New Faculty
2012
Laura Waller joined the EECS faculty in 2012 as an Assistant Professor. Her research lab develops new methods for computational optical imaging, in which optical hardware and computational algorithms are designed simultaneously. Specifically, we focus on measuring and controlling higher-dimensional wave-field effects (such as phase, partial coherence or nonlinearity). She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Electrical Engineering and Lecturer of Physics at Princeton University from 2010-2012 and received B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2004, 2005, and 2010, respectively.
Eric Paulos works at the interface between computing and the humanities, with research research and creative activities encompassing both human-computer interactions and New Media arts. He is is the Director of the Living Environments Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM).
Previously, Eric held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute and in the Entertainment Technology Center. Prior to CMU, Eric was Senior Research Scientist at Intel Research in Berkeley, California where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group - challenged to employ innovative methods to explore urban life and the future fabric of emerging technologies across public urban landscapes. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in urban computing, sustainability, green design, environmental awareness, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, and intimate media.
Prasad Raghavendra received his Ph.d. from the Computer Science and Engineering Department at University of Washington, Seattle, advised by Venkatesan Guruswami. He then spent a year Microsoft Research New England as a postdoc. Prior to this he received a Dual degree(Btech/Mtech) in computer science from IIT Madras. His research interests are in Approximation Algorithms, Hardness of Approximation, Complexity, Coding theory.
2011
Ana Arias joined EE as an acting associate professor in January 2011. She received her B.S. and M.S. in physics at the Federal University of Parana, Brazil (1995 and 1997). She also received a certificate in Physics Teaching in 1995. She received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 2001.
Prior to joining EECS, she had a postdoctoral research appointment at Cambridge University in 2001, and worked as an engineer and group leader for the startup company Plastic Logic Limited in the UK from 2001 to 2003. She joined the Palo Alto Research Center as a member of the research staff in 2003, and became the area manager for printed electronic devices there in 2008.
Her research area is in Physical Electronics - Printed Organic Flexible Electronics, and her interests are in solution processed electronic materials for flexible sensors; fully printed systems (dosimeters and medical devices); and correlation of materials deposition conditions and morphology on device performance.
Sylvia Ratnasamy is joining EECS as assistant professor in Computer Science July 1, 2011. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2002 and a B.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Pune, India in 1997.
Early in her graduate career, she already played a prominent role in networking research. As a second-year Ph.D. student, she was appointed to the ICSI Center for Internet Research, in Berkeley, serving as the only junior researcher in a team of senior superstars. In 2001 she was first author on “A Scalable, Content-Addressable Network,” which introduced the first efficient design for distributed hash tables (DHTs), a critical element in all modern distributed and peer-to-peer computing systems (they enable a data object to be located quickly anywhere in a network without requiring a central registry). The DHT paper remains one of the most heavily-cited papers in all of computer science. More recent breakthrough work introduced “RouteBricks," a way of exploiting parallelism to scale software routers.
During several years as a lead researcher at Intel Berkeley, Ratnasamy continued her path-breaking research, always focusing on the “big” problems in networking (design, implementation, analysis and deployment of networked systems) in work that consistently combines conceptual elegance with practical impact.
2010
Professor Michael Lustig (EE) received his Bsc in Electrical Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 2002. He received his Msc and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2004 and 2008 respectively. His research focuses on medical imaging, in particular Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). More specifically, the application of compressed sensing to rapid and high-resolution MRI, MRI pulse sequence design, medical image reconstruction, inverse problems in medical imaging and sparse signal representation.
2009
Professor Bjorn Hartmann (CS) received a BA in Communication, BSE in Digital Media Design, and MSE in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2009. His research in Human-Computer Interaction focuses on on the creation and evaluation of user interface design tools, end-user programming environments, and ubiquitous computing toolkits.