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 Berkeley – the Athens of the West – is

arguably the world’s best place to live.” arguably the world’s best place to live.” New York New York

TimesTimes– Fabulous restaurants, theatre, parks, scenery, weatherFabulous restaurants, theatre, parks, scenery, weather– Culture: a community of Culture: a community of independent thoughtindependent thought, nonconformity, nonconformity

New York TimesNew York Times

““The campus of the University of California at BerkeleyThe campus of the University of California at Berkeley in springtime is about as close to Shangri-La as most in springtime is about as close to Shangri-La as most mortals are likely to get.” mortals are likely to get.”

New York TimesNew York Times

University of California, Berkeley

Times Higher Education Supplement Worldwide University Ranking:

Academic Reputation1. Berkeley2. 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:• MIT 2. Berkeley 3. Stanford

Graduate:1. MIT 2. Berkeley / Stanford

Our EECS Facultyis Extremely Distinguished:

2 National Medals of Science 3 ACM Turing Awards (“Nobel Prize” of CS)3 IEEE Medals of Honor (“Nobel Prize” of EE)7 Members of National Academy of Sciences37 Members of National Academy of Engineering 14 Fellows of American Academy of Arts & Sciences 16 Sloan Foundation Fellowships1 MacArthur “Genius” Award12 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

Soda Hall

Cory 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

Building Comfort;Smart Alarms

Great Duck IslandGreat Duck Island

Elder Care

Fire ResponseFire Response

Factories

Wind ResponseWind ResponseOf Golden Gate BridgeOf Golden Gate Bridge

VineyardsVineyards

RedwoodsRedwoods

Sensor Networks: Instrumenting the World

Soil monitoringSoil 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 Machineused in our modeling classes.

“Pax Mundi 2” (Kansas City, 2007)

5-inch FDM maquette 10-foot bronze sculpture

Creation of the Eurographics Award Trophy

Carlo H. Séquin

EECS Computer Science DivisionUniversity of California, Berkeley

Soda Hall 1988

• Developed complete 3D model(exterior and interior)to debug our design.

Combine research with practical problems that need to be solved

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 The worst thing about having been at Berkeley is that you can never be really happy is that you can never be really happy anywhere else.” anywhere else.”

Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, MITProf. 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