Joey Gonzalez wrote a blog reflecting on the past decade of ML systems research and how data and compute were catalyzed by new ML abstractions to launch the ML revolution. Read it on Medium: https://link.medium.com/cHeo6qUzGrb

Register for Data@Scale to catch Ion’s keynote May 18! https://datascale2022.splashthat.com/

Anyscale cofounders Robert Nishihara, Ion Stoica, and Philipp Moritz Anyscale is making news with their latest round of funding, featured in articles this week in Forbes: “Berkeley Research Lab Group Mints Second Billion-Dollar Business In Startup Anyscale” and TechCrunch: “Anyscale adds $40M to bring its Ray-based distributed computing tech to the enterprise masses.” Founded by RISELab co-director Ion Stoica and RISELab Ph.D. graduates Robert Nishihara and Philipp Moritz, Anyscale uses the Ray tools developed in RISELab to allow individual users to take full advantage of distributed computing to scale AI applications in the cloud.

Join RISELab Co-Director Joe Hellerstein on The Data Wranglers podcast. Check the latest episode Best Use Cases of Apache Kafka with Jun Rao and more from The Data Wranglers website.

Congratulations to RISELab co-directors Joey Gonzalez and Raluca Ada Popa for their recent tenure announcements!

Congratulations to RISELab’s Audrey Cheng, Natacha Crooks, Ion Stoica, Peter Bailis and their Facebook collaborators! “RAMP-TAO: Layering Atomic Transactions on Facebook’s Online TAO Data Store“, won Best Industry Paper Award at VLDB 2021. More about VLDB: VLDB 2021 – 47th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases The VLDB 2021 conference, will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, 16-20 August 2021, and will feature research talks, tutorials, demonstrations, and workshops. It will cover issues in data management, database and information systems research. VLDB is a premier annual international forum for data management and database researchers, vendors, practitioners, application developers, and users. VLDB 2021 – Conference Awards Best Paper, Best Demo, and Distinguished Reviewers.

Professor Alvin Cheung talks with Justin Gottschlich, Principal AI Scientist and Director/Founder of Machine Programming Research at Intel Labs, about his journey to Berkeley, machine programming, and verified lifting. Alvin and Justin are teaching a Machine Programming course at UC Berkeley, Fall 2021.

Congrats Hao! RISE lab postdoc Hao Zhang–working with Prof. Ion Stoica–has won the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI ’21 for the paper: “Pollux: Co-adaptive Cluster Scheduling for Goodput-Optimized Deep Learning”. This paper develops a new measure of goodness for designing and implementing resource scheduling systems for deep learning, namely Goodput, which combines statistical efficiency and system throughput for deep learning. It demonstrates a new system for optimizing Elastic Deep Learning in GPU Clusters. The system will be integrated with Ray ecosystem soon. More details about the paper and code can be found here: Presentation: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi21/presentation/qiao Paper: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi21-qiao.pdf Code: https://github.com/petuum/adaptdl Integration with Ray: https://github.com/ray-project/ray/issues/17054

Congratulations Sam! Originally posted on EECS NEWS: Submitted by Magdalene L. Crowley on July 19, 2021 – 11:52am Sam Kumar wins OSDI Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award CS graduate student Sam Kumar (advisors: David Culler and Raluca Ada Popa) has won the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at the 15th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) for “MAGE: Nearly Zero-Cost Virtual Memory for Secure Computation.”   The OSDI, which brings together “professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in a premier forum for discussing the design, implementation, and implications of systems software,” selects three best papers each year after a double-blind review.  Co-authored by Prof. David Culler and Associate Prof. Raluca Ada Popa, the paper introduces an execution engine for secure computation…

Business Insider reports on how RISELab’s unique research model has sparked a generation of successful startups, featuring interviews with RISELab directors Raluca Ada Popa, Ion Stoica, and other RISE, AMP and RADLab alumni. “It is the combination of the talent in the labs, and the format, and the track record of the labs that keeps on continuing,” said Raluca Ada Popa. Read more on Business Insider. (Or here without ads)

Ray Summit was a huge success this year, with seventy one individual speakers presenting over three days to an audience of more than twelve thousand attendees. Visit the Ray Summit website to view the talks.

See the article on TechCrunch. https://opaque.co/

SiFive, a company co-founded by RISE affiliate faculty (Krste Asanovic) and students, is making business news headlines. Full article here (may require subscription).

In a true Cal spirit of giving back, RISELab director, Prof. Ion Stoica, makes a very generous gift to Berkeley CDSS. You can read the full article here.

A couple of announcements regarding Prof. Mike Jordan came in today: 1) Mike joins only a handful of distinguished Berkeley faculty members who have been elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society: https://royalsociety.org/news/2021/05/new-fellows-announcement-2021/ 2) He has also been selected to join the 2021 Class of Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows. The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF) is the US Department of Defense’s most prestigious single-investigator award and supports basic research with the potential for transformative impact. Another amazing week for Prof. Jordan!

Meet 2021 Datanami Person to Watch Joe Hellerstein

Listen to the interview here.

Congratulations Alvin! Originally posted on EECS News and Intel.com: EECS Assistant Profs. Alvin Cheung and Jonathan Ragan-Kelley are among 18 winners of Intel’s 2020 Outstanding Research Awards (ORA). These awards recognize exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research.  Cheung and Ragan-Kelley are developing ARION, a system for compiling programs onto heterogeneous platforms. The team will use verified lifting, which rewrites legacy code into a clean specification, stripping away optimizations that target legacy architectures. This spec, written in a DSL, can then be compiled to new platforms, sometimes with orders of magnitude of speedup in resulting code performance. Intel’s 2020 Outstanding Researcher Awards Recognize 18 Academic Researchers

RISELab faculty member Alessandro Chiesa–along with five other Berkeley assistant professors–was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early career researchers. View the complete list of 2021 fellows here. Congratulations Alessandro! 

Congratulations Dave! Reposted from EECS News: CS Prof. Emeritus David Patterson has won the 13th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies.  He shares the award with John Hennessy of Stanford University “for taking computer architecture, the discipline behind the central processor or ‘brain’ of every computer system, and launching it as a new scientific area.”  The citation says that Patterson and Hennessy “are synonymous with the inception and formalization of this field.  Before their work, the design of computers – and in particular the measurement of computer performance – was more of an art than a science, and practitioners lacked a set of repeatable principles to conceptualize and evaluate computer designs. Patterson and Hennessy provided, for…

We are pleased to announce that RISELab will hold a virtual poster session as part of the BEARS 2021 Research Symposium on February 11, 2021 from 1:00-2:30pm PST. This virtual event will highlight the exciting projects that RISELab’s researchers have been working on in recent months. You will have the opportunity to view posters and interact virtually with the graduate and undergraduate poster presenters, RISELab faculty, and other event guests. Remember, you must RSVP separately for both events: Register for BEARS here. (Select UCB Student, Employee or Industrial Affiliate for complimentary registration.) RSVP for the RISELab poster session here. A RISELab Poster Session event link will be emailed to everyone on our RSVP list on the day of the event. Please RSVP by February 10. Questions? Email us…

RISELab researchers Alvin Cheung, Natacha Crooks, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Matthew Milano presented “New Directions in Cloud Programming” at CIDR 2021. Read the paper here. Watch the talk on youtube. ABSTRACT Nearly twenty years after the launch of AWS, it remains difficult for most developers to harness the enormous potential of the cloud. In this paper we lay out an agenda for a new generation of cloud programming research aimed at bringing research ideas to programmers in an evolutionary fashion. Key to our approach is a separation of distributed programs into a PACT of four facets: Program semantics, Availablity, Consistency and Targets of optimization. We propose to migrate developers gradually to PACT programming by lifting familiar code into our more declarative level of…

Catch Joseph Hellerstein’s keynote address from POPL 2021: “A Programmable Cloud: CALM Foundations and Open Challenges”. Available on youtube here.

Want to improve accuracy, interpretability, and generalization for your production models? Check out “Neural-Backed Decision Trees” from Professor Joseph E. Gonzalez’s group — including Alvin Wan, Lisa Dunlap, Suzie Petryk, and others — just accepted to ICLR 2021 and just one pip install away. See the brief 3-minute introduction: https://youtu.be/fQ2eNFCSRiA or the updated technical talk with new results and 4 additional human studies: https://youtu.be/bC5n1Yov7D0

RISELab faculty Prof. Michael Mahoney and his postdocs Michal Derezinski and Rajiv Khanna are recipients of NeurIPS 2020 Best Paper Award for their paper “Improved Guarantees and a Multiple-Descent Curve for Column Subset Selection and the Nyström Method“. To quote the selection committee: “(…) this paper is expected to have substantial impact and give new insight into (…) kernel methods, feature selection, and the double-descent behavior of neural networks.” Congratulations to Michael, Michal and Rajiv!

Prof. Michael I. Jordan, one of RISELab affiliated faculty, has been awarded the 2021 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Ulf Grenander Prize in Stochastic Theory and Modeling. The prize, which was established in 2016, recognizes “exceptional theoretical and applied contributions in stochastic theory and modeling.” It is awarded for “seminal work, theoretical or applied, in the areas of probabilistic modeling, statistical inference, or related computational algorithms, especially for the analysis of complex or high-dimensional systems.” Jordan, who has a split appointment in Statistics, was cited for “foundational contributions to machine learning, especially unsupervised learning, probabilistic computation, and core theory for balancing statistical fidelity with computation.” The prize is awarded every three years, making Jordan the second recipient of the honor.

Congratulations to Samvit Jain and Prof. Joey Gonzalez of RISELab for winning the Best Paper award at The Fifth ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing for the collaborative paper “Spatula: Efficient Cross-Camera Video Analytics on Large Camera Networks”!

Originally posted on UC Berkeley EECS News   Natacha Crooks wins 2020 ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie dissertation award CS Assistant Prof. Natacha Crooks has won the 2020 ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Dennis M. Ritchie dissertation award for her thesis titled “A Client-Centric Approach to Transactional Datastores.”  The award, which recognizes creative research in software systems, was bestowed upon a dissertation which a colleague described as “a landmark, with deep and beautiful results in transactions and distributed consistency, and systems that exploit them.”  The award committee commented that “Natacha Crooks’ thesis achieves something rare: a new conceptual framework for client-centric consistency and two efficient systems built on those insights. The document for this attractive package is…

Video recordings of all the presentations can be viewed on our YouTube channel. Slides and tutorials can be found on the event website. Thanks to all the participants who made RISE Camp 2020 a success!  

Inaugural Ray Summit is happening this Wednesday, September 30th through Thursday, October 1st. With thousands of the global Ray community from over 100 countries planning to attend, it’s an important milestone for the Ray project that started at U.C. Berkeley’s RISELab nearly four years ago. If you haven’t registered yet, please register here (it’s free!) to get access to the livestream and all session videos. You will hear exciting announcements about the latest features in Ray, new integrations with popular libraries, real-world use cases, and the latest research in AI, scalable systems, and security. Looking forward to seeing you all at the summit! 

Please check out Professor Gonzalez’s post to the June Edition of the IEEE Data Engineering bulletin.  This special edition provides an overview of several of the major digital contact tracing efforts around the world as well as some of the societal implications.

RISELab researchers were recognized with best paper awards at recent SIGMOD, VLDB and ICDE conferences. 2019 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award “Interactive Checks for Coordination Avoidance”, VLDB 2019 — Michael J. Whittaker and Joseph M. Hellerstein VLDB 2019 selected best papers “Interactive Checks for Coordination Avoidance” — Michael J. Whittaker and Joseph M. Hellerstein “Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna.” — Chenggang Wu, Vikram Sreekanti, Joseph M. Hellerstein ICDE 2018 selected best papers “Anna: A KVS For Any Scale.” — Chenggang Wu, Jose M. Faleiro, Yihan Lin, Joseph M. Hellerstein. Congratulations to RISELab’s Jose Faleiro, Joe Hellerstein, Vikram Srikanti, Michael Whittaker, and Chenggang Wu in recognition of their groundbreaking research!

Join RISELab’s Joseph Gonzalez on the TWIML (This Week in Machine Learning) Podcast for a discussion of his paper “Train Large, Then Compress: Rethinking Model Size for Efficient Training and Inference of Transformers”.

Hello, Anyscale will be hosting a complimentary new online speaker series, Ray Summit Connect, throughout the Summer. Join these events to learn more about the future of Ray. The first hour-long event in the series kicks off May 13th. During this event, Prof. Michael Jordan and I will provide our perspectives on the state and future of AI and computing. Please check out anyscale.com/events to register and see other future events coming over the coming months. If you are interested, please register above. Also, please feel free to forward this email to your colleagues. We look forward to having you join this event! Best, Ion

RISELab Faculty members Raluca Popa and Dawn song are profiled in the April 2020 Berkeley Engineering feature “Reinventing Cybersecurity.” Find it here.

RISELab’s Alvin Cheung was chosen for the IEEE TCDE Rising Star Award. Alvin was recognized for his work at the intersection of data management and programming languages. Congratulations Alvin!

Prof. Aditya Parameswaran, RISELab faculty, is one of the nine Sloan Research Fellowship recipients from UC Berkeley, in recognition of his work on building tools to enable people unfamiliar with programming to understand large datasets. You can read related articles here and here. Full list of recipients on Sloan Foundation’s website.

This year’s BEARS Symposium will be held on Thursday 2/13/20 at the International House in Berkeley from 9am-5pm. https://eecs.berkeley.edu/research/bears/2020 Concurrently, RISELab will host an Open House and Poster session from 1pm-3pm in the lab. Please join us for some engaging discussions over light snacks and refreshments. RISELab is located in 465 Soda Hall, on the corner of Hearst and LeRoy Avenues in Berkeley. See you there!

Join us for Ray (http://ray.io/) meetup on January 30th at 6:00pm, hosted at Galvanize SF! Please RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/Bay-Area-Ray-Meetup/events/267883815/  

DataBricks and Anyscale made Business Insider’s list of “47 enterprise startups to bet your career on in 2020.” View the list on reddit if you don’t have a Business Insider account. Anyscale is the latest startup to come out of RISELab. A note from Anyscale co-founder and RISELab director Ion Stoica: Anyscale is the future of distributed computing. Founded by the creators of Ray, an open source project from the UC Berkeley RISELab, Anyscale enables developers of all skill levels to easily build applications that run at any scale, from a laptop to a data center. Anyscale empowers organizations to bring AI applications to production faster, reduce development costs, and eliminate the need for in-house expertise to deploy and manage…

Anyscale was founded by our grad students Robert Nishihara and Philipp Moritz, as well as our lab director, professor Ion Stoica. The company is an extension of the research they were doing on Ray, an open source project developed in RISELab. You can read the Busineess Insider article here.

CS Prof. Michael I. Jordan has won the prestigious John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The award was established in 1990 to acknowledge “outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology.” Jordan, who was ranked as the world’s most influential computer scientist in 2016 by Science magazine, was cited for “For contributions to machine learning and data science.” Jordan began developing recurrent neural networks as a cognitive model in the 1980s, was prominent in the formalisation of variational methods for approximate inference, and popularised both the expectation-maximization algorithm and Bayesian networks among the machine learning community. Jordan is the fifth Berkeley CS faculty member to win this award. Congratulations to Professor Jordan! https://eecs.berkeley.edu/news#news-3106

RISELab Co-Director Raluca Ada Popa will be presenting a keynote at the SOCC ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing on Friday 11/22. Find more information here at the SOCC website.

Videos of all talks from RISE Camp 2019 are now available for viewing on RISELab YouTube channel.

Photos from the awesome RISE Camp 2019 have been posted to our Facebook page. (If you haven’t been aware of its existence, now is your chance to click “Like” and start getting all the latest RISELab news in your feed!)

Quick update: There are two separate links for live streaming (one for each day). Please use the following: YouTube RISE Camp 2019 Live Stream – Day 1 YouTube RISE Camp 2019 Live Stream – Day 2     Best regards, The RISE Camp Team

RISE Camp will be live streamed on YouTube later this week! Introductions begin at 8:45 AM on Thursday October 17, 2019. Use the following link to view. Find the agenda for both days here on the RISE Camp website. If you are interested in attending in-person, General Registration spots are available for a $600 registration fee. Please use the following link to register: https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ereg/index.php?eventid=478734&categoryid=3352675 Members of the UC Berkeley research community are encouraged to email risecamp@cs.berkeley.edu to inquire about complimentary spots. Best regards, The RISE Camp Team

Prof. Michael Mahoney, one of RISELab’s faculty members, was interviewed on O’Reilly Data Show Podcast.   Topics included understanding deep neural networks and developing a practical theory for deep learning, the new Hessian AWare Quantization (HAWQ) framework for addressing problems pertaining to model size and inference speed/power, and how these relate to challenges at the foundations of data analysis.

Our latest newsletter mailed this week, find it online here.

It was great having the lab full of active undergraduates this summer. Head over to our facebook page for photos from their end-of-project poster session.

Prof. Popa, one of RISELab’s core faculty members, has been selected for the Bakar Fellows Program, which supports faculty working to apply scientific discoveries to real-world issues in the fields of engineering, computer science, chemistry, and biological and physical sciences. With her Bakar Fellows Spark Award, Prof. Popa will design and build a data encryption platform that will enable collaborative machine learning studies by performing these multi-party computations under encryption. https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/bakarfellows/about

Congratulations to RISELab’s newest faculty member Aditya Parameswaran  for winning this year’s VLDB Early Career Award. The award recognizes a researcher who has demonstrated research impact through a specific technical contribution of high significance since completing their Ph.D.   More information can be found here: https://vldb.org/2019/?2019-vldb-endowment-awards Congrats Aditya!    

Congratulations to Professor Raluca Ada Popa for making this year’s M.I.T. Technology Review’s list of 35 Innovators Under 35! Read more on the M.I.T. Technology Review website.

Congratulations to Prof. Raluca Ada Popa for receiving the prestigious Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship! The fellowship recognizes innovative, promising new faculty members, whose exceptional talent for research and innovation identifies them as emerging leaders in their fields.  

Students and faculty of RadLab, one of the predecessors of the RISElab, just won a “Test of Time” award  for the most influential paper of the 40 presented at the original conference in 2009 . It combined systems and machine learning fields, setting a precedent for a popular combination today. You can read the official announcement here.

Congratulations to Raluca Popa, core RISELab faculty member, and EECS faculty Moritz Hardt, who just won 2019 Okawa Research Foundation Grants! The award will be celebrated at a presentation in San Francisco in the fall.

We are excited to announce the launch of RISELab’s DARE program. One of the most challenging barriers to participating in research for undergraduate students is reaching out to professors and finding a match that works for both the student and the professor.  DARE, founded by Professor Raluca Ada Popa and her students Wenting Zheng and Jessica Ji, acts as an active liaison to remove this barrier and make electrical engineering and computer science research more readily accessible, as well as to encourage diversity of thought in these growing fields. DARE strongly encourages women and traditionally under-represented groups to apply. Website: https://dare.berkeley.edu Raluca Ada Popa

RISELab publication “System Architecture Directions for Post-SoC/32-bit Networked Sensors,” authored by Hyung-Sin Kim, Michael Andersen, Kaifei Chen, Sam Kumar, William Zhao, Kevin Ma, and Prof. David Culler, has won the best paper runner-up award at ACM SenSys 2018. This paper triggers paradigm shifts on low-power embedded networked system design, which was formed by a two-decade old paper from UC Berkeley.

Prof. David Culler, one our affiliated faculty, has received ACM SenSys Test of Time Award 2018 for his paper “IP is Dead, Long Live IP for Wireless Sensor Networks,” published in ACM SenSys 2008. The Test of Time Award is to recognize papers that are at least 10 years old and have had long lasting impact on networked embedded sensing system science and engineering. Congratulations to Prof. Culler!

RISE Camp 2018 videos have been posted to our YouTube channel! Please enjoy and share!

Lost of great photos from last week’s RISE Camp can be found here! And if you haven’t already, please make sure you “like” our Facebook page, for all the latest RISELab  news.

A summary of our recent news, publications, awards and a note from our Director Ion Stoica is available online at this link.

Prof. Raluca Popa, one our core faculty, has received an award from The Hellman Fellows Fund, which supports junior faculty research on the ten campuses of the UC system and at four private institutions. Congratulations to Prof. Popa!

Professor Joseph Gonzalez was recently awarded the prestigious Okawa research grant to explore systems for managing the machine learning lifecycle. More information can be found at EECS News and the Okawa Foundation website.

The Ray team is starting a series of meetups, the first of which was held at OpenAI (in San Francisco) on August 2, 2018, with over 50 people in attendance! Here is a great summary of what was presented, written by Ben Lorica of O’Reilly Media: https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/notes-from-the-first-ray-meetup

RISELab publication “Bridging the GAP: Towards Approximate Graph Analytics“, authored by Anand Iyer, Aurojit Panda, Shivaram Venkataraman, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Prof. Aditya Akella, Prof. Scott Shenker and Prof. Ion Stoica, has won the best paper award at ACM GRADES-NDA 2018, co-located with SIGMOD. The paper proposes the use of approximation to speed up distributed graph processing.

Please go to our Facebook page to see photos from our best retreat yet!

The online version of our April 2018 Newsletter can be found here.

Prof. Ion Stoica  and Xin Jin, a former postdoc in RISELab (now a faculty at John Hopkins University), have received the best paper award for their paper on NetChain which shows that it is possible to do coordination in distributed systems at line speed. You can read more about it at the official NSDI link.

We are proud to announce that Professor David Patterson, one of the RISELab founders, is a recipient of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award, the annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to “an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community,” and often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”. He shares the award with John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, for their invention of the RISC processor. For more details, please read the official ACM announcement. Congratulations to Prof. Patterson on joining the highest ranks of computer science luminaries!

EECS faculty continues to make big news in the outside world! Michael Jordan, the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in EECS and the Department of Statistics, has been named a Plenary Lecturer at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Rio de Janeiro this August. This is an honor that has been bestowed upon a very small handful of computer scientists over the 100-year history of the ICM. (For the uninitiated, a plenary lecturer is one who gives his or her talk to all attendees of a conference at once. It’s a pretty huge deal.) Here is the list of plenary speakers at the ICM 2018 Conference. The title of Prof. Jordan’s speech will be “Dynamical, Symplectic and Stochastic Perspectives on Gradient-Based Optimization”…

The UC Berkeley RISELab has been awarded the prestigious NSF Expedition Award by the National Science Foundation (NSF).  The expedition award, which provides $10 million in funding over five years, is awarded to only three labs in the country. This funding will enable the RISELab to make fundamental advances in the theory and design of real-time, intelligent, secure, and explainable systems.  This research has the potential to transform the next generation of systems that interact with the real-world, including autonomous vehicles, medical robots, privacy-preserving information exchanges, fraud detection systems, and the power grid. Read the full NSF press release and Berkeley press release for more details.

You can read the full article here. For more info on Prof. Popa, please go to her page.

Our biggest retreat so far (182 registered attendees!) happened January 10 – 12, 2018, at Monterey Tides hotel. We had lots of productive interactions (presentations, meeting, poster sessions), but also managed to have some fun kayaking at the Elkhorn Slough! You can see the photos on our Facebook page.

Berkeley-based startup incubator and venture capital fund The House is launching an AI-specific initiative backed by Google that is meant to take advantage of the technical and academic expertise in the field coming out of UC Berkeley. The faculty involved in the program include Databricks co-founder and UC Berkeley professor Ion Stoica, Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research lab co-director Trevor Darrell and UC Berkeley professor Michael Jordan, one of the most influential computer scientists working in AI. You can read the whole article here.

The third installment of the RISELab newsletter went out on November 15. You can read all about what’s been going on here. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, simply fill out this form. Happy reading!

Alibaba Group launched a massive global research program, “Alibaba DAMO Academy”, by committing $15B in funding. The Academy aims to increase technological collaboration worldwide, advance the development of cutting-edge technology, and strive to make the world more inclusive by narrowing the technology gap. The Academy will cooperate with the University of California, Berkeley through its RISE Lab on areas such as secured real-time computing. For more information, please read this article.

RISELab’s Raluca Ada Popa gave a keynote talk on security for machine learning systems at the GE Industrial Machine Learning Workshop 2017. https://wise.io/imlw17/ Her talk discussed security threats in deploying machine learning systems as well as three promising approaches to address some of these: secure multi-party computation, differential privacy and hardware enclaves.

We are pleased to announce the involvement of RISELab faculty with the new Foundations of Data Analysis (FODA) Institute. The FODA Institute is funded as part of the NSF TRIPODS program, and it is designed to bring together core research communities in theoretical statistics, applied mathematics, and theoretical computer science to address foundational questions at the heart of data science. In addition to RISELab faculty Michael Mahoney and Mike Jordan, also involved with this FODA/TRIPODS effort are statistics faculty Bin Yu and Fernando Perez and EECS/Simons faculty Dick Karp. We look forward to the fruitful interactions between theory, implementations, and real-time applications.   For more details, here is the link to the press release: https://data.berkeley.edu/news/berkeley-defining-next-academic-frontier-two-nsf-awards-uc-berkeley-set-stage-new-era-data

The FireSim project was recently featured on the AWS Compute Blog. Read the article here: Bringing Datacenter-Scale Hardware-Software Co-design to the Cloud with FireSim and Amazon EC2 F1 Instances.

The RISELab faculty—who cover the fields of machine learning, systems, security, and hardware—have just published a vision paper on systems challenges for AI. They argue that future AI systems must make timely and safe decisions in unpredictable environments, be robust against sophisticated adversaries, and process ever increasing amounts of data across organizations and individuals without compromising confidentiality. These challenges will be exacerbated by the end of the Moore’s Law, which will constrain the amount of data these technologies can store and process. They propose several open research directions in systems, computer architecture, and security that can address these challenges and help unlock AI’s potential to improve lives and society. Link to the press release: https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/10/16/berkeley-experts-on-how-to-build-faster-safer-and-more-secure-ai-systems/

ActiveClean has been featured in today’s “the morning paper“. The ActiveClean project aims to develop tools and algorithms to address one of the key steps in model training pipelines: handle dirty or inconsistent data including extracting structure, imputing missing values, and handling incorrect data.

PyWren won the Best Vision paper Award at SOCC’17. PyWren is a new paralle computation engine that drmatically lowers the barrier for scientists to use public cloud for massively parallel worklods, by obviating the need for complex cluster management. This is a joint work between RISELab and Berkeley Center for Computational Imaging.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTPaZLQlNIHqJf8GYCly6m2Pl8pBqPLpR. Please subscribe to our channel!

This is the YouTube Live Stream link for Friday, 9/8/17: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwCXafHmgg

PLEASE NOTE: tutorials are not Live Streamed – they will be made available on the event page at a later date

Apologies for the earlier problems; the live stream link is working now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmQOEjymzUk

For the latest agenda updates and link to the Live Stream (starting at 9 AM), please go to the event website: https://risecamp.berkeley.edu/.

In case you missed it (it went out on August 1, 2017), you can still read a web copy here. If you’d like to be added to our mailing list, please fill out this form.

Shivaram Venkataraman has received the 2016-2017 “Demetri Angelakos Memorial” Achievement Award  who recognizes students that “in addition to conducting research, unselfishly take the time to help colleagues beyond the normal cooperation existing between fellow students“. There is hard to imagine a more deserving recipient than Shivaram. During his PhD, Shivaram has been generous with his time and sharing credit to a fault. He has helped his peers in every imaginable way; after six years his colleagues still have to hear him saying “no” when asked for help. He has been a trusted sounding board for other graduate students (and even faculty) when it comes to feedback on their research, talks, and papers. Shivaram has been, without exaggeration, the nexus of knowledge…