EECS 70 GSIs - Fall 2014

Office hours

You can view a calendar of GSI and reader office hours here.

Section schedule




Biographies

Name: Claire Baek
Email: cs70clairebaek@gmail.com
Office hour: Mondays 10-11am Cory 504
Discussion sections: n/a
Internship experience: Interned at ASML, the biggest manufacturer of photolithography (tool used in "printing" out circuits) tools
About: Claire Baek is a 5th year graduate student at Cal, advised by Professor Costas J. Spanos. Her research interests are applying data mining algorithms to semiconductor manufacturing processes for higher yield and better quality control. She did her B.S. at Stanford University before coming to Cal.

She grew up in Queens, NY and moved to South Korea before attending Stanford. Her favorite thing to do is go fishing with her Dad when she goes back home to Korea.



Name: Steven Bi
Email: chenhsi+cs70@berkeley.edu
Office hour: Tuesdays 10-11am in Soda 611
Discussion sections: MW 6-7pm in 85 Evans
About: Steven is a junior, majoring in Computer Science, Sociology, and Linguistics, with an additional interest in Classical Latin. His interest in CS and algorithms originates from competing in programming contests in high school, and has been part of Berkeley's ACM teams for the last two years. He spends too much of his free time playing Magic the Gathering (specifically EDH) and watching anime.



Name: Erin Carson
Email: erin@cs.berkeley.edu
Office hour: Mondays 10-11am in Cory 504
Discussion sections: MW 2-3pm in 315 Hearst Mining
Research website: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ecc2z/
About: Erin Carson is a sixth year PhD candidate in Computer Science advised by James Demmel.

Her research interests include numerical linear algebra, high performance computing, parallel algorithms, and scientific computing. Her thesis work is on evaluating tradeoffs between performance and accuracy in communication-avoiding iterative methods.

When she isn't doing numerical analysis, she loves backpacking, hiking, running in the Berkeley hills, knitting, baking, and attempting to teach herself German.



Name: Shuo-Yiin Chang
Email: shuoyiin@icsi.berkeley.edu
Office hour: Wednesdays 2-3pm in Cory 367
Discussion sections: MW 11-12pm in 105 Latimer
Research website: https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~shuoyiin
About: Shuo-Yiin is a 4th year Ph.D student in EECS advised by Nelson Morgan.

He works at the International Computer Science Institute, a non-profit organization affiliated with UC, Berkeley. His research interests are deep neural network for speech recognition, noise-robust speech recognition and physiologically motivated signal processing. He obtained his Masters of Science at National Taiwan University, and a Bachelor's of Science at the National Tsing Hua University.

He loves hiking, biking, inline skating, swimming and other outdoor activities. Recently, he is learning Cantonese from his friend.



Name: Kevin Chen
Email: kevinzc@berkeley.edu
Office hour: Wednesdays 4-5pm in Soda 751
Discussion sections: MW 5-6pm in B56 Hildebrand
Research website: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~kevinchn/
Internships: Google, FireEye and IBM Research
About: Kevin Chen is a 5th year Ph.D Candidate and he does research on cyber security and software vulnerability. He likes to use program analysis and formal techniques to solve practical security problems.

He really likes skateboarding and was able to ollie over 3 decks and heelflip over 1 deck. But it was the good old days when he had a lot of time to practice :p. But he still enjoys watching s.k.a.t.e. competition and occasionally playing with his board.



Name: Katie Driggs-Campbell
Email: katie.the.headta@gmail.com
Office hour: Friday afternoon homework parties
Discussion sections: n/a
Research website: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krdc/
About: Hello! My name is Katie and I'm a third year graduate student in EECS. I'm originally from Arizona and I went to Arizona State University for my undergraduate degree. Currently, I'm working with Ruzena Bajcsy on modeling human behavior for human-in-the-loop systems. Specifically, I'm focusing on driver behaviors, studying why humans make decisions and how they are executed so we can design better control systems for semiautonomous vehicles. That means I spend my days building test beds and creating fun experiments to collect data and thinking about why I change lanes.

During my undergrad, I spent most of my time doing research in a lab making chemical sensors, but I spent a summer interning at TASER. There, I worked on the development of new safety control mechanisms to provide higher safety margins while maintaining the ability to induce Neural Muscular Incapacitation.

I really enjoy doing outreach and mentoring programs, being involved in student organizations like the EEGSA and WICSE, playing video games, and reading non-work related things. My biggest life regret is meeting the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers and not doing something cool when I got a picture with them.

Please email Katie with any logistical questions about the class that cannot be posted to Piazza.



Name: Eddie Groshev
Email: cs70eddie@gmail.com
Office hour: n/a
Discussion sections: MW 4-5pm in 75 Evans and 7-8pm in 85 Evans
About: Eddie is a 4th year undergrad in EECS, who is currently doing research at Robot Learning Lab with Pieter Abbeel. His research interests are in hierarchical task planning and belief space planning. His other interests include music, the arts, food, and sleep.

When Eddie's not working long hours in the lab, he enjoys exploring new and exciting places in California and working with his partners on their 3D Sound and Virtual Audio startup.



Name: Ena Hariyoshi
Email: ehariyoshi+cs70@berkeley.edu
Office hour: n/a
Discussion sections: MW 3-4pm and 7-8pm in 87 Evans
Internships: A German car parts company in summer 2013 and at Google in summer 2014
About: Ena is a 3rd year EECS student, and is doing research in control and information theory this semester with Anant Sahai. She can ride a unicycle, but doesn't have one. She can also jump and turn at the same time.
In her spare time, Ena enjoys drawing, translating, and following history and world politics.



Name: Joseph Hui
Email: ctu+cs70ta@berkeley.edu
Office hour: n/a
Discussion sections: MW 12-1pm in 85 Evans
Internships: Dropbox in summer of 2014; and Twitter in summer of 2013
About: Joseph is a 3rd-year EECS student. His favorite classes so far have probably been 61A/B, 170, 188 and of course, 70. Among other things, Joseph enjoys algorithms, anime, sewing (not especially competently), and puzzles. He does not understand why people dislike the Foothill DC food.

Random fact: As a child Joseph stuck his finger through a hole in a plastic combination ruler/stencil to see what would happen. His finger became stuck and adults were forced to snap the ruler in two in order to free it. Since that day he has sworn to never stick his finger in a plastic combination ruler/stencil ever again.



Name: Penporn Koanantakool
Email: penpornk@eecs.berkeley.edu
Office hour: Tuesdays 10-11am in 611 Soda
Discussion sections: MW 5-6pm in 75 Evans
Research website: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~penpornk/
Internships: National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan (Optimized satellite image stereo matching application on GPGPU)
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Thailand (Implemented Lattice Boltzmann Methods on Cell Broadband Engine processor in PlayStation 3)
About: Penporn is a 4th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science advised by Prof. Katherine Yelick.

Her research interests include parallel algorithms, scientific computing, and high performance computing. She has been working on communication-avoiding algorithms for N-Body problems and a little of numerical linear algebra.

Her name is actually pronounced Pen-pon, but because of some unfortunate spelling rule there has to be an r in it. Some people found her name easier to remember as Ping pong and she doesn't mind. She loves playing it and tennis. She also loves watching musicals, drawing, and playing ukulele.



Name: Chi Pang Lam
Email: cs70.cplam@eecs.berkeley.edu
Office hour: Tuesdays 5:30-6:30 in 531 Cory
Discussion sections: MW 11-12pm in 3105 Etcheverry and 1-2pm in 140 Barrows
About: Chi Pang Lam received his B.S. and M.S. from National Taiwan University. He is a 4th-year PhD student in EECS advised by Prof. Shankar Sastry. His research interests include control, machine learning and robotics. He has been working on a unified framework for human-in-the-loop system.

In his free time, he enjoys swimming, watching movie and traveling. He was a lifeguard and was really good at swimming while holding bricks.



Name: Sean Liu
Email: cs70ta.seanliu@berkeley.edu
Office hour: n/a
Discussion sections: MW 5-6pm and 6-7 in 87 Evans
About: Hello! I am a 3rd year undergraduate, pursuing a bachelor's degree in EECS. I was a reader for CS 70 for the last two semesters. I enjoy skiing, playing frisbee, and hanging out with friends.



Name: Preetum Nakkiran
Email: preetum@berkeley.edu
Office hour: n/a
Discussion sections: MW 12-1pm in 85 Evans
Website: http://preetum.nakkiran.org
About: Hello, I am a 3rd year undergrad student at Berkeley.
I like simple but powerful ideas (mostly in EECS, classical physics, and math).

Recently I have been looking at the communication requirements of updates in distributed storage codes (toy example: Alice and Bob have slightly different versions of a document. Everyone knows the difference is at most N words, but no one knows exactly which words. How much data must Alice send Bob such that he can have her updated version of the file? ...Generalizing this to the distributed setting involves codes similar to the Reed-Solomon codes in EECS70)

Last summer I worked with the speech team at Google, developing ways to compress hotword models (ie, neural nets to detect "ok google" in audio) to fit on phones. (the insight being that the structure of speech can inform the topology of neural nets, not just the weights)

Feel free to talk to me about any of the above, or more.



Name: Vasuki Narasimha Swamy
Email: vasuki.cs70@gmail.com
Office hour: Tuesdays 12-1pm in 258 Cory
Discussion sections: MW 10-11am in 105 Latimer and 3-4pm in 3113 Etcheverry
Research website: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vasuki/
Internship Experience: She interned at Qualcomm Flarion in Summer 2014 in the Corporate R&D division. She developed algorithms to do localization in indoor environment.
About: Vasuki is a 3rd year graduate student in Electrical Engineering advised by Prof. Anant Sahai.

Her research interests include wireless communication, signal processing, networks and information theory. She interned at Qualcomm Flarion in Summer 2014 where she worked on measurement engines for positioning. In her free time, she likes to hike, bike, run, travel and experiment with different cuisines. She is addicted to Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series and can talk about it for hours.



Name: Khoa Tran
Email: khoatran@berkeley.edu
Office hour: Wednesdays 11-12pm in 611 Soda
Discussion sections: MW 10-11am in 3105 Etcheverry
Random Fact: Khoa is planning to run the Berkeley Half this November, and he'd love to do it with as many students and staff members from EECS70 as possible!
About: Khoa is in his last semester at Cal studying Computer Science, and he is most interested in Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, and their applications in the real world. In his free time, he likes to sail at the Marina, box, go hiking/rockclimbing, bake cookies, and play Open Rec tennis/pingpong. You can get EC (Extra Cookie) if you challenge and defeat him in a tennis/pingpong match.

Khoa interned at Autodesk in Summer 2014 and will most likely join them full-time after graduation. Come by his Office Hour and say hi, and feel free to ask or email him any questions about classes at Cal or just life in general.
Internship Experience: This past summer, Khoa was an intern on the Design Graph team at Autodesk. He automated their data pipeline using open source batch job scheduler software and built a bag-of-features model to classify Autodesk Inventor 3D's design data. The most relevant classes that he took at Cal were INFO 256 (Natural Language Processing) and INFO 290T-3 (Data Mining), although he found that a solid background in Linear Algebra (Math 54/110) and Probability Theory (our very own EECS70! + EECS126) is extremely crucial. Come find him during Office Hour and he can tell you more about his internship experience, as well as the aforementioned classes.



Name: Ajay Shanker Tripathi
Email: chausies@berkeley.edu
Office hour: Mondays 4-5pm in 500 Soda (note that this is the big atrium/hallway)
Discussion sections: MW 6-7pm in 71 Evans
Internship Experience: I've had internship experience at Tula Technology Inc., a very promising startup in talks with General Motors and other big car companies. They introduce algorithms to the controller in the car that increase car efficiency by insane amounts (well over 25%).
Random Fact: I can juggle (up to 4 balls, but my main is the Chinese Yoyo). I can also speak 5 languages fluently and play 5 instruments.
Areas of interest: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Optimization, Systems and Control, Signal Processing, and Communications.
About: I'm a senior undergrad here in Berkeley EECS, and my focus is mainly in the crossroads of EE and CS. I plan to become a PhD, and then wreak havoc from there. I'm a burningly passionate son of a gun whose fire you're probably gonna catch, so be prepared :3. My hobbies are: watching anime, playing video games, playing with interesting problems, playing music, and playing with weapons (swords, sticks, guns).