News

3rd place winners of the 2017 Greylock Hackfest

Berkeley team takes 3rd place in Greylock Hackfest

Undergraduate students Jian Lu (EECS junior), Walt Leung (CS sophomore), Jiayi Chen (CS junior), and Malhar Patel (EECS junior) placed 3rd at the Greylock Hackfest in July.  Their platform, BeAR, allows multiple users to connect to the same #AR (augmented reality) session.  The Hackfest, sponsored by Greylock Partners, allows 45 teams of up to four university students the opportunity to show what they can build to a panel of tech industry  judges.  Hacks are judged based on five different criteria: level of difficulty, aesthetics, originality, usefulness, and your project’s “WOW factor.”

Berkeley is one of the best computer science colleges for women

U.C. Berkeley made StudySoup's list of the top 20 female-friendly computer science programs in the country.  The graduate student group WICSE (Women in Computer Science and Engineering) is credited for the ranking because they are working to "build a more inclusive environment in the industry. In addition to outreach programs for younger students, the organization partners with research institutions and corporate partners to host workshops and network events."

Rebecca Portnoff takes a step toward fighting human trafficking

CS graduate student Rebecca Portnoff (adviser: David Wagner) has developed the first algorithm to identify adult ads tied to human trafficking rings by linking the ads to public information from Bitcoin — the primary payment method for online sex ads.  “The technology we’ve built finds connections between ads,” says Portnoff.  “Is the pimp behind that post for Backpage also behind this post in Craigslist? Is he the same man who keeps receiving Bitcoin for trafficked girls? Questions like these are answerable only through more sophisticated technological tools – exactly what we’ve built in this work – that link ads together using payment mechanisms and the language in the ads themselves.”  Her team will present their findings this month at the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.

Grant Ho, Mobin Javed, Vern Paxson and David Wagner win 2017 Internet Defense Prize

CS graduate student Grant Ho, Aashish Sharma (LBNL),  CS alumna Mobin Javed (Ph.D. 2016), and CS Profs. Vern Paxson and David Wagner have won the 2017 Internet Defense Prize, worth $100,000, for their paper "Detecting Credential Spearphishing in Enterprise Settings."  CS graduate student Thurston Dang,  Petros Maniatis (Google Brain), and Prof. David Wagner, were finalists for their paper "Oscar: A Practical Page-Permissions-Based Scheme for Thwarting Dangling Pointers."  The award, which is funded by Facebook and offered in partnership with USENIX, recognizes research that meaningfully makes the internet more secure.

Alexi Efros's team offers custom colorization using deep neural networks

CS Prof. Alexei Efros (also alumnus, Ph.D. '03) and his team have developed a new technique, leveraging deep neural networks and AI, to allow novices--even those with limited artistic ability--to quickly add realistic color to black and white images.  "The goal of our previous project was to just get a single, plausible colorization," says Richard Zhang, a coauthor and PhD candidate, advised by Efros. "If the user didn't like the result, or wanted to change something, they were out of luck. We realized that empowering the user and adding them in the loop was actually a necessary component for obtaining desirable results."  They will present their research into "Real-Time User Guided Colorization with Learned Deep Priors" at SIGGRAPH 2017 in August.

Aviad Rubinstein helps show that game players won’t necessarily find a Nash equilibrium

CS graduate student Aviad Rubinstein (advisor: Christos Papadimitriou)  is featured in a Quanta Magazine article titled "In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium," which describes the results of his paper on game theory proving that no method of adapting strategies in response to previous games will converge efficiently to even an approximate Nash equilibrium for every possible game. The paper, titled Communication complexity of approximate Nash equilibria, was co-authored by Yakov Babichenko and published last September.  Economists often use Nash equilibrium analyses to justify proposed economic reforms, but the new results suggest that economists can’t assume that game players will get to a Nash equilibrium, unless they can justify what is special about the particular game in question.

Berkeley team qualifies for Cambridge 2 Cambridge Cybersecurity Challenge

Undergraduates Richard Li (CS), Veeral Patel, Yian Liou (EECS), and Roy Tu (EECS, graduated 2016) have qualified for the 2nd Annual Cambridge 2 Cambridge Cybersecurity Challenge (C2C), which will be held July 24-26, 2017 at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in England.  Conceived as a way to create a greater cybersecurity collaboration between the US (MIT CSAIL) and UK, the C2C gives students the opportunity to explore creative ways to combat global cyber attacks and acquire and hone crucial skills.  Along with gaining a sense of accomplishment, building friendships overseas, and receiving guidance from mentors in leading security organizations,  top students will earn glory, medals, and a share of $20K in cash prizes.  The competition will be a live three-day showdown with over 100 competitors from 25 universities in the US and UK.

CalSol's Zephyr wins 2017 Formula Sun Grand Prix

Zephyr, the solar vehicle built by UC Berkeley's CalSol team (including sophomore Wen Rui Liau, one of Prof. James Demmel's research students), has won the 2017 Formula Sun Grand Prix (FSGP).  The FSGP is an annual nationwide solar vehicle race that takes place on closed-loop race tracks. From July 6-8, in Austin, Texas, competing teams tested the limits of their vehicles in handling curves, braking, and acceleration.  The winner, determined by the total number of laps completed--minus penalties--over three days of racing, was Zephyr with 228 laps completed and zero penalties.

CS Assistant Teaching Prof. Josh Hug

Thank you, Josh Hug

In an article for the Daily Cal, undergraduate Taylor Choe thanks CS Assistant Teaching Prof. Josh Hug for helping her overcome her negative first impression of Berkeley and discover what makes it so special.   "My mindset going into CS 61B was definitely not a positive one. I struggled with 61A and felt discouraged, making me really come to dislike computer science." she wrote.  But Dr. Hug made her fall in love with computer science and helped her find faith in the public school system.   "You could tell that he wanted to be at lecture and wasn’t thinking about being somewhere else. His projects, homeworks and labs were entertaining and engaging, displaying the time and thought that went into each of them. He constantly emphasized the importance of being an honest person in addition to being an honest programmer. He was somehow able to make a 1,400-person class feel a little smaller. And I don’t think there is anything more you can ask of a professor, especially at a school as large as UC Berkeley."

Vasuki Narasimha Swamy and César Torres win Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants

EE graduate student Vasuki Narasimha Swamy (adviser: Anant Sahai) and CS graduate student César Torres (adviser: Eric Paulos) have won inaugural Microsoft Research Dissertation Grants.  These grants offer financial support to selected doctoral students from groups that are under-represented in the field of computing.  Of the 200 applicants, only 12 were chosen.  Vasuki's research topic is “Real-time Ultra-reliable Wireless Communication” and César's is “Hybrid Aesthetics – A New Media Framework for the Computational Design of Creative Materials, Tools, and Practices within Digital Fabrication.”