Three papers with Berkeley authors received the Helmholtz Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2017 in Venice, Italy.  This award honors  papers that have stood the test of time (more than ten years after first publication) and is bestowed by the IEEE technical committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI).    Seven papers won this year, among them: "Recognizing action at a distance," by A Efros, A Berg, G Mori and J Malik, ICCV 2003; "Discovering objects and their location in images," by J Sivic, B Russell, A Efros, A Zisserman and W Freeman, ICCV 2005; and "The pyramid match kernel: Discriminative classification with sets of image features," by K Grauman and T Darrell, ICCV 2005."

Computer Science faculty in the Real-Time Intelligent Secure Execution Lab (RISELab) have outlined challenges in systems, security and architecture that may impede the progress of Artificial Intelligence, and propose new research directions to address them.  The paper, A Berkeley View of Systems Challenges for AI, was authored by Profs. Stoica, Song, Popa, Patterson, Katz, Joseph, Jordan, Hellerstein, Gonzalez, Goldberg, Ghodsi, Culler and Abbeel, as well as Michael  Mahoney in Statistics/ICSI. Some of the challenges outlined include AI systems that make timely and safe decisions in unpredictable environments, that are robust against sophisticated adversaries, and that can process ever increasing amounts of data across organizations and individuals without compromising confidentiality.

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.

U.C. Berkeley has the top ten most AMiner Most Influential Scholar Award winners across all fields of computer science in 2016 and the top five most award winners in the fields of Computer Vision, Database, Machine Learning, Multimedia, Security, Computer Networking, and System.  The 28 CS faculty members included in the rankings were among the 100 most-cited authors in 12 of the 15 research areas evaluated. Two were among the 100 most-cited authors in 3 different areas each: Scott Shenker ranked #1 in Computer Networking, #51 in System, and #99 in Theory; and Trevor Darrell ranked #8 in Mulitmedia, #18 in Computer Vision, and #100 in Machine Learning.  Out of the 700,000 researchers indexed, only 16 appeared on three or more area top 100 lists.  See a more detailed breakdown of our influential faculty scholars.

Dr. Scott Beamer's dissertation titled "Undertanding and Improving Graph Algorithm Performance" has been selected to receive the 2016 Standard Performance Evaluation Corp (SPEC) Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award.  The award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general.  Papers are evaluated on scientific originality, scientific significance, practical relevance, impact, and quality of the presentation.

Among other comments, the members of the committee were impressed with Beamer's deep understanding of open-source graphs, with the quality of the implementations, with the creation of a graph benchmark suite that is already been used, that is relevant for High Performance Computing, and that is likely to have further impact in the future. The committee also remarked on the clarity and simplicity of the ideas presented in the document.

The award will be presented at the International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) in April.

Prof. Sergey Levine, EECS alumni Oriol Vinyals and EECS postdoc Wei Gao (working with Ali Javey) have been named on MIT Technology Review’s 2016 TR35 (Innovators Under 35) who push the edge of science, creating new approaches to tackling technology challenges. In the “Pioneers” category Prof. Levine teaches robots to watch and learn from their own successes, supervising it’s own learning, and Oriol Vinyals is working to create computers that can teach themselves how to play and win complex games by enabling them to learn from experience. In the “Inventors” category, Wei Gao is building sweatbands that monitor your health on a molecular level.

EECS alumnus Scott Aaronson (Computer Science Ph.D. '04) "Answers Every Ridiculously Big Question (John Horgan) Throws at Him" in a Cross-Check interview for Scientific American.  Aaronson, an Associate Professor at MIT (soon UT Austin) and an authority on quantum computation, riffs on simulated universes, the Singularity, unified theories, P/NP, the mind-body problem, free will, why there’s something rather than nothing, and more.

The AMP (Algorithms, Machines and People) Lab was featured in the NEA Venture Capital Firm’s blog by Peter Sonsini, in a post titled "Veriflow: The next great startup with Cal connections”. Veriflow is the 3rd and latest EECS UC Berkeley startup to join the NEA portfolio. The successes surrounding Cal’s computer science program stem from the uniqueness of its “lab” model--the open and collaborative project-based approach that focuses on specific objectives over a specific period of time.

The paper by Prof. David Culler and former students Joseph Polastre and Jason Hill titled “Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks", in the Proceedings of the 2nd international Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems has been selected as a winner of the inaugural SIGMOBILE Test of Time award for 2016. The Berkeley MAC (B-MAC) was a pioneering contribution to media access control in TinyOS-based wireless sensor networks. B-MAC and its underlying low-power listening principle became a facto standard in sensor networks. It plays a lasting role in the development of new low power wireless technologies such as IoT.