The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing has announced the creation of the Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lectures, named in honor of CS Prof. Emeritus Richard Karp, the Institute’s Founding Director. The series will feature talks by leading researchers in the foundations of computing including Sanjeev Arora (Ph.D. '94, advisor: Umesh Vazirani), Faith Ellen (Ph.D. '82, advisor: Richard Karp), Dan Gusfield (B.S. '73/Ph.D. '80, advisor: Richard Karp), Mike Luby (Ph.D. '83, advisor: Richard Karp), Antony P.-C. Ng (Ph.D. '92, advisor: Richard Brayton), Prabhakar Raghavan (Ph.D. '86, advisor: Clark Thompson), CS Prof. Scott Shenker, Vijay Vazirani (Ph.D. '84, advisor: Manuel Blum), and Karp, himself.  The lecture series will be launched in the Fall.

A viral real-time AI art application, co-created by three current and former graduate students of CS Prof. Alexei Efros, has won two coveted awards--Best in Show and Audience Choice--at the SIGGRAPH 2019 Real-Time Live Competition.  The interactive application, called GauGAN, was co-created by Ph.D. candidate Taesung Park during a summer internship at NVIDIA, along with alumni and NVIDIA researchers Jun-Yan Zhu (Ph.D. '17,  ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Disseration winner) and Ting-Chun Wang (Ph.D. '17), as well as NVIDIAs Ming-Yu Liu.  GauGAN is the first semantic image synthesis model that can turn rough sketches into stunning, photorealistic landscape scenes.

CS alumnus Bill Kramer (Ph.D. 2008, advisors: David Culler and James Demmel) has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), a joint research center of Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh.  Kramer, currently project director and PI of the Blue Waters Project and the senior associate director for  NCSA @Scale Science and Technology at Urbana-Champaign, begins his role in  fall 2019.  Kramer has also held leadership rolls at LBNL, NASA Ames, and NERSC.

EECS alumna Valerie Taylor (M.S. '86/Ph.D. '91, advisor: David Messerschmitt), currently the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science division of Argonne National Laboratory, has been named a 2019 Argonne Distinguished Fellow.  Distinguished Fellows hold the highest scientific and engineering rank at the laboratory.  Taylor, whose research focuses in the areas of performance analysis and modeling of parallel, scientific applications, was a member of the EECS faculty at Northwestern University for 11 years before joining the Computer Science department at Texas A&M.  She has collaborated professionally with Argonne for most of her career.

Recent CS alumnus Shawn Magee (B.A. '19) and Haas student Raja Riahi are developing an app called Wymbo to help UC Berkeley students navigate the campus’s many events and activities.  They co-founded Wymbo inside Berkeley startup accelerator SkyDeck as a discovery platform:  students choose what types of subjects they’re interested in and Wymbo displays related resources, events and opportunities around campus.  They hope the app will provide students with opportunities to step away from their smart phones to explore the Berkeley campus and community.  Wymbo is set to be released on both the iOS and Android app stores by the end of July.

CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson, his former graduate student Zhangxi Tan (PhD '13), and Lin Zhang of the Tsinghua-UC Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), have been chosen to co-direct the new RISC-V International Open Source (RIOS) Laboratory, an non-profit research lab launched by the TBSI.  RIOS aims to expand and elevate the capabilities of Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) microprocessors.  Patterson, who is currently a distinguished engineer at Google, coined the term RISC in the early 1980s to describe a computer architecture that allowed microprocessors to operate far more efficiently with simple, general instructions.  Nearly all of the 16 billion microprocessors produced annually are RISC processors.

The Community Memory Project, a 1970's era counterculture experiment co-founded by EECS alumnus Lee Felsenstein (B.S. '72), is the subject of an article in California Magazine titled “'We’re Using a Computer': Was Social Media Invented in Berkeley?"  Members of the public were invited  to interface with a carboard box "terminal" where they could enter and retrieve messages on a computer via a teletype machine.  “It was sort of a noisy, sluggish craigslist,” Felsenstein says .  It “...was the first point where spam showed up, the first point for trolling, the first place where people developed personas online.”  An original Community Memory terminal is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

According to Crunchbase News,  UC Berkeley graduated 108 startup founders--not including business school graduates --who raised $1M or more after May 1, 2018.   This makes Berkeley the top-ranked public university, and the third-ranked university of any kind after Stanford and MIT, in founding graduates.  In the Crunchbase tally of all funded founders graduating from public universities (including those with business school degrees), Berkeley (with 240) had more than three times the number of funded founders than second-ranked UCLA (with 85).  Berkeley News notes that you would have to combine the second- through fifth-ranked schools (UCLA, Michigan, Illinois and Washington)  to get to Berkeley’s level. “Berkeley is the original question-the-status-quo, do-disruptive-thinking place,” says Caroline Winnet of Berkeley SkyDeck. “I like to say that we don’t just think outside the box. There is no box.”

A paper written by recent graduate Elizaveta Tremsina (B.S. '19 CS/Physics/Applied Math) has taken third place in the undergraduate category of the 2019 ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) Grand Finals.  The paper, titled "Your Story Recorded in a Magnet: Micromagnetic Simulations of Spin-Orbit Torque in Multi-layer Structures," was a continuation of the first place poster she presented at the 2018 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.    "I am extremely thankful to the Berkeley EECS department for the amazing 4.5 years and for the unique chance to participate in cutting-edge research with Dr. Salahuddin's group and also attend the Tapia conference (my first one back in 2016 and last year)," she said. "I hope that more Berkeley undergrads participate in this competition in the future, be it at Tapia or other ACM conferences."  Tremsina was presented with her award at the ACM awards banquet last weekend.

EECS alumna Nadia Heninger (B.S. '04) has won the 2019 Borg Early Career Award (BECA).  The BECA  is given to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions and who has contributed to her profession, especially in the outreach to women.  After graduation, Heninger earned a Ph.D. from Princeton and is currently an associate professor in Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.  She is known for her work on freezing powered-down security devices to slow their fading memories and allow their secrets to be recovered via a cold boot attack, for her discovery that weak keys for the RSA cryptosystem are in widespread use by internet routers and other embedded devices, and for her research on how failures of forward secrecy in bad implementations of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange may have allowed the NSA to decrypt large amounts of internet traffic via the Logjam vulnerability.