EECS Assistant Prof. Gopala Anumanchipalli has been selected for the Rose Hills Innovator Program which supports distinguished early-career UC Berkley faculty who are "interested in developing highly innovative research programs" in STEM fields.  The program will provide discretionary research support of up to $85,000 per year for "projects with an exceptionally high scientific promise that may generate significant follow-on funding."   Anumanchipalli's project, titled "Multimodal Intelligent Interfaces for Assistive Communication," proposes to "improve the current state of assistive communication technologies by integrating multiple neural and behavioral sensing modalities, and tightly integrating the graphical interfaces, and personalizing them to the user’s context."  His team will use "state-of-the-art neural engineering and artificial intelligence to develop novel communication interfaces" including Electrocorticography, non-invsive in-ear Electroencephalography sensors and functional near infrared spectroscopy.  They will also use on-device speech recognition and dialog management to incorporate the acoustic context of the user.

EECS Prof. Sanjit Seshia was a recipient of the CAV Award at the 2021 International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV) earlier this month.  This award is presented annually "for fundamental contributions to the field of Computer-Aided Verification," and comes with a cash prize of $10K that is shared equally among recipients.  This year's award specifically recognizes “pioneering contributions to the foundations of the theory and practice of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT).”  Seshia's Ph.D. thesis work on the UCLID verifier and decision procedure helped lay the groundwork for this field.  SMT solvers are critical to verification of software and hardware model checking, symbolic execution, program verification, compiler verification, verifying cyber-physical systems, and program synthesis. Other applications include planning, biological modeling, database integrity, network security, scheduling, and automatic exploit generation.  CAV is the premier international conference on computer-aided verification and  provides a forum for a broad range of advanced research in areas ranging from model checking and automated theorem proving to testing, synthesis and related fields.

"PlushPal: Storytelling with Interactive Plush Toys and Machine Learning," co-authored by CS Masters student Deanna Gelosi (advisor: Dan Garcia), has won the Best Full Paper Award at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Interaction Design for Children (IDC) conference 2021.  IDC is "the premier international conference for researchers, educators and practitioners to share the latest research findings, innovative methodologies and new technologies in the areas of inclusive child-centered design, learning and interaction."  The paper, which was presented in the "Physical Computing for Learning" conference session, describes PlushPal, "a web-based design tool for children to make plush toys interactive with machine learning (ML). With PlushPal, children attach micro:bit hardware to stuffed animals, design custom gestures for their toy, and build gesture-recognition ML models to trigger their own sounds."  It creates "a novel design space for children to express their ideas using gesture, as well as a description of observed debugging practices, building on efforts to support children using ML to enhance creative play."  Gelosi's degree will be in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and New Media, and her research interests include creativity support tools, traditional craft and computing technologies, digital fabrication, and equity in STEAM.  She is a member of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), the Berkeley Institute of Design (BID), and the Tinkering Studio--an R&D lab in the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Three EECS faculty have been named associate deans for the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS).  CS Prof. Armando Fox is the associate dean of online programs; CS Prof. John DeNero is the associate dean of undergraduate studies; and EE Prof. Katherine Yelick is transitioning from her role as CDSS’s associate dean for research to the CDSS executive associate dean.  Berkeley launched CDSS in 2018 to expand teaching and research in data science, and to bring together programs, schools, and departments across campus to tackle the technical, scientific, social, and human dimensions of urgent challenges in biomedicine and human health, climate and sustainability, and human welfare and social justice.

CS Prof. Bin Yu has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland (UNIL).  Honoris causa doctorates are often conferred as a way of recognizing individuals who are unaffiliated with an institution but who have contributed to a specific field or to society in general.  Yu was cited as "one of the most influential researchers of her time" for her "international reputation," "her character and her openness to others and to the world," and "the breadth and importance of her contributions" which "are far from being confined to the scientific community" and "are part of collective efforts to build a better world."  These include her recent work predicting the severity of COVID-19 in the United States.  Yu has a shared appointment in the Department of Statistics, and is affiliated with the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and the Berkeley Center for Computational Biology.

CS Prof. Stuart Russell, has been named a 2021 Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE).  The Officer rank is the second of the order, and is bestowed by the Sovereign of the United Kingdom twice a year to reward valuable "services rendered to the United Kingdom and its people."  Russell, who co-authored the world's most popular AI textbook, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, and founded the Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI), was cited for "For services to artificial intelligence research."  He is an innovator in probabilistic knowledge representation, reasoning, and learning, including its application to global seismic monitoring for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.  He is also a powerful advocate for the creation of "safe AI" and is active in the movement to ban the manufacture and use of autonomous weapons.  His official title is now: Professor Stuart Russell OBE.

EECS Assistant Prof. Jonathan Ragan-Kelley is the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) 2021 Significant New Researcher Award.  The award honors researchers who are new to the field of computer graphics and who have made "recent, significant contributions to the field."  Ragan-Kelley, who was instrumental in the development of the language and compiler Halide, was cited for “outstanding contributions to systems and compilers in rendering and computational photography.” Halide is now the industry standard for providing fast, efficient and portable computation on images and tensors.  Ragan-Kelley is also an Assistant EECS professor at MIT.

Five projects led by EECS faculty have won C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (DTI) AI for Energy and Climate Security Awards. The awards recognize projects that are using AI techniques and digital transformation to advance energy efficiency and lead the way to a lower-carbon, higher-efficiency economy that will ensure energy and climate security.  "C3.ai DTI selects research proposals that inspire cooperative research and advance machine learning and other AI subdisciplines. Projects are peer-reviewed on the basis of scientific merit, prior accomplishments of the principal investigator and co-principal investigators, the use of AI, machine learning, data analytics, and cloud computing in the research project, and the suitability for testing the methods at scale." Each project was awarded $100,000 to $250,000, for an initial period of one year.  The winning proposals were:

Offline Reinforcement Learning for Energy-Efficient Power Grids - Sergey Levine, Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
We propose to develop offline RL algorithms to incorporate real-world data in training an RL agent to reduce emissions associated with running an electrical grid.

Sharing Mobile Energy Storage: Platforms and Learning Algorithms - Kameshwar Poolla, Cadence Design Systems Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering
This proposal aims to design, validate, and test platforms and learning algorithms for mobile storage applications, which can simultaneously serve the role of generation (supplying energy) and distribution (reticulating energy).

Reinforcement Learning for a Resilient Electric Power System - Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Edgar L. and Harold H. Buttner Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Harnessing the potential of AI techniques to make the power system resilient against such extreme cases is crucial. We propose to develop AI-based methods, and corresponding testing strategies, to achieve this goal.

Affordable Gigaton-Scale Carbon Sequestration: Navigating Autonomous Seaweed Growth Platforms by Leveraging Complex Ocean Currents and Machine Learning - Claire Tomlin, Charles A. Desoer Chair in the College of Engineering
A promising approach to carbon sequestration utilizes seaweed, which fixates dissolved CO2 into biomass. Floating platforms that autonomously grow and deposit seaweed could scale this natural process to the open ocean, where the carbon is confined for millennia.

Interpretable Machine Learning Models to Improve Forecasting of Extreme-Weather-Causing Tropical Monster Storms - Da Yang, Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Bin Yu, Chancellor's Distinguished Professor and Class of 1936 Second Chair Departments of Statistics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
We propose to develop interpretable, machine-learning (ML) models to forecast the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) — the Storm King in Earth’s tropics.

CS Prof. Jennifer Chayes, who is also the Associate Provost for the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS), is the recipient of the 2020 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Service Award.  She was selected for the award, which recognizes outstanding career-long "contributions to the computing community at large," for "her effective leadership, mentorship, and dedication to diversity during her distinguished career of computer science research, teaching, and institution building."  Chayes' contributions include leadership at both Microsoft Research (where she founded and led the Theory Group, and Microsoft Research New England, New York City and Montreal) and UC Berkeley (where she is also the Dean of the School of Information); service to many computing and science organizations (including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Research Council, and the ACM A.M. Turing Award Committee); expanding the diversity of the computing field through mentorship of women, underrepresented racial minorities and other disadvantaged groups; and making important research contributions in machine learning.