News
November 12, 2024
Building the Future: Meet the 2024 Sequoia Open Source Fellows
From one celebrated UC Berkeley lab come two groundbreaking projects: vLLM and Chatbot Arena.
Open source projects draw equity-free funding from corporates, startups, and even VCs
A dearth of funding for vital open source technologies is leading to a swath of support from startups, unicorns, corporations, and even venture capital firms.
October 14, 2024
Alvin Cheung wins Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize
CS Associate Professor Alvin Cheung has been awarded the Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize. Cheung was cited for his groundbreaking work on “verified lifting,” applying ideas from program synthesis to dramatically improve the end-to-end performance of database-backed applications. The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes, founded in 2004 by the Association Internationale Pour les Technologies Objets (AITO), are the most esteemed honors in object-oriented programming. Named in honor of the pioneering visionaries Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, who created the first object-oriented programming language.
September 25, 2024
Letta, one of UC Berkeley’s most anticipated AI startups, has just come out of stealth
A startup called Letta has just emerged from stealth with tech that helps AI models remember users and conversations. Created in UC Berkeley’s famed labs startup factory, it also announced $10 million in seed money led by Felicis’ Astasia Myers, at a $70 million post-money valuation.
September 11, 2024
Sam Kumar wins 2024 ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Runner-up Award
This annual award by SIGSAC recognizes excellent research "for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer and Information Security" by doctoral candidates in the field of computer and information security.
September 6, 2024
What AI Is The Best? Chatbot Arena Relies On Millions Of Human Votes
With companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta dropping increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence products, crowdsourced rankings have emerged as a popular—and virtually only practical—way of determining which tool works best, and LMSYS’s Chatbot Arena has become possibly the most influential real-time gauge.
March 6, 2024
Prof. Natacha Crooks wins IEEE TCDE Rising Star Award
Professor Natacha Crooks awarded the IEEE TCDE Rising Star Award for contributions to distributed data management, and its applications to blockchain technology, security, and cloud computing.
February 20, 2024
Prof. Matei Zaharia and his students and collaborators talk about compound AI systems and their research on them
AI caught everyone’s attention in 2023 with Large Language Models (LLMs) that can be instructed to perform general tasks, such as translation or coding, just by prompting. This naturally led to an intense focus on models as the primary ingredient in AI application development, with everyone wondering what capabilities new LLMs will bring. As more developers begin to build using LLMs, however, we believe that this focus is rapidly changing: state-of-the-art AI results are increasingly obtained by compound systems with multiple components, not just monolithic models.
February 7, 2024
Prof. Ion Stoica elected into the National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced today that three UC Berkeley faculty members — Arpad Horvath, Ravi Prasher and Ion Stoica — have been elected to its ranks.
February 6, 2024
Salk Institute scientists scale brain research on Google Cloud with SkyPilot
The cloud, with its large numbers of the latest processors and scalable storage systems, is becoming indispensable to modern biomedical research organizations, who use it to generate and analyze vast amounts of data. However, research by its very nature is not a linear process, and so cloud resources must be flexible enough to rapidly scale up and down in response to changing demands. Additionally, research always has limited funding, and so cost- and time-efficiency are critical to achieving research insights.