Endowed Professorship named for TerraSwarm PI Carlos Guestrin

Yesterday, Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington announced the establishment of the Guestrin Endowed Professorship in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Named for leading expert in the machine learning field, UW CSE Professor Carlos Guestrin, the $1 million endownment will augment UW CSE's ability to recruit and retain the world's most outstanding faculty members in these emergent areas.

"Seattle and UW are near and dear to my heart, and it was incredibly important to me and our team that we continue supporting this world-class institution and the amazing talent coming out of the CSE program,” said Guestrin. “We look forward to strong collaboration between Apple, CSE and the broader AI and machine learning community for many years to come.”

See more at UW TODAY.

TerraSwarm PI David Blaauw and colleague present research on "micromote" computers at IEEE Conference

Professor David Blaauw and colleague Dennis Sylvester, computer scientists and IEEE Fellows from the University of Michigan, presented 10 papers at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco earlier this month. The papers were related to their work with "Micromote" computers, tiny devices they've presented in different variations for several years.

The overarching goal is to make smarter, smaller sensors for medical devices that can do more with less energy. Many of the devices (microphones, cameras and other sensors) are always on alert and beam personal data into the cloud because they cannot analyze it themselves. It has been predicted by some that by 2035 there will be 1 trillion such devices.

“If you’ve got a trillion devices producing readings constantly, we’re going to drown in data,” says Blaauw.

Blaauw and Sylvester hope to make these devices more secure while also saving energy by developing tiny, energy-efficient computing sensors that can do analysis on board.

See IEEE Spectrum for full article.

TerraSwarm PI Michel Maharbiz awarded $1.5m by CZ Biohub

Michel Maharbiz, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley, has been selected to receive a senior investigator award by CZ Biohub.

Professor Maharbiz will be awarded $1.5 million over 5 years for his research exploring ways that miniaturized technology and biology can be threaded together to create novel clinical devices that interface with the human body.

“I am humbled and speechless,” said Maharbiz when he found out about the award. “This is an ambitious endeavor and I can’t wait to get started and be part of it. I really do believe we, collectively, can make a big impact on diseases over the next decade, and I’m really excited to be a part of this.”

The CZ Biohub was established in September 2016 with $600 million over 10 years from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, and operates as an independent nonprofit medical research organization collaborating with UC Berkeley, Stanford University and UC San Francisco to fund research. Its goal is to harness science, technology and human capacity to cure, prevent or manage all disease during our children’s lifetime.

Exyn Technologies, founded by Dr. Vijay Kumar, raises $6.8m in partnership with Uniformity Labs

In news released today by Marketwired, IP Group announced that its first two portfolio companies from US university partners Exyn Technologies and Uniformity Labs have raised a combined $6.8 in new financing rounds.

Exyn Technologies is a spin-out from the University of Pennsylvania and was founded by Dr. Vijay Kumar, the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn Engineering and a Terraswarm Principal Investigator. The company develops fully autonomous aerial robot systems with multi-modal sensing capabilities to enable robust and reliable applications in the commercial market.

IP Group has committed another $3.7m to the two US companies following completion of the financing rounds which included both new and existing US and UK based investors. The Exyn transaction closed in 2017.