EECS Faculty will headline a new AI lecture series to explore the “paradigm shift” that ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed. CS Professors Jitendra Malik, Stuart Russell and Michael Jordan are among the seven speakers scheduled this spring to address the sensation that is ChatGPT and other related LLMs. CS Professor Ken Goldberg, who organized the lecture series on behalf of Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), said, “Something changed very dramatically with the performance of ChatGPT, compared with previous large language models, and everyone, including experts, is asking, ‘What does it mean? Where do we go from here?’” The series will also feature John Schulman (Ph.D. ‘16; advisor: Pieter Abbeel), a co-founder of OpenAI and the primary architect of ChatGPT. “Everyone wants to hear from the experts,” Goldberg said. “There are so many misconceptions out there. In the series, we’ll hear from those who have been working in the field for many years who can provide valuable perspectives on the importance of ChatGPT.”

Two EECS graduate students, Jessy Lin (advisors: Anca Dragan and Dan Klein) and Abhishek Shetty (advisor: Nika Haghtalab) have been named 2023 recipients of the Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD fellowship. This fellowship recognizes graduate and postgraduate students in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Apple Scholars are selected based on “innovative research, record as thought leaders and collaborators, and commitment to advancing their respective fields.” Jessy Lin’s research is focused on using language as a medium to build agents that can collaborate and interact with humans. Abhishek Shetty’s research is broadly interested in theoretical computer science and machine learning, understanding how learning theory, complexity theory, and probability interact with each other. Apple Scholars receive funding to support their research, and mentorship with an Apple researcher in their field.

EE Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli has won the 15th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies. He was cited “for ‘radically transforming' the design of the chips that power today’s electronic devices, giving rise to ‘the modern semiconductor industry.’” Prof. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli transformed chip design in three fundamental ways: first, he created simulation tools that sped up electronic circuit design and fabrication; second, he invented a program to automate circuit design with hardware programming languages, eliminating the need for what was once a complicated and arduous process; and finally, he developed algorithms to geometrically optimize circuit placement for performance and energy efficiency. From this body of work, he founded two companies, Cadence and Synopsys, both of which are instrumental to the semiconductor industry today, and continue to provide technology to companies like Apple, GM, Intel, Tesla and Boeing. He received 28 nominations for this award, both individual and institutional, from all over the world. The Frontiers of Knowledge Award was established in 2008 with the goal of promoting “the value of knowledge as a public good without frontiers, the best instrument to take on the great global challenges of our time and expand the worldviews of individuals for the benefit of all humanity.” Each recipient is awarded €400,000.

EECS Ph.D. student Yicheng Zhu (advisor: Robert Pilawa-Podgurski) has won an NVIDIA Graduate Fellowship. Zhu, whose research interests include enabling technologies for high-performance electric power conversion, is one of five recipients of the fellowship, which awards up to $50,000 to each recipient in support of research in areas such as accelerated computing, with fellows tackling projects in deep learning, robotics, computer vision, computer graphics, circuits, autonomous vehicles, and programming systems. Awardees are selected from a highly competitive, global applicant pool and will participate in a summer internship with NVIDIA. Spanning 22 years, NVIDIA has awarded $6 million to nearly 200 students to support graduate research. “Our fellowship recipients are among the most talented graduate students in the world,” said NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally. “They’re working on some of the most important problems in computer science, and we’re delighted to support their research.” Zhu’s research will explore extreme-performance hybrid switched-capacitor voltage regulation modules for ultra-high-power GPUs, which enables highly efficient and ultra-compact vertical power delivery with fast transient response.

An interdisciplinary team of industry and academic researchers led by EECS Prof. Alexandre Bayen has completed its most ambitious real-time traffic experiment to date. The project was led by the CIRCLES Consortium, an effort led by UC Berkeley and Vanderbilt University, involving collaborators from five universities and multiple government agencies. The experiment tested 100 partially automated vehicles in real traffic with the aim of improving overall traffic flow. Operating out of a massive control center designed to monitor one section of I-14 in Nashville, TN, the researchers used AI to build on existing adaptive cruise control systems to smooth phantom jams collaboratively. Their results show a positive energy impact. “Driving is very intuitive. If there’s a gap in front of you, you accelerate. If someone brakes, you slow down. But it turns out that this very normal reaction can lead to stop-and-go traffic and energy inefficiency,” said Prof. Bayen. “That’s precisely what AI technology is able to fix—it can direct the vehicle to things that are not intuitive to humans, but are overall more efficient.” 

CS Prof. Raluca Ada Popa was interviewed as a Featured ACM Member as part of the "People of ACM" bulletin. As the Co-Director of RISELab and SkyLab, two labs aiming to build secure intelligent systems for the cloud and for the sky of cloud, she spoke about her research interests, which include security, systems, and applied cryptography. “I love both to build systems that can solve a real-world problem and to reason about deep mathematical concepts,” she said. Aiming to predict the direction of her research, she outlined her renewed focus on confidential computing, a major shift in the cloud computing landscape, which she said “will revolutionize data systems in industry in the coming years…[through] the combination of hardware security via hardware enclaves and cryptographic techniques. Many organizations have a lot of confidential data that they cannot share between different teams in their organization or different organizations. Sharing it would enable better medical studies, better fraud detection, increased business effectiveness, and other benefits.”

The Bakar Institute of Digital Materials for the Planet (BIDMaP), led by Chemistry Prof. Omar M. Yaghi, brings together CS Profs. Christian Borgs, Joseph Gonzalez, Jennifer Listgarten, Jennifer Chayes, and Kathy Yelick, along with faculty from the Department of Chemistry and Statistics, respectively, to affect climate change by combining machine learning and chemistry. The institute aims to develop a new field of machine learning for experimental science, creating algorithms and designing platforms to optimize the discovery, development, and deployment of technology. “This is what we need to accelerate discovery at a rate that will save us from the worst effects of climate change,” said Jennifer Chayes, EECS prof., associate provost for CDSS and dean of the School of Information. “BIDMaP will bring together the founder of an important new field in chemistry and the best artificial intelligence and machine learning group in the world to imagine and create a better future.”

CS Prof. Pieter Abbeel has been interviewed as a Featured ACM Member. As part of the “People of ACM” bulletin, Abbeel details the groundbreaking work that led to his 2021 ACM Prize in Computing, and the direction of the field of AI and robotics in the warehousing industry and beyond. Given the different specializations required to pursue AI, he gives the following advice to the next generation of AI researchers: “In terms of foundations, basic mathematics such as calculus, probability, linear algebra are very important, and also optimization,” said Abbeel. “Taking physics classes can be very helpful, as it teaches you the skill of abstracting real world problem settings into equations." Prof. Abbeel is the director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab, in addition to Co-Founder, President, and Chief Scientist of Covariant, a Berkeley-based AI robotics company.

Berkeley Artificial Intelligence researchers are joining forces with climate experts, government agencies, and industry, as part of the new Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Climate Initiative, a multi-disciplinary student-led hub dedicated to fighting climate change.  The effort is being led by co-founding director CS Prof. Trevor Darrel and organized by three of his graduate students, Colorado Reed (co-advised by Kurt Keutzer), who will help lead the initiative, Medhini Narasimhan, and Ritwik Gupta (co-advised by Shankar Sastry).  Their objective is to develop AI techniques that address problems with data processing, particularly involving massive data sets. To maximize the benefit to other researchers studying the same problems around the world, all work done by the initiative will be openly published and available without exclusive or proprietary licensing.  One of their first projects, “The Fate of Snow,” will be a collaboration between BAIR Climate Initiative researchers and other scientists and policy experts on the Berkeley campus, Berkeley Lab (LBNL), Meta AI (which belongs to Meta Platforms, Inc.) and the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes. The researchers plan to apply AI methods to a multitude of openly available weather and satellite data sources to estimate how much water is in the Sierra Nevada snowpack and forecast what that will mean for streadmflow in the region.

Sky Computing Lab, the latest 5-year collaborative research lab launched out of Berkeley EECS, aims to build a new backbone for interconnected cloud computing, a milestone that would revolutionize the industry. The lab will leverage distributed systems, programming languages, security, and machine learning to decouple the services that companies want to implement from the choice of a specific cloud, with the goal of transforming the cloud into an undifferentiated commodity, much like the Internet. Google, IBM, Intel, Samsung SDS, and VMware are among the founding sponsors of the lab. The lab's team is comprised of over 60 members, including students, staff, and EECS faculty like Alvin Cheung, Natacha Crooks, Ken Goldberg, Joseph Gonzalez, Joe Hellerstein, Mike Jordan,  Anthony Joseph, Raluca Ada Popa, Koushik Sen, Scott Shenker, and Dawn Song. CS Prof. Ion Stoica, who will lead the lab, says “Sky will knock out current barriers and accelerate the transition to the cloud, which will accelerate the progress across different fields.”