Transcript Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley View from the top ... ...

Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science at UC Berkeley
View from the top ...
... and to the future.
Carlo H. Séquin
Associate Dean, College of Engineering
former Chair, Computer Science Division
You are here!
Living in Berkeley
“Berkeley – the Athens of the West – is
arguably the world’s best place to live.”
New York Times
– Fabulous restaurants, theatre, parks, scenery, weather
– Culture: a community of independent thought, nonconformity
New York Times
“The campus of the University of California at Berkeley
in springtime is about as close to Shangri-La as most
mortals are likely to get.”
New York Times
University of California, Berkeley
Times Higher Education
Supplement Worldwide
University Ranking:
Academic Reputation
1. Berkeley
2. Harvard
National Research Council
Survey of Graduate Programs:
1. Berkeley: 97% depts top 10
2. MIT/Harvard: 87%
EECS Academic Reputation
US News & World Report, Rankings 2008/09:
Computer Science Programs (only grad programs ranked):
1. Berkeley / MIT / Stanford (3-way tie)
Electrical Engineering Programs:
Undergraduate:
1. MIT 2. Berkeley 3. Stanford
Graduate:
1. MIT 2. Berkeley / Stanford
Our EECS Faculty
is Extremely Distinguished:
2
3
3
7
37
14
16
1
12
National Medals of Science
ACM Turing Awards (“Nobel Prize” of CS)
IEEE Medals of Honor (“Nobel Prize” of EE)
Members of National Academy of Sciences
Members of National Academy of Engineering
Fellows of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Sloan Foundation Fellowships
MacArthur “Genius” Award
Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Awards
… who teach undergraduate courses!
Contrary to urban legends:
• Every faculty member
teaches undergraduates!
• Teaching quality matters
a lot to us;
every course is surveyed;
student opinion counts!
• Many undergraduates get
involved in research early
in their stay at Berkeley.
• Every undergraduate has
an individual faculty
advisor.
The UC Berkeley EECS Department
Cory Hall
Soda Hall
CITRIS
Active Areas in EECS
Strong coupling between EE and CS:
In 1980’s we had strongest IC-CAD program anywhere !
 RISC, SOAR, SPARC, RAID
RISC I & II (1982),
first microprocessors built at a University
Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center
Pioneered micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)
~ “3-dimensional integrated circuits”
This center is more than
20 years old and has
more than 35 member
companies.
Accelerometer
technology used in
all airbag systems
worldwide comes
from Berkeley.
Sensor Motes
• Small systems
combining:
a computer,
networking
infrastructure,
and various
sensors:
– heat
– light
– sound
– pressure
– chemicals
Sensor Networks:
Instrumenting the World
Fire Response
Vineyards
Great Duck Island
Building Comfort;
Smart Alarms
Redwoods
Elder Care
Factories
Wind Response
Of Golden Gate Bridge
Soil monitoring
Systems Research at Berkeley
• Ingres, one of the first two relational database systems
[Stonebraker, Rowe, and Wong, 70s]
• Berkeley UNIX – virtual memory, TCP/IP, software tools
[Fabry, Ferrari, Graham, Joy et al, 70s - 80s]
• Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC)
[Patterson, Séquin, late 70s, early 80s]
• Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)
[Katz, Patterson, Ousterhout, late 80s]
• Network of Workstations and scalable web services
[Culler, Brewer etc, mid 90s]
• Sensor Networks, TinyOS, TinyDB [Pister, Culler, 00s]
• PlanetLab [Culler, Shenker, early 00s]
• The next Internet (GENI etc.)
• Manycore parallel architecture (PAR-Lab)
Complexity Theory at Berkeley
• 1936: Alan Turing (UK) defines
the Turing Machine — an elementary computing device;
– Extended Church-Turing thesis: every possible computing
device is essentially equivalent to a Turing machine.
• 1971/72: Steve Cook and Dick Karp develop
complexity theory; define NP-complete problems
(computable in principle but intractable in practice).
– Famous “P vs NP” question — one of seven major open
problems in all of Mathematics
• ~1980: Manuel Blum and students Shafi Goldwasser and
Silvio Micali develop foundations for secure cryptography
(an application of complexity!)
• 1994: Umesh Vazirani and student Ethan Bernstein
disprove the Church-Turing thesis;
— quantum computers are intrinsically more powerful!
Also: Focus on Building Things !
• Integrated circuits
• Prototype computers
• Software systems
• Web applications
• Mechanical gadgets
 CAD/CAM and
Rapid Prototyping
FDM Rapid Prototyping Machine
used in our modeling classes.
“Pax Mundi 2”
5-inch FDM maquette
(Kansas City, 2007)
10-foot bronze sculpture
Creation of the Eurographics Award Trophy
Carlo H. Séquin
EECS Computer Science Division
University of California, Berkeley
Soda Hall 1988
Combine research with
practical problems that
need to be solved
• Developed complete
3D model
(exterior and interior)
to debug our design.
Berkeley Architectural Walkthru
• Interactive walkthru model;
• These techniques are now used
in many video games.
RAD-Lab (constructed 2006)
RAD-Lab ... a very popular place
RAD-Lab
• Professors are
close to students
Prof. Randy Katz
PAR-Lab (projected June 2008)
OK, so what’s the BAD news?
The worst thing about having been at Berkeley
is that you can never be really happy
anywhere else.”
Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, MIT
BERKELEY ?
Good Choice !!
• Great climate
• Great campus
• Great people
• Great students
• Great faculty
• Interesting diverse research ...
lots of exciting stuff going on ...
not just in EECS, but in COE, and CITRIS