EECS honor society Eta Kappa Nu (HKN)  hosted a town hall on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2016, to discuss concerns created by long waitlists for some EECS classes.  The town hall was attended by EECS Chair Jitendra Malik, CS Chair James Demmel, and EE Chair Jan Rabaey, as well as a variety of faculty, staff, and students in the department.  The meeting was prompted by a dramatic increase in the number of undergraduates taking computer science classes over the past three years which resulted in waitlists of around 2,600 students at the beginning of this semester.   Although generous private donations, which were applied to short term funding for additional GSIs, helped alleviate the worst of the problem by the third week of classes, a longer-term strategy needs to be devised.

EECS graduate students Paul Bramsen and Wesley Hsieh have been selected as Siebel Scholars for 2017. The Siebel Scholars program promotes leadership, academic achievement and “the collaborative search for solutions to the world’s most critical issues." Paul builds data structures and Wesley leverages human intuition and demonstrations to improve robot learning.  Siebel Scholars are recognized as exceptional graduate students in business, computer science, bioengineering and energy science and comes with an award of $35,000.

ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) has awarded CS  Prof. Christos Papadimitriou the ABZ Gold Platinum Medal at a ceremony in Switzerland. This Medal is awarded to individuals who have fundamentally contributed to the development of computer science and the practice of computer science education.  Previous recipients include Niklaus Wirth, Donald Knuth, David Harel, and Ronald Rivest.

The CITRIS (Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society) Invention Lab and the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation are launching a new joint Maker Pass enabling UC Berkeley students, faculty and staff access to both facilities seamlessly. The CITRIS Invention Lab (Prof. Eric Paulos, co-founder and current director) was designed to support innovation by providing the knowledge and tools to rapidly design and prototype novel interactive products, embedded sensing systems and integrated mobile devices. The Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation (Prof. Björn Hartmann, Interim Faculty Director) is an interdisciplinary hub for learning and making at the intersection of design and technology with design studios and access to tools for prototyping, iteration and fabrication. Prof. Costas Spanos is the Director of CITRIS and the Banatao Institute.

AMPLab researchers Sanjay Krishnan, Prof. Michael Franklin, Prof. Ken Goldberg, Eugene Wu, and Jiannan Wang have developed ActiveClean, a system that uses machine learning to improve the process of removing dirty data by analyzing a user's prediction model to decide which mistakes to edit first, while updating the model as it works.  The demonstration paper titled "ActiveClean: An Interactive Data Cleaning Framework For Modern Machine Learning" received the Best Demo Award at SIGMOD 2016.

ActiveClean is profiled in an I Programmer article and the development team led byEugene Wu (now at Columbia) will present its research on Sept. 7 in New Delhi, at the 2016 conference on Very Large Data Bases.

Profs. Sanjit Seshia, Ruzena Bajcsy, Shankar Sastry, Björn Hartmann, Claire Tomlin and Tom Griffiths are the principal investigators of a new large National Science Foundation project that will tackle the problem of designing “human Cyber-Physical Systems (h-CPS)”, cyber-physical systems that work in concert with humans. The research outcome of the project, called Verified Human Interfaces, Control, and Learning for Semi-Autonomous Systems, or VeHICaL, will have applications in emerging technologies such as semi-autonomous cars and autonomous aerial vehicles (drones). NSF has awarded $4.6M for this project.

EECS alumni Matt Au (B.A. CS 2002) has been announced as the Chief Technology Officer of the cooking app start-up SideChef. SideChef is an interactive step-by-step cooking app that assists in the kitchen just like a virtual sous chef. With real time recipe navigation that includes hands-free voice commands, detailed photos, how-to videos, and built-in automatic timers, beginners have the tools to learn essential skills to cook with confidence, while intermediate and advanced cooks hone their abilities and contribute to the community with their own recipes.

Prof. Dan Garcia is quoted in an EdSource article titled “New computer science course's challenge is finding qualified teachers to teach it”. Expansion of a new Advanced Placement computer science course aimed at drawing young women and minorities into high-tech fields is being hampered by a nationwide shortage of teachers qualified to teach it. In President Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address, he said every student should be offered the opportunity to take “the hands-on computer science and math classes that make them job-ready on day one. Prof. Garcia cited a series of steps needed to boost the supply of teachers, including expansion of teacher training programs in computer science, creating a certification program for computer science teachers and expanding programs like Teach for America, which draws on recent college graduates and gives them minimal training before placing them in a classroom.

The research of postdoctoral scholar Oscar Beijbom (supervised by Prof. Trevor Darrell at the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center) is being used to help coral researchers speed up the under-sea mapping of reefs around the world.  Beijbom's neural-networking algorithm is part of a software project,  featured in a Nature article, that can zip through and classify over a million photographs in a matter of months.

The Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, which will focus on ensuring that AI systems are beneficial to humans, is being lead by  Prof. Stuart Russell, a long-time advocate of incorporating human values in the design of AI.  Associate Prof. Pieter Abbeel and Assistant Prof. Anca Dragan will serve as co-principal investigators along with cognitive scientist Tom Griffiths and faculty from Cornell and the University of Michigan.  The center was made possible by a grant of $5.5 million from the Open Philanthropy Project, as well as grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Future of Life Institute.