinary man the recognition he deserves. Donations to the Joseph Gier Memorial Fund will sponsor a statue of Gier, created by Oakland artist Dana King, to be unveiled in the Blum Hall courtyard on September 20th.  Please help us correct an historical oversight and restore Gier to his rightful place in the Berkeley narrative!

EECS Professor Emerita Ruzena Bajcsy was awarded the Berkeley Citation, the university’s highest honor, at a special event on Tuesday, Sept. 5. The surprise announcement was made at the end of a special event to commemorate The Past and Future of Robotics and Machine Learning Based on 250 Years of Research Experience. Tsu-Jae King Liu, dean of the College of Engineering, presented the award. The Berkeley Citation is awarded to distinguished individuals whose contributions to UC Berkeley go beyond the call of duty and whose achievements exceed the standards of excellence in their fields. Bajcsy, whose storied career spans over 50 years, conducted seminal research in the areas of human-centered computer control, cognitive science, robotics, computerized radiological/medical image processing, and computer vision. Among her numerous awards and firsts, Bajcsy was the first-ever woman to receive a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in the United States. She is renowned for her intellectual leadership, tireless work ethic, and inspiring approach to research and mentorship. Bajcsy is widely considered the foremost role model of generations of educators and researchers in computer science and engineering.

A team of researchers from UCSF and Berkeley EECS have developed an implantable AI-powered device that can translate brain signals into modulated speech and facial expressions. The device, a multimodal speech prosthesis, and digital avatar, was developed to help a woman who had lost the ability to speak due to a stroke. The results have the potential to help countless others who are unable to speak due to paralysis or disease. The breakthrough study, published in the journal Nature, was led by UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang, EE Assistant Professor Gopala Anumanchipalli and Ph.D. student Kaylo Littlejohn. “This study heavily uses tools that we developed here at Berkeley, which in turn are inspired by the neuroscientific insights from UCSF,” said Gopala. “This is why Kaylo is such a key liaison between the engineering and the science and the medicine — he’s both involved in developing these tools and also deploying them in a clinical setting. I could not see this happening anywhere else but somewhere that is the best in engineering and the best in medicine, on the bleeding edge of research.”

Tsu-Jae King Liu’s leadership of the nation’s top public school of engineering is continuing for a second term. Chancellor Carol Christ and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Benjamin Hermalin announced on August 1st in a campus message that Liu has accepted her reappointment as dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. “We extend our sincere congratulations to Tsu-Jae on her reappointment, effective as of July 1, 2023,” they stated in a campus announcement. “Her exceptional leadership, vision and unwavering commitment to the college and to UC Berkeley have set a remarkable precedent, and we look forward to seeing Berkeley Engineering’s continued growth and success under her leadership and guidance.” King Liu is the Roy W. Carlson Distinguished Professorship in Engineering in EECS. Her research activities are presently in advanced materials, fabrication processes and devices for energy-efficient electronics. She has authored or co-authored over 500 publications and holds over 90 patents. Professor Liu is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and serves on the board of directors for Intel Corporation. “My goal is for Berkeley Engineering to exemplify excellence in all that we do to benefit people and society through innovation and collaboration,” said Liu. “I look forward with excitement to seeing all that we will accomplish together as a community in the years ahead.”

A team led by CS Assistant Professor Anjoo Kanazawa has created Nerfstudio, an open-source platform to help speed up the development of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). NeRFs are a type of 3D imaging technology that can be used to create photorealistic 3D models of objects and scenes from a series of images. The plug-and-play framework, called Nerfstudio, makes it easier for researchers to create and train NeRFs, allowing users to run NeRFs on real-world data. “Advancements in NeRF have contributed to its growing popularity and use in applications such as computer vision, robotics, visual effects and gaming. But support for development has been lagging,” said Kanazawa. “The Nerfstudio framework is intended to simplify the development of custom NeRF methods, the processing of real-world data and interacting with reconstructions.”

CS Professor Stuart Russell testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). In the July 25 hearing, Russell argued that AI is a powerful technology that has the potential to do great good or great harm, and he urged the Senate to take a proactive approach to regulating AI. Russell's testimony focused on three key areas of AI regulation: transparency, accountability, and safety. “My research over the last decade has focused on the problem of control: how do we maintain power, forever, over entities that will eventually become more powerful than us? How do we ensure that AI systems are safe and beneficial for humans? These are not purely technological questions. In both the short term and the long term, regulation has a huge role to play in answering them,” said Russell.

Charis Zhang, Oliver Johansson, and Tobias Worledge, three Berkeley CS undergraduates, have co-founded RIZZ!, an AI-dating app that uses AI to generate witty and charming messages. The app, which was featured on “The Today Show,” has helped users drastically reduce the time between chatting online and meeting in person. “Traditionally it might take you a week, but with RIZZ!, it might take two to three days to get a date,” said Zhang.

NASA astronaut and EECS alumnus Warren “Woody” Hoburg (M.S.’11, Ph.D.’13 EECS) was interviewed by The Robot Brains Podcast while aboard the International Space Station (ISS). CS Professor Pieter Abbeel, who is the brains behind the podcast as well as Woody’s Ph.D. advisor, interviewed Woody about life on the ISS, the scientific experiments being conducted in the low-orbit space station, living in a weightless environment, and the promising impact ISS research could have on humanity. “As a young kid, I thought being an astronaut would be the coolest job. I had no idea how to achieve that goal. It seemed far too improbable of a goal to set my heart on. But I could pursue things I found interesting and challenging and pursue passions. You enabled one of those… I can’t thank you enough for your open-mindedness. I’m so lucky and blessed to have this opportunity.”

CS Professor Alyosha Efros has won the Thomas S. Huang Memorial Prize. The Huang Memorial Prize was established in 2020 by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI). The prize, which is awarded annually at the IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), recognizes exemplary research, teaching, mentoring, and service to the computer vision community. Thomas S. Huang was a pioneering scholar “who left deep impressions in multiple fields including computer vision and image processing, and a role model who contributed to the growth and well-being of several generations of researchers in the community.” The award includes a cash prize of $3,000 and a commemorative plaque.