News

UC Noyce Initiative researcher Yoshimi Fukuoka, Ph.D., R.N., F.A.A.N, was recently (Jan 26) named one of UC San Francisco's "24 People to Watch in 2024."

Ann Schmeltz Bowers, a technology industry executive pioneer and longtime philanthropist who inspired the founding of the UC Noyce Initiative, died on January 24, 2024, at her home in Palo Alto, California. She was 86.

Among the many accomplishments UC Noyce Initiative researchers realized in 2023, UC Noyce Initiative research Ziad Obermeyer was name among one of the top 100 leaders in artificial intelligence by TIME.

Learning more about women's brains, protecting the grid from cyberattacks, exploring the capacity of quantum computing — these are transformational research projects being pursued because of a new, five-campus, University of California consortium called The UC Noyce Initiative. 

Two UC Noyce Initiative researchers are co-authors of a recently published a collaborative study investigating the extent to which interactions with smart speakers, like Amazon's Echo devices, are being used for ad targeting.

In mid-2022, Instagram began asking an assortment of its users to complete a survey about their race, ethnicity and gender. By the end of the year, a huge number of people had filled out the survey, which was part of a new effort to ensure that the social media platform was fair and inclusive.

Behind the scenes, Professor Dawn Song, PhD, an expert in computer security and privacy, was helping ensure that the sensitive data was staying safe while still enabling researchers to analyze it.

When he was 12 years old, Hartmut Haeffner got his first computer— a Commodore 64. On the C64, Haeffner learned to program, first for fun and then as a job, using the computer to track sporting events in his native Germany. He was fascinated with both what the computer could do, and the underlying technology that made it possible.

As a child, Bin Yu never dreamed she’d go to college. She grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, when nearly all of the country’s institutions of higher learning were closed. But in third grade, a cousin gave Yu a math book. She fell in love with the structured way of thinking and the concrete answers found in the textbook.

Emerging speech neuroprostheses may offer a way to communicate for people who are unable to speak due to paralysis or disease, but fast, high-performance decoding has not yet been demonstrated. Now, transformative new work by researchers at UCSF and UC Berkeley shows that more natural speech decoding is possible using the latest advances in artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT. Alexa and Siri. Self-driving vehicles. It may seem that artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere – and that’s because it is.